Long vistas of ruins were open at every side street--demolished walls, beams fallen from roofs or stretching across between one house and another, and broken doors. The stricken houses had launched their walls against the opposite buildings, and remained open, empty, unrecognisable. Having thus traversed the Rue d'Elverdinghe, which seemed as if it would never end, we entered the famous square, and for an indefinable time remained there at the corner, nailed as it were to the ground, stupefied and moved, full of admiration and grief and reverence, incapable of expressing our feelings, overcome by the grandeur and the sadness of that which we saw, intimidated by something that was both prodigious and sacred. We seemed to be disturbing the solemn mystery of an august end. The life of seven centuries, which was still palpitating yesterday, was being extinguished in a solitude of horror in the pallid twilight of a winter day. Gigantic and solemn above the mournful crowd of crumbling houses towered the monumental piles--torn, battered, devastated, but erect and still proud. Undermined by the blows of the shells, showing long cracks, breached and broken, the noble stone walls of the Halles, the Hôtel de Ville, and the Cathedral of St. Martin remained standing, indescribable in death, still stretching towards the sky their proud towers without bells and without pinnacles, hollowed at their bases as though by blows of a monstrous axe. * * * * * We pointed to things with vague gestures, without being able to find words, and forgetting even to bend our backs when we heard the lamenting voice of the shells. None of us had ever seen Ypres, and together with the discouragement, caused by the vision of irreparable ruin, there was created in us the marvel of a revelation. For the love and devotion of innumerable generations there had kept intact on the earth a wonderful corner of the twelfth century, and we, arriving in front of this marvel, whilst it was dissolving, surprised the dream at a moment when it was vanishing for ever. All the rest of the world was plunged in the barbarism of the Middle Ages when the Flemish peace had Ypres for its centre. It was the wealthy and serious merchants of Ypres who created the Halles, the market of the world, the capital of business, the incomparable seat of commerce, the parliament of rulers and of people. Dante had not then been born, and already the Halles of Ypres were a century old.