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A MOST impressive and dignified commemoration on Sunday, October 28th,.
marked the 14th anniversary of the Ypres League.
The large assembly was honoured by the presence of Her Royal Higfhness The
Princess Beatrice who was received on the Horse Guards' Parade by His Excellency The
Belgian Ambassador, and amongst those present included Lieut. General Sir. W. P.
Pulteney, Chairman of the Ypres League, The Military Attaché Belgian Embassy,
Lieut. Colonel G. P. Vanier, representing the High Commissioner for Canada, and the
Dowager Viscountess Plumer. The parade comprised contingents of Officers Training
Corps cadets, 5th Army, O.C.A., 85th Club, Old Contemptibles, St. Dunstans and the
Ypres League.
The service commenced at 3 p.m. with the singing of the Hymn, O Valiant
Hearts," played by the band of the 1st Surrey Rifles, after which the Rev. M. P. G.
Leonard, D.S.O. gave the following touching address:
We are here this afternoon, whether we be young or old, as legates; that is,
we have entered into possession of something which belonged originally to those who
are now dead, something which the dead created and which, though dying, they
bequeathed to us. It is something so precious that not on grounds of sentiment alone
are we bound to treasure and to preserve it. For we are trustees of a spirit and of an
example shiningly displayed and associated for all time with the heroic defence of Ypres.
The men who held the Salient exhibited in their living no less than in their dying,
a spirit of cheerful endurance, of indomitable courage, of dogged devotion and of
ungrudged self sacrifice. They gave their friendship to each other as gaily and as
recklessly as they gave their lives for others. It is of that spirit that we are trustees.
"We mourn the passing during the last twelve months of two of our fellow
trustees of that spirit, namely, that very gallant kingly lover and leader of his people,
Albert, King of the Belgians and General Sir Herbert Uniacke, that prince of gunners.
We know that their passing leaves the Ypres League immeasurably impoverished. We
will remember them.
One example of that spirit of which I speak must suffice this afternoon. During
the Passchendaele offensive there was found a scrap of blood-stained paper in a smashed
pill-box. On that scrap of paper were the orders signed by the N.C.O. in charge of
the Machine Gun section.
These were the orders:
^(1) This position will be held and the section will remain here until relieved.
(2) If the section cannot remain here alive it will remain here dead; but, in any
case, it will remain here.
(3) Should any man through shell-shock or other cause attempt to surrender
he will remain here dead.
(4) Should all guns be blown up, the section will use mills bombs, grenades and
other novelties.
(5) The position will be held as stated.
Nor was that an idle boast, for when the relief arrived, the position was held by
dead menevery single member of that Machine Gun section lying dead across their
broken guns. That is the glorious spirit which to-day we commemorate, and any
commemoration worthy of that spirit and of our inheritance of that spirit must be more
than just one yearly act of remembrance, and thé laying of a wreath on the Cenotaph
for all remembrance of the past is sterile, unless it be a spring of courage in the present
and a dynamic for the future.
Our task as trustees of that spirit is to embody it to give it a bodyso that it
may be used in a creative service of the world óf men to-day.Those of you who lived
sixteen years ago will remember how the very soul of Belgium was broken, battered,
martyred. The Ypres Salient was the abomination of desolation spoken of by the
Prophet. One may say that the body of the salient was killed just as truly as the
bodies of its quarter of a million defenders died. But its spirit lived on The spirit
