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[Page 33]
We were camped in the St Lawrence Camp situated about three mils from the ruins of Ypres & a mile or so from Popeninghe. The latter is a fair sized town & is prospering under military regime. The country around is covered with hop fields already in flower & to the N.E. over the tops of these shows the ruins of the once famous Cloth Hall. It rained as it only knows how in these parts. On the 30th & on the 31st we made another move for the line. We took trains to the outskirts of Ypres & at dark entered the city, or rather the remains of it. Not a building is left intact. On each side of the wide cobble streets the
[Sketch of soldier in uniform doing somersault.]
Deserted ghostly structures stand as grim witness 's of the struggle which has been waged here for two years. Ypres, once the prosperous community of southern Belgium treasuring in the Cloth Hall some of the most valuable works of art in the world was thrown into desolation in a few days under the battering German artillery. Half their population is said to have been killed during the terrible period. Of the famous Cloth Hall all that remains are a few charred walls, perhaps the buttress of a tower & huge piles of blackened & fallen masonry. Little one thinks that when a few years ago he read of the glories of this building that he would live to see it in this state, its treasures lost or scattered & its towers & arches mangled by the side of the streets in heaps of broken stone.
Continuing through the silent streets we crossed the Yser Canal, where