by john buchan.
d from “the history of the war.” by john buchan. (thos. nelson & sons.)
the present writer first saw ypres from a little hill during the later stages of the battle. it was a brilliant spring day, and, when there was a lull in the bombardment and the sun lit up its white towers, ypres looked a gracious and delicate little city in its cincture of green. it was with a sharp shock of surprise that one realised that it was an illusion, that ypres had become a shadow. a few days later, in a pause of the bombardment, he entered the town. the main street lay white and empty in the sun, and over all reigned a deathly stillness. there was not a human being to be seen in all its length, and the houses on each side were skeletons. there the whole front had gone, and bedrooms with wrecked furniture were open to the light. there a 42-cm. shell had made a breach in the line, with raw edges of masonry on both sides, and a yawning pit below. in one room the carpet was spattered with plaster from the ceiling, but the furniture was unbroken. there was a buhl cabinet with china, red plush24 chairs, a piano, and a gramaphone—the plenishing of the best parlour of a middle-class home. in another room was a sewing-machine, from which the owner had fled in the middle of a piece of work. here was a novel with the reader’s place marked. it was like a city visited by an earthquake which had caught the inhabitants unawares, and driven them shivering to a place of refuge.
through the gaps in the houses there were glimpses of greenery. a broken door admitted to a garden—a carefully-tended garden, for the grass had once been trimly kept, and the owner must have had a pretty taste in spring flowers. a little fountain still plashed in a stone basin. but in one corner an incendiary shell had fallen on the house, and in the heap of charred débris there were human remains. most of the dead had been removed, but there were still bodies in out-of-the-way comers. over all hung a sickening smell of decay, against which the lilacs and hawthorns were powerless. that garden was no place to tarry in.
the street led into the place, where once stood the great church of st. martin and the cloth hall. those who knew ypres before the war will remember the pleasant fa?ade of shops on the south side, and the cluster of old flemish buildings at the north-eastern corner. words25 are powerless to describe the devastation of these houses. of the southern side nothing remained but a file of gaunt gables. at the northeast corner, if you crawled across the rubble, you could see the remnants of some beautiful old mantelpieces. standing in the middle of the place, one was oppressed by the utter silence, a silence which seemed to hush and blanket the eternal shelling in the salient beyond. some jackdaws were cawing from the ruins, and a painstaking starling was rebuilding its nest in a broken pinnacle. an old cow, a miserable object, was poking her head in the rubbish and sniffing curiously at a dead horse. sound was a profanation in that tomb which had once been a city.
the cloth hall had lost all its arcades, most of its front, and there were great rents everywhere. its spire looked like a badly-whittled stick, and the big gilt clock, with its hands irrevocably fixed, hung loose on a jet of stone. st. martin’s church was a ruin, and its stately square tower was so nicked and dinted that it seemed as if a strong wind would topple it over. inside the church was a weird sight. most of the windows had gone, and the famous rose window in the southern transept lacked a segment. the side chapels were in ruins, the floor was deep in fallen stones, but the pillars still stood. a mass for the dead must have been in progress, for the altar was draped in black, but the altar26 stone was cracked across. the sacristy was full of vestments and candlesticks tumbled together in haste, and all were covered with yellow picric dust from the high explosives. in the graveyard behind there was a huge shell crater, 50 feet across and 20 feet deep, with human bones exposed in the sides. before the main door stood a curious piece of irony. an empty pedestal proclaimed from its four sides the many virtues of a certain belgian statesman who had been also mayor of ypres. the worthy mayor was lying in the dust beside it, a fat man in a frock coat, with side-whiskers and a face like bismarck.
out in the sunlight there was the first sign of human life. a detachment of french colonial tirailleurs entered from the north—brown, shadowy men in fantastic weather-stained uniforms. a vehicle stood at the cathedral door, and a lean and sad-faced priest was loading it with some of the church treasures—chalices, plate, embroidery. a carmelite friar was prowling among the side alleys looking for the dead. it was like some macabre imagining of victor hugo.
the ruins of old buildings are so familiar that they do not at first dominate the mind. far more arresting are the remnants of the pitiful little homes, where there is no dignity, but a pathos which cries aloud. ypres was like a city destroyed by an earthquake; that is the simplest and truest description. but the skeletons of her great buildings, famous in europe for27 500 years, left another impression. one felt, as at pompeii, that things had always been so; one felt that they were verily indestructible, they were so great in their fall. the cloak of st. martin was not needed to cover the nakedness of his church. there was a terrible splendour about these gaunt and broken structures, these noble, shattered fa?ades, which defied their destroyers. ypres might be empty and a ruin, but to the end of time she would be no mean city.
one of the truest of our younger poets, rupert brooke, who died while serving in the dardanelles, wrote in his last months a sonnet on the consolation of death in war:—
“if i should die, think only this of me:
that there’s some corner of a foreign field
that is for ever england. there shall be
in that rich earth a richer dust concealed.”
in the salient of ypres there are not less than a hundred thousand graves of allied soldiers, sometimes marked by plain wooden crosses, sometimes obliterated by the débris of ruined trenches, sometimes hidden in corners of fields and beneath clumps of chestnuts. that ground is for ever england; and it is also for ever france, for there the men of dubois died around bixschoote and on the klein zillebeke ridge. when the war is over this triangle of meadowland, with a ruined city for its base, will be an enclave of belgian soil consecrated as the holy land of two great peoples. it may be that it will be specially set28 apart as a memorial place; it may be that it will be unmarked, and that the country folk will till and reap as before over the vanishing trench lines. but it will never be common ground. it will be for us the most hallowed spot on earth, for it holds our bravest dust, and it is the proof and record of a new spirit. in the past when we have thought of ypres we have thought of the british flag preserved there, which clare’s regiment, fighting for france, captured at the battle of ramillies. the name of the little flemish town has recalled the divisions in our own race and the centuries-old conflict between france and britain. but from now and henceforth it will have other memories. it will stand as a symbol of unity and alliance—unity within our empire, unity within our western civilization—that true alliance and that lasting unity which are won and sealed by a common sacrifice.
