Page:The Borzoi 1920.djvu/72

 A MEMORY OF YPRES

By H. M. Tomlinson

As for the city itself you propably [sic] know all about it, and wish you had never heard of it. As for me I had been in it so often that my mouth didn't get so dry on wet days, when walking up that Sinister Street from Suicide Corner to what was once the Cloth Hall. There I was, one summer day, in a silence like deafness, amid ruins which might have been in Central Asia, and I, the last man on earth, contemplating them. There was something bumping somewhere, but it wasn't in Ypres, and no notice is ever taken in Flanders of what doesn't bump near you. So I sat on the disrupted pedestal of a forgotten building and smoked, and wondered why I was in the city of Ypres, and why there was a war, and why I was a fool.

It was a lovely day, and looking up at the sky over what used to be a school dedicated to the gentle Jesus, which is just by the place where one of the seventeen-inchers has blown a forty-foot hole, I saw a little round cloud suddenly appear in the blue, and then another, and then lots in a bunch, the sort of soft little cloudlets on which Renaissance cherubs rest their chubby hands, and with fat faces on one side consider mortals from cemetery monuments. Then came down dull concussions from the blue, and right over head I made out two Boche 'planes. A shell case banged the pavé near me and went on to make a white scar on a wall. Some invisible things were whizzing about. One's own shrapnel is often tactless. 42