- 'Ypres : the Unique City'
- by Arnold Bennet : from his book ‘Over There’
War Scenes on the Western Front
the Cloth Hall in Ypres in January 1915
WHEN we drew near Ypres we met a civilian wagon laden with furniture of a lower middle-class house, and also with lengths of gilt picture-frame moulding. There was quite a lot of gilt in the wagon. A strong, warm wind was blowing, and the dust on the road and from the railway track was very unpleasant. The noise of artillery persisted. As a fact, the wagon was hurrying away with furniture and picture-frame mouldings under fire. Several times we were told not to linger here and not to linger there, and the automobiles, emptied of us, received very precise instructions where to hide during our absence. We saw a place where a shell had dropped on to waste ground at one side of the road, and thrown up a mass of earth and stones on to the roof of an asylum on the other side of the road. The building was unharmed ; the well-paved surface of the road was perfect — it had received no hurt; but on the roof lay the earth and stones. Still, we had almost no feeling of danger. The chances were a thousand to one that the picture-frame maker would get safely away with his goods ; and he did. But it seemed odd — to an absurdly sensitive, non-Teutonic mind it seemed somehow to lack justice — that the picture-framer, after having been ruined, must risk his life in order to snatch from the catastrophe the debris of his career. Further on, within the city itself, but near the edge of it, two men were removing uninjured planks from the upper floor of a house ; the planks were all there was in the house to salve. I saw no other attempt to make the best of a bad job, and, after I had inspected the bad job, these two attempts appeared heroic to the point of mere folly.
I had not been in Ypres for nearly twenty years, and when I was last there the work of restoring the historic buildings of the city was not started. (These restorations, especially to the Cloth Hall and the Cathedral of St. Martin, were just about finished in time for the opening of hostilities, and they give yet another proof of the German contention that Belgium, in conspiracy with Britain, had deliberately prepared for the war — and, indeed, wanted it!) The Grande Place was quite recognisable. It is among the largest public squares in Europe, and one of the very few into which you could put a medium-sized Atlantic liner. There is no square in London or (I think) New York into which you could put a 10,000-ton boat. A 15,000-ton affair, such as even the Arabic, could be arranged diagonally in the Grande Place at Ypres.
This Grande Place has seen history. In the middle of the thirteenth century, whence its chief edifices date, it was the centre of one of the largest and busiest towns in Europe, and a population of 200,000 weavers was apt to be uproarious in it. Within three centuries a lack of comprehension of home politics and the simple brigandage of foreign politics had reduced Ypres to a population of 5,000. In the seventeenth century Ypres fell four times. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it ceased to be a bishopric. In the middle of the nineteenth century it ceased to be fortified ; and in the second decade of the twentieth century it ceased to be inhabited. Possessing 200,000 inhabitants in the thirteenth century, 5,000 inhabitants in the sixteenth century, 17400 inhabitants at the end of the nineteenth century, it now possesses 0 inhabitants.
It is uninhabited. It cannot be inhabited. Scarcely two months before I saw it, the city — I was told — had been full of life ; in the long period of calm which followed the bombardment of the railway-station quarter in November 1914 the inhabitants had taken courage, and many of those who had fled from the first shells had sidled back again with the most absurd hope in their hearts. As late as the third week in April the Grande Place was the regular scene of commerce, and on market-days it was dotted with stalls upon which were offered for sale such frivolous things as postcards displaying the damage done to the railway-station quarter.
Then came the major bombardment, which is not yet over.
hand colored photo of the ruins of the Ypres cathedral in 1918
You may obtain a just idea of the effects of the major bombardment by adventuring into the interior of the Cathedral of St. Martin. This Cathedral is chiefly thirteenth-century work. Its tower, like that of the Cathedral at Malines, had never been completed — nor will it ever be, now — but it is still, with the exception of the tower of the Cloth Hall, the highest thing in Ypres. The tower is a skeleton. As for the rest of the building, it may be said that some of the walls alone substantially remain. The choir — the earliest part of the Cathedral — is entirely unroofed, and its south wall has vanished. The apse has been blown clean out. The Early Gothic nave is partly unroofed. The transepts are unroofed, and of the glass of the memorable rose window of the south transept not a trace is left — so far as I can remember.
