A lonely sentry standing against the wall of a shattered _estaminet_, a dead horse lying in a pool of blood in a gutter, a long vista of empty streets lined with roofless houses, jagged beams projecting into the void, jets of bricks spouted out across the cobble-stones amid charred fragments of furniture, and a silence so absolute, so heavy, that one might almost hear it--this was what the Hun had left of Ypres. Here, indeed, was the tragedy of Belgium, the horror of Louvain, the crime of Dinant. But murdered Ypres, as it seemed to me, cried out more loudly to Heaven for vengeance than her slaughtered sisters. Her destruction had been wrought from afar, the destroyer could not enter, her citizens had left her, her saviour shunned her. The city was empty, desolate, her toppling walls bending forward as though in grief for her children buried beneath the ruins, for the utter obliteration of five centuries of work and planning to the end of prosperity, happiness, and beauty. The city lay silent in the sunshine, and a subtle odour of death crept out of nooks and crannies, where swarms of noisome flies danced eternally in the sunbeams. But the air above me was full of noise. Our heavy shells were passing over and about the city with a prodigious reverberating bang that seemed to shake the vault of heaven, followed by long-drawn-out gurgling rushes like the beating of wings of a host of lost angels. Now and then the scream of shells became louder on a different note. Then the sound stopped of a sudden, and was swallowed up in a deafening explosion mingling with an orange flash and a pillar of black or white smoke. Not even dead might Ypres find mercy at the hands of her tormentors. Morning and evening the Germans shelled the empty shell of a city, demolishing the ruins, rekindling fires that had burnt themselves out. I paid many visits to Ypres. The dead city fascinated me. Every visit was for me a pious pilgrimage to the place of sacrifice of the best of England’s sons. The crumbling, battered remnant of the Cloth Hall, the roofless nave of St. Martin’s, the ruined houses of the Guilds, the four-square tower of the Abbey of Thérouanne, sliced and rent but not demolished--all those relics of a beauty that was Flemish were to me Belgium’s offering to the memories of the men who had laid down their lives that a great crime might be atoned. Some day, maybe, we shall know how many shells the Germans hurled into Ypres. I know that in all my visits to the ruined city I never found a single house that had escaped unscathed, and I passed through every quarter of the town.