From The New Statesman 30 June 1917
In 1914, the medieval town of Ypres in Flanders was a quiet backwater admired for its Gothic Cloth Hall, Grand’ Place and cathedral. Then in the 1914-1918 Great War, Ypres was turned into a mass killing field. Despite state censorship, this vivid report, published on the eve of the July 1917 Passchendaele offensive (in which more than half a million soldiers were killed or seriously injured in less than four months), hints at the relentless barbarism.
Selected by Robert Taylor
Five wounded Tommies sat behind me in car- crutches in rest, bandages forgot, but Eaps or Wye-press under gay discussion- not Wipers, which was always officer slang. The time was early in the war, before the Salient yielded pride of anguish to the Somme, I remember turning round and telling a Yorkshireman, with a waggish nose, how it happened that I was rather interested in the place they were talking about. And the cheery rejoinder: “Then he's in a dead -'ole!” For it was so.... And the other Sunday I was in it myself.
The last stage is from a town with a name that sounds exactly like a bar on the banjo : let it keep your heartstrings tinkling if you want to see things as they deserve to be seen from this point on. By the stage-door you are entering that theatre of war which once did the biggest business of all, and any day may be doing it again ; for the piece had never been withdrawn, and here you are behind historical scenes. Over those pale green flats, sleeping in spring sunshine on our left front, the invading horde (if they had only known it) might once have poured into the citadel ; there or thereabouts the devoted Canadians endured their noble agony. Along this high, breezy, poplar-shaded, dead-straight road the townsfolk flew in frenzy from their burning homes ; and British battalions have been tramping up and down between firing-line and billets, to the blesses certainty of a short rest or a very fine chance of the long one, these thirty months on end.
I came armed with two little books as guides. One is The Story of Ypres, as brilliantly told by Captain Pollard, of the London Regiment ; the other a small volume of private letter, a schoolboy's simple contribution to the already extensive private literature of the war. It is the schoolboy who keeps me going in the car, now hastily hunting up little hints about places, now vainly endeavouring to snatch the places themselves from the flying countryside.
The banjo town was unmistakable. That, obviously, was where the shells were “ coming in one after the other, like cocoanuts on Epsom Race Course,” on the way up to the front. The long straight street is left behind, still refreshingly a street of the living, but here and there the blackened stumps of houses, like bad teeth. Outside the town you remember this is like Belgium. Farmhouses all along the road, as though they had been turned out of France, where you never see one, and each dropped down in the first vacant lot I wish there were not so many of them ; then I might know almost for certain where it was that my boy Guide billeted at blesses intervals. In one or other of these homely homesteads some of these precious letters were written. In one or other of them he was “ as happy as a lark and a humming-bird rolled in one,” because next day he was at last having his “ blooding “ ! In one or other he used to find “ the same squalling kids, etc.” but also “ freedom for strolling round the fields”, and “ our little dinner on the table in the garden.” Think of it, after the trenches north of Ypres, and the bitter end of the Second Battle! “I slept in my barn again-topping to get out to get out of one's clothes for a change-I shall have a bath to-morrow ! ”
If only that barn could hail me as I pass!
* * *
Things were happening as we motored into Ypres. When were they not? A cannonade of sorts behind the roofless ruins, perhaps outside the town ; nobody seems to know or care; it is only the Archies, only an air-fight for our benefit. We crane our necks and train our glasses. Nothing whatever to be seen.
Wait ! There's one of them whirling away so high that you can't see what it is .... and there's another. They themselves, shredding away in wisp and filament of floating filth. Where are the burning cores? They have none. They were shrapnel all the while. The fighting planes are out of sight in the clouds-and our time in Ypres is all too short.
Here comes are living Guide, the great Town Major. His fame is known to us. It is already legendary. He is the seventh, or eighth, or ninth Town Major of Ypres this war, and he has outstayed his natural span. A big man, too, with an almighty chest, flown with pride in the Dead Hole which has come to be his life. An Irishman, of course ! He will show us round as well as under the lee of that fairly firm wall, lest worse things than air-fights befall.
“ I walk fast !” says the Town Major of Ypres.
He does- especially here and there. For there are parts of Ypres where it does not do to dawdle ; popular resorts of other visitors, who still have a way of dropping in at any hour of the day or night; unwholesome holes and dangerous corners which may as well be nameless, but the Town Major knows them like the back of his hand, and brings their record up to date in a sentence as you pass.
“This was done last night,” he remarks airily one minute, and in another : “ Lost three men here a week ago. Big stuff.”
We stare at the wounded wall, at the clot of earth and cobbles at our feet, and reflect that this is just about the time of day when the Boche is in the habit of sending over his explosive emissaries. Only the day before yesterday a party of inquiring civilians had to make the best of a bad roof in quite a heavy shower of shrapnel, They had all the luck ; nothing comes our way, except the two fighting aeroplanes put of the clouds.
