The Sectors of the Ypres Salient.
The Ypres Times.
.J-r rO 3
You may get out your old trench maps and pore over the old places that you knew
during the war, but without the division of the ground into the different sectors, as you
knew them, there will perhaps be something lacking, and it may not take you back, as it
ought, to realities. Hence this sketch and a modest attempt to pass in review the char
acteristics of the various sectors. The sketch is an endeavour to show the sectors as they
were during the two years from June, 1915, to June, 1917, when the line of the Salient
remained fixed. They have been drawn from the memory of experiences in many of the
sectors and partly with the aid of a trench-map, so that the result is quite probably-
inaccurate, omitting or confusing some sectors which we did not know. If this estimate
of the sectors is correct there were a dozen sectors, each with a frontage of roughly a
kilometre, and the whole seems to make a singularly symmetrical figure, divided at the
centre by the Ypres-Roulers railway. Each sector has, of course, its distinguishing
features, without which the memory of the sector would be incomplete. Thus, for
example, in the Pilckem Sector, who can ever forget Lancashire Farm or in the Hooge
Sector, the Culvert If all the strange and terrible happenings in each sector could be
gathered into separate volumes, what a series they would makeBut memories of names
and places and events are already fast fading into oblivion. Let us take a glance round
the sectors as we saw them and see what blurred images still stand pictured in the
mind.
