The immediate future of Ypres, after the war, is plain.  It will instantly become one of the show-places of the world.  Hotels will appear out of the ground, guides and touts will pullulate at the railway station, the tour of the ruins will be mapped out, and the tourists and globe-trotters of the whole planet will follow that tour in batches like staring sheep.  Much money will be amassed by a few persons out of the exhibition of misfortune and woe.  A sinister fate for a community!  Nevertheless, the thing must come to pass, and it is well that it should come to pass.  The greater the number of people who see Ypres for themselves, the greater the hope of progress for mankind.

If the facade of the Cloth Hall can be saved, some such inscription as the following ought to be incised along the length of it: 

“On July 31st, 1914, The German Minister At Brussels Gave A Positive And Solemn Assurance That Germany Had No Intention Of Violating The Neutrality Of Belgium.  Four Days Later The German Army Invaded Belgium.  Look Around.”

When you are walking through that which was Ypres, nothing arouses a stronger feeling—­half contempt, half anger—­than the thought of the mean, miserable, silly, childish, and grotesque excuses which the wit of Germany has invented for her deliberately planned crime.  And nothing arouses a more grim and sweet satisfaction than the thought that she already has the gravest reason to regret it, and would give her head not to have committed it.  Despite all vauntings, all facile chatterings about the alleged co-operation of an unknowable and awful God, all shriekings of unity and power, all bellowings about the perfect assurance of victory, all loud countings of the fruits of victory—­the savage leaders of the deluded are shaking in their shoes before the anticipated sequel of an outrage ineffable alike in its barbarism and in its idiocy.

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