In the centre of the Cathedral, where the transepts meet, is a vast heap of bricks, stone, and powdery dirt. This heap rises irregularly like a range of hills towards the choir ; it overspreads most of the immense interior, occupying an area of, perhaps, from 15,000 to 20,000 square feet. In the choir it rises to a height of six or seven yards. You climb perilously over it as you might cross the Alps. This incredible amorphous mass, made up of millions of defaced architectural fragments of all kinds, is the shattered body of about half the Cathedral. I suppose that the lovely carved choir-stalls are imbedded somewhere within it. The grave of Jansen is certainly at the bottom of it. The aspect of the scene, with the sky above, the jagged walls, the interrupted arches, and the dusty piled mess all around, is intolerably desolate. And it is made the more so by the bright colours of the great altar, two-thirds of which is standing, and the still brighter colours of the organ, which still clings, apparently whole, to the north wall of the choir. In the sacristy are collected gilt candelabra and other altar-furniture, turned yellow by the fumes of picric acid. At a little distance the Cathedral, ruin though it is, seems solid enough ; but when you are in it the fear is upon you that the inconstant and fragile remains of it may collapse about you in a gust of wind a little rougher than usual.
You leave the outraged fane with relief. And when you get outside you have an excellent opportunity of estimating the mechanism which brought about this admirable triumph of destruction ; for there is a hole made by a 17-inch shell; it is at a moderate estimate fifty feet across, and it has happened to tumble into a graveyard, so that the hole is littered with the white bones of earlier Christians.
two coverpages : left - a view in December 1914 and right in 1917
The Cloth Hall was a more wonderful thing than the Cathedral of St. Martin, which, after all, was no better than dozens of other cathedrals. There was only one Cloth Hall of the rank of this one. It is not easy to say whether or not the Cloth Hall still exists. Its celebrated three-story facade exists, with a huge hiatus in it to the left of the middle, and, of course, minus all glass. The entire facade seemed to me to be leaning slightly forward; I could not decide whether this was an optical delusion or a fact. The enormous central tower is knocked to pieces, and yet conserves some remnant of its original outlines ; bits of scaffolding on the sides of it stick out at a great height like damaged matches. The slim corner towers are scarcely hurt. Everything of artistic value in the structure of the interior has disappeared in a horrible confusion of rubble. The eastern end of the Cloth Hall used to be terminated by a small beautiful Renaissance edifice called the Niewwerk, dating from the seventeenth century. What its use was I never knew ; but the Niewwerk has vanished, and the Town Hall next door has also vanished ; broken walls, a few bits of arched masonry, and heaps of refuse alone indicate where these buildings stood in April last.
So much for the two principal buildings visible from the Grande Place. The Cloth Hall is in the Grande Place, and the Cathedral joins it. The only other fairly large building in the Place is the Hopital de Notre Dame at the north-east end. This white-painted erection, with its ornamental gilt sign, had continued substantially to exist as a structural entity ; it was defaced, but not seriously. Every other building in the place was smashed up. To walk right round the Place is to walk nearly half a mile ; and along the entire length, with the above exceptions, there was nothing but mounds of rubbish and fragments of upstanding walls. Here and there in your perambulation you may detect an odour with which certain trenches have already familiarised you. Obstinate inhabitants were apt to get buried in the cellars where they had taken refuge. In one place what looked like a colossal sewer had been uncovered. I thought at the time that the sewer was somewhat large for a city of the size of Ypres, and it has since occurred to me that this sewer may have been the ancient bed of the stream Yperlee, which in some past period was arched over.
"I want to make a rough sketch of all this," I said to my companions in the middle of the Grande Place, indicating the Cloth Hall, and the Cathedral, and other grouped ruins. The spectacle was, indeed, majestic in the extreme, and if the British Government has not had it officially photographed in the finest possible manner, it has failed in a very obvious duty ; detailed photographs of Ypres ought to be distributed throughout the world.
