Norwich bulletin., 1915-07-06
STORIES OF THE WAR

to any extent in Ypres and you could count the number of army wagons hit on the fingers of one hand. One shell in the British trenches accomplished result was that the homes and offlces and cafes of eighteen thousand people were destroyed.
 The 42-centimeter (17-inch mortar) had it's part in the work. When a seventeen-inch shell struck a house the remains of the building not dis tributed on the pavement were in an enlarged cellar. Debris in the streets still remains where it fell. There is no purpose in cleaning it up in an un- inhabited town. Paving stones are scattered about from the explosion Of a seventeen-inch shell 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 learned. It 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 unless they hit. On the princi- pie that lightning never strikes twice in the same place probably the safest cover you could find in case of another bombardment of Ypres would be to sit in the bottom of one of those craters. 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 clipped with shrapnel- If there was a house which looked from the outside as if it were unhit. it would be found that it had been eviscerated by a shell through the roof.
 Yet only one of the figures of that golden clockface had been bent and three out of four turrets hold their place untouched in relief against a genial afternoon sun of June above the desolation of that dead city.
 Well. what do you think of Ypres, as a place of residence?" asked an officer who rode by.
 Pretty rotten" the visiting cor respondent replied.
 q know one that is rottener." he replied with 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. It 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 1t.
 Occasionally a father of a family who had to leave the town during the bombardment is able to secure a cart and permission to return to the sal- wage of the remains of his house. He finds that nothing has been disturbed except by shell fire. Ypres Is forbid den bad lands where no one may go except on military business. In a sense it is policed Noo in the same way as a rattle snakes nest. The citizen who goes to glean a mattress, a bureau and the family Bible from the debris of his roof, takes time to see if the turrets and the clock of the old Cloth Hall are still holding out.