YPRES A SANCTUARY.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXII, 26 October 1916, Page 8

YPRES A SANCTUARY.

MOVING ACCOUNT OF A VISIT.

Dr Percy Bearmer gives a moving ■account of his visit to Yores in the "Cornhill":—

''Ypres was a haven of peace that day when. we reached it—peace, and such, utter desolation as surely, has been never Seen before. I have seen villages in Macedonia that have been burnt -out five or *ix years } ago when the Turk ruled over that unhappy land; but here was/a whole city —a" compact^ selfV contained little city, mediaevally established within its own ramparts,-and now ground into such ruin as no Vandals of old time could ever, have accomplished. They Were clumsy creatures, alter ail, those old scourges of humanity, with their swords and. torches.; but here every wonder of modern science had &een' concentrated on 'the work of methodical' destruction. One corner of the Cathedral tower still stands at its full height, a soaring ruin, graceful and ■ delicate;-, hinting at some new style of Architecture, a new type of risedle-like structure that is neither tower nor ! spire. That unforgettable fragment, and the belfry by the' Cloth Hall, which still loots square and sturdy from the side where its ruin is "unseen, are' the first one sees of Ypres a couple of miles away; and sometimes there are little glimpses of these two monuments among the fields "from the camps at a greater distance. The abomination of desolation! The words ,of the old prophets are actual again to-day, 'for the things which they describe are done 'again and outdone. Babylon has come up from the east to battle against the holy places. / "There k no .place like Ypres in the '.world—nothing so sad and "nothing so jbeatttiful. For all the squalid and soi-did are gone; thsre are no shims, no filthy :hovels, no brawling or greasy, sensuality, no crying in the streets; the city is very pure and quiet, and white under the sun, a dusty oasis of silence amid tthe drumming of the guns. Yet one realises how lovely a thing is Ihumanity/ with all its strains, and the common life of the tavern and the streets, and all th.3 littleness of the average home when one sees this beautiful loneliness, the chaste and awful grandeur of these ruins, softly crumbling under the sun, and the wonderful fantasy of this fretted architecture— proud remnants ;of famous halls still lifting themselves nigh in the ancient moated city, which stands in the midst of tbe' 'tumbled . graveyard that we call to-day the salient of Ypres. ." It will be rebiiilt some day. The ancient houses are gone for the most part, never to return; but there is enough—at pres^nWleft at Cloth Hall, ! and even of the Cathedral, to make its restoration no difficult . matter. Restoration is an ugly word, but the corner of the great Cathedral tower cannot remain for ever as jt is: either it will have to b's pulled down, or eke it must be rebuilt by the reproduction of its missing walls. And one hopes for a new era of architecture and of town ■ planning, and the building up of Belgium .and Poland and Serbia. But I think that when the war is over Ym-es will at first be kept a guarded sanctuary within its moated battlements for all the world _ to see. And all America will go :to visit it. and all the neutral peoples; and they will realise what we fotight for, and why the fate of Christendom dspended upon our conquering. France and Britian, too, will troop to see it— /and- Belgium; such troops of pilgrims as have never been" seen beFore—multitudes among them wearing black."