Part 4

This time is it possible that this noble city should rise again? Its pride--the glorious Guild Hall--the mediaeval churches and mansions are all but level with the ground. There is scarce a single house in the city whose walls are undamaged, and most of them are mere heaps of bricks and mortar.

I have just made a tour of the streets, accompanied by a young Canadian engineer. It is a desert whose silence is only broken by the thunder of guns, for the Germans are bombarding again. Occasionally a 4.5 shell crashes perilously near, or a shrapnel explodes over our heads, and instinctively we dart into cover. But for these reminders of a savage and felon present we might be walking in a city buried like Pompeii or Herculaneum, and now exhumed to display to curious eyes the crumbling memorials of a remote and peaceful past.

My companion reminds me, as we pass the convent of the Irish Nuns of Ypres, that the Princess Patricia's carried their colours through Ypres, and that while they halted here one of their officers quoted some lines of the famous ballad:

In the cloisters of Ypres a banner is swaying, And by it a pale, weeping maiden is praying.

There have been, in dreams, many pale, weeping maidens praying beside that banner wrought by the royal Princess Patricia. God grant soon that the prayers of all women be heard!

*APPENDIX.*

I.

Hooghe.--The Baron Gaston de Vinck, Belgian ex-Senator and Burgomaster of Zillebeke, writes me that the name and proper orthography is the Chateau de la Hooghe. "All has been blown up by dynamite and burnt. My fine collection of antiquities of great value, my furniture, pictures, and family portraits, all have perished. The chateau was built in 1721: my family acquired the estate in 1740, and since then six generations have dwelt there. I know with what martial glory on my old and beloved lands your compatriots have covered themselves. Of this, I and those who shall come after me, will keep an imperishable memory."

II.

GENERAL MERCER'S DEATH.--Lieutenant Gooderham, the General's aide-de-camp, now a prisoner in Germany, writes: "I was beside my beloved general when he was killed. He lay on the battlefield for two days, suffering from shell shock, until picked up by a German patrol. He was first shocked by large shell, and I tried to get him away, but it was impossible. He was shot through the leg, which was broken. He lay on the field, in no pain, and next day was killed by shrapnel instantly."

The General's body was found in the Armagh Wood and buried in a military cemetery near Poperinghe, Sir Julian Byng and a large number of officers attending the funeral.

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