THE YPRES TIMES
It seems fashionable to-day, when designing a story, to make the briefest
possible reference to the war. One casual paragraph takes the characters into it,
conveniently drops them there or brings them back, without distressing the reader
at all. But before the present vogue many of your authors strived in all honesty
to write their own first impression of the Salient. A futile tasksome things must
be lived.
We lived those same impressions. Filing along the roads toVlamertinghe,
to Dickebusch Lake and beyond, the never-ceasing flashes of batteries around us
cutting the darkrevealing musty, tumbling villages and empty miles of desola
tion; the night-long orchestra of tumult numbing our sense of hearing; rockets
and Very pistols marking the sinister footlights ahead. A dramatic stage at the
end of a 3,000-mile road.
As the days, and more particularly the nights, passed we learned to know the
Salient intimately. We are not limited to second-hand knowledge of unhealthy
cross-roads, barrages searching and creeping over the fields at night; the
unexpected one, two or three shells out of the quiet day sky; rain, mud, odours,
weariness; ration parties with flattened sacks of bread, jam, cheese; petrol-tins
of water.
There was that most miserable hour when the eastern sky turned slate colour
and the rockets faded out against a grey curtain of cloud and smokeit was with
life seemingly at lowest ebb the Tommy shared his meagre rum-ration with the
nearest Yank, the officer found a Scotch to divide. It will not be forgotten.
We did not have the days and weeks of desperate defence without reliefs,
shelling to endure with no retaliation, gas to meet with no masks, the multiplied
misery of winter trenches. We are duly grateful these things were spared us, and
we can correctly appraise the fortitude needed to hold Ypres through the long
years.
The facts given above demand consideration and reflection as a subject of the
utmost importance, a subject that has been emphasized by Major-General O'Ryan,
who commanded the 27th Division.
On both sides of the Atlantic we must suffer a certain number of small-minded
or short-visioned persons whose aim in life seems to be the promoting of irritation
between our two countries. While their number is insignificant and their object
usually less than creditable, it is unfortunately true that their expressed views
constitute news." As a consequence, they can and do command publicity
entirely out of proportion to their importance.
Against the trouble makers we may count the vast majority of inarticulate but
straight-thinking people who realize our common heritage, its influence in world
affairs, the criminal folly of disturbing our mutual faith. Among this majority
will always be some who feel its value more intensely than others, and it is reason
able to include amongst them, here, the many thousand soldiers who know the
Salient because they were in it, who lived beside your own soldiers, understood
their task and pictured aright the qualities necessary to persist in that task through
the war.
Our feeling is that it would be an eminently fitting and a supremely worthy
mission to foster, to keep alive, the soldier sentiments of mutual respect and
comradeship growing out of our contact in war. It can be made an anchor to
prevent our drifting in currents of demagoguery, in storms revolving around
phrases worded to appeal to local pride and political passion, well worded to
arouse resentment and suspicions where it will do harm. It would seem an
imperative duty among ourselves, and a worthy tribute to those whose memory
the Ypres League would perpetuate, that we remember the days our organizations
stood interlocked in one unbroken line.
E. W. Strong. Captain.
