CHAPTER IVSILENT YPRES
“Et erit sui monumentum gloriosum.”(Epitaph in the ruined Cathedral ofSt.Martin at Ypres.)
“Et erit sui monumentum gloriosum.”
(Epitaph in the ruined Cathedral ofSt.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, theGrand’ Place, orGroote Markt, as the bilingual street signs proclaimed, where the magnificent Hall of the Cloth-Makers, the far-famedHalle des Draps, with its noble tower and majestic front, quite dwarfed the charming Renaissance houses nestling about the square. Fromthe 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.
All the stirring past of Ypres, once wealthiest and most powerful city of Flanders, was outlined in the noble buildings thrusting their heads up out of the undulating plain. Built in a sparsely populated region, there was no city, far and wide, to compare with the beauty, the luxury, and wealth of Ypres. It stood proudly alone, superbly beautiful among ugly surroundings, its ramparts all about, a broad moat where swans glided idly among the water-lilies on the one side, the Yser Canal, bearing trade to Ostend on its sluggish waters, on the other. Ypres feared no comparison with the cities far about. Neither Courtrai nor Menin nor Lille nor Béthune norSt.Omer, nor even Arras, could match with this perfect jewel of old Flemish civilization.
Square and solid to the four winds of heaven, which in winter blow lustily across these mournful plains, stood the Gothic tower of the Cathedral ofSt.Martin, where Bishop Jansen, most renowned of heretics, sleeps his untroubled sleep in the shadow of the high-altar. Near by rose the massive red-brick keep of the Abbey of Thérouanne, last survival of a powerful and wealthy foundation transferred to Ypres when Elizabeth ruled in England. The loftyRenaissance roof ofSt.Nicholas, the graceful spire ofSt.Pierre, the high fabric ofSt.Jacques, looked down from other parts of the city on the ancient gabled houses clinging close together in the narrow cobbled streets. The splendid old houses of the Ypres guilds, rich and independent and free, told of the days when the cloth-makers and lace-workers of Ypres were renowned throughout Europe, before pestilence and internal dissension and wars dethroned the city from its high estate.
There was a delightful intimacy in this old-world Flemish city. Even in the names of the streets you saw it—the Street of Paradise, a narrow thread of an opening between two ancient gabled houses with a glimpse of waving foliage at the end; the Street of the Pots, where doubtless the tinsmiths once sat and hammered before their shop-doors; the Street of the Mice, survival of some legend of the Middle Ages; the Street of the Moon, derived probably from a shop or inn sign. A fine old almshouse, with gaudily painted statues in niches on the outside, theHospice Belle, a refuge for old women founded in the days of the Plantagenets by a pious noblewoman of Ypres, Christine de Guines, stood in the Rue de Lille, a perfect background to a Jan Steen or Pieter Brueghel painting. In every street the elaborately decorated fronts and carved doors were silent witness of centuries of prosperity and ease, the fatal fat years that brought ruin to Belgium.
But above all and before all, first and foremost, pride and heart of the city as it was its centre, rose the fair square tower of the Cloth Hall, with its fourrichly decorated pinnacles in the Gothic style and great golden clock. The heavy hand of the nineteenth-century restorer, taking his cue from the smug iconoclasts of Victoria and Louis Philippe, had played havoc with the interior rooms, great, lofty halls with fine old wooden roofing. The walls had been decorated with frescoes in the best “Sham Castle” style, illustrating the history of the city. But nothing, not even the modern statues set in niches to replace the statues destroyed by the armies of theDirectoire, could spoil the majestic harmony, the perfection of line, of the great three-storied façade with its corner-turrets, a vast towering front such as you might have seen nowhere else in the world.
