26 The Ypres Times. THE GHOSTS OF YPRES. By GILBERT FRANKAU. A HUNDRED years hence, when new hates and new ambitions have usurped the place of those now raging, the military history of this war will be published. It will be, I think, a dull bookfilled with diagrams, with statistical calculations of man-power, of munition power and of course it will be raddled with maps. The men who write it will not be the men who lived it, and so they will see only cold geography, not the warm humanity of it all. To them it will be the British Empire, France, the Central States, Italy or Mon tenegro nations at death-grips, kings, generals, politicians to me, who lived in the heart of it, the picture comes differently. I can see only men, ordinary men who are brave, who are afraid ill-tempered or good-humouredmillions of them toiling at unaccustomed hated tasks. I see all these, English or German, French or Austrian, in mud, in blood, in discomfort and monotony, not for the love of it, but because of a higher instinct, a créed whose one tenet is Better dead, better maimed, than own oneself, to oneself, coward." This view of mine may be but -the figment of a war-worn imagination there may be in all these men the primal combative instinct, the love of country, lust of power, the greed of possession. I say may be," for to me it seems that of all these millions who are fighting, and dying, and being maimed about the world, very few would ask for more than the means of livelihood, a little leisure, and the laughter of their woman and her children. Nor has this opinion come to me suddenly, as most of my opinions. A weary time out there pregnant months of fear and thoughthave gone to the making of it. Hear this one of many tales, and judge. It is midnight in the City of Fear. In my dug-out, tunnelled, steel-arched under the brick ruins of what was once a house, I am preparing for bed. The flicker of my candle plays hide-and-seek with the shadows where the rats patter, with the rough yellow table legs and the low back of my camp bedstead. The sacking curtain has slipped from the entrance to my burrow, and the blue night steals in on me like a Whistlerian dream. The canal water gleams darkling turquoise, a splash of palest lemon glints acrossthe light in some dug-out much as mine, where perhaps a man sits writing to the, woman he loves. Above thè turquoise of the water, the grey-blue matrix of the canal bank bands the lighter azure of a faint starred sky. Every now and then, as the white lights soar from the forward trenches, the manifold blues lighten and darken, the gaunt ruin of a tower is silhouetted starkly against the silver glow. At moments, I catch the orange flicker of shrapnel, the saffron reflection of the flash from a gun muzzle. And always there is noise. The far crackle of a single rifle-shot, the metallic stutterbreaking and hushingof a machine-gun, swish of a flighting shell, the thud of its bursting the four-fold answering beat of our own batteries. But the City of Fear is strangely quiet to-nighta blue eeriness, almost of the tropics, broods over its shattered roofs. I wonder, as I unlace my wet boots, if any but myself can feel this. For I am a poet, and these others are only men. I can hear them passing, hear the squish of their feet through the mire of the towpath, their rough voices, the clink of harness and wheel, the breathing of horses. Men who work with their hands, drivers and diggers brave, yes, but because they have no imagination. Fine fellows, I have learnt thatbut to be led by us who have cleanliness as instinct, not drillby us who are born to the function of command. An opaque shadow blots out the turquoise of the night, a voice calls, 'Ullo, mate." Before I can answer he is inside my dug-out, a big man in mud-stained khakiweapon less. There is a coil of wire over his right shoulder, a leather telephone-case on his left. He wears the blue and white armlet of the Signal Corps. My tell-tale tunic is lying on the (Continued on fage 28.)

HISTORISCHE KRANTEN

The Ypres Times (1921-1936) | 1922 | | pagina 4