ANOTHER LOOK AT YPRES

Hokitika Guardian, 15 September 1923, Page 4

ANOTHER LOOK AT YPRES

(By Richard Capell in Daily Mail)

YPRES, July 'l'l

My first was towards the end of October 191(5; and thereafter, foxeleven months, here and hereabouts the privilege, such as it was, was mine of looking mv fill. My elegant billet of to-day uverlooKS the Menin Gate. There are cheerful domestic sounds, a striking eloclt. cackling poultry, the cries of children, the rattle of leisurely rural trnlfie the sounds one used to call to memory wiLh an effort as belonging to another incarnation. Along the ramparts courting couples are taking the evening air, outlined against the bright red roofs of the town. There is an ice-cream harrow on the bridge.

Of course. But— something in my mind’s machinery wants oiling, for 1 can’t yet quite readjust old and new. Cheap motor-cars came humping merrily in from Menin nr go out towards Passehondaele and Routers. As twilight falls electric street lamps are lighted along the Menin Bond precisely as far as Hell-Fire Corner. Everything is entirely ordinary and oblivious, of course. As for me, I am like Joseph’s Pharaoh returned to mis (lern Cairo, respectful, admiring and

unsettled. This is a dubious privilege here today. I lie privilege of a ghost allowed to revisit his lifetime’s scene. Pharaoh s imiclv ghost at least would have the 'Pyramids to linger by. But here neons have passed since 19b, and painfully recognise hut the barest contours of the land, and only m a few neglected corners perceive relics o! my

It is not strange that houses he rebuilt and the land brought hack to culture, though the rapidity of all this is highly remarkable. M hat is strange beyond "words is that these roads and low hills and broad skies have to-day

so thrown off their old tragic oppression and become ordinary. You would have said this land must always keep its old tense look of alarm and of menace, so that its very children would play only with gravity and in hidden corners and its very revellers laugh only bitterly. But nut at all: everything is actively, furiously oblivious. Why, HellKiro Corner itself has lost its name, except in the mcomry of us ghost-like wanderers! The station there on the Haulers railway is called KniisstadSiuiiethiiig. Bence has been hasty ar-

Amid the marvellous, patient work of these I-Joinings, at ilicir traditional i.,l> of cleaning up their land after other people’s war.-, there are to be seen small, rather resolale little parlies of British visitors making efforts as they view this commonplace landscape to conceive "what it was like then.” Well, coming to Ypres has not helped them.

The spick-and-span village of Pass chendaelo, snug Zillcbeke, the miles of thriving country dotted willi countless red roofs to be seen from Hill 90, the gay chateau at linage, Ypres itself with few more ruins in most of its streets than in Regent-street—these are a new world ; and T am told there is much appreciation here oi the mo deni household conveniences now installed bv Ypri.-ms who might have had to dwell in mediaeval houses all their lives. But fancy anyone hearing the idea of living again at linage Chateau'.

What arc the relics 'i There are eonorele ■■pill-boxes” (so many more ol Fritz's than of ours!), standing like incomprehensible Druidical monument., amid tliis busy agriculture. There are lhe l.rov.n Im.-lies of tile dumps ol wire, now quickly rusting to nothing ness. And there are the British graveyards—the graves, they say, of 209,000.

The Belgians hare nut yet iacklcu the repairing of tin* Cumines Canal. It, banks (Spoil Ban!,, the Bluff, Bailie Wood) are lolielv, wildly oveigiowii with gorgeous broom. Here are duck-boards, diignut material, r.ceasioiiallv (lie blue enamel of a walerliuttle. Here is solitude, and memory

can make its rather seared effort to play in the past—the unbelievable past! But it is not nice to he for long a ghost astray out of a nearly prehistoric ago, amid forgetfulness and progress. It is impossible, and no doubt just as well, that Ypres cannot understand its past. Indeed it is untellabie —even if nowadays people believed in ghosts. If I stay here any longer I shall begin not to believe in myself, so to-morrow —good-bye. This will have been my last look at Ypres.