Out in the sunlight there was the first sign of human life. A detachment of French Colonial _tirailleurs_ entered from the north--brown, shadowy men in fantastic weather-stained uniforms. A vehicle stood at the cathedral door, and a lean and sad-faced priest was loading it with some of the church treasures--chalices, plate, embroidery. A Carmelite friar was prowling among the side alleys looking for the dead. It was like some _macabre_ imagining of Victor Hugo.
The ruins of old buildings are so familiar that they do not at first dominate the mind. Far more arresting are the remnants of the pitiful little homes, where there is no dignity, but a pathos which cries aloud. Ypres was like a city destroyed by an earthquake; that is the simplest and truest description. But the skeletons of her great buildings, famous in Europe for 500 years, left another impression. One felt, as at Pompeii, that things had always been so; one felt that they were verily indestructible, they were so great in their fall. The cloak of St. Martin was not needed to cover the nakedness of his church. There was a terrible splendour about these gaunt and broken structures, these noble, shattered _façades_, which defied their destroyers. Ypres might be empty and a ruin, but to the end of time she would be no mean city.
One of the truest of our younger poets, Rupert Brooke, who died while serving in the Dardanelles, wrote in his last months a sonnet on the consolation of death in war:--
“If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed.”
In the salient of Ypres there are not less than a hundred thousand graves of Allied soldiers, sometimes marked by plain wooden crosses, sometimes obliterated by the _débris_ of ruined trenches, sometimes hidden in corners of fields and beneath clumps of chestnuts. That ground is for ever England; and it is also for ever France, for there the men of Dubois died around Bixschoote and on the Klein Zillebeke ridge. When the war is over this triangle of meadowland, with a ruined city for its base, will be an enclave of Belgian soil consecrated as the holy land of two great peoples. It may be that it will be specially set apart as a memorial place; it may be that it will be unmarked, and that the country folk will till and reap as before over the vanishing trench lines. But it will never be common ground. It will be for us the most hallowed spot on earth, for it holds our bravest dust, and it is the proof and record of a new spirit. In the past when we have thought of Ypres we have thought of the British flag preserved there, which Clare’s Regiment, fighting for France, captured at the Battle of Ramillies. The name of the little Flemish town has recalled the divisions in our own race and the centuries-old conflict between France and Britain. But from now and henceforth it will have other memories. It will stand as a symbol of unity and alliance--unity within our Empire, unity within our Western civilization--that true alliance and that lasting unity which are won and sealed by a common sacrifice.