And all this is a heap of ruins.  Whether any portion of it can ever be repaired I do not know, but the cost would be fabulous.  The roof is entirely destroyed, and with it the whole of the great gallery and its paintings, for fire consumed what the shells had left.  Only the bare stone walls remain, and as we stood among the pillars which had supported the floors above, it was difficult to realize that the heap of rubbish around us was all that was left of what had once been the envy of Europe.  The only building which we have at all comparable to the Cloth Hall is the Palace of Westminster.  If it were blasted by shells and gutted by fire, we might regret it, but what would be our feelings if it were the legacy of Edward the First, and had been handed down to us intact through six centuries?

Behind the Cloth Hall stands the Church of St. Martin, once for two and a half centuries the Cathedral of Ypres.  It was largely built at the same time as the Cloth Hall, and it is a glorious monument of the architecture of the thirteenth century.  Perhaps its most beautiful features are the great square tower, the lofty and imposing nave, and the exquisite rose window in the south wall of the transept, which is said to be the finest in Belgium.  The tower was surrounded with scaffolding, and around its base were piles of stone, for the church was being repaired when the war began.  I wonder if it will ever be repaired now.  The Germans had expended on its destruction many of their largest shells, and they had been very successful in their efforts.  There were three huge holes in the roof of the choir where shells had entered, and in the centre of the transept was a pile of bricks and stone six feet high.  Part of the tower had been shot away, and its stability was uncertain.  The beautiful glass of the rose window had been utterly destroyed, and part of the tracery was broken.  The old Parish Chapel on the south side of the nave had nothing left but the altar and four bare walls.  The fine old roof and the great bronze screen which separated it from the nave had perished in the flames.  The screen was lying in small fragments amongst the rubbish on the chapel floor, and at first I thought they were bits of rusty iron.

As I stood in the ruins of the Parish Chapel looking round on this amazing scene, there was a roar overhead, and one of the big 14-inch shells passed, to explode with a terrific crash amongst the houses a few hundred yards farther on.  It was plain that the bombardment was beginning again, and that we must see to our business without any delay.  Two more shells passed overhead as I came out of the church, with a roar very different from the soft whistle of a small shell.  The destruction produced by one of these large shells is astonishing.  One large house into which a shell had fallen in the previous night had simply crumpled up.  Portions of the walls and a heap of bricks were all that was left, a bit of an iron bedstead and a fragment of