We had left behind us towns and villages crowded with troops, immense parks of carts and motor-lorries scattered over the meadows, extensive encampments at the edges of the road, in which the innumerable piles of arms seemed like black sheaves crowned with points, the general quarters of divisions and brigades denoted by standards. Then, having passed Vlamertynghe, about three miles from Ypres, we came upon the sinister solitude of a modern battle. There was no other voice, no other sound, than the boom of cannon and the crash of shell. But the flashes of the explosions seemed to render all the more evident, more profound, and more significant the terrible silence of the town and the fields. It was the silence of resignation, fear, and agony. The sound of our footsteps upon the muddy pavement of the suburb echoed amidst the little houses--the first houses of Ypres. Not one building remained intact. The hurricanes of steel had battered and penetrated them all. * * * * * At one side of the street three wounded men were waiting for succour, having remained where they had fallen a few minutes before. They were poor inhabitants who had possibly been compelled by the need of obtaining food to come forth from some cellar. They did not call for assistance; they did not say a word, they did not even complain. Pale, stunned, suffering, and mute, they merely looked. The danger seemed to impose silence; there is an unconscious desire not to be heard, not to be discovered by the invisible and monstrous will to massacre which is in the air. Under the bombardment one had the vague impression of being searched for by death. There were three of us, and we walked in Indian file along the wall towards the famous Grande Place, which only a few days ago afforded one of the most precious and complete visions of the arts of the world. The route was not always easy. We had to avoid the holes which had been dug by the projectiles, to clamber over heaps of ruins, extricate ourselves from the labyrinths of innumerable fallen telephone wires, and every time we heard the voice of a shell we stopped immediately and irresistibly. We ceased to move with a strange and involuntary suddenness, like the automatic figures of the Three Kings in a Flemish clock when the last stroke of the hour sounds. Then, when an explosion had taken place, our mechanism was again set in motion, and we proceeded. A little forest of red crosses arose on the edge of the road in a glade; they marked a group of fresh graves in which lay inhabitants who had come out of their places of refuge only to meet with death. In the tragic silence any noise seemed to be enormously exaggerated. * * * * *