Sonne Stray Lines about Ypres
2 THE YPRES TIMES
By Stephen Graham.
Author of "A Private in the Guards"; "Ivan the Terrible"; "Boris Godunof," etc.
ONE always doubted whether the names of Neuve Chapelle, Festubert, Loos
would be found in the school history books after the war, whether they would
not be dwarfed by much greater battles in later stages of the war. But the
name of Ypres we gradually learned must stand. As a nation we were not much
concerned with Ypres before 1914, but for ever after we must be associated with
itthrough the memory of the blood which has been shed and of the dead who have
been buried there. What regiment in the British army has not fought or held the
line at Ypres? At what expense of lives has it been held? The more ruinous it
has become the more sacred it has become, and the more determined we have been
to keep it. And not on military so much as on emotional groundsSome Roman
writer describing the ancient Saxons said they fought on the sea with such a spirit
that, in course of battle, were there but two planks of a boat left the warriors would
somehow be found standing on them and fighting still. So also amidst the ruins
of Ypres.
The sentiment about Ypres is not confined to one section of the army, the feeling
about it is universal, and almost any soldier, if asked about the town, will give testi
mony to the one effect. "Oh, I think I'd kill myself if they took Ypres," says a
blaspheming old soldier who otherwise would not seem to have an ounce of religion
in him. "Ypres was the most beautiful little town you could ever wish to see at
the end of a day's march," says another. The most fantastic notions of its beauty
have arisen in the mind of the common soldier. Ypres is now part of the substance
of a dream. It is legendary already. The havoc wrought there is a sort of picture
and symbol of the havoc wrought in our lives by the war, and its ruins have stood
for us as a picture in little of the ruins of our civilization as a whole.
On some shattered buildings in France a warning has been set up against making
repairs since the Government has the intention of leaving them standing as they
are as a witness for all time of what the Germans have done. The same might be
put over Ypres, though not because of what the Germans have done but because
of what they failed to do.
The battalion of Scots Guards in which at a later date I served, took a vital
part in the First Battle of Ypres, for it was there that it received its baptism of fire.
It did not take part in what is sometimes called the Second Battle of Ypres, namely,
the abortive German attack of May 1915 where they carried the abasement of the
profession of arms a stage lower by the introduction of poison gas. But when the
battalion came into the town on the 14th March, 1916, it held the salient in company
with other regiments throughout the desolating summer of that year, and only left
it late in July for the Battle of the Somme.
What a contrast was the Ypres which the battalion left in November 1914 and
the one which met its eyes a year and four months later. It had been a flourishing
little town, full of eager civilians, with Cathedral and Cloth Tower intact, and manj
an ancient and old-fashioned building, but when we returned it was a place of the
dead, utterly wrecked, with not one whole building left standing, a place where at
night the footstep on the cobbled roadway echoed eerily as if one were in a haunted
domain. There were no roofs, no upper storeys anywhere, and all was flat except
the many jagged pointers of isolated walls and the low stumps of what had been
houses and shops.
