Chapter 15

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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