YPRES SALIENT

Hokitika Guardian, 15 July 1927, Page 4

YPRES SALIENT

CEMETERY OX THE RIDGE. (By F. M. Cutlack.) This week the president of the Returned Sailors and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australita (Mi G. J. C. Dyett), who lias been attending the Empire-wide conference of ex-service men in London, unveiled the Cross of Sacrifice in the largest cemetery in the Ypres salient. The Tvnecot Cemetery was a real battlefield burying ground, one of the many small cemeteries near the front lino; to it after the Armistice other graves were transferred under the concentration scheme of the Imperial War Graves Commission. It lies on the slope of the I’asscbndaele Ridg near that place of evil memory. Augustus Wood. On a dull winter day. dull with the burden upon the air of rain that was just falling, in a winter just six years after the awful campaign in the salient of 1017, a couple of us motored out of the Afonin Gate up the Passehemlaele road. With tile exception, of the Cloth Hall and the Hotel de Ville. A'prcs had somehow got itself unrcogiiisahly rebuilt. although the lines remained as formerly of the streets which no man of the A.T.F. can ever forget. The

dugouts in th ramparts were gone. The Alenin Gate was a bigger gap in th wall than ever; it had been knocked- about by demolition gangs as never by hostile shells, in order to admit the masonry of iho great new Memorial Gate on which were to he (and have been) inscribed the names of all those in the armies of the British Empire who lost their lives in the salient ami

have no known graves. THE SAPPERS’ CLUB. Here, iust inside on the light, used to he the half-demolished house where certain Australian sappers ran their billet as a make-belief club. In its shop window front these fellows displayed, on serried meat hooks, a string of army biscuits, a pair of corsets, a battered howler hat. and some other 1 1 ilies humorous to the war-weary eye. Through a hole in the wall the members entered the club, wrote themselves from tt hook of forms provided a cheque for a thousand francs or two. iin 1 with a'l solemnity hooked it room for the night. The cook served out 11: ■ rations inside; the rum issue Was

taken in .solemn f'rm at an interior bar. But the panLomime was not complete without; the farce of going upstairs and tumbling into bed. An interior partition wall had been demolished by site'] tiro above a height ot ill out six feel. The rules demanded that guests for the night in that billet should mount a fragment of eiiviilar iron staircase set against this demoli he l wall, mount from its last step at (he top of rite wall on to the next imaginary one. and so fall into the stiaw on the other side. An unliuni-e.-.-.fs British colonel who obserhed this p’ac;> protested to an Australian officer a minst troops in the line' and ill action being permitted to play the 100 l in such fashion. The result was that even ‘‘Birdie” joined the amused numbers who came and saw and wrote their “monickers” in the register-hook. A CHANGED ,-CENE. ('. me that landmark, and as we drove out i f the Alenin Gate and past the I’ lieje ('halvaii we looked in vain for other land-marks cha i p-vlear in one or other our nut- memories yet inexplicably vanished. Who could imagine the Afonin Road without its corduroy surface, ami with neat litt'e brick houses alanit it. There were small children playing at v. hat 1111 i-1 assuredly have boon Hell Eire Corner. We turned to (Ire left for Zt nnebeke, and marvelled at the whealfie'd up to the AYcstlioek Ridge on all llie left hand side of the road. The right hand side was not vet quite reclaimed. Rv the ruins '-f some of the giganti - shell-craters, in which aforeiim ■ if a lini’e fell he might easily he gone frmo sight under the mml. we

saw some of the peasant reelatming squads at noik. industriously tilling in the holes with spades. All history of (hi Flanders was written in them. S’o bail they cleaned up the aftermath of every war. Her? and there among the wheal on the left we could see the roof of a pill-box. somethifi.g the peasants oerld not remove. On the right, in we p'ls'ed. tnn or three read-men-ders. h'ltvin ■ wo-k for the day. threw

their spades into another of these old forts—one that had in duo course become an Australian dressing station. AVitli relief we hailed it, like stret-cher-bearers newly some from the line, for it was something that rebutted the growing notion that wo did not know the geography of the salient after all. ZONXEBEKE AD THE RIDGE. Under the indubitable skyline of Broodseinde Ridge wo rolled into Zonnebeke. It must have been ZonncIreke. for its name was painted in large letters on the side of a house. AYe spoke of the deception of tourists by this large new red-brick village, many of the houses in it of two floors high. How could civilian visitors to the battle field ever picture the Zonnebekc that was? These new-painted green shutters. this'even-surfaced road, these new three-wheeled vehicles—this countryside that stared at us like strangers! An enormous brick church reared itself from the foundations of the old one beside the awful swamps, the scene which we once knew as Zonnebekc.

AYe got out and stared at the railway cutting, where the Holders railway crosses the Ridge, the cutting where the advance ended, and where AA ilKins the photographer took pictures of what he mourned as a row ot dead men and then found they were only sound asleep in the mud. Below, looking hack towards Ypres, what once was Augustus Mood must have lain beside a slight spur. The whole foreground was not occupied by the gigantic cemetery first called Tvnecot, probably by some regiment from the North of England, and swollen by the War Graves Commission into a burial ground of nearly 40,000 graves. Four old pill-boxes stood one in each corner of it, and in the very centre was a fift.li one, bigger than all the rest, from which the visitor might survey the whole cemetery. On the roof of it the commission was

apparently preparing to raise a memorial column. AUGUSTUS WOOD.

The barbed wire was all gone from the spur where, on the memorable 20tli. of October, 1917, the New Zealanders were beaten hack in front of an uncut wilderness of German wire. The 10th. Australian .Brigade on their right. -

cd no wire, hut an equally impel, - table obstacle ill the -morass of Align '.- ns AVood ,a small patch of smashed a d levelled trees covering a region of mud where men sank in up to their knees and even their waists. The only s' ’id spots were the pill-boxes at the corners of the wood, unreachable pill-boxes garrisoned by German machine-gunners. Outside, them riliemen held positions about the .stumps and roots of the trees. AATien advance was found to 1 ? impossible and the wounded had to he brought in and the Germans continued to fire, tin Australian doctor stood up from the halted Australian line anil shook his fist at flic enemy and cursed them to the limit of his capacity; and somehow the enemy understood. st:poc'il their lire and began, likewise to vdV'ei their own wounded. It .seemed long, long ago—though only six years "'ith all that old agony and thr.se who took the leading part in it buried here under a now and utterly strange world, a new overlay of towns and larms and cattle, which seemed not only incongruous, but a’so a'oof aid unfriendly. AA’e regretted having eon vs

hack to the country, ’(he anticipat 'd pleasure of renewing arquaintan: • s with old scenes was working out .dl wrong. AA'e realised rt length wk d: had happened, and why the towns an I villages which we had remembered "i h a sense of homeliness, and expected . o greet again with affection, raised n v no emotion whatever. Tin- "liigge; had gone, and with them ha ! de-mri- d the life of these places as we lie 1 known it. One or Iwo efforts to find the Madame of an old-tin;;. l billet )- "1. Finish! A few of the old stories wherever to or three are gathered together anywhere in Australia can bettor retail the old times and friendships than any return to the seme of them.