Publisher's Synopsis
From the introductory.
THERE is no name connected with the European War that will live longer in men's minds than that of Ypres. It is a word that carries its suggestion of deathless heroism, its sad symbolism of sacrifice, and its glorious tradition of victory to all corners of the earth where the Anglo-Saxon tongue is heard.
Ypres, Ypres "la morte" - a City of the Dead - but deathless for all time.
To hold the city the best blood of the Allies has been shed. British and Belgian, French and Canadian, Turcos from Algeria, and Indians from the banks of the Ganges and Indus, all have given their lives, dying to maintain the position upon which depended the whole fortunes of the Western war.
There were two separate battles of Ypres in the first year of the war, each critical, each costly, but both victorious. Out of the medley of contemporary accounts, sketches, and stories of the war in Flanders, tales of the salient of Ypres take premier place, and no other battle name can assail the majesty of the Dead City.
It is in this very breadth and spaciousness of the images that the name evokes that clear idea of the city itself is lost. Ypres means so much to us that it is hard to realize it as a little Flemish town, the kernel of those lines of defence that twice withstood the stupendous onslaught of the German legions. The city is ashes, but its name will live forever. The story of its death is the story of the collapse of the German offensive in Flanders.
It is difficult to convey an idea of the size or extent of a strange town to people who have never seen it, but Ypres was a city of some seventeen thousand inhabitants - a little quiet country town about the size of Durham, St. Albans, or Bridgewater.
Established in the fourteenth century, it was for long the centre of the woolen trade, and had much traffic with our English towns. The prosperous burghers took pride in their city, and its wonderful Cathedral of Saint Martin and its celebrated Cloth Hall were among the finest early Gothic buildings in Flanders. With the passing of time and the decay of the wool trade, Ypres became a sleepy little backwater, whose indolent calm was occasionally disturbed by the various French wars; but in those days it was seldom that the fabric of a city suffered hurt from siege or leaguer.
