nteresting to
him, and that they ought to have formed the subject of conversation.

"Fine!" I said.

And I hope my monosyllabic sincerity satisfied him.

We shook hands, and he turned silently away to the everlasting peril
of his post. His retreating figure was rather pathetic to me. Looking
at it, I understood for the first time what war in truth is. But I soon
began to wonder anxiously whether our automobile would get safely
past a certain exposed spot on the high road.

VI The Unique City

When we drew near Ypres we met a civilian wagon laden with
furniture of a lower middle-class house, and also with lengths of gilt
picture frame-moulding. There was quite a lot of gilt in the wagon. A
strong, warm wind was blowing, and the dust on the road and from
the railway track was very unpleasant. The noise of artillery
persisted. As a fact, the wagon was hurrying away with furniture and
picture-frame mouldings under fire. Several times we were told not
to linger here and not to linger there, and the automobiles, emptied
of us, received very precise instructions where to hide during our
absence. We saw a place where a shell had dropped on to waste
ground at one side of the road, and thrown up a mass of earth and
stones on to the roof of an asylum on the other side of the road. The
building was unharmed; the well-paved surface of the road was
perfect--it had received no hurt; but on the roof lay the earth and
stones. Still, we had almost no feeling of danger. The chances were
a thousand to one that the picture-frame maker would get safely
away with his goods; and he did. But it seemed odd--to an absurdly
sensitive, non-Teutonic mind it seemed somehow to lack justice--
that the picture-framer, after having been ruined, must risk his life in
order to snatch from the catastrophe the debris of his career.
Further on, within the city itself, but near the edge of it, two men
were removing uninjured planks from the upper floor of a house; the
planks were all there was in the house to salve. I saw no other
attempt to make the best of a bad job, and, after I had inspected the
bad job, these two attempts appeared heroic to the point of mere
folly.

I had not been in Ypres for nearly twenty years, and when I was last
there the work of restoring the historic buildings of the city was not
started. (These restorations, especially to the Cloth Hall and the
Cathedral of St. Martin, were just about finished in time for the
open