Bismarck daily tribune. [volume] (Bismarck, Dakota [N.D.]) 1881-1916, 1915-07-07
PALMER TELLS
STORY Of YPRES
Once Populous French Town Now
Completely Ruined and
Deserted.
GERMAN MORTARS
DO GREAT DAMAGE
Noted War Correspondent Says
It's a Rotten Place to
Live.


British Headquarters, France, June
21,-,"Eow are the turrets? Still
holding OUT" they ask up anu down
the line of anyone who has come from
Yprcs. Everybody has a tender per-
sOnal interest in tho turrcts of the
old Cloth Hall which deepens with
each day that they survive in defiance
OF the German gunners above the
wreckage wrought by the German
shells.
People are still living in Rheims
and Louvain, but Ypres is absolutely
a dead city: dead as Ponpei: dead as
as a deserted mining camp in Alaska.
No face appears in any door or win
dow that can still be called a door 0:
window: no figures are seer moving
through the shell holes in walls that
are still standing.
Before the war Ypres had some
eighteen thousand inhabitants. Now
it has net a single one. No II Is
making any effort to make any ruin
nabitable. The only signs of life ex.
cept occasional soldiers coming out
and going to the lines are cats grown
{ wild which become streakS OF four
disappearing among the ruins of their
former homes.
The Cathedral which stands back
Of the Cloth Hall was a noble. editice
no doubt; but there are a great many
cathedrals in Europe. The Cloth Hall
is unique: the best of its kind. Any
one who ever saw it always remember
ed it's turrets. Different conquerers
of Ypres put her women and children
to the sword but no n had even
harmed old Cloth Hall beyond taking
away a few statues.
German Big AZ.
The 42-centimeter. l7-inch mortar)
had it's part in the work. When a
F.. ~seventeeninch shell struck a house
the remains of the building not distri-
buted on the pavement were in an en-.
larged cellar. Debris in tho streets
: still remains where 1t fell. There is
no purpose in cleaning it up in an
,uninhabited town. Paving stones are
scattered about from the explosion Of
a seventeen-inch she'll which struck
in the center Of the Grande Place and
made a crater about fifteen feet across
and ten feet deep. This two thousand
pounds Of steel and powder did not
kill anybody so far as could be learn.
ed. 1t would not take a paving gang
long to make repairs. Another which
could have brought down a cathedral
tower dug a still larger crater in the
soft earth of the cathedral grounds.
Big shells or little shells, they do not
count uness they hit. On the principle
that lightning never strikes twice in
the same place probably the safest
cover you could find in case of anoth.
or bombardment of Ypres would be to
sit in the bottom of one Of those crat-
ers. Another bombardment would
seem as bootless as failing last years
straw or kicking a dead dog, How
ever, the Germans keep on throwing
shells into the %wreckage at intervals
as if they could never be satisfied that
they had properly finished the job OF
chaos. Every standing wall was chip
ped with shrapnel. If there was a
house which looked from the outside
as III IL ere uuNlt, IL WOulu uc lOulO
that it had been eviscerated by a she'll
through the roof.
Yet only o1e Of the figures Of that
golden clockface had been bent and
three out of the four turrets hold
their place untouched in relief against
) a genial afternoon sun of June above
the desolation of that dead city.
We'll, what do you think OF Ypres,
as a place Of re%sidence?" asked an
officer who rode by. ..
Pretty rotten" the visiting cores
pendent replied.
II know one that is %rottener," re-
piled he with a suggestive nod back
toward the trench line beyond Ypres.
Were the turrets still holding out?
The visitors could report that they
were. To the German gunners they
must be like the high apple on the
tree that will not come down for all
the small boys stone throwing. 1t
must have cost about two hundred
thousand dollars in shells to destroy
Ypres by manufactured piecemeal
earthquake and it will cost several
millions to restore it., '