Before Us in Flanders,
THE YPRES TIMES
By Edmund Blunden.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE writes of the thoughtful whisperings, mercurisms,
airy nuncios, or sympathetic insinuations, which many seem to have had at
the death of their dearest friends." It is possible that these hints are not
confined to such occasions. When we speak of the associations of a place, we use
a simple word to represent much that would ibe difficult to define, but is certainly
felt. The rooms of our friends vary in the quality of their effect upon us. Every
old house has its own corners, from which we hear whisperings, and apprehend
personal emanations.
In Flanders, and that area occupied by the British armies from 1914 to 1919,
I thought I sometimes had sense of our race passing that way in lost centuries.
Sometimes a place-name, sometimes a turn in conversation agreed with that
puzzling dream of things remote, yet near and significant. Au Tir Anglais
took my fancy; and in Ypres the wine-caves in the Ramparts were mentioned
curiously as having been Marlborough's stables two hundred years before our
brigade staff sorted itself into the mailbagged compartments, and stood on the
roof to watch sharp bombardments towards St. Eloi. But, in fact, the ghosts of
Flanders must have been all about usthe British ghosts. From Dunkirk to
Péronne, from Creqy to Tournay, there they were, there they are, those soldiers
before usour earlier selves.
Since those times of daily question and conjecture in Ypres, I have often
chanced upon some outlying literary reference to the older British acquaintance
with Flanders; and one or two of these passages seem so unlikely to be discovered
in the ordinary way of reading, and so vivid and sympathetic, that I venture to
discuss them now. We are proud of our Ypres. We are not the first, this side
the Channel, to be proud of that astonishing city. Let one or two of our
predecessors be heard, .more clearly than we could hear them in the days of the
ammunition lorries and the uproar on the Menin and the Lille Gates.
And first of all, there was always trouble over the correct pronunciation of
"Ypres." I remember Wipers, Ypray, Yeepray, Yeeps. In the New Monthly
Magazine for 1821, a writer on Innovations in the English Language" has a
word on this head. He says: Who does not remember when the contending
armies were hovering (vulture-like) in the neighbourhood of Ypres, and how did
my poor countrymen distress themselves, or their few knowing friends, with the
pronunciation of this word so familiar to French understandingsOne called it
Wypres, another Yerps, a third Whipprees, and while nobody was right, the
belligerents were slaughtering each other with as little ceremony or compunction
as this poor name was mangled by our cobbler politicians, or mechanic
newsmongers."
If we follow the story of Ypres back from 1821, we have no lack of English
action. Perhaps the most extraordinary of the concurrences between old history
and new is the Expeditionary Force raised by Lord Henry Spencer, Bishop of
Norwich, in 1382, to destroy the influence of the French King in the Low Countries.
Sixty thousand men landed at Calais, and besieged Ypres. Many Flemings from
Ghent, well equipped, marched to join them. The English were rejoiced,"
writes Froissart, at their coming and made great cheer for them, saying they
would take Ypres and make them conquer Bruges, Damme and Sluys, making no
doubt that before September they would have conquered all Flanders." Where
have we heard that very same expression? However, the governor at that time
