Out in the sunlight there was the first sign of human life. A detachment of French Colonial _tirailleurs_ entered from the north--brown, shadowy men in fantastic weather-stained uniforms. A vehicle stood at the cathedral door, and a lean and sad-faced priest was loading it with some of the church treasures--chalices, plate, embroidery. A Carmelite friar was prowling among the side alleys looking for the dead. It was like some _macabre_ imagining of Victor Hugo. The ruins of old buildings are so familiar that they do not at first dominate the mind. Far more arresting are the remnants of the pitiful little homes, where there is no dignity, but a pathos which cries aloud. Ypres was like a city destroyed by an earthquake; that is the simplest and truest description. But the skeletons of her great buildings, famous in Europe for 500 years, left another impression. One felt, as at Pompeii, that things had always been so; one felt that they were verily indestructible, they were so great in their fall. The cloak of St. Martin was not needed to cover the nakedness of his church. There was a terrible splendour about these gaunt and broken structures, these noble, shattered _façades_, which defied their destroyers. Ypres might be empty and a ruin, but to the end of time she would be no mean city. One of the truest of our younger poets, Rupert Brooke, who died while serving in the Dardanelles, wrote in his last months a sonnet on the consolation of death in war:-- “If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed.”