Back Aa

War

<h2>X</h2> <h3>AN EVENING AT YPRES</h3> <div class="blockquot">"In anticipation of death I make this confession, that I despise the German nation on account of its infinite stupidity, and that I blush to belong to it." Schopenhauer. "The character of the Germans presents a terrible blend of ferocity and trickery. They are a people of born liars. One must see this to believe it." Velleius Paterculus, In the year 10 of the Christian era. </div> March, 1915. Ruins in a mournful light which is anxious, seemingly, to fade away into a premature darkness. Vast ruins, ruins of such delicacy! Here is a deployment of [Pg 96]those exquisite, slender colonnades and those archways of mysterious charm, which at first sight conjure up for the mind the Middle Ages and Gothic Art in its fair but transient blossoming. But in general, surviving specimens of that Art were only to be found in isolated examples, in the form of some old church or old cloister, surrounded by things of modern growth, whereas at Ypres, there is an ensemble; first a cathedral with additions of complicated supplementary buildings, that might be called palaces, whose long façades with their clock-towers present to the eye their succession of windows with pointed arches. As an architectural group it is almost unique in the world, actually a whole quarter of a town, built in little columns, little arches and archaic stone tracery. The sky is low, gloomy, tormented, as in dreams. The actual night has not yet [Pg 97]begun to fall, but the thick clouds of northern winters cast upon the earth this kind of yellowish obscurity. Round about the lofty ruins, the open spaces are full of soldiers standing still, or slowly making their rounds, all with a certain air of seriousness, as if remembering or expecting some event, of which everyone is aware, but which no one discusses. There are also women poorly dressed, with anxious faces, and little children, but the humble population of civilians is merged in a crowd of rough uniforms, almost all of them faded and coated with earth, obviously returned after prolonged engagements. The yellow khaki uniforms of the English and the almost black uniform of the Belgians mingle with the "horizon" blue of great-coats worn by our French soldiers, who are in a majority; all these different shades blend into an almost neutral colour scheme, and two or three red burnouses [Pg 98]of Arab chiefs strike a vivid note, unexpected, disconcerting, in that crowd, coloured like the misty winter evening. Here are ruins indeed, but on closer inspection, inexplicable ruins, for their collapse seems to date from yesterday, and the crevices and gaps are unnaturally white among the greyish tints of the façades or towers, and here and there, through broken windows, on the interior walls is visible the glittering of gilding. Indeed it is not time that has wrought these ravages—time had spared these wonders—nor yet until our own days, even in the midst of the most terrible upheavals and most ruthless conquest, had men ever attempted to destroy them. No one had dared the deed until the coming of those savages, who are still there, close at hand, crouching in their holes of muddy earth, perfecting each day their idiotic work, and multiplying their volleys of scrap-iron, [Pg 99]wreaking their vengeance on these sacred objects whenever they are seized again by an access of rage in consequence of a new repulse. Near the mutilated cathedral, that palace of a hundred windows, which in the main still stands, is the famous Cloth Hall, built when Flanders was at the height of her glory, a building vulgarised in all its aspects by reproductions, ever since the vindictiveness of the barbarians rendered it still more famous. One November night, it will be remembered, it blazed with sinister magnificence, side by side with the church and the precious buildings surrounding it, illuminating with a red light all the open country. The Germans had brought up in its honour the best that they could muster of incendiary material; their benzine bombs consumed the Hall and then all that it contained; all the treasures that had been preserved there for centuries, [Pg 100]its state-rooms, its wainscoting, its pictures, its books, all burned like straw. Now that it is bereft of its lofty roof it has acquired something rather Venetian and surprising in its appearance, with its long façades pierced with uninterrupted rows of floreated pointed arches. In the midst of its irremediable disorder, it is strange and charming. The symmetrical turrets, slender as minarets, set in the angles of the walls, have hitherto escaped those insensate bombs and rise up more boldly than ever, whereas the woodwork of the pointed roofs no longer soars with them up into the air. But the belfry in the centre, which ever since the Middle Ages has kept watch over the plains, is to-day hatefully disfigured, its summit clean cut off, shattered, cleft from top to bottom. It is scarcely in a condition to offer further resistance; a few more shells, and it will collapse in one mass. On one of its sides, [Pg 101]very high up, still hangs the monumental dial of a ruined clock, of which the hands point persistently to twenty-five minutes past four—doubtless the tragic moment at which this giant among Flemish belfries received its death blow. Around the great square of Ypres, where these glories of past ages had so long been preserved for us intact, several houses, the majority of them of ancient Flemish architecture, have been eviscerated in like manner, without object, without excuse, their interior visible from outside through great, gaping holes. But this the barbarians did not do on purpose; it was merely that they happened to be too near, these houses, too closely adjacent to the targets they had chosen, the cathedral and the old palace. It is known that everywhere here, as at Louvain, at Arras, at Soissons, at Rheims, their greatest delight is to direct their fire at public buildings, ruining again [Pg 102]and again all that is famous for beauty, art or memories. So then, except for its historic square, the town of Ypres has not suffered very greatly. Ah, but wait! I was forgetting the hospital yonder, which likewise served them for target; for the matter of that the Germans have notoriously a preference for bombarding places of refuge, shelters for wounded and sick, ambulances, first-aid stations and Red Cross wagons. These acts of destruction, transforming into a rubbish heap that tranquil country of Belgium, which was above everything an incomparable museum, all are agreed to stigmatise as a base, ignoble crime. But it is more than that, it