THE YPRES TIMES
49
From his comparative luxury he saw ever the tortured Front, the shell-churned,
terrible mud or arid, devastated soil, the grim-eyed boys doing the job from which
he was exempted.* He never forgot, and to-day, fifteen years after, appreciates
still the gulf that lay between their lives and his, honours them, and cordially
addresses them.
You who once kept the Line beyond the Cloth Hall, fought in the shallow ruts
round Kemmel, moved on your bellies across the pitted slime at Poelcapelle,
Messines, MenincheerohSome of you have done well, many not too well, a
lot of you are workless, seemingly prospectless. To you latter the present must
often have seemed less palatable than the Past. I have met men who said "If
my choice lay between this and that, I'd have a basin of that.' Poor com
mendation of the time we live in, but pretty true. I am, however, convinced,
despite the pronouncements of axe-grinding politicians, that a better time is near,
and my desire is to communicate this optimism to Salient survivors whose faith
may have suffered eclipse.
Messages of hope are cheap. Their promiscuous utterance tires those whose
lane of difficulty has been long and seems to stretch forth interminably. But is
not a beam perceptible in the grey skya lessening of the gloom that since the
after-war flush has steadily deepened over us I earnestly think so. The lighten
ing may be slow. The pulse of business is beating stronger, as should be evident
to the most prejudiced. The rise of share prices and tendency to loose money-bags
in industrial and commercial enterprise, the factory-building fillip, must show that
blood is pumping at the heart of things. In due course it will reach the veins and
capillaries and animate local industry. It must come. It is on the way.
Lest it be thought the writer speaks from a comfortable height above the mud
flats of adversity, he hastens to say that his feet are hardly dry, and have been
sometimes embedded since his farewell to the war and the Salient. He therefore
feels qualified to counsel those who have found the mire of Peace as sticky as that
round Ypres. If he did not mount the fire-step or crawl from one foul shell-hole to
the next across No Man's Land, he has missed the duckboards since. But he sees
dry weather ahead, a firmer footing in prospect, and ventures to express his faith.
In the rugged days out there you stuck it when the very bottom seemed
to have fallen out of things, and life at Home, in any conditions, appeared Heaven.
The soberest minds hardly foresaw the length of the inevitable slump. The Peace
has tried the nation almost as severely as the War, and many of those who carried
Britain on their khaki backs have been embittered by the long depression and the
dark aspect of the future. Their brighter day, I believe, is soon coming.
Spring is here again. 19141934!
Twenty Springs ago Ypres was meaningless to usKemmel, St. Eloi,
Poperinghe, Messines, Menin, undreamt of in our philosophy. Twenty Springs
since, they are significant to usto you, perhaps, I should have saidthough the
New has grown up over the Old, and time has somewhat dimmed their images.
Our aspirations will not expunge them.
The sap is moving where wire and trench held swaybuds thrusting forth in
the Salient. There and here Nature is rejuvenating. Let us also rejuvenate. Let
us renew our hopes of substantial betterment for Britain and ourselves, believing our
Spring at hand.
Comrades of the Line, cheeroh
F. H. S.
Not as an objector, but by his duties, being Pre-War enlisted.
