I
Communications to
The Editor. "Ypres Times,"
20 Orchard Street. London, W.l.
PRICE 6d
POST FREE 7d.
Vol. 6, No. 7
Published Quarterly
July, 1933
By Robert Blatchford.
T is well that there should be a Ypres League to keep green our remembrance
of the long sustained and victorious defence of the Salient, and to preserve
the camaraderie of the trenches.
For four long and awful years that dangerous and difficult position was held,
at first by our Expeditionary Force of Regulars, later by Territorials, Kitchener's
armies, Canadians, Australians, Indian Divisions, and conscripts. No words can
do justice to the epic achievement of those heroic regiments, nor can our deepest
gratitude be worthy of their magnificent and ungrudging sacrifice. A quarter of
a million of our dead lie on those battlefieldsour best men; and what men they
were.
Through four tragic years our soldiers held the lines against the stubborn
and intrepid attacks of the German armies. Always outnumbered and for the first
year outgunned, enfiladed by artillery, raided by aircraft, surprised in the second
year by the first attack by poison gas, they stood fast, officers and men, enduring
wet and cold, often standing for hours on end knee deep in muddy water. Who
that was not in the line can realize the strain and suffering of the terrible winter
of 1916? Later, when I saw the shell-holes and the mud, the torn and rusted wire
and the unspeakably squalid trenches of the Somme, I was appalled. How could
flesh and blood endure such trial It is something we must try to imagine so that
we do not underrate our debt. Tired veterans and green boys of our blood and
breed living and sleeping in muddy drains, tried by heat and cold; by rain and
snow, plagued by vermin, disgusted by rats and stench and mire; with hidden
snipers trying to murder them, with aircraft bombing them; with mortars and
howitzers trying to blast them with poison gas and high explosives. This not for
days, but for months, for wearing years.
