on over
the glorious ruins of Ypres. The singular distinction of the city is
that it is destroyed but not abased. The walls of the Cathedral, the
long bulk of the Cloth Market, still lift themselves above the
market place with a majesty that seems to silence compassion. The
sight of those facades, so proud in death, recalled a phrase used
soon after the fall of Liege by Belgium's Foreign Minister--"_La
Belgique ne regrette rien_ "--which ought some day to serve as the
motto of the renovated city.

We were turning to go when we heard a whirr overhead, followed by a
volley of mitrailleuse. High up in the blue, over the centre of the
dead city, flew a German aeroplane; and all about it hundreds of
white shrapnel tufts burst out in the summer sky like the miraculous
snow-fall of Italian legend. Up and up they flew, on the trail of
the Taube, and on flew the Taube, faster still, till quarry and pack
were lost in mist, and the barking of the mitrailleuse died out. So
we left Ypres to the death-silence in which we had found her.

The afternoon carried us back to Poperinghe, where I was bound on a
quest for lace-cushions of the special kind required by our Flemish
refugees. The model is unobtainable in France, and I had been
told--with few and vague indications--that I might find the cushions
in a certain convent of the city. But in which?

Poperinghe, though little injured, is almost empty. In its tidy
desolation it looks like a town on which a wicked enchanter has laid
a spell. We roamed from quarter to quarter, hunting for some one to
show us the way to the convent I was looking for, till at last a
passer-by led us to a door which seemed the right one. At our knock
the bars were drawn and a cloistered face looked out. No, there were
no cushions there; and the nun had never heard of the order we
named. But there were the Penitents, the Benedictines--we might try.
Our guide offered to show us the way and we went on. From one or two
windows, wondering heads looked out and vanished; but the streets
were lifeless. At last we came to a convent where there were no nuns
left, but where, the caretaker told us, there were cushions--a great
many. He led us through pale blue passages, up cold stairs, through
rooms that smelt of linen and lavender. We passed a chapel with
plaster saints in white niches above paper flowers. Everything was
cold and bare and blank: like a mind from which memory has gone. We
came to a class room with lin