194
THE YPRES TIMES
The amazing story of Ypres cannot be told. It was a war, a war of many
battles. Desperate feats of arms were recurrent and numerous. The dramas of
Thermopylae and Balaclava were fought again and again in those muddy fields
and shattered villages of Flanders. Names like Pilkem, Kruiseeck, Zandvoorde,
Wytschaete and Zillebeke have actually no place in the public memory; were
never made familiar in the Press; yet the battles fought in those obscure villages
were of greater intensity and magnitude than Inkerman or Waterloo, and their
names would thrill us if we knew the facts.
I saw the Scots Guards entrain for the front. A splendid regiment they
looked, as the Iron Duke said of his men, Fit to go anywhere and do anything."
Four weeks later they were relieved after fighting at Kruiseeck, and numbered
only 450 men. That was in September, 1915. In November the German armies,
reinforced by the Prussian Guard, attacked along the entire front from Zillebeke
to Zonnebeke. In this sanguinary battle the Prussian Guard of fifteen battalions
was almost annihilated, and our own losses were alarming. The First Brigade,
which met the Guards' attack, went into action 4,500 strong and came out with 5
officers and 468 men. Of the 1st Scots Guards there survived one captain and
69 men; of the Coldstreams there were 150 men and of officers not one. I write
here of episodes, incidental battles which established the Salient, battles fought in
the first few months of the war. The scale of the fighting loosely spoken of as The
Defence of Ypres was too vast for detailed description. It was, as I have said,
a war, a war of many battles, and its purpose, successfully accomplished at a
tragic cost, was the defence of the Channel ports.
I need not stress the importance of that defence. Had we lost the Channel
ports we should have forfeited the security of the Channel crossings. Our
reinforcements would have been threatened, our supplies of munitions and stores
endangered, and it is not too much to surmise that we might have lost the war.
How much then do we owe to the marvellous endurance and self-sacrificing
courage of our troops in Flanders. I call their endurance marvellous because I
really am amazed when I remember that our men could and did endure such
dangers, toils and sufferings and live. There was no lack of courage and devotion
amongst enemies and allies in the Great War; but I do not believe that any of the
combatants, sorely tried as all were, had to win through such physical hardships
as those suffered by the British and Belgian and French soldiers engaged in the
long agony of the battles and watches among the oozy fields around the Salient.
We must remember these men, and when we remember them we should place
above the greatness of their victory the splendour of their sacrifice.
There exists an easy and simple comradeship in the Army which is impossible
amid the exigencies of civil life. A regiment is a family; a band of brothers, and
those of us who have left the Colours must and do regret the loss of that comrade
ship so genuine and so intimate. It is good work to re-unite, if only for a brief
space, men who stood together in the trenches and moved together on the march.
Of the two hundred and fifty thousand brave and faithful men who died in
the great defence we think with a tender reverence and abiding regret, and it is
fit we should honour their memory. And no Briton who remembers the war, not
as a luminous story, but as a dreadful reality and humiliating human disaster, can
think without a thrill of the crowd that once a year stands bare-headed in awed
silence round the Cenotaph, that saddest of national monuments; but do not let
us neglect the survivors. We have, happily, still amongst us, thousands of the men
who fought at Ypres. Let us then say for them as we say for the honoured
dead in all sincerity: "At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will
remember them."