My companions left me to myself. I sat down on the edge of a small shell-hole some distance in front of the Hospital. I had been advised not to remain too near the building lest it might fall on me. The paved floor of the Place stretched out around me like a tremendous plain, seeming the vaster because my eyes were now so much nearer to the level of it. On a bit of facade to the left the word "Cycle" stood out in large black letters on a white ground. This word and myself were the sole living things in the Square. In the distance a cloud of smoke up a street showed that a house was burning. The other streets visible from where I sat gave no sign whatever. The wind, strong enough throughout my visit to the Front, was now stronger than ever. All the window- frames and doors in the Hospital were straining and creaking in the wind. The loud sound of guns never ceased. A large British aeroplane hummed and buzzed at a considerable height overhead. Dust drove along.
I said to myself : "A shell might quite well fall here any moment."
I was afraid. But I was less afraid of a shell than of the intense loneliness. Rheims was inhabited ; Arras was inhabited. In both cities there were postmen and newspapers, shops, and even cafes. But in Ypres there was nothing. Every street was a desert; every room in every house was empty. Not a dog roamed in search of food. The weight upon my heart was sickening. To avoid complications I had promised the Staff officer not to move from the Place until he returned ; neither of us had any desire to be hunting for each other in the sinister labyrinth of the town's thoroughfares. I was, therefore, a prisoner in the Place, condemned to solitary confinement. I ardently wanted my companions to come back.
Then I heard echoing sounds of voices and footsteps. Two British soldiers appeared round a corner and passed slowly along the Square. In the immensity of the Square they made very small figures. I had a wish to accost them, but Englishmen do not do these things, even in Ypres. They glanced casually at me ; I glanced casually at them, carefully pretending that the circumstances of my situation were entirely ordinary.
I felt safer while they were in view ; but when they had gone I was afraid again. I was more than afraid ; I was inexplicably uneasy. I made the sketch simply because I had said that I would make it. And as soon as it was done, I jumped up out of the hole and walked about, peering down streets for the reappearance of my friends. I was very depressed, very irritable ; and I honestly wished that I had never accepted any invitation to visit the Front. I somehow thought I might never get out of Ypres alive. When at length I caught sight of the Staff officer I felt instantly relieved. My depression, however, remained for hours afterwards.
- hand colored photo of the Cloth Hall in 1918
- see above photo for black and white version
Perhaps the chief street in Ypres is the wide Rue de Lille, which runs from opposite the Cloth Hall down streets to the Lille Gate, and over the moat water into the Lille road and on to the German lines. The Rue de Lille was especially famous for its fine old buildings. There was the Hospice Belle, for old female paupers of Ypres, built in the thirteenth century. There was the Museum, formerly the Hotel Merghelynck, not a very striking edifice, but full of antiques of all kinds. There was the Hospital of St. John, interesting, but less interesting than the Hospital of St. John at Bruges. There was the Gothic Maison de Bois, right at the end of the street, with a rather wonderful frontage. And there was the famous fourteenth - century Steenen, which since my previous visit had been turned into the post office. With the exception of this last building, the whole of the Rue de Lille, if my memory is right, lay in ruins. The shattered post office was splendidly upright, and in appearance entire ; but, for all I know, its interior may have been destroyed by a shell through the roof. Only the acacia-trees flourished, and the flies, and the weeds between the stones of the paving. The wind took up the dust from the rubbish heaps which had been houses and wreathed it against what bits of walls still maintained the perpendicular. Here, too, was the unforgettable odour, rising through the interstices of the smashed masonry which hid subterranean chambers.
We turned into a side-street of small houses — probably the homes of lace-makers. The street was too humble to be a mark for the guns of the Germans, who, no doubt, trained their artillery by the aid of a very large scale municipal map on which every building was separately indicated. It would seem impossible that a map of less than a foot to a mile could enable them to produce such wonderful results of carefully wanton destruction. And the assumption must be that the map was obtained from the local authorities by some agent masquerading as a citizen. I heard, indeed, that known citizens of all the chief towns returned to their towns or to the vicinity thereof in the uniform and with the pleasing manners of German warriors. The organisation for doing good to Belgium against Belgium's will was an incomparable piece of chicane and pure rascality. Strange — Belgians were long ago convinced that the visitation was inevitably coming, and had fallen into the habit of discussing it placidly over their beer at nights.
