The Wrack of the Storm | Page 5

towns, which will rise again from their ashes,
more beautiful than before. They have annihilated Louvain and Malines;
they have but lately levelled Dixmude; their torches, their incendiary
squirts and their bombs are about to attack Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent,
Bruges, Ypres and Furnes, which are like so many living museums,
forming one of the most delightful, delicate and fragile ornaments of
Europe. The things which are beginning here and which may be
completed would be irreparable. They would mean a loss to our race
for which nothing could atone. A quite peculiar aspect--familiar, kindly,
racy of the soil and unique--of that beauty which a long series of
comely human lives is able to acquire and to hoard would disappear for
ever from the face of the earth; and we cannot, in the trouble and
confusion of these too tragic hours, realize the extent, the meaning or
the consequences of such a crime.
2

We have made every sacrifice without complaining; but this would
exceed all measure. What can be done? How are we to stop them? They
seem to be no longer accessible to reason or to any of the feelings
which men hold in honour; they are sensible only to blows. Very soon,
as they must know, we shall have the power to strike them shrewdly.
Why do not the Allies, this very day, swiftly, while yet there is time,
name so many hostage cities, which would be answerable, stone for
stone, for the existence of our own dear towns? If Brussels, for example,
should be destroyed, then Berlin should be razed to the ground. If
Antwerp were devastated, Hamburg would disappear. Nuremburg
would guarantee Bruges; Munich would stand surety for Ghent.
At the present moment, when they are feeling the wind of defeat that
blows through their tattered standard, it is possible that this solemn
threat, officially pronounced, would force them to reflect, if indeed they
are still at all capable of reflection. It is the only expedient that remains
to us and there is no time to be lost. With certain adversaries the most
barbarous threats are legitimate and necessary, for these threats speak
the only language which they can understand. And our children must
not one day be able to reproach us with not having attempted
everything--even that which is most repugnant--to save the treasures
which are theirs by right.
* * * * *

TO SAVE FOUR CITIES

IV
TO SAVE FOUR CITIES
1
First Louvain, Malines, Termonde, Lierre, Dixmude, Nieuport (and I
am speaking only of the disasters of Flanders); now Ypres is no more

and Furnes is half in ruins. By the side of the great Flemish cities,
Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent and Bruges, those vast and incomparable
living museums which have been watchfully preserved by a whole
people, a people above all others attached to its traditions, they formed
a constellation of little towns, delightful and hospitable, too little
known to travellers. Each of them wore its own expression, of peace,
pleasantness, innocent mirth, or meditation. Each possessed its
treasures, jealously guarded: its belfries, its churches, its canals, its old
bridges, its quiet convents, its ancient houses, which gave it a special
physiognomy, never to be forgotten by those who had beheld it.
But the indisputable queen of these beautiful forsaken cities was Ypres,
with its enormous market-place, bordered by little dwelling-houses
with stepped gables, and its prodigious market-buildings, which
occupied one whole side of the immense oblong. This market-place
haunted for ever the memory of those who had seen it, were it but once,
while waiting to change trains; it was so unexpected, so magical, so
dream-like almost, in its disproportion to the rest of the town. While the
ancient city, whose life had withdrawn itself from century to century,
was gradually shrinking all around it, the Grand'Place itself remained
an immovable, gigantic, magnificent witness to the might and opulence
of old, when Ypres was, with Ghent and Bruges, one of the three
queens of the western world, one of the most strenuous centres of
human industry and activity and the cradle of our great liberties. Such
as it was yesterday--alas, that I cannot say, such as it is to-day!--this
square, with the enormous but unspeakably harmonious mass of those
market-buildings, at once powerful and graceful, wild, gloomy, proud,
yet genial, was one of the most wonderful and perfect spectacles that
could be seen in any town on this old earth of ours. While of a different
order of architecture, built of other elements and standing under sterner
skies, it should have been as precious to man, as sacred and as
intangible as the Piazza di San Marco at Venice, the Signoria at
Florence or the Piazza del Duomo at Pisa. It constituted a peerless
specimen of art, which at all times