The moral of the battle, brought home to every man that took part in it, was that the ultimate victory in this war will lie with the nation that best organizes itself to provide its armies with the sinews of war. If at Neuve Chapelle we bitterly felt our shortage of shells, at Ypres we realized even more intensely the enormous advantage which the enemy’s superiority in artillery and high-explosive ammunition gave him. The fighting at Neuve Chapelle and Ypres, and later on at the Fromelles ridge, showed us that the principal weapon of modern warfare is the heavy gun, and gave us due warning that the next German attempt to break our line will be preceded and accompanied by an artillery bombardment even severer than that inferno of fire which played for more than three weeks on the Ypres salient, and failed to pierce our front. Artillery fire can only be crushed by artillery fire, so we have our lesson. And because that lesson has at length been learnt, the thousands of Britons who made the supreme sacrifice at Ypres will not have died in vain. CHAPTER IV SILENT YPRES “Et erit sui monumentum gloriosum.” (Epitaph in the ruined Cathedral of St. Martin at Ypres.) In years to come the name of Ypres will loom large in the annals of our race. Before the war it was known only to a few tourists who, sated with the more familiar art treasures of Belgium, had the curiosity or the time to take the steam tram out from Ostend or Menin to the quaint old city lying in the plain thrust up close to the French frontier. Such visitors had their pains well rewarded (and a two-hour journey by a Belgian steam tram along the flat and dusty Flemish roads merits some recompense). In Ypres they found a perfect jewel of an old-world Flemish city, small and self-contained, well preserved, the two or three principal streets lined with fine old houses with curiously wrought façades, leading to the splendid square, the _Grand’ Place_, or _Groote Markt_, as the bilingual street signs proclaimed, where the magnificent Hall of the Cloth-Makers, the far-famed _Halle des Draps_, with its noble tower and majestic front, quite dwarfed the charming Renaissance houses nestling about the square. From the distant plain the lofty towers of Ypres peeped forth in the summer sunshine above a fringe of greenery. The trees marked the old ramparts of the city, where the burgesses were wont to take the air in the evenings, and where the hearts and intertwined initials cut into the stout old trees still speak, amid the desolation of to-day, of love-making through the centuries.