EUROPE TO-DAY

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVIII, Issue 245, 14 September 1938, Page 11

EUROPE TO-DAY

LOST AND FOUND. Ypres was utterly shattered in tho war, hut now it is again a beautiful town, one of which Belgium must ever be proud, its Alenin Gate—a memorial to missing British soldiers—one of the sights of Europe. One day soon after the war King Albert of Belgium looked on Ypres—a heap of ruins. He came with President Wilson. were tents and camps of British soldiers clearing away the ruins, and just one hut, the soldiers’ canteen, where the King and the President could have tea. The Burgomaster met them in the canteen, made bright for the day with flags, and Air Brooks saw that King Albert looked young and cheery, but President Wilson careworn He had lately come from the wordy warfare at Versailles

While they waited in the canteen for Queen Elizabeth of Belgium, who was to join them, King Albert produced liis war-map with his notes on it and pointed out to the President where the Belgian Army had so stubbornly stood so long. When the Queen arrived the King and President went out to meet her. In the greetings and inspection which followed the King’s map lay forgotten in the hut. It may have fallen on the floor, and someone picked it up and put it on a shelf of the canteen’s small library. But wlien tbe King and Queen and the President passed the Alenin Gate on the way back to Brussels nobody thought of it, and the next day, when a Belgian general came to ask for it, nobody knew anything about it. Air Brooks was demobilised in the autumn. Ilis canteen was shut up, and he took home to England a few small properties, souvenirs, and some books. Later, when the town was rising from its ashes, he went hack to make it his home, and stopped there while the years flew by, coming back to his mother’s home in England every Christmas. In 1037 he thought he would take back to Ypres the parcel of books he had taken to England in 1919. They had never been unpacked. While untying those old books, thumbed by so many honest British soldiers, out fell a dusty map 1 In a flash he understood what it was. It was King Albert’s lost map—(G).