The years that have gone “with the old world to the grave,” as Henley sang, swept all the horrors of warfare over Ypres, yet the city survived. Often in bygone days the sky above Ypres had reddened with the flames of the buildings set alight by the conqueror, while the narrow streets ran with the blood of the hapless inhabitants massacred by a ruthless victor. Popular riots, fighting between the nobles and the Guilds, an awful visitation of the Black Death—the same plague that ravaged England in the fourteenth century and affected our entire national life as deeply as Magna Carta itself—and a succession of sieges, destroyed the one-time commercial supremacy of Ypres. Over against the Lille Gate of the city there still stands, amid the rack and ruin of to-day, a humble little house with a gabled front of timber, probably the most ancient buildingin the city, that has witnessed most of the exciting happenings of Ypres’ storied past: the burning of the outlying parts of the town by the English and the burghers of Ghent in 1383; the devastations of the Iconoclasts, most fantastic of sects, in 1566; the sack of the city by the Gueux in 1578; its capture by the soldiers of Alexander Farnese in 1584; and by the French, who obtained possession of Ypres four times in the seventeenth century and held it until 1715.
Harried by fire and sword, the Ypres weavers fled from their homes, and many came to England, where the so-called Wipers Tower at Rye is, I believe, a token of the hospitality they received in our islands. Now once again, after many centuries, the hand of fate has bound together the threads of England and the ancient Flemish town so close that, as long as England endures, the name of Ypres shall signify a stern ordeal bravely borne and willing faithfulness even unto death.
The graves of our dead, the heroes of the two great battles which raged about this placid city, the dead of the fierce assaults, the daily toll of the trenches, lie in a vast semicircle about Ypres. Ypres was already a sacred name to us, while its towers and pinnacles yet stood, and life pulsated as of old in the congested streets of the quaint old town. Now, in its ruins heaped up in a funeral pyre over the corpses of its hapless civilians slain by German monster shells, it is, more than ever, a fane for ever holy to Englishmen, who in days to come shall know no greater pride than to say, “I was at Ypres!”
It was in the chill wet days of October that ourarmy first came to Ypres. We had fought the great battles of the Marne and the Aisne, and Sir John French had executed that wonderfully adroit and silent move from the Aisne to the left of the Allied line to hold the Germans off the Channel ports. The Seventh Division, fresh from its ineffectual attempt to save Antwerp—ineffectual because too late—had been placed under Sir John French’s orders and was operating eastward of Ypres. Sir Douglas Haig, beloved of Corps Commanders, Sir John French’s trusted Chief of Staff in South Africa, was sent to take his First Army Corps through Ypres towards Thourout, with the idea of sweeping the Germans eastward with the help of the French.
Ypres, with its snug houses and intimate streets, must have made a comforting impression on our troops, the war-worn veterans of Mons, the Marne, and the Aisne, as they tramped in from beneath the sighing poplars of the Poperinghe road. The city yet sheltered people when our troops came through; moreover, the 87th French Territorial Division was billeted in the town. How many of the Englishmen, whose eyes were gladdened by the sight of the old-world houses and smiling prosperity of the ancient city, were destined never to return through the Menin Gate, beyond which in the wooded plain the greatest battle of the war was raging! In the churches and convents of the city, particularly in the Chapel of the Irish Ladies of Ypres, where was hanging the British standard captured by Clare’s Dragoons fighting with the French at Ramillies, many a prayer went up in those days for the armyfighting so steadfastly without the city against overwhelming odds.
The roads from Ypres radiate like spokes of a wheel. To pass from westward to eastward of Ypres you must go through the city. During the fight all the immense activity of the rear of an army, redoubled in intensity when a battle is in progress, went on in and about Ypres, whose century-old houses, with their red roofs and overhanging gables, will be ever associated with the battle in the minds of those who fought there. For three weeks, while our thin line resisted the mighty smashes of the flower of the German army, the guns drummed almost unceasingly in the distance, and the little motor ambulances came whirring over the uneven cobble-stones of the city, bearing in the wounded to the field dressing-station, an unending procession of pain.
Ypres could not remain unscathed in the battle. Soon the German batteries took the proud towers of the Cloth Hall andSt.Martin’s for their goal, and amid a rain of shells pouring into the city, the luckless inhabitants, once again after centuries, were compelled to fly for safety out along the bare and dusty road that leads to Poperinghe.
The Poperinghe road! Who of our army in the field that has ever passed along it will ever forget that hideous highway—the road of pain for many, the road of death for many, the road of glory for all? I have traversed it in all weathers and in all conditions, and never have I seen it without a feeling almost of dread, the sensation of treading on ground sanctified by the feet of heroes going to their death.
