* * * * * Ypres is terribly empty. Hundreds of thousands of eyes would look on it but there are few people who come to look at it--just ones and twos who stand diminutively in front of the great ruins and peer at them like the conventional figures in an old print. This absence of the living intensifies the strange atmosphere. It is said that the city will build itself up again, but it is possible to feel some doubt on that point. Perhaps Ypres will never be built again. At present it has some hundred and fifty places where they sell beer to two where they sell anything else. Its string of wooden hotels with cubicle bedrooms do not pay. The curious come for an hour or so from Ostende but do not spend the night. There is a sense of emptiness and tragedy which cannot be dispelled. Some sort of unit of British troops does duty instead of police and is posted to various guards, the sentries being however without rifles. The soldiers in their "sixth year" impart a certain liveliness. A party of them at night coming down the middle of the street singing One word of thine, Tell the world you are mine, And the world will be dearer to me, in a full-throated chorus wakens echoes from dark corners of the ruins. There is music and dancing in favoured taverns. The returned Belgians do not perhaps belong naturally to the atmosphere of the sublime. They love beer and sociality. They will make their money by some means--they are not too particular how. Civilised ethics do not rule in these places where war has worked its will. Strolling along at dusk past the Cloth Hall tower a bright-eyed Belgian wolf asks you who you are. "_C'est triste, n'est ce pas?_" says he, pointing to the ruins. _Triste_ is what they are not. The Belgian is from Poperinghe. It is very dull there now. _Tous les soldats sont partis._ Also the mamzelles. Pas de jig-a-jig. "Like a glass of beer?" asks the Belgian. A spare woman of thirty serves two glasses of ale at a table outside a hotel. She seems to speak English for preference. "You want someone to sleep with?" asks the man from Poperinghe. "No, I sleep with no man." "Not married?" "No, and plenty time yet, and I shan't marry an English when I do. The English are all false." The man from Poperinghe seems taken aback. At a further table a curious scene is being enacted. Here are sitting a pioneer corporal and a sergeant, both wearing the 1914 ribbon. They have their beer, and between them is an effervescent loose-mouthed Alsatian. The latter, like the man from Poperinghe, stands treat. "I vill take you, one minit, I vill take you," says the Alsatian, kissing the tips of his fingers, "just vait, not ten minits from 'ere." "Oh you go on, you bloomin' well shut up. I b'lieve you're agent for the girl or something," says the sergeant. "No, listen, I'll tell you vot it is.... C'est de gateau, got that, gateau; naw need to drink any coffee, just ten minits, you see for yourself."