To return to the side-street. So far as one could see, it had not received a dent, not a scratch. Even the little windows of the little red houses were by no means all broken. All the front doors stood ajar. I hesitated to walk in, for these houses seemed to be mysteriously protected by influences invisible. But in the end the vulgar, yet perhaps legitimate, curiosity of the sightseer, of the professional reporter, drove me within the doors. The houses were so modest that they had no entrance-halls or lobbies. One passed directly from the street into the parlour. Apparently the parlours were completely furnished. They were in an amazing disorder, but the furniture was there. And the furnishings of all of them were alike, as the furnishings of all the small houses of a street in the Five Towns or in a cheap London suburb. The ambition of these homes had been to resemble one another. What one had all must have. Under ordinary circumstances the powerful common instinct to resemble is pitiable. But here it was absolutely touching.
Everything was in these parlours. The miserable, ugly ornaments, bought and cherished and admired by the simple, were on the mantelpieces. The drawers of the mahogany and oak furniture had been dragged open, but not emptied. The tiled floors were littered with clothes, with a miscellany of odd possessions, with pots and pans out of the kitchen and the scullery, with bags and boxes. The accumulations of lifetimes were displayed before me, and it was almost possible to trace the slow transforming of young girls into brides, and brides into mothers of broods.
Within the darkness of the interiors I could discern the stairs. But I was held back from the stairs. I could get no further than the parlours, though the interest of the upper floors must have been surpassing.
So from house to house. I handled nothing. Were not the military laws against looting of the most drastic character ! And at last I came to the end of the little street. There are many such streets in Ypres. In fact, the majority of the streets were like that street. I did not visit them, but I have no doubt that they were in the same condition. I do not say that the inhabitants fled taking naught with them. They must obviously have taken what they could, and what was at once most precious and most portable. But they could have taken very little. They departed breathless without vehicles, and probably most of the adults had children to carry or to lead. At one moment the houses were homes, functioning as such. An alarm, infectious like the cholera, and at the next moment the deserted houses became spiritless, degenerated into intolerable museums for the amazement of a representative of the American and the British Press ! Where the scurrying families went to I never even inquired. Useless to inquire. They just lost themselves on the face of the earth, and were henceforth known to mankind by the generic name of "refugees" — such of them as managed to get away alive.
After this the solitude of the suburbs, with their maimed and rusting factories, their stagnant canals, their empty lots, their high, lusty weeds, their abolished railway and tram stations, was a secondary matter leaving practically no impression on the exhausted sensibility.
A few miles on the opposite side of the town were the German artillery positions, with guns well calculated to destroy Cathedrals and Cloth Halls. Around these guns were educated men who had spent years — indeed, most of their lives — in the scientific study of destruction. Under these men were slaves who, solely for the purposes of destruction, had ceased to be the free citizens they once were. These slaves were compelled to carry out any order given to them, under pain of death. They had, indeed, been explicitly told on the highest earthly authority that, if the order came to destroy their fathers and their brothers, they must destroy their fathers and their brothers: the instruction was public and historic. . . . The whole organism has worked, and worked well, for the destruction of all that was beautiful in Ypres, and for the break-up of an honourable tradition extending over at least eight centuries. The operation was the direct result of an order. The order had been carefully weighed and considered. The successful execution of it brought joy into many hearts, high and low. "Another shell in the Cathedral !" And men shook hands ecstatically around the excellent guns. "A hole in the tower of the Cloth Hall." General rejoicing ! "The population has fled, and Ypres is a desert !" Inexpressible enthusiasm among specially educated men, from the highest to the lowest. So it must have been. There was no hazard about the treatment of Ypres. The shells did not come into Ypres out of nowhere. Each was the climax of a long, deliberate effort originating in the brains of the responsible leaders. One is apt to forget all this.
