"POOL OF PEACE”

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XIX, Issue 283, 14 November 1929, Page 11

"POOL OF PEACE”

last crater at st. eloi BEING ACQUIRED. “LOVELY THING DONE BY NATURE.” (British Official Wireless.) Rugby, Nov. 11. The last crater at St. Eloi, near Messines, is being acquired as a ‘ ‘Pool of Peace, ’ ’ at the instance of the Rev. P. B. Clayton, founder and Padre of the Talbot House Club and tho rest house for troops stationed during tho war in Poperinghe, which now has branches throughout the Empire. Talbot House, or “Toe H,” as it is called, has 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 tho craters at St. Eloi has become a pool of rare perfection. It is edged with whispering rushes; and tho autumn sky looks down into tho grey depths as upon tho treasury of many mothers’ tears. Men of two races rest beneath. Tho 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 bo 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.”]