The atmosphere of Ypres was heavy with tragedy. Alone and unheeded I wandered from house to house--ever obsessed with the feeling that I was indecently intruding into another’s intimacy--amid the rich _intérieurs_ of the old patrician families and the humble surroundings of the small shopkeepers. I rambled through the ancient cloisters of the Belle Hospice, where the exquisite Renaissance chapel had been destroyed save for a single delicate pillar still rearing its head aloft to where God’s blue heaven now formed the roof. I roamed through Ypres’ ruined churches, where the pigeons were fluttering to and fro over heaps of rubbish that on examination disintegrated themselves into fragments of old pictures, pieces of carved oak confessionals, remnants of _prie-dieu_, all dusted with the fine yellow powder scattered by the German high-explosive shells. The sacristy of St. Martin’s, where the exquisitely embroidered sacred vestments still peeped out of their long, flat drawers, was ankle-deep in this dust. It lay over everything--on the linen sheets enveloping the magnificent copes on their wooden stands, on the Mass missals and vessels, on the old brass candelabra, even on the uniform of the Suisse cast hurriedly in a corner. One day I met an _abbé_ who was seeking to salve what he could of the church treasures. With him was a Carmelite monk. The wizened old _abbé_ and the tonsured monk in his brown and white habit dragging old pictures across the ruined square formed a picture that might have come straight out of the Middle Ages. The fancy took me to see what the bombardment had left of the two museums of Ypres, containing valuable collections of old Flemish pottery and china and prints of the city. The Municipal Museum had been installed in the so-called _Boucheries_, a fine old colonnaded house opposite the Cloth Hall. The other had been housed in an old-world mansion, the Hotel Merghelynck, in the street that the French call the Rue de Lille and the Flemish the Rijssel-Straat, Rijssel being the Flemish name for Lille. Both museums were utterly destroyed. Whether the City Fathers of Ypres had removed the treasures of Ypres to a place of safety before the first bombardment I do not know, but of both museums only the blackened shell remained, the interior piled up high with an immense heap of bricks and charred rafters.