40
THE YPRES TIMES
The night before we had taken the train at St. Pancras for Tilbury with packs
on our backs and without any plan other than that of wandering down the Western
Front, revisiting villages and battlefields once familiar to us. Arriving at Ypres
we had been directed to the Church of St. George. We had arrived too late to
take part in the service, and indeed we would not have found room in the little
church. We had perforce been content to wander round it, admiring the grace and
dignity of its architecture, at once reminiscent of England and yet in harmony
with the Flemish streets and houses of rebuilt Ypres. But it was good to hear the
English church service in a town, which to our generation at least is for ever
England, and to see again in the streets the khaki which once was the only colour.
The crowd surrounding the little church slowly dispersed. We returned to
the square, and made our way to the Menin Gate. For a time we sought and
found the names there inscribed of many of our friends to whom the fortune
of war denied the known and honoured burial given to their comrades in death."
Then we mounted to the ramparts of Ypres and looked out on the grimmest of all
battlefields. Ten years before from horizon to horizon there was nothing but
desolation, a vast and noisome swamp littered with the wreckage of war, a
wilderness peopled only by the unburied dead. Now farms and villages have
re-appeared on their old sites, very clean and new, and unremitting toil has levelled
the tormented land and re-established cultivation. Over the battlefield the lion
which surmounts the arch of this splendid gateway gazes for ever across the Ypres
Salient and the graves of the myriad dead. Within the hall of the gateway there
is a wonderful sense of power and space and light. The dead are nobly com
memorated here for all time.
We continued along the Menin Road to Hooge and Clapham Junction and so
to Greenjacket Ride, so full of memories of the far-off days of First Ypres, of the
ever-dwindling remnant of the Old Army barring the road to the sea, of the
heroic figure of General FitzClarence, O.C. Menin Road," the inspiration of
the defence, dying in the hour of final success.
We found by the Ride the desolate remains of an old German cemetery. No
more melancholy scene could be imagined than these rotting wooden crosses over
grown with rank vegetation, against the background of shell-torn woodland, in
the oncoming twilight. We hurried on to Zwartelen and to Hill 60, scene of an
epic stand by my regiment, in the gas attack of Second Ypres. Here my greatest
friend, Robin Kestell Cornish, defending the Hill with the four survivors of its
garrison, won the first of many honours on the battlefield. Three years later he
won the supreme honour, falling on the battlefield of Passchendaele.
Monday found us at the Ypres Railway Station, taking tickets for Moorslede.
From there we climbed the hill, if so it can be called, to Passchendaele. How little
a hill; how great a cost was paid for it. We passed through the rebuilt Passchen
daele and turned south to Tyne Cot and its wilderness of graves, so few with a
name, testimony to the conditions under which Third Ypres was fought. We
pursued our way along the high ground as far as Broodseinde. On our way home
by Zonnebeke and Frezenberg we passed a French cemetery. On one cross there
was a crown of thorns, made of barbed wire.
Tuesday found us at Armentières, Wednesday at Loos, Thursday at Arras.
Friday brought us to Albert and the battlefield of the Somme, ground very
familiar to us both. On the Bapaume Road we met an old soldier. Were you
wounded here? I asked. No," he said, I fell out of a train at Rouen."
We continued up the road to La Boisselle and my first front-line trench, still
