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-------------------------------------Ypres Article----------------------------------------------------------------
Ypres To-Day. (From John Buchan.) 'British HEADQUARTERS, MAY 20. Yesterday the villages of Poperinghe and Vlamertinghe were heavily shelled and the Ypres road made unwholesome travelling. But today there was a lull in the cannonade, and it was possible to' make a push for Ypres and the salient beyond it. After two days of rain the dust was laid, and the land, scoured by a north wind, looked very fresh and green. Civil life goes on up to the very edge of the fire zone. 'In the hamlets girls sit outside their doors busy at lacemaking; the country people are at work in the fields, and children are playing round the cottages. The roads beyond the fire zone are alive with troops-battered battalions that have returned from the trenches; cavalry with their horses; French infantry of the line and chasseurs-à-pied, for the French front on the canal is only a few miles of. Belgian working parties are engaged repairing the roads, which need it badly; numbers of motor lorries and converted London omnibuses move along below the poplars, and motor dispatch riders twist in and out among the traffic. A little farther back is the car of the Commander-in. Chief, for Sir John French is to address some of the battalions engaged in the recent fighting. The road is as busy as Piccadilly-circus. And *then suddenly you pass out of this wholesome bustle through the fire zone and into a place of the dead. A SHATTERED TOWN It is not healthy to linger at the cross-roads or the level crossing at the entrance to Ypres, for these 'are places of which the Germans have the exact range. Before you is a square tower which looks quite normal, and the grouping of masonry around it seems natural and ordinary. But as soon as you enter the faubourg of little houses you realize that you are in a shattered world. The red cottages are riddled 'and roofless; the asylum opposite has had its front blown off; a water tower has a shell hole in the middle of it. Presently you are in the main street, with the Cathedral at the head of it. The street lies white and empty in the sun, and over all reigns a deathly 'stillness. There' is not a human being to be seen in all its length, and the houses which contain it are skeletons. Here the whole front has gone and bedrooms with wrecked furniture are open to the light. Hero a 42cm. shell has made a breach in the line with raw edges of masonry on both sides and a yawning cavern below. Go into one of the houses which have suffered least. In one room the carpet is spattered with plaster from the ceiling, but the furniture is unbroken. There is a Boule cabinet 'with china, red plush chairs, a piano, and a gramophone-the plenishing of the best parlour of a middle-class home. In another room is a sewing '"machine, from which the owner has fled in the *middle of a piece of work. Hero is a novel with the reader's place marked. It is like a city which has been visited by an earthquake which caught the inhabitants unawares and drove them shivering to seek a place of refuge. Through the gaps in the houses there are glimpses of greenery. Push open this broken door and you enter a garden-a carefully tended garden, for the grass has been once trimly kept and the owner must have had a pretty taste in spring flowers.' A little fountain still splashes in a stone basin. But at one corner an incendiary shell has fallen on the house, and in the heap of charred debris there are human remains. Most of the dead have been removed, but there are still bodies in out-of-the-way corners. Over all hangs a sickening smell of decay, against which the lilacs and hawthorns are powerless. That garden is no place to tarry in. From the street you enter the Place, where stand the great Church of St. Martin and the Cloth Hall. Those who knew Ypres before the war will remember the pleasant façade of shops on the south side, and the cluster of old Flemish buildings at the north-eastern corner. There are no words to describe the devastation of these houses. Of the southern side nothing remains but a file of gaunt gables. At the north- east corner if you crawl across the rubble you will find the remnants of some beautiful old mantelpieces. Stand in the middle of the Place and you will be oppressed by the utter silence. Some jackdaws are cawing from the ruins and a painstaking starling is rebuilding its nest in a broken pinnacle. An old cow, a miser- able object, is poking her head in the debris and sniffing curiously at the dead body of a horse. But these sounds only intensify the stillness, and it is well, for sound is a profanation in this tomb which was once a city. CLOTH HALL AND CATHEDRAL The Cloth Hall has lost all its arcades, most of its front, and there are great rents everywhere. Its spire looks like a badly whittled, stick, and the big gilt clock with its hands irrevocably 'fixed hangs loose on a jet of stone. Through the gaps one sees the bad modern frescoes on the further walls. St. Martin's Church is a ruin, and its stately square spire is nicked and dinted till it seems as if a strong wind would topple it over. Inside the church is a weird sight. Most of the windows have gone, and 'the famous rose window in the southern transept lacks a segment. The side chapels are in ruins, the floor is deep in fallen stones, but the pillars still stand, and one can realize the noble lines of the building. No damage has been done to the fine Renaissance reredos. 'A mass for the dead must have been in progress, for the altar is still draped in black, but the altar stone is cracked across. The sacristy is full of vestments and candlesticks tumbled together in haste, and all are covered with yellow pieric dust from the high explosives. In the graveyard behind there is a huge shell crater, 60ft. across and 20ft deep, with human bones exposed in the sides. Before the main door there is a curious piece of irony. An empty pedestal proclaims from its four sides the many virtues of a certain Belgian states man, who was also Mayor of Ypres. The worthy Mayor is lying in the dust beside it, a fat man in a frockcoat with side-whiskers and a face like Bismarok. Out in' the sunlight there is the first sign of human life. A detachment of French colonial tirailleurs enters from the north-brown men in fantastic weather-stained uniforms. A vehicle is at the Cathedral door, and a lean and sad-faced priest is loading it with some of the church treasures, chalices, plate, and embroideries. A Carmelite friar comes up with news of some dead in a side street. Slowly under constant shellfire we are getting on with the work of clearing of the ruins. The dead beasts have been mostly burned and the dead citizens buried, and in this cold wind there is a good chance of staving off disease. The ruins of old buildings are so familiar that they do not at first arrest the imagination. Far