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The guns ceased fire. Their tumult died down, and all was quiet again.
It was horribly quiet on our way into Ypres, across the railway, past
the red-brick asylum, where a calvary hung unscathed on broken walls,
past the gas-tank at the crossroads. This silence was not reassuring,
as our heels clicked over bits of broken brick on our way into Ypres.
The enemy had been shelling heavily for three-quarters of an hour in
the morning. There was no reason why he should not begin again. . . I
remember now the intense silence of the Grande Place that day after
the gas-attack, when we three men stood there looking up at the
charred ruins of the Cloth Hall. It was a great solitude of ruin. No
living figure stirred among the piles of masonry which were tombstones
above many dead. We three were like travelers who had come to some
capital of an old and buried civilization, staring with awe and
uncanny fear at this burial-place of ancient splendor, with broken
traces of peoples who once had lived here in security.


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