THE HISTORIC TRIANGLE
The last time I saw the Ypres salient was from the shoulder of the
Scherpenberg. The torn church tower of Dickebusch stood up darkly near a
leaden gleam of water. From St. Eloi in front of it trenches ran curving
up to Hooge and back again to within, on the north, a mile and a half of
Ypres, enclosing the level, sodden farmland four miles across its base,
two from base to nose, which is the Ypres salient. A reluctant dawn was
turning the darkness to a dull and threatening day, and as it grew
lighter the famous miles slowly came into view. It was the hour of
'Stand-to.' All round the Salient, and north and south of it far beyond
the horizon, the trenches were filled with watching men, weary from the
night's toil at digging or wiring or 'carrying' fatigues, but standing
ready until the dangerous hour of dawn should pass. It had been an
anxious week, for the wind was blowing from the enemy's lines, and night
after night the long warning call of the gas-gongs, followed in a moment
by the awakening of all the Salient into a ring of darting flames and
tremendous concussions as the guns were called into action, had brought
all ranks to their feet. But this morning no sound broke the strange
silence. It was hard to believe that hidden beneath the soil tens of
thousands of men were silently standing face to face. As the dawn lifted
I knew that everywhere in the ten-mile ring the British soldier was
boiling the water for his tea, very strong and very sweet, the first of
half a dozen tea brewings he would make that day. Another day of the war
had begun.
Surely so long as great deeds appeal to the British race those weary
miles will be always sacred. Within them lie the unnumbered British
dead, 'the dear, pitiful, august dead.' Comrades of the dauntless
warriors of Gallipoli, comrades of the sailors who have gone down
fighting in the cold waters of the North Sea, brothers of all brave men
suffering for a clean cause, they leave the issue with us. As long as
the British Empire endures, and it will endure so long as it works for
God and no longer, the memory of the heroes of the Ypres salient will
live and glow.
'I hate war: that is why I am fighting,' said one of them. They fought
not merely for their country, but because they believed they were
fighting war itself. We shall not be true to their memory unless we
remember that. 'Slavery will always be,' said the defenders of slavery.
'It is impossible to prevent those things, human nature being what it
is,' said others of schools like Dotheboys Hall. A little time ago
England and Scotland were at one another's throats; a little before that
clan fell upon clan with vindictive fury. When we have beaten Germany,
who stands for the old, rotten, pagan belief in old, rotten, pagan
things we must see that we do not betray the men who died fighting
because they hated war.
But war has good in it too, they say. Yes, and amid its hideous wrong no
doubt there was good in slavery, as there is in cancer or blindness.
Almost any evil or agony may be the root of noble qualities, and war is
no exception.
These men died in the hope that it might be impossible for a civilised
nation again to thrust this evil on the human race. They died trusting
us to see that Europe would not again have to choose the alternative of
entering upon such an agony or of forgetting its honour towards God.
Force, it would seem, must long remain the last remedy, but might it not
be force resting on a pivot and striking with effect wherever
international crime seeks to disturb the peace of the nations? The mere
knowledge of such a united determination would at least be a powerful
persuasive. That may be only a dream. The immediate fact is that the
doctrine of Will to Power must first be crushed, represented as it is
to-day by Germany and her dupes. But men who have been through the
furnace will not rest content with less than the solemn attempt, in the
name of the dead, to put the nations of the world in a worthier
relationship to one another than has so far prevailed. Our brothers who
have fallen died in the hope that for succeeding generations life would
be different. They died believing that because of their sacrifice it
might be possible to substitute for the German (or any other) Will to
Power the Christian Will to Righteous Peace. This effort alone can be
their fitting monument.
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at the Edinburgh University Press