GOOD-BYE TO THE YPRES SALIENT

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 3183, 6 September 1917, Page 5

GOOD-BYE TO THE YPRES SALIENT

A LETTER TO FRITZ BY AN OFFICER ON LEAVE My dear Fritz,—The familiar use' of Jour- Christian name argues no undue iamiliarity on my part. 1 employ it Because, where fornierlythe. uame spoko "to peaceable Britons of a golden-bearded Prince wllo wooed and won an English Princess, to our Empire in arms it now signifies the enemy. I am writing 'to you, Fritz, as to the man on the other side of No Han's Land and quite distinct from your brother at home, because tho occasion of my letter is an evont with which you are by this thoroughly acquainted, but which your Government has i'losed over for domestic consumption. I Tefer to the death of the Tpres Salient. Tho salient was a good friend to you, I'iitz, but not always. You havo probably not forgotten that rainy October of 191-i when, amid mud and blood and anguish, it was born. Do -you remember the scenes at Eouler3 and and Menin, tho dense columns of your enthu- ; eiastic comrades pressing forward from the capture of Antwerp to drive a way : through our silly little Army, through: the disorganised Belgians, through the Jx-aten French, to the Channel ports? Fritz, you were a good trier. You tried nt Langomarck, to the north, at Zandyoorde, to the south of Ypres, and along the Menin fload, to blast the passage .to tho sea. The Supreme War Lord himself camo up to Routers—or was it Menin ? —to emphasise his imperial command that the road, to Calais must be forced at all. costs. You had the guns, you had tho men, Fritz, many more guns and ;anany more men than we; but you didn't ,?et through. Your Westphalians andyour Wadeners and your Wurtcmbergers, and .ell tho rest of them, came on in their thousands; your unfledged recruits advanced hand-in-hand, piping in their boys' "voices your soldier songs; but you never Reached tho pea. Even your Guards, doSng the parado stop into battle along the iSlenin Road, sent in as the supremo effort iSvhen all else had failed, achieved no than tho rest of you against the 'haggard, dirty shadows of men who had hTonght without respite for nigh on a nmonth. < ....

■ I don't want to buck, Fritz, because, [iGod knows, you nearly succeeded. You [never realised until months afterwords, ktid you, how near yon were to victory on (October, 31, 19U? Tho U-boat menace lyou talk so much about was not in it Svith the peril that threatened the British Empire between the hours of two and Whree o'clock in the afternoon of that clay when you had punched a hole in tho list Division lino and thousands of you iVoro surging forward to flow through tho ; Kap. But wo foiled you again, Fritz j 'M\e Woreosterswent in with, the bayonet wind'recaptured Gheluyelt, and tho road hto Calais was "na poo." * * * * ■

I Still, despite your awful losses, you rtlidn't do. so badly. You managed to (collar all the rising ground , (such as it !Ss in these flat Flanders plains), the Pu!3cem Ridge, the aiidge; north and smith of Ypres you .bent our line back so far that at thfl end of this great battle it was like a tightly-strung bow spanned about Ypres. Tou had the high ground, the dry ground; we had tho plain, tho water, <and the mud. You could dig nice, secure /trenches which you cleverly manased to drain into ours; wo had to build up, gainfully, by night, earthworks which yon, having tho observation, promptly and demoralised with your guns jin the morning.. . It must havo been a bully fimo for :jou, Fritz. You held all the • trumps, ■superiority of position, of observation, of shells.' You were as safe as a cruel little boy sitting on a high, wall and chucking stones at an. invalid'in a chair tin tho garden below. No wonder you .used your lines in front of Ypres as a Itraining school for young gunner officers! You used to shell ue left, front, and !fecntre. From the Messines Eidge you could peer right in behind Tie as wo sat, as cheerfully as we might, behind our crumbling sandbags; How your "Herron •leutnarite" (who have such a special Bense of humour; Fritz)' must-have laughed to see us patching up our petty littlo parapets amid the great graveyard of the ]sritish race stretehing in. front ot shattered Ypres! But wo held on, Fritz. You think we ore a stupid race. Perhaps we are, if ■that means we do not know when wo are beaten. And you did your best,'in your ingenious, plodding way, to make life in the salient a. hell on, earth for our anen. You 'shelled us by night; you shelled us by day. You pumped shrapnel into us filing up to the trenches; you scattered high-eiplo-eive shells over all the roads; you bomibarded the villages behind the lines; you lobbed those infernal and terrifying ''Minnies" into our front line or searched it up and down with noisy, black ■five-point-nines. And when, you had blown down the .parapet so toilfuily Wilt in the night, your snipers laid on the gaps,- and, Fritz, they took their toll.

Life was devilish unpleasant in the Balient. Still, the fellows who were therp always kept their tails up. I j-eniember seeing a big notice-board jilanted at the entrance to a village .which you particularly delighted to strafe: "Please keep under shelter of Mo houses and don't draw fire, , ' it ran. "We live here; you don't." And it was signed with the name of the unit billeted there. Quite a tribute to the cicellenco of your .observation, wasn't it, Fritz? ' But scarcely, a sign oi' low spirits? Well, the old salient is dead, so they iell me: The North and South Irish, iby whose squabbles you thought to profit, the English and the New Zealnr.dera buried it with bell, book, and candle. _And, Fritz, old friend, it looks ae though the tables were going to be turned on you. For, in spite of what old Jlindenburg tells your public ot heme, roc know that your little Messini'S- i AVytschaete salient is ilattoned out; that the guns which were wont to make life w> disagreeable for us are either in our ■hands or are buried under tons of earth; that you can no longer pry into the Tear of our lines in front of Ynresj that trather we shall be looking down into the indifferent trenches in the plain, 1 back to which you. have been driven.

Now the laugh is with us. And, Fritz, we have a lot to pav back. There is scarcely a Briton bnt )\ag a relative or friend who is slumbering somewhere ibotween Boesingho and_ the Hill of Keminsl. You made thinps so hard for them that many must have beeu glad to go to their rest. But I feel Mire they smiled in their last sleep when they heard the story of the Seventh of Jane. Fritz, I think you're "for it." Hoping to meet you fooit again. —"Daily Mail."