Ihe Ypres Times.
231
could and fell back, shelled and machine-gunned
at every step to the fringe of Zillebeke Wood.
Here the officers, every cook orderly and man
■who could stand, took rifle and fought, for they
were all that stood there between the enemy and
the Channel ports. Years later a man, remember
ing that fight, said, 'Twas like a football scrum
Everyone was somebody, ye'll understand. If he
dropped there was no one to take his place
great days! An' we were not so frightened as
when it came to fightin' by machinery on the
Somme afterwards."
And this is Mr. Kipling's impression of condi
tions in the Salient when the roar of battle was
at its loudest ere it passed further south to the
Somme
The outstanding wonder that anyone in the
Salient should be alive at all is not referred to
in the Diary. Men who watched the shape of
that cape of death, raken by incessant aeroplanes
and cross-cut by gun-fire that fell equally from the
flanks and, as it seemed, the very rear, sometimes
speculated, as did the French in the livelier hells
of Verdun, how long solid earth itself could hold
out against the upheavals of attack. Flesh and
blood could endurethat was their businessbut
the ground on which they stood did not abide.
As one man said, It 'ud flee away in lumps under
the sole of your foot 'till there was no rest any
where.'
There could be no better example of how Mr.
Kipling treats his incidents than his description
of how a V.C. was won for the 2nd Battalion
At 6.30 (on Sept. 16th, 1916, in the Salient)
there lined up Sergt. Moyney with the remainder
of No. 3 Co.'s platoon, which had been missing
since the 12th. He had been left in command of
an advanced shell-hole in Ney Copse with orders
neither to withdraw nor let his men break into
their iron rations. The Würtembergers' raid on
that day had cut off his little command and at
the end of it he found a hostile machine gun post
established between himself and the duckboard
bridge over the Broembeek. They lay
quiet in their shell hole in the wood and speculated
on life and death. The enemy knew they
were there, but it was not till the dawn of the
16th that he sent out a full company to roll them
up. The Sergeant allowed them to get within
twenty-five yards and then ordered his men to
jump out and attack." Their Lewis gun came
into action on the flank and got off three drums
into the brown of the enemy, while the infantry
expended five boxes of bombs at close quarters.
Sergeant Moyney then gave the order to charge
through the Germans to the Broembeek. It was
done, and he sent his men across that foul water,
bottomed here with curly barbed-wire coils, while
he covered their passage with his one rifle. They
were bombed and machine-gunned as they floun
dered over to the western bank, and it was here
that Private Woodcock heard cries for help behind
him, returned, waded into the water under bombs
and bullets, fished out Private Hilley with a broken
thigh, and brought him safely away
'Twas a bad mix-up from first to last. We
ought never to have been that side the 'dam river
at that time at all. And there's a lot to it that
can't be told. And why did Moyney not
let the men break into their rations? Because in
a tight place, if you do one thing against orders,
ye'll do annything. 'An 'twas a dam' tight place
that that Moyney man walked them out of.")"
That is all, except that both Moyney and Wood
cock got the V.C., and there are scores of other
passages as restrained, as simple, as noble as the
men they describe. Mr. Kipling's work is not
merely a possession for Irish Guardsmenit is a
possession for us all, for no other book has so
caught the spirit of the thing, the spirit of Ypres,
the spirit of the British Army, new and old. It
ranks among the great war books, the simple
history of two battalions raised by genius into
great literature. The Bookworm.
WIPERS."
Can yer^'ear the fellers singin' in Number One Platoon
They're marchin' out Jo' Wipersit ain't a day too soon.
Good-bye, Wipers Though I 'opes it is for good.
It 'urts me for to leave yerI little thought it would
When I gets back to Blighty, and all the fightin's done,
Mebbe the picters of the past will rise up, one by one.
Like movies at the Cinema, they'll bob up in my brain,
The places that I knew so well-I'll see 'em once again.
The battered big Asylum the Prison scorched and scarred
And old Salvation Comer with the guns a-bellowin' 'ard.
The muddy, ruddy Rampartsthe mist upon the Moat
The grey Canal between whose banks no barges ever float.
An' them Cathedral ruinsO Gawd the "idious sight
Like mutilated fingers they points up through the night.
Good-bye, Wipers 1 Though I 'opes it is for good,
It 'urts me for to leave yerI little thought it would.
Henry D'A. Beumberg.
Reprinted by hind permission of the Editor of the Morning Post."
