THE YPRES TIMES
237
passion loved, that Inferno before which the most terrifying vision of Hell becomes but
a playground.
The battles of Ypres tested the qualities of human courage, fortitude, patience
and self-sacrifice, unmatched by any other struggle in all the anguish of world history.
No one will ever believe, who has not ventured through the storm of steel across the
muddy fastnesses of Passchendaele, where death in rat-chewed flesh and gas-bleached
bones grinned from every shell-
hole or who has not wallowed
through the black slime of Dum
barton Lakes, and finally has
found a moment of gaseous
sanctuary in the dirty depths of
Tyne Cott's pillbox, that men
lived and triumphed under con
ditions which so numbed the
limbs and paralyzed the spirit.
They were a wall unto us by »*-
day and night." If we, who
knew Ypres and suffered in its J dgwHL,
Salient, love Ypres, it is because m, wfö.' w f JfrnMp
the qualities of comradeship tw j
which found expression there, fw A V* r&fjF
and the self-sacrifice which was JHt5kJP<s§Jr
hourly demanded, transcends all «■■FjMNi»"3*"* -JÊ
other human emotion and has
consecrated for us for all time the ||H
fields and copses and bitter land- ^9
scape of that area of all men's
heritage, in which sleep for ever
nearly one million of our com- 4 'if "f
rades whose physical and j
spiritual experience was so ^1' i
uniquely attuned to our own.
No one who did not know Ypres
can ever realize to what depths
human emotion was stirred when iV >*k
we lay shoulder to shoulder in a
shell-hole, beneath the scourge of
trommel feuer, under pitiless rain
with death all around; or were
miraculously saved to share a
blanket for a few sweet hours of
human confidence and com-
munion in the bowels of the HK ;B
earth, fetid, rank and sticky. >9§T^^HH
Every stone, every tree of the
Salient became for us haunted LIEUT.-COLONEL GRAHAM SETON HUTCHISON,
with memory. If the pilgrim, D.S.O., M.C., in a Machine-gun Emplacement at Passchendaele
and he cannot be otherwise
described, wanders alone along the Menin Road, up through Zonnebeke, on to the
Ridge to the east, or further north to Passchendaele, and faces west, to-day, and for
so long as pilgrim veterans return to review the battlefield, in truth they must confess
that here, as they survey the Salient, though they never yielded to the foe, their hearts
have been surrendered to a love, passing that of women.
