Pilgrimage.
40
THE YPRES TIMES
Turenne is said to have embraced Morgan as one of the bravest leaders of his
time. One wonders what Thomas Morgan, who was four days before Ypres,
would have thought of the fourteen months which the Welsh Division spent in
defence of that same town in 1916-17!
Morgan's victory was gained on the very day when another great Welshman,
Oliver Cromwell, ended by his death a brilliant and ruthless dictatorship. For
Cromwell was a Welshman by descent, and his true name was Williams. Whereas
the Morgans were proud of their Welsh name and blood, the Williams family
assumed the surname of the notorious Thomas Cromwell, to whom they were
related, and by whose patronage they were enriched from the plunder of the
monasteries. A well-known name, even if it be only that of the new nobility, may
go better with one's social pretensions than an humble and common Welsh one.
Cromwell had secured for himself all that pertained to that Monarchy which he had
once denounced, even to securing his son's succession to his throne, as if he were
Prince of Wales. Thus it was from Richard Cromwell that Morgan received the
honour of a Cromwellian knighthood in November, 1658. But if Cromwell
despised the land of his fathers, nothing less than hatred was the feeling of the
Welsh for his dictatorship. Now even Morgan realized that the usurping dynasty
could not survive and that these realms required the restoration of the King and
Constitution. He therefore rejoined his old leader, General Monck, in Scotland,
and marched with him into England to restore the rightful king to his three
thrones. After the occupation of York he was sent back to command the English
troops in Scotland, but he was able to celebrate in Edinburgh the proclamation of
Charles II as King of Scots de facto as well as de jure. He lost his command
when those forces were disbanded in December, 1660, but two months later
Charles II rewarded him with a Baronetcy.
Major-General Sir Thomas Morgan, Bart., died on August 13th, 1679, having
married the daughter and heiress of Richard Cholmondley, of Brame Hall, York
shire. The title remained with his descendants until the extinction of the male
line in 1767. As Ecclesiasticus says of heroes in the Apocrypha, There be of
them that have left a name behind them." Yet some of his men must have their
graves near Vlamertinghe and Ypres, where 260 years later their general's country
men revived his spirit of happy-go-luckywarfare, driving before them the
picked troops of the German Empire, past Pilckem Ridge and the Yperlee.
THE word "pilgrimage" means a journey to some holy place. Such a title for
this article is quite apt, if one is still old-fashioned enough to believe that
men who go out to battle prepared to lay down their lives for an ideal are
not necessarily the friends of Satan. Of course, they hated war and all the horrible
things it brings in its train; but out of the torture and horror of such a gigantic
clash the bright stars of selflessness, supreme sacrifice, and real comradeship stood
out perhaps as never before.
Under these conditions man is stripped of all the make-up and camouflage with
which he hides his real self from his friends of civil life. If character stood out in
the war, it was real, and surely the character of the British soldier was never more
apparent than on the battlefields of Ypres, where sheer dogged tenacity and devo
tion to duty held on to those few square miles of Belgian territory. In that tragic
soil a quarter of a million of the Empire's manhood sleep until Réveillé." Surely,
then, it is a holy place because of their sacrifices for an ideal. Can you wonder
