Part 17 (2/2)

”It seems absurd to continue sh.e.l.ling the town,” I said. ”There is nothing left.”

Then and there I had a lesson in the new warfare. Bombardment of the country behind the enemy's trenches is not necessarily to destroy towns. Its strategical purpose, I was told, is to cut off communications, to prevent, if possible, the bringing up of reserve troops and transport wagons, to destroy ammunition trains. I was new to war, with everything to learn. This perfectly practical explanation had not occurred to me.

”But how do they know when an ammunition train is coming?” I asked.

”There are different methods. Spies, of course, always. And aeroplanes also.”

”But an ammunition train moves.”

It was necessary then to explain the various methods by which aeroplanes signal, giving ranges and locations. I have seen since that time the charts carried by aviators and airs.h.i.+p crews, in which every hedge, every ditch, every small detail of the landscape is carefully marked. In the maps I have seen the region is divided into lettered squares, each square made up of four small squares, numbered. Thus B 3 means the third block of the B division, and so on. By wireless or in other ways the message is sent to the batteries, and B 3, along which an ammunition train is moving, suddenly finds itself under fire. Thus ended the second lesson!

An ammunition train, having safely escaped B 3 and all the other terrors that are spread for such as it, rumbled by, going through the Square. The very vibration of its wheels as they rattled along the street set parts of the old building to shaking. Stones fell. It was not safe to stand near the belfry.

Up to this time I had found a certain philosophy among the French and Belgian officers as to the destruction of their towns. Not of Louvain, of course, or those earlier towns destroyed during the German invasion, but of the bombardment which is taking place now along the battle line. But here I encountered furious resentment.

There is nothing whatever left of the city for several blocks in each direction round the Cloth Hall. At the time it was destroyed the army of the Allies was five miles in advance of the town. The sh.e.l.ls went over their heads for days, weeks.

So accurate is modern gunnery that given a chart of a city the gunner can drop a sh.e.l.l within a few yards of any desired spot. The Germans had a chart of Ypres. They might have saved the Cloth Hall, as they did save the Cathedral at Antwerp. But they were furious with thwarted ambition--the onward drive had been checked. Instead of attempting to save the Cloth Hall they focussed all their fire on it. There was nothing to gain by this wanton destruction.

It is a little difficult in America, where great structures are a matter of steel and stone erected in a year or so, to understand what its wonderful old buildings meant to Flanders. In a way they typified its history, certainly its art. The American likes to have his art in his home; he buys great paintings and puts them on the walls. He covers his floors with the entire art of a nomadic people. But on the Continent the method is different. They have built their art into their buildings; their great paintings are in churches or in structures like the Cloth Hall. Their homes are comparatively unadorned, purely places for living. All that they prize they have stored, open to the world, in their historic buildings. It is for that reason that the destruction of the Cloth Hall of Ypres is a matter of personal resentment to each individual of the nation to which it belonged. So I watched the faces of the two officers with me. There could be no question as to their att.i.tude. It was a personal loss they had suffered. The loss of their homes they had accepted stoically. But this was much more. It was the loss of their art, their history, their tradition. And it could not be replaced.

The firing was steady, unemotional.

As the wind died down we ventured into the ruins of the Cloth Hall itself. The roof is gone, of course. The building took fire from the bombardment, and what the sh.e.l.ls did not destroy the fire did. Melted lead from ancient gutters hung in stalact.i.tes. In one place a wall was still standing, with a bit of its mural decoration. I picked up a bit of fallen gargoyle from under the fallen tower and brought it away. It is before me now.

It is seven hundred and fifteen years since that gargoyle was lifted into its place. The Crusades were going on about that time; the robber barons were sallying out onto the plains on their raiding excursions.

The Norman Conquest had taken place. From this very town of Ypres had gone across the Channel ”workmen and artisans to build churches and feudal castles, weavers and workers of many crafts.”

In those days the Yperlee, a small river, ran open through the town.

But for many generations it has been roofed over and run under the public square.

It was curious to stand on the edge of a great sh.e.l.l hole and look down at the little river, now uncovered to the light of day for the first time in who knows how long.

In all that chaos, with hardly a wall intact, at the corner of what was once the cathedral, stood a heroic marble figure of Burgomaster Vandenpeereboom. It was quite untouched and as placid as the little river, a benevolent figure rising from the ruins of war.

”They have come like a pestilence,” said the General. ”When they go they will leave nothing. What they will do is written in what they have done.”

Monsieur le Commandant had disappeared. Now he returned triumphant, carrying a great bundle in both arms.

”I have been to what was the house of a relative,” he explained. ”He has told me that in the cellar I would find these. They will interest you.”

”These” proved to be five framed photographs of the great paintings that had decorated the walls of the great Cloth Hall. Although they had been hidden in a cellar, fragments of sh.e.l.l had broken and torn them. But it was still possible to gain from them a faint idea of the interior beauty of the old building before its destruction.

I examined them there in the public square, with a sh.e.l.l every now and then screeching above but falling harmlessly far away.

A priest joined us. He told pathetically of watching the destruction of the Arcade, of seeing one arch after another go down until there was nothing left.

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