7 Jan.—"Ma mission principale est de servir de guide et d'interprète et aussi de décider les malades à se laisser conduire à l'hôpital, ce qui n'était pas toujours facile! Quand les malades y consentent, l'opposition de la famille soulève de nouveaux obstacles et les protestations injurieuses souvent ne manquent pas, ces pauvres gens ne comprenant pas qu'on ne veut que leur faire du bien. Une fois même, une vieille femme empoigna la pelle à charbon et le tisonnier pour me frapper. Heureusement les messieurs anglais, ignorant la langue flamande, ne comprennent pas les termes délicats par lesquels on paye leur dévouement."
The city was left entirely in ruins ([Plate 7] is a view from the wall at the South Gate), not a single building standing with walls and roof, or in any condition that could be called habitable. The ruined tower ([Plate 8]), of which the foundation dates from 1201, is all that remains of the once beautiful Cloth Hall, and the Cathedral of St. Martin behind it is just as completely destroyed. It is to be hoped that after the celebrations of July, 1920, the miserable restaurants with their flaunting advertisements, which seemed to smother the tragic ruins with their commonplace banalities in 1919, may be done away with. It cannot be impossible to find means by which the natural interest of visitors, for too many of whom the salient is the grave of friends and relatives, can be gratified without vulgarising ground which for generations to come will be sacred in memory to the Allies whose soldiers fought there, and whose sons it was who formed the "thin red line" which was for so long the chief barrier to hold back the German hordes from the north of France, and, in effect, from our own country.
It must be remembered, in looking at such views as Plates [7] and [8], that the clear spaces in the foreground are only clear because all the buildings upon them have been destroyed, wiped out. Before the war these spaces were closely built upon, covered all over with houses. In [Plate 7] are seen two or three "reconstructions" started after the ground had been cleared of the mass of brick and stone rubbish with which it was thickly covered until the end of the fighting. It is hardly necessary to say that the general tidiness of the ground in the Grande Place ([Plate 8]) belongs to a time months after the Germans had been driven finally out of range. During the war there was neither time nor opportunity to clear away the débris, which covered road and building sites alike.
The Ypres Salient, as we came to know it, is essentially the ground north and south of the twelve miles of road running from Ypres to Menin. Ypres itself is about 65 feet above sea-level, and Menin (on the Lys) about 35 feet. But the ground between them rises to over 200 feet at "Clapham Junction" (three miles from Ypres) and remains approximately at the same level for the two miles farther to Gheluvelt. This higher ground circles round to the south-west (through Hill 60) until it joins Wytschaete (eight miles south of Ypres) and the Messines Ridge. To the north it continues from Gheluvelt by Broodseinde, between Becelaere and Zonnebeke, to the Passchendaele Ridge (180 feet), some seven miles north-east of Ypres. The unfortunate city was therefore not only at the centre of a very narrow salient, but one in which it was encircled by higher ground on three sides within easy observation and shelling range. For a long time, until our advance in 1917, the German lines were only distant two and a half miles north, east, and south from the city, and everywhere were on levels sufficiently above that of the city to keep it always under observation.
It would have been cold comfort to our poor fellows who had to face the horrors of the Flanders mud to know that three centuries ago a traveller wrote: "Near Ypres they found the road often indistinguishable from the fields, and the mud came up to their horses' girths."[9]
But in fact the physical difficulties due to the nature of the soil, churned up by shells on every square yard, were so horrible that Lord Haig (who is certainly not given to exaggeration in his despatches) says of the 1917 advance:[10]
"Our men advanced every time with absolute confidence in their power to overcome the enemy, even though they had sometimes to struggle through mud up to their waists to reach him. So long as they could reach him they did overcome him, but physical exhaustion placed narrow limits on the depth to which each advance could be pushed, and compelled long pauses between the advances.... Time after time the practically beaten enemy was enabled to reorganise and relieve his men and to bring up reinforcements behind the sea of mud which constituted his main protection."
The statement made that "nine-tenths of the time our men were fighting Nature, and the remainder fighting Germans," cannot be much exaggerated.