"HOLY YPRES."

Taranaki Daily News, 10 January 1920, Page 11

"HOLY YPRES."

VANDALS AS TOURISTS.

GHOULS OF THE BATTLEFIELD.

NOTICE. This is Holy Ground.

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 Cloth Hall at Ypres. The notice has been placed there by the officer in charge It was necessary. Within sight of this notice people hunt for souvenirs, and then sit in the sun and drink beer. An English correspsndent who has seen that sad exhibition of human callousness calls them 'Ghouls of the Battlefield."

Who are they? Belgians, who have perhaps supped so full of horrors in the last five years that it comes natural to them to live in a graveyard. "French," so says Lieut.-General Bethune, "a few English, many Americans. And British soldiers were selling bogus souvenirs." Making holidays in a graveyard! GUNS.PITS VANISHING.

At Zonnebeke, Zillebeke, Hooge, and Houthulst there is no merry-making and souvenir buyisg. Those are the hunting grounds for the souvenir hunter 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, and no vigilant watchman, and the ruined gun pits and gun fittings are vanishing, stone by stone and bit by bit. The Chinese salvage man stand by and see white men of the Anglo-Saxon race pilfer on what is a veritable field of martyrs.

The Belgians are coming back from exile; it is natural that they should look upon the matter with different eyes from ours. Americans are accustomed to wide spaces and to feeling at home, in a whole continent. 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 sons 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 Ypres is an exception. Before the war it was, being very old and beautiful, almost a memorial of the past. It is said that its late inhabitants are willing to build their new homes upon another site, and to leave tjie Cloth 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 a "Place of Pilgrimage." But it depends in the main on the pilgrims whether any such place is sacred or desecrated- Governments cannot control this; nor can bereaved parents who remain at home. And Ypres is not the only battlefield.