The Ypres Times.
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safety. Outside it, in the dreary wide flat oozing open, one felt as bare and uncovered
as a naked man among thrusting knives once inside it, there came a sense of relief
and shelter and safetyfoolish if you wish, because no man there but had seen the cobbled
streets and blood, the tall houses rock and rash under the roar of high explosives
foolish, but nevertheless strong and instinctive.
To many a thousand men, passage of the Gate was the first passage into action and
close contact with war. They would have seen close enough and ugly enough evidence
of war on the way up, through Pop and on the long, straight road to the back door
of Ypres, or in the shattered ruins of Elverdinghe, Dickebusch, Vlamertinghe, passing
through the old city itself, between the high heaps that had once been houses but were
now mere rubbish swept to the roadside to make way for guns and men and horses, wagons
and motors and ambulances.
In every War-hardened unit that moved out through the Gate there were always some
men who were new to the game, who were waiting that first quaking experiment of under
fire," wondering perhaps what they would feel like when the time cameif, in spite of
themselves, their cheeks would pale and their knees knock and if their comrades
would notice itthere were always some new warriors with high mettled hearts and eager
desire to be in it," actually to use a rifle against the enemy, and maybe even the bayonet
for in the Salient who ever knew what was going to happen from hour to hour In the
same units were more who before then had drunk deep of the dreadful waters of war, who
perhaps had passed in and out the Gate before, who knew with horrible certainty what
awaited them in the water-logged trenches, slithering up the shaky duck-boards, wallowing
in the scummy shell-holes, and who passed out through the Gate wondering if they would
ever see it again. All this is a little of what the Menin Gate means to the men who
passed it.
Just as Ypres meant a fixed symbol of our determination to hold on to that corner
of Flanders, so did the Menin Gate mean to us the holding of Ypres. From the Gate
the Menin Road ran almost straight to Hooge, from there dead straight through Gheluvelt
and the enemy lines.
In 1914 the massed attacks of the German armies had poured along the Menin Road,
had striven for weeks to flood down on and through the Menin Gate. It was out through
the Gate that there passed the weakened regiments of the Old Contemptibles to face
the apparently impossible task of stemming a torrent of the finest fighting men and greatest
guns in the German Army under the eye of the Kaiser himself.
It might almost be said that it was out through the Menin Gate, onward along the
Menin Road, that the regiments of the old Regular British Army passed to their last and
greatest battle, passed to non-existence as an army, and passed to never-ending glory.
The road to the Gate was held, but at the cost of practical annihilation of the finest
army that ever marched. On a chill October morning a battalion of the 1st Scots Guards
went into the battle along the Menin Roadand came out of it with 1 officer and 69 men.
Of nearly 700 1st Grenadiers who followed along the road 150 men and not an officer
returned. The Irish Guards lost three-fourths of their strength in three days the 2nd
Borderers lay under a fire of two shells a minute for three days, losing 150 men a day
.the Worcesters had 187 casualties in one bayonet charge which saved that day, and perhaps
the Salient, for us. Some battalions were almost exterminatedthe -Welch Fusiliers
being reduced in a fortnight from 1,100 to 86and some completely wiped out, fighting
and dying to the last man without flinching. The 1st Brigade (4,500 strong in August)
met the full force of the Prussian Guards' attack along the Menin Road, and came out
with 5 officers and 500 men. The 7th Division, which held the ground astride the road,
lost in the three weeks incessant fighting 356 officers out of 400, and 9,664 men out of
12,000.
