MEMORIES OF THE MENIN ROAD.
The Gateway to the Line and What it Stood For.
220
The Ypres Times.
By BOYD CABEE Author of "Behind the Lines," etc.)
In all our long and famous battle roll of war history there is no one name, as there is
no one spot, which means so much to so many as those two simple words Menin Gate."
I suppose there is no battalion of the Empire forces in France which did not tramp at
one time or another through the grim portal of the Gate, no regiment that did not trudge
back through it leaving scores or hundreds of its dead out on the dreary, shell-smitten,
bullet-scoured waste outside.
The piled tiers of carven names on the Memorial Gate record the 58,000 Unknown
Dead who lie in this one little corner of Flanders, but these are only a portion of the
great army of the Empire's dead who died in the defence of Ypres.
In the hotel lobbies and public places of Ypres you will find, hanging on the walls
as a guide to the stream of visitors coming all the year round to see each their own one
hallowed spot, a map of the area, with Ypres marked a black spludge in the centre, and a
shower of red spots scattered as thickly round it as if red-ink pens had showered their
haphazard blots over the paper.
Down the sides of the map you will see long lists of names and numbers, and if you are
curious and count these, you will find 233. Each tells the name and place of a cemetery,
a cemetery where our Glorious Dead He in their scores of thousands under the long ranks
of white head-stones that stand Hke soldiers on parade. They also were Defenders of
the Way, Defendersand some of them at the ven' crisis of life and deathof the
Empire.
For Ypres came to mean from the first days of the war more than a mere town to
be held or lost, a square of the great chess game to be yielded or taken. For the Empire
and the whole world Wipers became a sign and a symbol. Dearly enough in the first
year we had paid for its holding none in the later years would have believed any feeble
tale of strategic retirement or according to plan if we had lost it or withdrawn from
it. In 1914 the enemy had strained every nerve to take and we to hold it. A prize so
highly paid for must, in the minds of the multitude, be a prize worth the price. Through
the years the belief strengthened that Ypres must be held at all cost, and if it had fallen,
if once that Menin Gate had been forced, the world would have trembled to the crash
of the fall. If only for that reason, the Gate had to be held and for that, or any other
reason you like, it was held.
But the value of the position and the price of its holding were, are, and doubtless
will be, matters for the high minds of the historians and master strategists to ponder and
debate. To the men who, in those days of war passed out through the Gate, and who
limped wearily back between its crumbling portals, all such matters counted less than
the howl of one approaching shell, than the curtain of steadily pouring rain, than the slimy
mud squelching underfoot.
To these men the town was a place with some priceless thick ramparts and dug-outs
the Gate was the way through which one passed from such comparative shelter out into
the naked dangers of the Salient, the spot up to which one marched in solidly comfortable
blocks, and then, if a strafe were on, broke up into strung-out blobs," and marched as
stolidly as might be into the area of concentrated Mud, Blood, and Misery.
Coming back after hours, or days, or weeks, in that horror of mental and physical
misery and strain, the battered Gate loomed into sight like a very haven of shelter and
