h a suburb of small brick houses and stopped
under cover of some slightly taller buildings. Another military
motor waited there, the chauffeur relic-hunting in the gutted
houses.

We got out and walked toward the centre of the Cloth Market. We had
seen evacuated towns--Verdun, Badonviller, Raon-l'Etape--but we had
seen no emptiness like this. Not a human being was in the streets.
Endless lines of houses looked down on us from vacant windows. Our
footsteps echoed like the tramp of a crowd, our lowered voices
seemed to shout. In one street we came on three English soldiers who
were carrying a piano out of a house and lifting it onto a
hand-cart. They stopped to stare at us, and we stared back. It
seemed an age since we had seen a living being! One of the soldiers
scrambled into the cart and tapped out a tune on the cracked
key-board, and we all laughed with relief at the foolish noise...
Then we walked on and were alone again.

We had seen other ruined towns, but none like this. The towns of
Lorraine were blown up, burnt down, deliberately erased from the
earth. At worst they are like stone-yards, at best like Pompeii. But
Ypres has been bombarded to death, and the outer walls of its houses
are still standing, so that it presents the distant semblance of a
living city, while near by it is seen to be a disembowelled corpse.
Every window-pane is smashed, nearly every building unroofed, and
some house-fronts are sliced clean off, with the different stories
exposed, as if for the stage-setting of a farce. In these exposed
interiors the poor little household gods shiver and blink like owls
surprised in a hollow tree. A hundred signs of intimate and humble
tastes, of humdrum pursuits, of family association, cling to the
unmasked walls. Whiskered photographs fade on morning-glory
wallpapers, plaster saints pine under glass bells, antimacassars
droop from plush sofas, yellowing diplomas display their seals on
office walls. It was all so still and familiar that it seemed as if
the people for whom these things had a meaning might at any moment
come back and take up their daily business. And then--crash! the
guns began, slamming out volley after volley all along the English
lines, and the poor frail web of things that had made up the lives
of a vanished city-full hung dangling before us in that deathly
blast.

We had just reached the square before the Cathedral when the
cannonade began, and its roar seemed to build a roof of ir