The ruined Ypres Cloth Hall
By 8 June 1915 the city of Ypres in Flanders was in ruins.
In his diary, soldier George Ramage thinks of the architectural similarities between the Cloth Hall and the old National Museum — now the Scottish National Portrait Gallery — in Edinburgh's Queen Street:
'The two small end towers of the Cloth Hall are still standing. The Central Tower a magnificent ruin — its clock stopped at 5.25. Statues all around the wall in niches as on the National Museum in Edinburgh. Lots of broken glass. Not a whole house in Ypres.'
