THE NEW YPRES.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3130, 14 August 1922, Page 7

THE NEW YPRES.

(By Cyril H. King.)

We caught u glimpse of an old ruin ill the distance as our train crept slowly towards Ipres. The rugged outline stood out Doldly in the spring sunslime, but what a different setting from the one we remembered so well. As the train drew alongside the low platform we were surprised at the uusinesslike activity 01 the crowded little station, with its groups of peasant women with market produce; workmen sorting out building materials, from the dumps in the station yard, and a lew others —like ourselves —on a hurried visit to a land of memories. We passed out into the busy little station square where motor-cars were drawn up, and a steam tram, with many cars attached, stood ready for passengers. Directly opposite the station we discovered the place we were looking for, a new building with "Hotel Continental" in bold letters high over the door. And this was the little town which only a year or two ago was, perhaps, the most unpopular and certainly one of the most unhealthy places in the whole of France and Belgium. In the place that was once a shell-swept quagmire, with yawning craters and heaped-up masses of iron, bricks and masonry; the place where scarcely one wrecked building boasted more than a few feet of wall standing above ground level, we found a new town growing up. The old Cloth Hall—that historicpile, still in its ruined grandeur—dominates the scene, and stands out in bold contrast to the newly-built houses, with their red tiled roofs gleaming in the sunshine. Everywhere one encounters feverish activity; everyone seems to be taking a hand in the remaking of this famous old town. Streets are being relaid with the familiar rough pave, atrractivclooking shops are full of new merchandise, and the souvenir shop near the Grande Place oilers picture postcards and mementoes to the visitor. There is the Grand Alazasin, where one can get a smart suit of clothes made to measure, a stylish hat, ladies' millinery, or household goods lor the new homes of the 12,000 inhabitants of the township which has appeared, phonixlike, out of the ashes of its former self. We took several "snaps" of this new Vpres and returned to our hotel lor dejeuner, where we were waited upon by a trim little mademoiselle, who favored yellow-brown stockings with decidedly smart high-heeled black boots. Out through the Meuin Gate, past the old prison and along the Mcnin Road, in bygone days as "Hell-fire Corner." A quiet enough spot these days, though in the past it well deserved its name. Then it was hardly a suitable spot lor one to sit and smoke and ruminate on the hardships of war. ..... How the ration limbers, the carrying parties and the mule trains, laden with ammunition loathed this ill-fated place ! On both sides of the road we saw desolate stretches of land strewn with the debris of war—stacks of old shells unexplodcd, Mills bombs, rifle grenades, tangled masses of rusty barbed wire piled into heaps, stacks of timber, and here and there old duckboards, an old badly-battered tank, to-day but a gaunt iron skeleton, halfburied in the ground, a- steel helmet, broken rifles, and on the rise near Hooge a well-kept cemetery, with its rows and rows of graves. All around slow-moving laborers in corduroy waistcoats and coarse blue trousers toil ceaselessly behind the plough, Helped by their wonderful womenfolk in their task of reclaiming the land. Hotted here and there are concrete pillboxes, old Nissen huts, and new, red-roofed cottages. Near Hooge we came across the two woods well-known to every man who served in the salient —Chateau and .Sanctuary-decayed spectres these days, with their broken, dead tree stumps and rank undergrowth; unhealthy places once, which one scuttled through with bated breath and ofttimes wondered how anyone ever got through at all. Vpres to many of us is still a place of glorious sacrifice, of noble deeds, of perilous adventure —and to those of us who have been permitted to see it ayain under different conditions, what a place of hallowed memories. New bricks and mortar may htiiltl a now town, but they cannot build a new Vpres within our hearts.