Speech Broadcast from 2 L.O.
142
The Ypres iimes.
to reach our members during the first week of the New Year. We apologise to any whose
names we may have inadvertently omitted. We can only say that the pressure of work
to get this article completed in time was intense, so that we may have failed to thank
some helpers through the medium of these columns.
We hope to organise a similar appeal next year as both the sympathy that has been
shown us and the financial results obtained, have been such that we feel that our work is
truly appreciated by the nation.
The total amount taken by the sale of the song of the Ypres Eeague has been £683,
and the working expenses, which include all the despatch and return of parcels, has been
15J per cent. All the returns are not in yet, and certain people are holding over numbers
of songs for sale during the next few weeks, but judging from the averages we expect to
reach a total of £700.
Our cordial thanks to everyone who assisted in making Ypres Day a great success.
NoteWe regret that the photograph of Mr. J. M. Cannon, the Manager of the
Premier Super Cinema, East Ham, arrived too late for inclusion in this article, but we
hope to publish it at a later date.
By SIR HARRY PERRY ROBINSON, K.B.E., on the 30th October, 1924.
I have a message to you from the Prince of Wales, but I am going to keep that till
the end of my short talk.
To-night we are all engrossed in the Election. But I would for a minute call on you
to consider what England might be at this moment, what kind of an election we should be
having but for the gallantry of British troops ten years ago this night, and to-morrow.
To-morrow is Ypres Day, and it is of Ypres that I would speak to youof Wipers,
if you like to call it so, Good old Wipers"which in the ears of future generations of
Englishmen will be a greater name than Trafalgar or Waterloo. The historian of the
War has called the defence of Ypres the greatest military performance in all our history."
And it is true. Not Waterloo, or Trafalgar, or any other victory of British arms was so
great, so incredibly great, as the defence of Ypres. We do not universally realise it yet,
only because the days of the Great War are still too near to us. You have to go some
distance from it to see how high, how much higher than its fellows, a high mountain is.
Do you know what our losses in the Ypres Salient were In the course of the four
years the British armies lost at Ypres 250,000 mena quarter of a million men. These
were killed. The total casualties in killed, wounded and missing, were over a million.
Do you now, busy with the hurly-burly of politics, grasp the significance of these figures
The Ypres Salient was about ten or eleven miles wide from east to west, and as much
from north to south. That is to say, that if it were laid upon Eondon it would reach only
from Hammersmith in the west to Poplar in the eastfrom Highgate in the north to
Streatham in the south. In this little area, one million of our men were wounded, 250,000
lost their lives, between October, 1914, and October, 1918. This is more than 5,000
for every month of all those four years. Including all the wounded over 5,000more than
a brigade—were put out of action every week. Over 700, nearly a battalion, were
crippled every day.
If you add up our total losses on all the battlefields of the War, at Eoos, at Arras,
and on the Somme at Cambrai and in the heroic retreat of 1918, and add all those who
fell at Gallipoli, in Mesopotamia, in Palestine, in East or West Africa, or elsewhere in the
fighting upon land, and add again the total of all our losses at sea, in the Navy or in
merchant ships, on patrol duty and in all auxiliary services, add further all who lost their
lives in the Air Force in all parts of the worldadd all together and one-fourth of all total
losses of the War (and we fought over half the world and in all the seas) were incurred in
holding that little tract of land, no larger than from Hammersmith to Poplar, from High-
gate to Streatham. The world in all the history of warfare has never seen anything like it