They interrupt the Town Major badly. This time they are well below the clouds. You cannot again confuse them with the blackish ball of worsted and the almost white one which aptly represent the Boche shrapnel and our own. Neither brand seems to do much harm, neither duellist in the least flurried by the enemy aloft or below ; they wheel and swerve disposedly, as in some stately Spanish dance, their machine-guns tapping like castanets. So it all strikes the vile earthmen, unworthy to behold such wonders; and even he knows better in his jumpy heart. He has seen the way of a ship on the horizon-looking becalmed at twenty knots an hour-and he wonders what the British lads are roaring at each other through the rushing blast up yonder. He knows of one observer who climbs out of his place to bellow certain music-hall patter into his pilot's ear in most emergencies!
And presently his heart of clay stands still enough. One of the pair is giving up the fight ; one of the pair is descending swiftly, in a storm of dirty snowballs ; one of them banks steeply, as it were just clear of these jagged ruins-it might be by inches, it may be by miles-but flattens out and skims away down behind them in most perfect order. Some little leakage of blood or petrol. The others soars out of sight in chastened triumph. He has downed but lost his man. A little more manoeuvring and both might have descended in the top-dog's lines, and (since they failed to kill each other) dined together and talked it all over, with a free exchange of notes, compliments and criticisms, like any other pair of sportsman when the match is lost and won, but like no order of opponents on any front. For the way of the fighting-man in the air-and after-is the prettiest wonder of this wonderful war-; and the veriest earthworm, following ever so little of even such an every-day, unsensational, inconclusive bout as we were privileged to watch, gets uplifting inklings of something impossible here below, a mutual chivalry not of this tortured earth, but of the heavens, heavenly.
* * *
The Town major has picked up his trampled thread with sardonic forbearance; he is showing us the Grand' Place of his heart, which is also the grand finale of our potted entertainment. It is furthermore the riddled bull's eye of a target which has never fallen out of favour with the enemy.
“The most dangerous corner in Europe ! ” says the Town Major, suiting his agility to the hyperbole. We follow suit, and line up with our backs against a still steward chunk of masonry looking south.
There are not many like it that we can see. The Town Major points out the principled fragments, builds them up in a sentence, fills in a wealth of detail with a phrase, waves an index finger like a wand that reconstructs the ruins before our eyes. That single, blackened, tottering wall may be all that is left of the poor Cloth Hall one minute ; in less than half another the Town Major has restored it to out sight in at least some semblance of its old frail beauty and quaint distinction. It is the same with the Halles, with the Cathedral, with everything else ; no dismembered bone of a building but the Town Major is the man to clothe it in stone and mortar while you hold your breath. Pointed gables roof in aching gaps; mellow walls go up again; homely souls appear at lattice windows, on low doorsteps, at the little tables under the awning whose shadows lie again like black mats on the broad, white cobbles. Pursy burghers, shapeless dames, a picturesque sprinkling of pleasant costumes-one sees them all, good easy folk not untouched by the soft old-world grace of their surroundings. And then the horrible awakening from the placid trance of centuries, red ruin and the shrieking shambles, wholesale flight- and a Celtic euthasiast in charge of the wreck!
He lives in the midst of hourly alarms, daily destruction, endless danger, but you would never think it to hear him on his beloved ruins. They might be as old as Karnak or the Pyramids. There is not one roof within sight, nor a living creature besides ourselves; and from the white, paven bed of that which has a river of blood the stains of death have been expunged, together with all signs of life. If anything happened at this minute, one feels that all would be spotless within half an hour. That would be the Town Major's affair; the original holocaust is not. My boy Guide has more to tell about that:
Every 5 minutes to the tick a great “ Uncle Sam” comes whistling over, and makes the town more of a scrap-heap than ever: the pity of it!
It is another heavenly evening, and with the ruins of--------against the sky-what a picture-by heavens!-what wonderful sights there are to see here if one keep one's eyes open. . .There! They are shelling the town now-great 12-inch shells in the middle of it-and then at night a dull glow will gradually appear in the sky, which will redden and spread as more shells are poured in. Mind you, I am in the outskirts of this place myself at this moment- so I am writing with the very thing before me.
I turned again to the Grand' Palace, cold and cleanly in the March sunlight, and I bid good-bye to Ypres. Her delicate face is battered and smashed beyond repair her ancient pride could suffer. She will carry her cruel disfigurements for ever; but she may glory in them more than in all the tranquil beauty they destroyed; remembering that for every eyesore with her ramparts there is a disfigured face in England, for very treacherous wall there is a hobbling cripple here, and for every broken home a home here that is broken too, whose light went out for ever with the innocent life of one of those deathless sons, whose graves stud the margin of the shield wherewith she held the pass for Christendom.
“Drive fast through the square!” cries the Town Major, as we all get back into the car.
But I had rather not drive at all. I long to walk, slowly and alone, in case something should happen even now to grant me one inkling of all that they went through.
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