In the smiling country of the Mendips, in Somersetshire, there stands a little village church alone by itself in the fields, remote from the village to which it has given its name. In my schoolboy days in Somersetshire they used to tell me that that church--the name of which has gone from me--was the last survival of one of the villages devastated by the Black Death when it ravaged England in the fourteenth century. They said, I remember, that the villagers could not plough the fields about the ancient church, for the stones and bricks of the vanished hamlet were still lying just beneath the surface. In later years men had built another village to take the place of that which was dead, but had placed it away from the original site, so that only the little church remained amid the fallow fields to speak to future generations of a little corner of England razed from the face of the earth. The picture of that little Somersetshire church came drifting back to me over a long span of years when I went back to Ypres on a sunny morning in May, a week or so after the second great attempt of the Germans, reinforced by asphyxiating gas, to burst their way through to the sea had failed. “_Lucia e morte, la bella Lucia!_” runs the old Italian song. Ypres, beautiful Ypres, was dead, and Death had strewn all the approaches to the city with the hideous emblems of his trade. From April 24 to May 13 a second great struggle had raged about Ypres, where our line bent out in a wide salient round the city. Ypres was shelled incessantly throughout the battle with artillery of the heaviest calibre, and our reinforcements, rushed up from other parts of the line, met on their way into Ypres the long and melancholy procession of refugees again seeking safety in flight, while the huge German “fat Berthas,” as the Boches call their 17-inch shells, exploded noisily in the emptying city. I remember arriving in Lisbon at three o’clock on a bright moonlit October night on the day following the revolution. The Sud-Express, which brought me down from Paris, was the first train into the Portuguese capital since the overthrow of the Monarchy. The Central Station was battered by artillery fire, the houses in the Avenida da Liberdade were torn and pitted with shell-holes, and the city lay absolutely silent and deserted, the ruins hard and black in the brilliant white moonlight. Lisbon on that October night is the only city I have seen that even approximately resembled Ypres as I found it on that sunny May morning. Even so the resemblance was fallacious, for the battered corner of Lisbon which met my eyes on my arrival represented practically the whole of the damage done, and the prevailing silence was the silence of night, whereas Ypres was all destroyed, and the silence was the silence of death.