"POOL OF PEACE"

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 117, 13 November 1929, Page 11

"POOL OF PEACE"

LAST CRATER 'AT ST. ELOI

PERMANENT MEMORIAL

British Official Wireless.

RUGBY, 11th November. _ The last crater at St. Eloi, near Messines, is being acquired as a "Pool of Peace," at the instance of the Roy. P. B. Clayton, founder and padre of the Talbot House Club find the rest house for troops stationed during the war in Poporinghe, which now has branches throughout the Empire. Talbot House, or "Toe H," as it is called, •ras as its motto "To Conquer Hate.''

The Rev. P. B. Clayton, in a letter to the London "Times" in September, said: "Nature has done one lovely thing in Flanders. The last and greatest of the craters at St. Eloi has become a pool of rare perfection. It is edged with whispering lushes; and

the autumn sky looks down into the grey depths as upon the treasury of many mothers' tears. Men of two races rest beneath. The other craters of this awful chain are now filled in, and grow kitchen produce. ' The same fate threatens here. The lip of the earth—once the German front line — is now to be excavated and tilted back into the pool. The section already cut displays what Nature has more wisely hidden. Cannot a halt be called, and these two acres purchased and preserved precisely as they stand, with a few chosen trees to guard them? Scarcely a spot near Ypres is now left undisturbed, away from motor-horns and manufactured souvenirs. Here is a pool of peace, where man's wrath is God's praise."