I went off down the street towards the Square where the last shell had
fallen, and there on the corner I saw a large house absolutely crushed
in. It had formerly been a club, for there were billiard tables in the
upper room. The front wall had crashed down upon the pavement, and from
the debris some men were digging out the body of an officer who had
been standing there when the shell fell. His was the first terribly
mangled body that I had ever seen. He was laid face downwards on a
stretcher and borne away. At that moment a soldier came up and told me
that one of the officers with whom I had entered the town about half
an hour ago had been killed, and his body had been taken to a British
ambulance in the city. I walked across the Square, and there I saw the
stretcher-bearers carrying off some civilians who had been hit by
splinters of the shell. In the hospital were many dead bodies and
wounded men for there had been over one hundred casualties in the city
that day. We had hardly arrived when once again we heard the ripping
sound which had such a sinister meaning. Then followed a terrific
explosion. The final and dreadful bombardment of Ypres had begun. At
intervals of ten minutes the huge seventeen-inch shells fell, sounding
the death knell of the beautiful old town.
On the next morning, the brother-in-law of the officer who had been
killed called on me and asked me to go and see the Town Major and
secure a piece of ground which might be used for the Canadian Cemetery.
The Town Major gave us permission to mark off a plot in the new
British cemetery. It was in an open field near the jail, known by the
name of the Plain d'Amour, and by it was a branch canal. Our Headquarters
ordered the Engineers to mark off the place, and that night we laid the
body to rest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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