"Ninth." 31st October, 1931
4
THE YPRES TIMES
By Lieut.-Col. Graham Seton Hutchison, D.S.O., M.C., Author of
"Footslogger" "The W Plan," etc.
I WONDER if everyone had my experience. I wandered into the Ramparts
of Caxton Hall, looking for some benevolent soul, and possibly that extra
tot which in other days so eased the journey east, when I was greeted by
the Divisional signallers. The gap of fourteen years was closed. What's the
password to-night?"
Cheerioh flashed the kid, whose smile was always angelic.
"All right, damn you! Cheerioh." And so it was more than a decade
later. Nor had we changed one whit.
A Reunion of the Ypres League is Ypres—as it was. Almost anyhow. It
is true that no one changed his socks in Caxton Hall. There was no reading
of vests, nor killing of insect pests with shovels. No live-stock hunting. No
rats. No grousing. No one swinging- the lead. But there was reproduced
the same comradeship, the same which made man share his blanket, his last crust
or the safety of his shell hole, with a comrade. Comradeship, instantaneous.
Cooks' sons, Dukes' sons, sons of Belted Earls," any old son-of-a-gun, so
long as he was a child of the Salient
It is the common paternity of this bleak, wracked, soggy, mucking, thrice
beggared battlefield which has produced the Ypres brotherhood. Plumer
wasn't with us. He was missed mightily-the elder brother, and mother
of us all, who watched with care our goings and comings, whose kindly solicitude
was always with us, whose implacable courage, and unqualified genius in attack
or defence inspired usbut Plumer was with us in spirit.
Five hundred members, and heaven knows how many guests, the hall was
filled, were gathered together under the chairmanship of Sir Hubert Gough. We
were glad to do him honouras the truth of history has done. Mark that! In
his speech he emphasized the vitally important need to retain the spirit of comrade
ship, born of the Salient; "the spirit which kept men astonishingly and wonder
fully happy." Perhapsthis happiness was the most illogical a.nd inconsistent
thing in all human history. But no one who looks back across the years can but
discover memories infinitely tender, love stronger than are all other bonds.
In those days men were men. In a Ypres League Reunion men conjure again
the rare quality of that matchless manhood, taste again the essence of that
comradeship.
God knows what cynical wit christened those splintered stumps Inverness
Copse or Sanctuary Wood! Who named that stinking quagmire Dumbarton
Lakes? And who ordained that those treacherous heaps of filth should be known
as Stirling CastleS or Northampton Farm? How we laugh in the recollection of
a bulging burrow, belching-smoke, termed a chateau! No battlefield was ever
quite like Ypres, where a myriad shells found their billet. So deep, so yielding,
was the soil in its embrace that seconds passed before the impact against some
thing solid which might detonate the metal mass. Then, as if moved by some
angered reptile of the nether world, the earth's surface would heave and spout
and flash with fire, emitting black fumes before delivering itself of a tempestuous
diarrhoeaa shower of gangrenous metal and yellow sticky mud. I hear an echo