26
The Ypres Times.
THE GHOSTS OF YPRES.
By GILBERT FRANKAU.
A HUNDRED years hence, when new hates and new ambitions have usurped
the place of those now raging, the military history of this war will be
published. It will be, I think, a dull bookfilled with diagrams, with
statistical calculations of man-power, of munition power and of course it
will be raddled with maps. The men who write it will not be the men who
lived it, and so they will see only cold geography, not the warm humanity of
it all. To them it will be the British Empire, France, the Central States, Italy or Mon
tenegro nations at death-grips, kings, generals, politicians to me, who lived in the
heart of it, the picture comes differently. I can see only men, ordinary men who are
brave, who are afraid ill-tempered or good-humouredmillions of them toiling at
unaccustomed hated tasks. I see all these, English or German, French or Austrian, in
mud, in blood, in discomfort and monotony, not for the love of it, but because of a higher
instinct, a créed whose one tenet is Better dead, better maimed, than own oneself, to
oneself, coward."
This view of mine may be but -the figment of a war-worn imagination there may
be in all these men the primal combative instinct, the love of country, lust of power, the
greed of possession. I say may be," for to me it seems that of all these millions who are
fighting, and dying, and being maimed about the world, very few would ask for more than
the means of livelihood, a little leisure, and the laughter of their woman and her children.
Nor has this opinion come to me suddenly, as most of my opinions. A weary time out
there pregnant months of fear and thoughthave gone to the making of it. Hear
this one of many tales, and judge.
It is midnight in the City of Fear. In my dug-out, tunnelled, steel-arched under the
brick ruins of what was once a house, I am preparing for bed. The flicker of my candle
plays hide-and-seek with the shadows where the rats patter, with the rough yellow table
legs and the low back of my camp bedstead. The sacking curtain has slipped from the
entrance to my burrow, and the blue night steals in on me like a Whistlerian dream.
The canal water gleams darkling turquoise, a splash of palest lemon glints acrossthe
light in some dug-out much as mine, where perhaps a man sits writing to the, woman he
loves. Above thè turquoise of the water, the grey-blue matrix of the canal bank bands
the lighter azure of a faint starred sky.
Every now and then, as the white lights soar from the forward trenches, the manifold
blues lighten and darken, the gaunt ruin of a tower is silhouetted starkly against the
silver glow. At moments, I catch the orange flicker of shrapnel, the saffron reflection
of the flash from a gun muzzle. And always there is noise. The far crackle of a single
rifle-shot, the metallic stutterbreaking and hushingof a machine-gun, swish of a
flighting shell, the thud of its bursting the four-fold answering beat of our own batteries.
But the City of Fear is strangely quiet to-nighta blue eeriness, almost of the tropics,
broods over its shattered roofs. I wonder, as I unlace my wet boots, if any but myself
can feel this. For I am a poet, and these others are only men. I can hear them passing,
hear the squish of their feet through the mire of the towpath, their rough voices, the clink
of harness and wheel, the breathing of horses. Men who work with their hands, drivers
and diggers brave, yes, but because they have no imagination. Fine fellows, I have
learnt thatbut to be led by us who have cleanliness as instinct, not drillby us who
are born to the function of command.
An opaque shadow blots out the turquoise of the night, a voice calls, 'Ullo, mate."
Before I can answer he is inside my dug-out, a big man in mud-stained khakiweapon
less. There is a coil of wire over his right shoulder, a leather telephone-case on his left.
He wears the blue and white armlet of the Signal Corps. My tell-tale tunic is lying on the
(Continued on fage 28.)