THE YPRES TIMES 245
To walk on and around the ancient ramparts with its surrounding moats and
many backwaters the picturesque pre-war appearance of Ypres can now be readily
visualised, indeed it seems hard to imagine that the foul breath of war ever blotted
out the pretty scenery one finds at the southern edge of the town, the aspect is quite
like that of an English park with the summer-clad boating parties wending their way
past shady banks and overhanging trees.
The young trees planted along each side of the more important outlying highways
to replace those blasted to bits by shellfire are now anything from twenty to thirty
feet in height in some places. Nothing gave a more complete battlefield aspect to
the Salient than those stunted skeletons of once magnificent trees, and the contrast
to-day is most marked to anyone who trod these roads in more stirring times.
Those famous woods east of Ypres whose names will never be forgotten by
those condemned to spend deadly hours in and around them are now once again
almost impregnable fastnesses, but the kindly hand of nature, not the bloody arms
of man, restrains the intruder.
THE YPRES-BOESINGHE ROAD AT ESSEX FARM CORNER.
Tall treesswiftly growing higher, dense undergrowth, luxuriant shrubs,
brambles, wild flowers, all are there in abundance; game, hares and rabbits are again
in possession of their rightful domain, blackberries can be picked in galore, the
illusion and impression of being somewhere in the English countryside is complete.
Returning to Ypres along the Boesinghe road a relic of a barbaric age gapes in
the canal bank near Essex Farm corner, the westering sun glints on the lines of
headstones just off the road and on reaching the shadow of the new Cloth Hall tower
the strains of the "Last Post" come up from the new Menin Gate.
Present day Ypres resembles its distant past, but to many there is also a past
that is ever present.
E.F.W.
