Through the gaps in the houses there were glimpses of greenery. A broken door admitted to a garden--a carefully-tended garden, for the grass had once been trimly kept, and the owner must have had a pretty taste in spring flowers. A little fountain still plashed in a stone basin. But in one corner an incendiary shell had fallen on the house, and in the heap of charred débris there were human remains. Most of the dead had been removed, but there were still bodies in out-of-the-way comers. Over all hung a sickening smell of decay, against which the lilacs and hawthorns were powerless. That garden was no place to tarry in.
The street led into the Place, where once stood the great Church of St. Martin and the Cloth Hall. Those who knew Ypres before the war will remember the pleasant _façade_ of shops on the south side, and the cluster of old Flemish buildings at the north-eastern corner. Words are powerless to describe the devastation of these houses. Of the southern side nothing remained but a file of gaunt gables. At the northeast corner, if you crawled across the rubble, you could see the remnants of some beautiful old mantelpieces. Standing in the middle of the Place, one was oppressed by the utter silence, a silence which seemed to hush and blanket the eternal shelling in the Salient beyond. Some jackdaws were cawing from the ruins, and a painstaking starling was rebuilding its nest in a broken pinnacle. An old cow, a miserable object, was poking her head in the rubbish and sniffing curiously at a dead horse. Sound was a profanation in that tomb which had once been a city.
The Cloth Hall had lost all its arcades, most of its front, and there were great rents everywhere. Its spire looked like a badly-whittled stick, and the big gilt clock, with its hands irrevocably fixed, hung loose on a jet of stone. St. Martin’s Church was a ruin, and its stately square tower was so nicked and dinted that it seemed as if a strong wind would topple it over. Inside the church was a weird sight. Most of the windows had gone, and the famous rose window in the southern transept lacked a segment. The side chapels were in ruins, the floor was deep in fallen stones, but the pillars still stood. A mass for the dead must have been in progress, for the altar was draped in black, but the altar stone was cracked across. The sacristy was full of vestments and candlesticks tumbled together in haste, and all were covered with yellow picric dust from the high explosives. In the graveyard behind there was a huge shell crater, 50 feet across and 20 feet deep, with human bones exposed in the sides. Before the main door stood a curious piece of irony. An empty pedestal proclaimed from its four sides the many virtues of a certain Belgian statesman who had been also mayor of Ypres. The worthy mayor was lying in the dust beside it, a fat man in a frock coat, with side-whiskers and a face like Bismarck.