“_Est-ce que mon lieutenant voudrait boire un coup?_” a sour-visaged Belgian peasant asked me in Ypres one morning. The Germans were shelling the city heavily, and I was inquiring as to the danger spots. The peasant was loading a cart with furniture from a big house in the Rue d’Elverdinghe (one of the principal streets), with the assistance of a mate and under the indulgent eye of a Belgian gendarme. These three men, with my companion and myself, were, I believe, the only human beings in Ypres that day. Standing drinks to strangers is inexpensive in a deserted city where locks no longer serve to imprison bottles in their cellars, and anyway looting is discouraged in the British Army. So, to the speechless amazement of the Belgians, who pointed, with gestures significant of the delights awaiting us, to a large array of ancient, cobwebbed bottles set out on a buhl table, we refused to drink with them. But we went over the house, a treasure-house of old Flemish art, as fine a specimen of a patrician home of the Low Countries as one might wish to see. The peasants were salving the treasures for the owner, who had fled for refuge to the village of Watou, some twenty miles away. Everything within was in the wildest disorder, and the peasants, with none too tender hand, were piling pell-mell into baskets and crates exquisite specimens of old Flemish pottery, tiles, blown-glass flagons, and wood-carving. I noticed on the floor a lovely old stone drinking-jug inscribed “Iper, 1506”--the sort of jug you see in a Teniers or Jan Steen painting. This family seemed to have thrown nothing away all through the centuries it had lived in the house. In one room a wonderful collection of old children’s toys was scattered about the floor--punchinellos and jack-in-the boxes, with clothes of faded chintz, and little model rooms, complete to the little clock on the wall, enclosed in boxes with glass sides. A shell had come through the roof of the library, a bright and sunny apartment on the top floor, with a charming outlook on the green surroundings of Ypres, and sent the bookshelves and their contents flying before it went on its way through another room on the floor below and out of the house. Old calf-bound tomes were scattered about the place in a smother of brick-dust.