Straight and ugly and flat, lined with tall poplars with bushy tops, set in the centre with unevenpavéworn bright by the wheels of a thousand motor-cars and lorries and carts, the Poperinghe road has been the silent witness of all the vicissitudes of the stupendous struggles which have raged about Ypres. On its polishedpavéthe emotions of a million men have been ground fine by the relentless wheels of the chariot of war. Men have passed along that road into battle, their hearts singing with the thrill of great deeds standing before, and along it have returned from the front pale, silent forms, the Angel of Death their escort—or have returned no more.
I have met them going into action along that road, in the blazing heat of noonday, tramping steadily in the thick dust of the footpath lining thepavé, tunics unbuttoned, sweat streaming down their begrimed faces. I have seen them returning, lying very still in the motor ambulances, with the stolid philosophy of wounded men, or else stifling in the ghastly grip of the asphyxiating gas.
Not even 17-inch shells blindly dropped at arbitrary intervals will permanently separate the Fleming from his home. Therefore, as soon as the German bombardment of Ypres slackened, the refugees came streaming back to find a great slice cut out of the tower of the Cloth Hall, the tower and roof ofSt.Martin’s irreparably damaged, and many houses in different quarters of the town considerably battered.
When I paid my first visit to Ypres in March—it was, I remember, during the battle of Neuve Chapelle which was raging far to the south—the city was fullof life. British, French, and Belgian troops were billeted there. There was a fine medley of khaki,bleu horizon, as the new powder-blue of the French Army is called, and the variegated hues of the uniforms of thebraves Belges. The soldiers had fraternized with one another and with the populace. All the small boys were wearing puttees, all the small girls, and some of the grown-up ones, British Army badges, whilst there appeared to reign a fine spirit of Socialism with regard to the rations of the three armies. Everybody, soldiers and civilians alike, seemed to be subsisting on bully-beef,singe(as the French soldier calls his tinned meat), the famous plum-and-apple jam of the British Expeditionary Force, and ration biscuits. English cigarettes and newspapers were for sale in the shops, and here and there on shutters or on doors were inscribed in more or less idiomatic English notices to the effect that washing was done, or that eggs and milk were for sale.
Whether it was the premonition that I should never see Ypres again as a populated city, I know not, but the fact remains that every detail of that brief visit to the city in March remains engraved on my memory. The streets were swarming with soldiers and children. Huge lorries of our Mechanical Transport grunted through the streets; mounted police clop-clopped over the cobbles; the women, lineal descendants of the lace-workers of the Middle Ages, sat at their half-doors, and plied the funny little wooden cocoons by means of which the renowned Ypres lace is made. Only theGrand’ Place, with the torn tower and gaping roof of the Cloth Hall, and the battered belfry ofSt.Martin’s,the damaged Lunatic Asylum where a Red Cross hospital was installed, and here and there a roofless house or a shell-hole torn in a façade, remained to tell of the stern struggle which had raged about the city.
I roamed through the empty and battered rooms of the Cloth Hall, and picked up from the floor great flakes of the ugly frescoes which had decorated the walls. I had a perfectly prosaic tea in a little teashop on theGrand’ Placebefore motoring away through the crowded streets into the gathering darkness. Thus I left Ypres, peaceful and busy, and, to tell the truth, I think, rather basking in the sunshine of publicity brought to the old place after so many centuries by the historic events of which it was the centre. Two months were to elapse before I saw Ypres again. Then Ypres was dead.
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 remainedamid 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 thebrilliant 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.
NeitherSt.Pierre, Martinique, nor Messina, nor Kingston, Jamaica—as I have it on the authority of men who visited those places after their destruction by earthquake, and who have also seen Ypres—produced on the mind such an overwhelming impression as the spectacle of this fair city of Flanders smitten with death all standing as it were. An earthquake or a cyclone will all but obliterate a city, will sweep across it, and leave a vast jumble of ruins in its passage. Bombardment, on the other hand, even the heaviest, will seldom wipe out the line of the streets, and the capricious path of the shells will leave standing single relics that recall in a flash all the beauty, all the intimacy, of the city that has passed away.
