The Dunkirk War Memorial
THE YPRES TIMES
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A Merchant Service Club and Seamen's Institute as a National War
Memorial in France's Northernmost Seaport.
MANY travellers to the Continent will recall Dunkerque as a welcoming port after
six hours of English Channela forest of masts and cranes and a row of quaint
quayside houses seen in the first light of the dawn. To them it will have meant
dry land again, hot coffee and a waiting train. But behind these first impressions lies
a busy and ever-growing seaport and all the crowded life of those who carry on their
business in great waters. History, too, is there, for not many years ago it was the scene
of a meeting on which the movements of half a dozen armies hung.
On November ist, 1914, the second day of the first Battle of Ypres, when Briton
and German were fighting to the death for the supremacy of the Menin Road, Lord
Kitchener, with Monsieur Paul Cambon, the French Ambassador in London, arrived in
Dunkerque to meet the President of the French Republic and Marshal Joffre for a hurried
Council of War. Later on Marshal Foch arrived from his headquarters on Mont Cassel,
and pronounced himself a determined optimist as to the issue of the great battle even
then raging round Ypres. This meeting, which actually took place in the British
Consul's room that now forms part of the present War Memorial buildings, will always
be famous in history for the fact that Lord Kitchener, for the first time, persuaded the
French military authorities that the war would last at least three years, and unfolded
to them the contribution that the British Empire would make. He told them that
seventy British divisions would take the field, and that the strength of the British forces
would reach its high watermark in the summer of 1917prophesies, though he did not
live to see them, which later proved their own truth.*
At this meeting a pathetic note was struck by Monsieur Cambon when he said
(in reply to Lord Kitchener's pronouncement), "Ne pouvez vous pas rapprocher la date.
Monseigneur, car je me fais bien vieux." The aged ambassador, however, continued to
represent his country in London until the Armistice was signed.
If Germany had realized, on the outbreak of war, what Dunkerque and the Channel
ports would mean to the issue of the war, and had concentrated on an attack on
Dunkerque, it seems difficult to see how the defeat of France could have been averted
for a sufficient time to enable British armies to take the field. It was fully realized later
and more than 7,000 projectiles of varying calibre and character from land and sea were
hurled upon the town. But the heroism of the French on land, and the dauntless courage
of British seamen defeated every effort to break through and the annals of the sea
contain no more glorious achievement than the successful defence of the Channel by the
Royal Navy, or the steady maintenance of an unbroken stream of merchant ships
between England and France, as well as from almost every corner of the earth to the
English and French coasts, throughout four and a half years of war. If the Great War
achieved nothing else, it demonstrated, with painful directness, this grim factthat
failure to defend the English Channel or to maintain the free passage of food-carriers
on the high seas, must mean the starvation of the British Isles. It is to the glory of the
Merchant Navyas it is in future to be designatedthat it will now rank in history
side by side with the fighting Services of the Crown.
From the opening speech of the Earl of Athlone at the inauguration of the War Memorial
Buildings.
