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The Ypres Times.
It is characteristic of our British way of doing things that the memory of Ypres, what
it was and what it stands for, has only been kept alive and forced on the public notice
by a voluntary association of patriotic men, the Ypres League, of which the Prince of
Wales is a Patron, and the Patron-in-Chief is the King.
It is in the name of the Ypres League, of which the Earl of Ypres is President, that
I speak to you to-nightand I would add emphasis to what he has said in the message
that I have just read to those of you who knew Ypres then.
Most of you, probably, have difficulty in thinking of Ypres as a real city but it was,
as I saw it in 1914, a real city, and a beautiful, untouched by shells. You probably
remember it bestas it will live in all our mindswhen it was but a tumbled pile of
broken masonry, over much of which the grass already began to grow, and only the jagged
spikes of the ruins of the Cathedral and the Cloth Hall still reached up like accusing arms
to the sky calling Heaven to witness to the city's agony. You will remember the Menin
Gate, and the way out to Hell Fire Corner and the heaped ruins of Hooge and, beyond,
the shuddering horror of the Menin Road to .Stirling Castle, Highland Copse and Glencorse
Wood. Do you remember Zillebekethe lake and the Promenadeand the dug-outs in
the railway bank Do you remember, on the other side, the foul stagnant pools of Essex
Crossing and Hilltop Farm, and the thing that was once a road (the Buffs' Road) out towards
Bellevue And Paradise Alley, and Wieltje, and, above all, that graveyard swamp of
mud and slime with the duckboards, continually shot away and continually repaired, over
which you made your way by St. J ulian to the long agony of Passchendaele
At most of these places the Ypres League is erecting monuments in memory of your
valour. Perhaps at times you wake at night to think of them. But you shrink from
talking of them, and a fashion, a silly fashion, has grown up not to speak of memories
of the War. But Lord Ypres is indubitably right when he says that it is your sacred duty
to your children to tell then all that you can, that the young generation may grow up with
a knowledge of the noblest heritage that England possesses. You will not speak of your
own deeds, I know. But tell them about your comrades, how they went always laughing
in the face of death and not of their gallantry only, but their modesty, their helpfulness,
their tenderness. So shall your children grow up to know what qualities Great Britain
demands, and has never failed to find, in her sons. So shall they know how high a calling
it is to be a citizen of this Empire.
To-morrow Field Marshal Lord Plumer, whose name will always be associated with
the holding of the Salient through the years, will lay a wreath on the Cenotaph in Whitehall
and on the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in the Abbey, in the name of the Ypres League,
which will bear the legend To the glorious memory of over 250,000 Britons who fell
in the Ypres Salient, 1914-1918. From the Ypres League."
You also, my listeners, to-morrow give a thought to that glorious memorythe
memory of those men by whose gallantry you still live a free people. You who mourn for
someone who fell at Ypres, be proud in your mourning to-morrow. And you younger
ones, who are too young to remember, learn what the day stands for. Hold your heads
high and thank God that you come of the stock that did what the British soldiers did at
Ypres ten years ago.
I have said, that His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales is Patron of the Ypres
League and that I have a message from him. You know how he has made the cause of
the ex-Service men his own. We should be thinking now," he says, of the men who
gained victory and maintained our freedom, just as earnestly as we did when they were
fighting for us." From his steamship in mid-Atlantic he cabled to Lord Ypres last night
As Patron of the Ypres League I rejoice to hear that the tenth anniversary
of the glorious defence of Ypres is being suitably commemorated.
(Signed) Edward, P."
Remember his words to-morrow.