The great battle that had raged for three weeks about Ypres had spread on all sides the disorder of war. The warm air was heavy with the stench of dead horses putrefying in the sun, their torn carcasses lying athwart the roads or sprawling in the fields where German shells had rent great holes in the grass or brown earth. The little houses by the roadside—squalid hovels of staring red brick, for the most part—bore abundant traces of the passage of our soldiers toand from the fight. Here a broken rifle lay resting against the post of a door hanging lamentably on a single hinge and giving a glimpse of wild confusion within—furniture overturned, crockery broken, mattresses disembowelled, with the sunshine streaming in through a shell-hole in the roof. There lay a crumpled khaki overcoat beside a tangled heap of webbing equipment, with empty cartridge-cases scattered around. Heaps of empty shell-cases, ranging from the huge cylinder of the 4·7 gun to the natty little tube of the light field-gun, were piled up in the farmyards where deep wheel-ruts, empty fuse-boxes, and all the litter of batteries, showed where the gun emplacements had been. Here and there I caught sight of a cheerful English face in the little roadside houses. Some of our men were billeted there. Some of the faces were lathered, and a great sound of splashing and a strong odour of fried bacon announced that the breakfast-hour was at hand.
A lonely sentry standing against the wall of a shatteredestaminet, 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, thedestroyer 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 ofSt.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 wasFlemish 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.
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 richintérieursof 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 ofprie-dieu, all dusted with the fine yellow powder scattered by the German high-explosive shells.
The sacristy ofSt.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 anabbéwhowas seeking to salve what he could of the church treasures. With him was a Carmelite monk. The wizened oldabbéand 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-calledBoucheries, 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.
“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 outlookon 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.
Disaster sometimes overtook the salvage parties. Whilst dodging shells in Ypres one late afternoon, about the hour of the “evening hate,” as our army calls the German evening bombardment, I came upon a large blackened patch opposite the Cloth Hall. As it had not been there on my last visit, I examined it. I did not have to look very closely. The sickening stench of charred human flesh took me by the throat as I approached the patch. A scorched black bowler hat and some fragments of burnt cloth were, with that vapour of the charnel-house, all that were left to show that the remains of a man lay in that horrible heap. There were two charred skulls of horses, some blackened harness chains and calcined parts of a cart. Near by was a jagged lump of cast-iron shell, which lies by me as I write. The cart and horses of one of the salvage parties had obviously been overwhelmed by a shell which, after blowing up driver, horses, and cart, had started a fire which had utterly consumed what the explosion had left.
In past centuries Ypres has been Flemish, French, and Belgian in turn. Whatever her ultimate fate, whether the city be built up again on her ruins or suffered to remain as she is, a perpetual monument of Hunnish malice, henceforth and for all time Ypres will be as British as the impress of the place left on a hundred thousand brains can make it. WhereverI have been all along our winding line I have been plied with questions about Ypres. “We were there in October.” “I was dressed in the asylum there when I got pipped on the Zillebeke ridge.” “What about the Cloth Hall?” “Are the cavalry barracks destroyed?”
The British graves in Ypres—but a fraction of the endless graveyards which the defence of the city has filled in the plain and on the wooded slopes beyond the gates—are a further link between Ypres and the Empire. There is a cluster of wooden crosses in the fields over against the asylum, where I have seen orderlies digging fresh graves when I have passed that way. There are graves on the ramparts, old graves hastily dug in the leaf-mould by the shallow trenches thrown up by the French round the city in October, and new graves, the resting-place of men killed in and about the city when the trees were green with this year’s summer foliage.
Ypres is impregnated with the memory of the British Army. You will find its cartridges ground into the cobble-stones of the streets, you will find its rations strewn about the floors of the abandoned houses, you will find its billeting directions and inscriptions of all kinds scrawled on doors and walls. As I walked down the echoing streets of ruined houses, amid the ghastly odours of the dead wafted insidiously from choked cellars, with German shrapnel bursting viciously about, sent screaming over from two sides of the salient, I found myself thinking that not the tangible signs of the passage of our army, the abandoned equipment and stores, the simplegraves, but the city itself, burned, battered, and blasted, is the most moving monument to the heroic self-sacrifice of our men. Rent and torn and blackened, “all tears, like Niobe weeping for her children,” Ypres, uncaptured still, stands, an indestructible witness to our unbroken line.