went away, and the ruins remained glaring in the sands—centuries, millenniums. That is the impression of Ypres to-day. It is grim and moving. It is like the Pyramids. At least a hundred thousand dead lie round it—an inner circle of the dead and an outer circle of decay. Looking on those spacious sun-steeped, sand-blown ruins one's mind is inevitably taken to the East, and a sense of Shelley's poem comes to one—

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

Yet six years ago the Cloth Hall tower chimed the quarter-hours! The road out from the Menin gate was shady. Polygon Wood was a wood, not a monument. There was seemingly a château near a wood called Hooge. Zandwoorde Church had a spire. Behold the army however digging itself in. There are rudimentary lines of defence making a spider's web across the Menin road. The Twentieth Brigade flounders from Zandwoorde to Gheluvelt in newly upturned earth. The Germans who followed so rapidly to Ghent and Thielt and Roulers are hot on the trail, expecting Ypres also to be left to them without a blow. But they have not arrived. Our men are sitting on the parapets of their trenches, singing. There have been no casualties to mention, a few men lost sight of; three sentries in fact left unrelieved at Ghent. There is a battalion of Guards in the line at Klein Zillebeke, and not one has yet been killed or wounded. A battle is coming, however, for the retirement has ceased.

You turn out of Ypres by the left hand on a road which faces Kemmel Hill—the Wytschaete road, and you come to a flattened-out village at cross-roads, called Kruistraat. Where were once ploughed fields is now a land-ocean of humps and hollows with a foam of wild flowers. Plunging toward Voormezeele one is intoxicated by a perfume and looking to the right you see the cause in a field of thistles as thick and close as wheat. At what was Voormezeele there is now nothing more remarkable than the crosses of the P.P.C.L.I. the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, who evidently went down in the most terrible way in 1915. Were not these the Canadians who first tasted the devilry of gas?

Cemeteries soon become all too frequent and unremarkable. At Klein Zillebeke there is an Englishwoman going from grave to grave diligently examining the aluminium ribbons on which the names are fixed to the wooden crosses—looking perhaps for her husband's grave but with an expression in her face and form of "They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him."

Virbranden Molen, where many encamped, is but a name now, and eastward the wire-covered duck-boards climb across the rushes and thistles to what was once a front line, past derelict limbers with rusty broken wheels, past unexploded five-nines—the wildest way. Reeds have filled the trenches, grass long and withered swarms o'er the parapets. There are heaps of rusty Mills bombs which no one has ever come to take away and no one will; there are ration-tins; there is all manner of army rubbish everywhere. Pilgrims and tourists evidently collect few souvenirs on the old Ypres front, and few Americans as yet arrive at Ypres, which has for them a lesser fame than Château Thierry and Verdun.

In October, 1914, the line was far in advance of what became such a carnage-strewn battlefield. Here is the railway cutting, then in supreme peace, and beyond it is a pale British monument inscribed with many names, though already defaced—to the memory of a lost mining and tunnelling company that took a sudden way to heaven before the war was won. Beyond it is a first German grave, where lie Fleully, Beck, Dechert, Mehlhorn, and an unknown, and helmets and old bombs strew the place where they lie. Klein Zillebeke is now marked by a huge concrete fort. Zandwoorde and Kruisseecke, which were scenes of hand-to-hand fighting in 1914, soon fell into German hands and remained within the enemy's lines throughout the war. The old church at Zandwoorde cannot now be identified by any ruins—one has to ask where it was. Even the bricks and the stones seem to have been swept away, but there are three graves there, Captain Rose and Lieutenant Turnor, of the Tenth Hussars, and a private soldier nameless and unknown, a sort of batman in death. An estaminet has jumped up like a weed beside the ruins but it has little trade. Zandwoorde was once a substantial little place but now perhaps it will not grow again so readily—it is off the main road and not served by rail. Kruisseecke will be bigger. On October 21st the Gordons drove the Germans back from Zandwoorde at the point of the bayonet. On that day the church tower was twice struck by shells. That was about the beginning of the history.

The old trenches 'twixt Zandwoorde and Gheluvelt are worn down and perhaps were never very deep. The shell-holes are much deeper. The land is desolate and all o'ergrown but it affords a scene of lesser desolation. The exhumers are patiently seeking for the dead who were left behind—the old dead of that first battle. It is ghoulish work, but they have become as matter of fact as can be.

"No, we don't find many Gordons. But we're picking up a lot o' Borders just now. Yes, and some Grenadiers. Brought in about thirty Borders yesterday. It isn't a bad job if they'd pay us more. We gets used to it. They say as how the Americans won't have the British touch their dead and have given the job over to the French. Fifteen thousand of them to be boxed and stuffed—there's a lot of work in that."

"You must dig up a fair number of Germans. What do you do with them?"

"Leave them where they are. We notifies the authorities, that's all. Of course Jerry buried most of his own, and I'll give him credit for that, he gave every man his eight feet. You don't so easy come across a man the Germans buried, but some of ours——"

The weather-beaten Tommy, in old flannel shirt and sagging breeches, waved his hand and grinned with mirth at our British ways.

"'S a funny thing though—the British dead keep much longer than the Germans. If I put a spade through something and it's soft, I know it's a Jerry."

"They say the body of a drunkard keeps fresh longest of all because of the spirit in it."

"Yes, that's true. And if buried in an oilskin it makes a heap of difference. But it's queer what you find. We came on a fellow the other day with a bayonet through his jaw. He'd been buried that way. No one could get the bayonet out——"

"Aren't the Germans doing anything to keep their dead? The Belgians would look after them if they got a hint from Berlin that it would be worth while."

"Oh, we'd bury them like Christians if they'd give us another half-crown on our wages. We ain't got nothing agin 'em—specially the dead."

"Do you sleep out here on this battlefield?"

"We bin 'ere six months now."

"No ghosts?"

The man smiled. He saw none. He felt the presence of none. Imagination did not pull his heart-strings. If it did, he would go mad.

Lying in an old trench behold a skull! It is clean and polished—a soldier's head, low and broad at the brows, high at the back. There is a frayed hole in an otherwise perfect cranium. The simplest way to pick it up would be to put a finger in an eye-hole and lift it. You must put both hands together and raise it fearfully if it be the first skull you have ever found.... Friend or foe? Hm—there are no identification marks on this. Thinking anything about it all? No, nothing—long since ceased to think. Friends living? Probably, somewhere. The more you look at the skull the more angry does it seem—it has an intense