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.

And in the centre of this scene of utter misery the Cathedral and the Cloth Hall, still towering above the general desolation, sublime even in their ruin, the roofs gone, the interiors a heap of rubbish—­the rubbish of priceless things—­the outer walls battered and broken, but standing as they have stood for centuries.  Most wonderful of all, as I saw it, a single pinnacle of the Cloth Hall still standing above the wreck, slender and exquisitely carven, pointing like an accusing finger to the eternal tribunal.  For long the Germans had been shelling that Finger of Ypres.  They shelled it the afternoon I was there and filled the market-place with great masses of masonry from the walls.  But they shelled it in vain, and as I left Ypres in the twilight, when the thunder of the guns had ceased, and looked back on the great mound of “the city that was,” I saw above the ruins the finger still pointing heavenward.

But if the solitude of Ypres is memorable, the silence is terrible.  It is the silence of imminent and breathless things, full of strange secrets, thrilling with a fearful expectation, broken by sudden and shattering voices that speak and then are still—­voices that seem to come out of the bowels of the earth near at hand and are answered by voices more distant, the vicious hiss of the shrapnel, the crisp rattle of the machine-guns, the roar of “Mother,” that sounds like an invisible express train thundering through the sky above you.  The solitude and the silence assume an oppressive significance.  They are only the garment of the mighty mystery that envelops you.  You feel that these dead walls have ears, eyes, and most potent voices, that you are not in the midst of a great loneliness, but that all around the earth is full of most tremendous secrets.  And then you realise that the city that is as dead as Nineveh to the outward eye is the most vital city in the world.

One day it will rise from its ashes, its streets will resound once more with jest and laughter, its fires will be relit, and its chimneys will send forth the cheerful smoke.  But its glory throughout all the ages will be the memory of the days when it stood a mound of ruins on the plain with its finger pointing in mute appeal to heaven against the infamies of men.