HOLY YPRES

Otago Witness, Issue 3443, 9 March 1920, Page 59

HOLY YPRES

SAVE IT FROM THE GHOULS. ( PILFERING ON THE FIELD OF MARTYRS. '. ■ . . NOTICE. " This is Holy Ground. 1 No Stone of this'-Fabric may be % taken away. . - It is a Heritage for all Civilised Peoples. This appears on the ruins of the, great Gloth Hall at ypres. The notice has beea placed there, by the officer in charge. It' wa9 necessary Within, sight of this notice people' hunf for souvenirs, arid then sit in the sun ana: drink beer.. An" English correspondent wfat has seen the sad exhibition of human caK lousness calls" thom "ghouls of the b'attlo fields." Who ai-e they? Belgians, who have per» haps supped so. full of horrors in the last five years that it comes natural to tthemj to live in a graveyard., "French," so says Lieutenant-general Bethune, "a few English, niany Americans, and British soldier* were selling bogus souvenirs." Making holiday in a graveyard 1 "* GUN PITS VANISHING. ... At Zonnebeke, Zillebeke, • Hooge, and Houthulst there is no merrymaking and souvenir-buying. Those are the huntiiiff grounds for the souvenir-h*nter .with a crowbar. The French and Belgians take no < hand in this game —the vandals are (say the British newspapers) English and-Americans—-American, officers among others. Here is no town major's notice, arid no vigilant watchman, and the ruined gun pita and gun fittings are vanishing, stone by stone and bit by bit. The Chinese salvage rnen stand by and see white men of the j Anglo-Saxon race pilfer on what is a verifr-.' able field of martyrs. The Belgians are coming back from exile j -, it is natufal that thev should look upon j the matter with different eyes from ours.. Americans are acoustomed to wide space*, and to feeling at home in a whole "conti.-" ' nent. They would quite naturally set aside battlefields as sacred places to be kept unused. But to the Belgian most of these blood-stained fields are primarily sacred because they are his home, and the way to keep homes sacred is to live in them. Anglo-Saxons cannot demand that' Belgians should make their homeland into a vast ' museum because other people have died there. Belgium is a small country, very crowded, and its people do_ not wish to emigrate. They must live in their country, whoever is buried under it. What they can do they do in tending the cemeteries where Americans and British lie. YPRES AN EXCEPTION. But Vpres is an exception. Before the war it was, being very old and beautiful and sparsely inhabited, almost a memorial of the past. It is said that its late inhabi-. tants are willing to build their new hopes upon another site, and to leave the Clotn. Hall ruins and the unidentified graves as a • memorial of the great war and those who' fell in it. ■ . The Minister of the Interior has told the Belgian Parliament that his Government ... has come to an agreement with the British:; Government to preserve Ypres as it is as a "place of pilgrimage." But it depends in the main on the pilgrims whether any such place is sacred or desecrated Governments cannof control 'this; nor can bereaved parents who rcrriain at home. And Ypres is not the only battlefield.