Then even the
soldiers seem left behind, and you enter the strange solitude where the war
is waged. Before you rises the great mound of Ypres. In the distance it
looks like a living city with quaintly broken skyline, but as you approach
you see that it is only the tomb of a city standing there desolate and
shattered in the midst of a universal desolation.
It is midday as you pass through its streets, but there is no moving thing
visible amidst the ruins. The very spirit of loneliness is about you--not
the invigorating loneliness of the mountain tops, but the sad loneliness of
the grave. I have stood upon the ruins of Carthage, but even there I did
not feel the same sense of solitude that I felt as I walked the streets of
Ypres. There, at least, the birds were singing above you, and the Arab sat
beside his camel on the grass in the sunshine. Here nature itself seems
blasted by some dreadful flame of death. The streets preserve their
contours, but on either side the houses stand like gaunt skeletons,
roofless and shattered, fronts knocked out, floors smashed through or
hanging in fragments, bedsteads tumbling down through the broken ceiling of
the sitting-room, pictures askew on the tottering walls, household
treasures a forlorn wreckage, hats still hanging on the hat-pegs, the
table-cloth still laid, the fireplace lustreless with the ashes of the last
fire.
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