The Ypres Times.
41
SALVAGING THE SALIENT.
9
By ARNOLD WHITE.
SEVEN WEEKS before the Armistice, by the generous hospitality of the
Australian Government, I was invited to accompany Mr. Hughes to the
front. Mr. Hughes, the Australian Premier, was unable at the last moment
to start, but I was permitted by General Sir John Monash (who has always
struck me as the Massena of the Northern Front, with a mind of infinite
resource, iron purpose and sensitive appreciation of the needs, sufferings, ambitions
and desires of his soldiers) to get to the Front.
Four miles ahead of our greater guns, in sight of the Hindenburg line, I was an inter
ested spectator of the volleys of screaming shells that crossed each other without collision,
proceeding respectively from the German and English lines. The German shells had
one scream the English another.
When talking to the officers and men of an 18 lb. battery sited on the ridge
of Hargicourt, I remembered that the average life of a second-" loot when he reached
the front line was a fortnight. Next day the Hindenburg line was breached, and the
canal crossed a day or two later. I was jolly glad to be ordered off the ridge hot foot.
A few months later, I found myself again on the Somme. The Unknown Soldier
has received great, if emotional, honours in Westminster Abbey at the Arc de Triomphe
the Capitol in Washington in Italy and in Tokio but the Unknown Soldier who is dead
is of less importance to the life of the nation than the Known Soldier who is neglected
or many of them. Seven thousand disabled men are on the waiting list for employment
under Lord Roberts's scheme for disabled men. The expenditure of national money oil
all and sundry while the disabled survivors of the Ypres Salient are in want makes one's
gorge to rise. Every diamond garter adorning the left legs of beautiful women should
be unshackled and sent to
The Soldiers' and Sailors' Memorial Workshops,
122, Brompton Road,
London, S.W. 3.
Send jewellery, watches, money, because justice and kindness are the secrets of nationa
strength not emotion or battleships battleships may get into the hands of traitors.
If we don't stand up for our friendsthe disabled soldiers and sailorsafter they
have stood up for us in the face of hell's blast from the enemy, how can we civvies claim
survival here or hope for survival hereafter
When I was in the Market Square at Ypres, shortly after the Armistice, before the
trippers had begun to arrive, and proceeded to the silent desolation of the Menin Road,
a faint impressionit has never left mewas that the spirits of the hundred thousand
men lying there, or thereabouts, were trying to say something. Joy-rides on the Menin
Road had not then begun. Is it possible that there is a spiritual appeal by those who
have gone west on behalf of the Disabled Soldiers of the Ypres Salient who still
survivewith one arm or one leg Tie your left arm to your body for half a day and
see what it means to live with one arm.
The ghosts of Gallipoli, the ghosts of Ypres and its Salient appeal to us for justice
for their surviving comrades.
I append a few extracts from letters received by me during the war from soldiers
in the Salient.
A lance-corporal in a London Territorial Regiment writes
I am not in the least religious, but I could not help noticing the times
out of number where I have seen walls of houses partly demolished, leaving religious
images, which are inlet in the brickwork, absolutely untouched. Also I have seen shrines