"But," you say, "this is war, after all." After all, it just is.
a scene of utter desolation - Ypres in the snow
The future of Ypres exercises the mind. Ypres is only one among many martyrs. But, as matters stand at future Present is undoubtedly the chief one. In proportion to their size, scores of villages have suffered as much as Ypres, and some have suffered more. But no city of its mercantile, historical, and artistic importance has, up to now, suffered in the same degree as Ypres. Ypres is entitled to rank as the very symbol of the German achievement in Belgium. It stood upon the path to Calais ; but that was not its crime. Even if German guns had not left one brick upon another in Ypres, the path to Calais would not thereby have been made any easier for the well-shod feet of the apostles of might, for Ypres never served as a military stronghold and could not possibly have so served ; and had the Germans known how to beat the British Army in front of Ypres, they could have marched through the city as easily as a hyena through a rice-crop. The crime of Ypres was that it lay handy for the extreme irritation of an army which, with three times the men and three times the guns, and thirty times the vainglorious conceit, could not shift the trifling force opposed to it last autumn. Quite naturally the boasters were enraged. In the end, something had to give way. And the Cathedral and Cloth Hall and other defenceless splendours of Ypres gave way, not the trenches. The yearners after Calais did themselves no good by exterminating fine architecture and breaking up innocent homes, but they did experience the relief of smashing something. Therein lies the psychology of the affair of Ypres, and the reason why the Ypres of history has come to a sudden close.
In order to envisage the future of Ypres, it is necessary to get a clear general conception of the damage done to it. Ypres is not destroyed. I should estimate that when I saw it in July at least half the houses in it were standing entire, and, though disfigured, were capable of being rapidly repaired. Thousands of the humble of Ypres could return to their dwellings and resume home-life there with little trouble, provided that the economic situation was fairly favourable — and, of course, sooner or later the economic situation is bound to be favourable, for the simple reason that it must ultimately depend upon the exertions of a people renowned throughout the world for hard and continuous industry.
- left : the Black Gate in Ypres
- right : the belfrey of the Cloth Hall
On the other hand, practically all that was spectacular in the city, all the leading, all the centre round which civic activities had grouped themselves for centuries, is destroyed. Take the Grande Place. If Ypres is to persist in a future at all comparable to its immediate past (to say nothing of its historic past), the privately owned buildings on the Grande Place will, without exception, have to be begun all over again, and before that task can be undertaken the foundations will have to be cleared — a tremendous undertaking in itself. I do not know how many privately owned buildings there were on the Grande Place, but I will guess a hundred and fifty, probably none of which was less than three stories in height. All these buildings belonged to individuals, individuals who intimately possessed them and counted on them as a source of income or well- being, individuals who are now scattered, impoverished, and acutely discouraged. The same is to be said of the Rue de Lille and of other important streets.
Suppose the Germans back again in the land of justice, modesty, and unselfishness ; and suppose the property-owners of Ypres collected once more in Ypres. The enterprise of reconstruction facing them will make such a demand of initiative force and mere faith as must daunt the most audacious among them. And capital dragged out of a bankrupt Germany will by no means solve the material problem. For labour will be nearly as scarce as money; the call for labour in every field cannot fail to surpass in its urgency any call in history. The simple contemplation of the gigantic job will be staggering. To begin with, the withered and corrupt dead will have to be excavated from the cellars, and when that day comes those will be present who can say : "This skeleton was So-and-So's child," "That must have been my mother. . . ." Terrific hours await Ypres.
And when (or if) the buildings have been re-erected, tenants will have to be found for them — and then think of the wholesale refurnishing ! The deep human instinct which attaches men and women to a particular spot of the earth's surface is so powerful that almost certainly the second incarnation of Ypres will be initiated, but that it will be carried very far towards completion seems to me to be somewhat doubtful. To my mind the new Ypres cannot be more than a kind of camp amid the dark ruins of the old, and the city must remain for generations, if not for ever, a ghastly sign and illustration of what cupidity and stupidity and vanity can compass together when physical violence is their instrument.
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.
- two pages of views of Ypres in 1915 (left) and 1918 (right)
- from 'the War Illustrated'
