YPRES.
By Field-Marshal Lord Plumer, Governor of Malta.
154
The Ypres Times.
The first day of a year is the day for kindly greetings to the present, for heartfelt
good wishes for the future, and beautiful even if sad memories of the past.
On none of the anniversaries of the New Year have these feelings been so intensified
in our hearts as those any of us spent in or near Ypres.
Some of us can remember her when she stood, a silent, beautiful figure, apparently
the very embodiment of peace others saw her for the first time when scars had marked
her, but had only accentuated her beauty and others only knew her as a personification
of desolation.
But during the whole period of her trial and suffering we all felt that her spirit was
not, and never would be, subdued, and she always seemed to appeal to us to regard her
as a symbol of the courage of a soldier who would never admit defeat.
Looking back, we feel that she did indeed inspire with her spirit our comrades who
lie around her, who by their sacrifice saved our country from the desecration she experienced
She transformed each one who fell in her defence into one more guardian angel for her
protection, and we can believe that when the victory was won and her safety assured
the chorus of triumph was swelled by the voices of those who had given their lives to
gain it.
Ypres will rise again from her ashes, a new Ypres, proud and stately we hope, but
never with quite the same queenly beauty as that by which we knew her and which will
always live in our memories.
She has gained an immortal place in history, such as no other city in the world can
claim, and whether it is our fortune to see her again or not we shall always feel that
Ypres stands for Remembrance.
Plumer, F.M.
Malta, December, 1922.
TO OUR GUNNERS.
Mud to the gun-wheel tops
Simply a sea of mud.
Torn sandbags that, like props,
Hold back the threat'ning flood
That swamps the misty plain.
Shell holes all newly churned,
Earth by explosions burned
Black, filled quickly by the rain
Poured from the angry sky
In such a thrice cursed spot
Our gunners liveand die
Die by the muddy stream,
Bubbling o'er warriors slain
Months since and in the gleam
Of Verey lights, shown plain
Is the moist pool of blood
Still flowing from the wound
Of an artillery horse,
Which lies upon the ground
Near where its master died.
To-morrow, just a mound,
Surmounted by a cross,
Will mark some mother's loss
Some lover's boy who gave
All he possessedhis life
And in a foreign grave.
Now rests. So let him rest
Freed from this earthly strife
God knows he gave his best
L. J. Dixon.
Written near Wiltje,
Steenbeke Valley,
11/11/17.
