In a few months perhaps there will be official guides conducting parties through the ruins, and in a year or two, the ruins of Ypres themselves may have given place to the rising streets of a new city.

As they now are, a strange and sinister majesty surrounds them.

At the entrance to the town there still hangs the notice: "Troops are not to enter Ypres except on special duty"; and the grass-grown heaps of masonry are labelled: "It is dangerous to dig among these ruins." But there was no one digging when we were there--no one moving, except ourselves.

Ypres seemed to me beyond recovery as a town, just as Lens is; but whereas Lens is just a shapeless ugliness which men will clear away rejoicing as soon as their energies are free for rebuilding, Ypres in ruin has still beauty enough and dignity enough to serve--with the citadel at Verdun--as the twin symbol of the war.

There was a cloud of jackdaws circling round the great gashed tower where the inner handiwork of the fifteenth-century builders lay open to sky and sun.