6
The Ypres Times.
good ground on the ridges above us. They had perfect observation of all we did, from the
Wytschaete ridge and the Messine ridge and Westhoek, and the Frezenberg. They had
great gun power when we were weak in guns, and the New Army had to stand under fire
without answering back," or with much artillery, and by day or night, as they marched
up the roads to Ypres past Vlamertinghe, as their guns went up and their wagons, and
their mules, shells followed them, and met them, and caught them, and they were fed
up with it all.
They were fed up with the stinking pits of Hooge where they lay in water, lice-
eaten, with the smell of death in their nostrils, with mine craters close to them. It was
the worst place of all for many months, and for longer than that. Year after year, the
Ypres salient did not change its character very much. It was never really pleasant for
British soldiers. It was not a health resort even after the capture of the Messines
ridge, when we knew how much the enemy had seenand were staggered at the knowledge.
It was less of a health resort when the battles of Flanders began in 1917. It was then
one of the most dreadful plots of ground upon which the old moon had ever looked down
since the beginning of the world.
Hundreds of thousands of men wallowed through the swamps in enormous strife, under
immense and all-destructive storms of high explosives. The solid earth became a liquid
bog when the rains began and did not end. By Glencorse Wood and Inverness Copse
wounded men fell and were drowned in the swamps, and I saw them lying there. The
way to Passchendaele was a via dolorosa and the horror of it, the immense range of its
misery and massacre was only relieved and lightened by the wonderful patience, the most
grim endurance of those masses of British soldiers who, in their masks of mud, refused
to surrender in their souls to the agony they endured. As I write, those human pictures
come back to me h'auntingly, and I salute again the men who served in the salient of
Ypres infantry and gunners, lorry drivers and labour units, surgeons and stretcher
bearers, Air Force and Tanks machine gunners and trench-mortar men, the great heroic
crowd. There were other bad days and weeks and months, when the enemy was strong still
in the last phase of the war which was touch-and-go for us. I remember seeing old Bailleul
go up in flames and Kemmel captured, and all our old roads about Westoutre taped out
by shell-fire. The battalions of ours who were in the salient then stood between us and
ruin. They were weak battalions, worn down to little groups of dazed and tired men,
fighting all the time, snatching a little sleep, and waking up to fight again. It was a weak
line that curved round Ypres and its rampartsbut it was strong enough to save us all,
and the ragged ruin of the Cloth Hall in Ypres is a pillar of victory gained by an immense
sum of death now gathered into the graveyards where those comrades lie.
II.—St. George's Day, 1915.
By SIR HENRY NEWBOLT.^
St. George's Eve, 1915, was a brilliantly fine calm day in the Ypres salient, with a
light steady breeze blowing from the north-east. It was this weather and this wind for
which the Germans had been waiting, as conditions necessary to the success of a new
method of war upon which they relied for the destruction of the salient and the reversal
of their defeat in the First Battle of Ypres. At 5 o'clock that evening a furious artillery
bombardment began along the Bixschoote-Langemarck front, and the greenish cloud
of the first poison gas attack rolled over the French lines at the point where they were
joined by the Canadian left.