more arresting are the ruins of the pitiful little homes where there is no dignity but a pathos which cries aloud. Ypres is 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, leave another impression. You feel, as at Pompeii, that things have always been so; you feel that they are verily indestructible they are so great in their fall. The cloak of St. Martin is not needed to cover the nakedness of his church. There is a terrible splendour about these gaunt and broken figures, these noble shattered fa9ades, which defies their destroyers. Ypres may be empty and a ruin, but to the end of time she will be no mean city. THE YPRES SALIENTAll the same I was glad to got out of that charnel house. About the Mennen gate it is unwise to tarry, for the German guns have the range to a foot, and this is a favoured place for their punctual shells. On the right is the spire of St. Jacques lacking one of its pinnacles, and then you cross the moat and reach the open country. That moat is the Ypres Canal, where the French are fighting farther north. It comes from the Yser, and south of Ypres runs to the Lys past the corner at Klein Zillebeke, which was the German objective last November. We are now on the greatest of our battlefields, where every yard has been fought over. In appearance the country is very like rural England-red-roofed farms and cottages, little straggling villages, and masses of lilac, may, and laburnum everywhere. Only everything is broken. A wayside cottage has been so tattered by shot that it looks like a skeleton autumn leaf, and from its rickety shade emerges a gnome-like private in the Army Service Corps; who makes precisely the right human counter- part. Once we held all the ground to Zonnebeko and beyond, but now the salient is shrunk and our front is only some two or three miles from Ypres. There lies the wood where our headquarters were shelled on October 31, when General Lomax received his fatal wound and five Staff officers were killed. Away beyond is a low ridge, and on this side half a mile off are our trenches. Beyond the ridge are the Wurtembergers. SOLDIERS' NICKNAMES If Ypres was silent, this place is a pandemonium of sound. Shellfire has been described so often that all epithets have become banal, and it is simplest to say that it never appears to stop. Now and again comes a report so sharp that it seems to be at one's ear. The British soldier has his own terminology for the different kinds of shell-" pip-squeak," "whizz- bang," "little Willy," "w white hope," "white swan," " mother," grandmother," " Archie," and many others. Most of them seem to be going on now, but I do not think "grand- mother " (the biggest howitzer) is talking, and I fail to detect " Archie " (the anti-aircraft gun). There are various kinds of headquarters. There is the pleasant house in a street of an ancient town many miles to the westward. There is the chateau in a neglected park-a very common type-and for the brigadier in the Hell of a fight there is the dug-out. There you will see the smartest of leaders, men whose names are on everybody's lips and whom you last met at a London dinner-party, dragging himself from an underground lair like a badger's earth. The Germans are always on the look out for headquarters on which to drop their shells, and they have their snipers-forest- rangers from South Germany-on every knuckle of ground, so it is not Wise to move about much in the open or in groups in these parts. A party of stretcher-bearers are bringing in the dead of the morning. Under the blossoming domes of the chestnuts are many graves with their simple wooden crosses; one was laid open this morning by a shell. In a corner lie two officers who fell in the great fight of the cavalry fast Thursday. A man becomes almost inured to reading in the casualty lists of the death of friends, and except in the case of the most intimate there is no acute realization. But to see, half a mile from where they fell, the new graves of men one had known in the pride of youth and strength is to awake, with a shock to the desolation of war. Any man who journeys from the Base to the actual front must be impressed with the immense and complex mechanism of modern armies.' At first it seems like a gigantic business concern, a sort of magnified combine. Fifty miles off we are manufacturing on a colossal scale, and men are suffering from industrial ailments as they suffer in dangerous trades at home. There are more mechanics than in Sheffield, more transport-workers than in Newcastle. But all this mechanism seems to me to resemble a series of pyramids which taper to a point as they near the front. Behind, are the great general hospitals and convalescent homes; then come the 'clearing hospitals; then the main dressing stations; and last of all the advanced and regimental dressing stations, where mechanism fails you. Behind are the huge transport depots and repairing shops; the daily trains to railheads; the supply columns and last the handcarts to carry ammunition to the firing line. Behind are the railways and the mechanical transport, but at the end a man 'has only his two legs. Behind are the workshops of the Flying Corps and the squadron and flight stations, but at the end of the chain is the solitary aeroplane coasting over the German lines and depending upon the skill and nerve of one man. A PRIVATE'S " KINGSHIP." This is the most highly organized and mechanical war ever fought. All modern science has gone to the making of it. But in the last resort you get to the human factor, the fight- in man, who, in spite of every artificial aid, depends upon the same qualities which gained victory in the days of bows and arrows. Here is a tale which may be untrue, but which is well vouched for, and will serve as a parable. When Ypres was first bombarded early in November we withdrew our troops from the town, but we did not remove the civil population. There was one British private who did not leave with the rest, for he was asleep in a cellar. Next morning he awoke to find Ypres without any authority, -and, misliking that, he set about covering it himself. ' He kept the citizens under an iron discipline, had looters shot at sight, and, though himself inclined to the bottle, prevented drunkenness in others. They called him le Roi d' Ypres, but his kingship lasted only for a week. A callous Court-martial tried him found that his efforts in the cause of order had been good and forgave him his other delinquencies. I take the doing of the not wholly reputable and probably mythical British private as emblematic of a certain governing and winning quality in our race. Mechanize war to the uttermost and the human factor will still remain and will still-granted a reason- able equality in equipment-determine the issue. In all humility one may believe-and the past months give warrant for the faith- that in the human factor we have the better of the enemy. YPRES TO-DAY. A CITY OF THE DEAD THE HUMAN, FACTOR IN WAR.

