Ypres was a city of ruin, with a
red fire in its heart where the Cloth Hall and cathedral smoldered
below their broken arches and high ribs of masonry that had been their
buttresses and towers.
When I went there two months later I saw Ypres as it stood through the
years of the war that followed, changing only in the disintegration of
its ruin as broken walls became more broken and fallen houses were
raked into smaller fragments by new bombardments, for there was never
a day for years in which Ypres was not shelled.
The approach to it was sinister after one had left Poperinghe and
passed through the skeleton of Vlamertinghe church, beyond Goldfish
Chateau. . . For a long time Poperinghe was the last link with a life
in which men and women could move freely without hiding from the
pursuit of death; and even there, from time to time, there were shells
from long-range guns and, later, night-birds dropping high-explosive
eggs. Round about Poperinghe, by Reninghelst and Locre, long convoys
of motor-wagons, taking up a new day's rations from the rail-heads,
raised clouds of dust which powdered the hedges white.
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