d was
then gutted by an accidental fire!

I was surprised to see anything at all of the once beautiful Cloth Hall.
We took some snaps of the remains. A lot of discoloured bones were lying
about among the _debris_ disinterred from the cemetery by the
bombardments.

Heaps of powdered bricks were all that remained of many of the houses.
The town gasometer had evidently been blown completely into the air,
what was left of it was perched on its head in a drunken fashion.

Beyond the gate of the town on the Menin Road stood a large unpainted
wooden shanty. I wondered what it could be and thought it was possibly a
Y.M.C.A. hut. Imagine my surprise on closer inspection to see painted
over the door in large black letters "Ypriana Hotel"! It had been put up
by an enterprising _Belge_. Somehow it seemed a desecration to see this
cheap little building on that sacred spot.

The Ypres-Menin Road stretched in front of us as far as the eye could
see, disappearing into the horizon. On either hand was No-man's-land. I
had seen wrecked villages on the Belgian front in 1915 and was more or
less accustomed to the sight, but this was different. It was more
terrible than any ruins I had ever seen. For utter desolation I never
want to behold anything worse.

The ground was pock-marked with shell-holes and craters. Old tanks lay
embedded in the mud, their sides pierced by shot and shell, and worst of
all by far were the trees. Mere skeletons of trees standing gaunt and
jagged, stripped naked of their bark; mute testimony of the horrors they
had witnessed. Surely of all the lonely places of the earth this was by
far the worst? The ground looked lighter in some places than in others,
where the powdered bricks alone showed where a village had once stood.
There were those whose work it was to search for the scattered graves
and bring them in to one large cemetery. Just beyond "Hell-fire Corner"
a padre was conducting a burial service over some such of these where a
cemetery had been formed. We next passed Birr Cross Roads with
"Sanctuary Wood" on our left. Except that the lifeless trees seemed to
be more numerous, nothing was left to indicate a wood had ever been
there.

The more I saw the more I marvelled to think how the men could exist in
such a place and not go mad, yet we were seeing it under the most ideal
conditions with the fresh green grass shooting up to cover the ugly
rents and scars.

Many of the craters half-filled with water