of Golo the dark persecutor
who--they say now--was a _real_ person and an ancestor of the
Hohenzollerns through the first Duc de Baviere.

At Ypres, Brian painted for me a funny "imagination picture" imitating
earliest Flemish work. It showed Ypres when there was no town save a few
tiny houses and a triangular stronghold, with a turret at each corner,
built on a little island in the river Yperlee. He named the picture "The
Castle of the Three Strong Towers," and dated it in the year 900. A
thousand years have passed since then. Slowly, after much fighting (the
British fought as hard to take Ypres once, as they fight to save it
now), the town grew great and powerful, and became the capital of
Flanders. The days of the rough earthen stockades and sharp thorn-bush
defences of "Our Lady of the Enclosures" passed on to the days of
casemates and moats; and still on, to the days when the old
fortifications could be turned into ornamental walks--days of quaintly
beautiful architecture, such as Brian and I saw before the war, when we
spent hours in the Grand' Place, admiring the wonderful Cloth Hall and
the Spanish-looking Nieuwerck. The people of Ypres told us proudly that
nothing in Bruges itself, or anywhere in Flanders, could compare with
those noble buildings massed together at the west end of the Grand'
Place, each stone of which represented so much wealth of the richest
merchant kings of Europe.

And now, the work of those thousand busy years has crumbled in a few
monstrous months, like the sand-houses of children when the tide comes
in! What Father Beckett saw of Ypres after three years' bombardment, was
not much more than that shown in Brian's picture, dated 900! A blackened
wall or two and a heap of rubble where stood the _Halle des
Drapiers_--pride of Ypres since the thirteenth century--its belfry, its
statues, its carvings, its paintings, all vanished like the contours and
colours of a sunset cloud. The cathedral is a skeleton. Hardly a pointed
gable is left to tell where the quaint and prosperous houses once
grouped cosily together. Ypres the town is a mourner draped in black
with the stains of fire which killed its beauty and joy. But there is a
glory that can never be killed, a glory above mere beauty, as a living
soul is above the dead body whence it has risen. That glory is Ypres.
She is a ghost, but she is an inspiration, a name of names, a jewel
worth dying for--"worth giving a man's eyes for," Brian says!