"It's jolly hard work. But it 'as its better side. Some fellers the other day came on a dug-out with three officers in it, and they picked up five thousand francs between 'em." The motor-lorry blundered forward toward a stone obelisk planted on a man-made hillock. On one side was a swamp of green stagnant water; on the other was a planting out of many hundred crosses of unvarnished wood. The lorry is full of crosses each named and numbered, roped up in scores, and these must be dumped inside the enclosure. The view from the Polygon monument is desolation on all sides. One living man standing there is as it were monarch of all the dead. It is a remarkable eminence, a pillar at Thermopylæ, one thing standing where all else is lying flat. As it stands to-day it has no inscription. Polygon--myriad-sided--it is one of the strangest standing places and shrines of the war. Pause thou who livest: salute the dead! * * * * * Back thunders the empty lorry--on to the Menin road--and faces Ypres. You see the grey contour of the tower afar, but doubt whether you are approaching a city, so flat has all become. Yet certainly it is Ypres. You enter by a series of new-painted wooden taverns and hotels. You walk up a wide main street and there is Ypres---- A great dust storm is raging here whilst the sun shines out of a perfect sky. Here are no rushes, no wild flowers, no moisture, but only infinite debris and the shatterings of old masonry. There is a suggestion of the desert. A notice says "THIS IS HOLY GROUND" and a barbed wire fence runs round the whole centre of old Ypres. Within that enclosure lies a ruined city. Thousands of years ago such a thing happened; all the people were slain or taken into bondage. No one came back, the victors went away, and the ruins remained glaring in the sands--centuries, millenniums. That is the impression of Ypres to-day. It is grim and moving. It is like the Pyramids. At least a hundred thousand dead lie round it--an inner circle of the dead and an outer circle of decay. Looking on those spacious sun-steeped, sand-blown ruins one's mind is inevitably taken to the East, and a sense of Shelley's poem comes to one-- My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.