is a masterpiece of the crassest stupidity—the stupidity that Schopenhauer himself could not forbear to publish in the frank outburst evoked by his last moments; for after all it amounts to signing and initialling the [Pg 103]ignominy of Germany for the edification of neutrals and of generations to come. The bodies of men tortured and hanged, of women and children shot or mutilated, will soon moulder away completely in their poor, nameless graves, and then the world will remember them no more. But these imperishable ruins, these innumerable ruins of museums or churches, what overwhelming and damning evidence they are, and how everlasting! After having done all this it is perhaps still more foolish to deny it, to deny it in the very face of such incontrovertible evidence, to deny it with an effrontery that leaves us Frenchmen aghast, or even to invent pretexts at whose childish imbecility we can only shrug our shoulders. "A people of born liars," said the Latin writer. Yes, and a people who will never eradicate their original vices, a people who, moreover, actually dared, despite the most [Pg 104]irrefutable written documents, to deny the premeditation of their crimes and the treachery of their attack. What absurd childishness they reveal in their impostures! And who can be the simpletons whom they hope to deceive? The light is still fading upon the desolate ruins of Ypres, but how slowly to-day! That is because even at noon the light was scarcely stronger on this dull day of March; only at this hour a certain atmosphere, indefinite and sad, broods upon the distant landscape, indicating the approach of night. They look instinctively at the ruins, these thousands of soldiers, taking their evening walk in such melancholy surroundings, but generally they remain at a distance, leaving the ruins to their magnificent isolation. However, here are three of them, Frenchmen, probably newcomers, who approach the ruins hesitatingly. They [Pg 105]advance until they stand under the little arches of the tottering cathedral with a sober air, as if they were visiting tombs. After contemplating them at first in silence, one of them suddenly ejaculates a term of abuse (to whom it is addressed may be easily imagined!), doubtless the most insulting he can find in the French language, a word that I had not expected, which first makes me smile and then, the next moment, impresses me on the contrary as a valuable discovery. "Oh those hooligans!" Here the intonation is missing, for I am unable to reproduce it, but in truth the compliment, pronounced as he pronounced it, seems to me something new, worth adding to all the other epithets applied to Germans, which are always pitched in too low a key and moreover too refined; and he continues to repeat, indignant little soldier that he is, stamping with rage: [Pg 106]"Oh those hooligans among hooligans!" At last the fall of night is upon us, the true night, which will put an end here to all signs of life. The crowd of soldiers gradually melts away along streets already dark, which, for obvious reasons, will not be lighted. In the distance the sound of the bugle summons them to their evening soup in houses or barracks, where they will fall asleep with no sense of security, certain of being awakened at any moment by shells, or by those great monsters that explode with a crash like thunder. Poor, brave children of France, wrapped in their bluish overcoats, none can foresee at what hour death will be hurled at them, from afar, blindly, through the misty darkness—for the most playful fancy presides over this bombardment; now it is an endless rain of fire, now only a single shell which comes and kills at haphazard. And patiently awaiting the rest of the great drama [Pg 107]lie the ruins, enveloped in silence. Here and there a little timid light appears in some house still inhabited, where the windows are pasted over with paper to enable them to resist the shock of explosions close at hand, and where the air-holes of the cellars of refuge are protected by sandbags. Who would believe it? Stubborn people, people too old or too poor to flee, have remained at Ypres, and others even are beginning to return, with a kind of fatalistic resignation. The cathedral and the great belfry project only their silhouettes against the sky, and these seem to have been congealed, gesturing with broken arms. As the night enfolds the world more completely in its thick mists, memory conjures up the mournful surroundings in which Ypres is now lost, deep plains unpeopled and soon plunged in darkness, roads broken up, impassable for fugitives, fields blotted out or [Pg 108]mantled with snow, a network of trenches where our soldiers, alas! are suffering cold and discomfort, and so near, hardly a cannon-shot away, those other ditches, more grim, more sordid, where men of ineradicable savagery are watching, always ready to spring out in solid masses, uttering Red Indian war whoops, or to crawl sneakingly along to squirt liquid fire upon our soldiers. But how the twilight has lengthened in these last few days! Without looking at the clock it is evident that the hour is late, and the mere fact of still being able to see conveys in spite of all a vague presage of April; it seems that the nightmare of winter is coming to an end, that the sun will reappear, the sun of deliverance, that softer breezes, as if nothing unusual were happening in the world, will bring back flowers and songs of birds to all these scenes of desolation, among all these thousands [Pg 109]of graves of youth. There is yet another sign of spring, three or four little girls, who rush out into the deserted square in wild spirits, quite little girls, not more than six years old; they have escaped, fleet of foot, from the cellar in which they sleep, and they take hands and try to dance a round, as on an evening in May, to the tune of an old Flemish song. But another child, a big girl of ten, a person in authority, comes along and reduces them to silence, scolding them as if they had done something naughty, and drives them back to the underground dwellings, where, after they have said their prayers, lowly mothers will put them to bed. Unspeakably sad seemed that childish round, tentatively danced there in solitude at the fall of a cold March night, in a square dominated by a phantom belfry, in a martyred city, in the midst of gloomy, [Pg 110]inundated plains, all in darkness, and all beset with ambushes and mourning. Since this chapter was written the bombardment has continued, and Ypres is now no more than a shapeless mass of calcined stones. [Pg 111] <hr /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.