The Birmingham age-herald., 1923-01-14

front. These men in the wheat fife paintings, stained glass windows. and valuable archives. The city itseif, reduced by time to eighteen thousand, or less than one-tenth of it's former size, was a beautiful relic of artistic antiquity. proud of it's history, but famous chiefly fer it's produce mar ket, in which, ol, some Saturdays, more than forty thousand pounds of butter changed hands
 At the close of the war the city was deader than Sodom after Lotand his two loving daughters, well arter sun-up, ran off to Zoar. The Cloth hall and Cathedral were one mass of ruins. The houses had vanished, and the town was "shell-swept grave yard There are now four hundred cemeteries scattered over the salient. and they contain two hundred and fifty thousand graves. The other day I rode by the cemetery of Poelca- belle were are buried four thousand bodies found in shell holes. On three thousand of the crosses above them are printed the words. Tn memory of an unknown British soldier"
 Watching the Builders
 Immediately after the armistice, the work of reconstructing Ypres was commenced The first thing was to create bright spot in the wilder ness. This was done by clearing the public square and filling it with flowers and shrubs surrounded by grass and planting two rows of trees along the Boulevard Malon, which leads from it. At the same time the people came back Wdeden struc-s lures of different types, from single room sheds to temporary town halls, sprang up over night until in Au-s gust, 1921, more than 12,000 had been erected. In the meantime brick and other materials became available and the construction of substantial houses commenced. During the war something like 1000 houses in Ypres have now been rebuilt.
 But we can see this much better by getting into our German. war built limousine,s with our Belgian soldier Jules at the wheel. and going over the city as it is today. We stop the machine in the main street that runs through the town. There are huge piles of bricks and stone on both sides of the street and we can see new houses extending on and on. At our right is a yard where dozen stone cutters are hewing out build- ing blocks and over the way the car penters are putting up the rafters for new roofs of red tiles. Huge wag- ons loaded with bricks and other building materials, hauled by big Belgian horses. pass by us, and the sound of the hammer and saw is broken oply by the footing of the horn of that rubberneck motor bus, filled with American tourists, which. inst coming i'm
 Now Jules starts the machine with a crank and we ride along through the streets turning this way and that seeing new structures everywhere going up. Our hearts burn as we pass the ruined cathedral and Halles with their acres of still falling walls. Parts of them are already sur rounded by scaffolding and the ma- sons have started to make repara- tions but it seems impossible that they can succeed; for the ruins look like those of Timgad or Pompeii, and in places no better than the remains of old Carthage, which was wiped again and again from the face of the earth.
 Re-Creating the Villages
 Now we have left the city and are riding about over the country, through villages which at the time uS. pass collections of portable one-story houses painted yellow and see new buildings going up everywhere. The landscape is spotted with patches of red, each patch the tiled roof of a new farm house or new village. Every old house has new roof and on soms of the roofs I see the figures 1920 or 1921 or 1922 painted or worked in with other tiles of black n sd ina China io ha ci ion af good duck. Here. in Belgium it is the sign of. reconstruction 4iand it means that prosperity isseoming back to the people.
 Nose of the houses are of brick or stone. Nearly all have. but one story with ridged roofs ending close to the. walls. It is only in the larger towns that you