And there are thousands and thousands of our sons mown down in this manner--sons from villages or castles, who were all the hope of, all that made life worth living for, mothers, fathers, grandfathers, and grandmothers. Night and day for eighteen years, twenty years, they had been surrounded with every care, brooded over with all tenderness. Anxious eyes had watched unremittingly their physical and moral growth. For some of them, of humbler families, heavy sacrifices had necessarily to be made and privations endured so that their health might be assured and their minds have scope to expand, to gain knowledge of the world, to be enriched with beautiful impressions. And then, suddenly, there they are, these dear boys, prepared for life with such painstaking love; there they are, beloved young heroes, with shattered breast or brains blown out--by order of that damnable Jack-pudding who rules in Berlin. Oh, execrations and curses upon the monster of ferocity and trickery who has unchained all this woe! May his life be greatly prolonged so that he may at least have time to suffer greatly; and afterwards may he still live on and remain fully conscious and lucid of intellect in the hour when he shall cross the threshold of eternity, where upon that door, which will never again be opened, may be read, flaming in the darkness, that sentence of utmost horror, "_All hope abandon, ye who enter here._" X AN EVENING AT YPRES "In anticipation of death I make this confession, that I despise the German nation on account of its infinite stupidity, and that I blush to belong to it." SCHOPENHAUER. "The character of the Germans presents a terrible blend of ferocity and trickery. They are a people of born liars. One must see this to believe it." VELLEIUS PATERCULUS, _In the year 10 of the Christian era_. _March, 1915._ Ruins in a mournful light which is anxious, seemingly, to fade away into a premature darkness. Vast ruins, ruins of such delicacy! Here is a deployment of those exquisite, slender colonnades and those archways of mysterious charm, which at first sight conjure up for the mind the Middle Ages and Gothic Art in its fair but transient blossoming. But in general, surviving specimens of that Art were only to be found in isolated examples, in the form of some old church or old cloister, surrounded by things of modern growth, whereas at Ypres, there is an _ensemble_; first a cathedral with additions of complicated supplementary buildings, that might be called palaces, whose long façades with their clock-towers present to the eye their succession of windows with pointed arches. As an architectural group it is almost unique in the world, actually a whole quarter of a town, built in little columns, little arches and archaic stone tracery.