--------------------------------------------Ypres Letter------------------------------------------------------------
Belgium
April 29th 1915

My own dear Mother,

I know how anxious you all must have been during the past week or so, and yet I could not even get a card away to you to set your at ease, however, these two weeks of fierce fighting are over, and we have fallen back a mile or so to the Reserve Line where things are quieter for us.

Our Battalion has lost about 700 for we are now less than 300 strong, but thank God I am one of them, how we got through some of that fire without a scratch, I can’t understand now, some of those moments come back as a fearful nightmare, I will not try to give you any of the details now, the papers will tell you all the facts of these engagements.

One of the worst parts was the asphyxiating gas, which the Germans have been using on us. My dates are all confused but I think it was about 4 o’clock on Saturday morning, (we had been standing to the parapet all night) when suddenly the whole line of German trenches was obscured behind a thick bank of rolling yellow black fumes, and the wind being right across our trenches, it was gently fanned across to the British Lines and came rolling slowly over the ground, and as they passed through us we experienced the most rotten choking feeling, many were killed, I hear that 400 in one Battalion were killed by it, the sickness was awful, and as soon as it had passed the Germans came over, but all that day we held our line and never gave up, all night we were hard at it, they attacked again but our fire drove them back, but at daybreak on Sunday a Regiment was sent to relieve us as we had had no sleep or proper rations for a week, some days we had but a biscuit or two each, so you can imagine the boys were ready to drop, I saw several fall at their sentry posts from sheer exhaustion, we changed every half hour to relieve the strain. All these days of which I write we had an awful dose of shelling, which wiped out an awful lot of fellows and many Officers, we buried them right there in the trenches.

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