Beyond, the tower of St. Mark's
was a stark ruin, which gleamed white through the darkening twilight.
We felt as men who should stand gazing upon the ruins of Westminster
Abbey, while the shadows of night crept into their dark caverns and
into their yawning chasms of chaotic masonry, with a gleam of moon
upon their riven towers and fingers of pale light touching the ribs of
isolated arches. In the spaciousness of the Grande Place at Ypres my
friend and I stood like the last men on earth in a city of buried
life.
It was almost dark now as we made our way through other streets of
rubbish heaps. Strangely enough, as I remember, many of the iron lamp-
posts had been left standing, though bent and twisted in a drunken
way, and here and there we caught the sweet whiff of flowers and
plants still growing in gardens which had not been utterly destroyed
by the daily tempest of shells, though the houses about them had been
all wrecked.
The woods below the ramparts were slashed and torn by these storms,
and in the darkness, lightened faintly by the crescent moon, we
stumbled over broken branches and innumerable shell-holes.
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