United States or Mayotte ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Kemmel is constantly being pounded by artillery fire of all sorts, but Scherpenberg, for some strange or at any rate unknown reason, is never shelled, and the windmill on the top of it is still going merrily.
The following day I walked through Wytschaete Wood to the ruins of the Hospice on the ridge. In 1914 some of our cavalry had passed this way when the Hospice was a big red-brick building with wings and outhouses and a large community of nuns and children. Through my glasses I had often seen its ruins from Kemmel Hill and the Scherpenberg.
As one looked from the windmill, Poperinghe with its prominent church spire was to the left and it was quite impossible to discern anything abnormal in its appearance. It looked even then like an ordinary prosperous Flemish town. In the foreground, that is between the Scherpenberg and Ypres, lay what everyone calls "Dickybush" and Voormezeele, or as the soldiers would say, Vermicelli.
The last time I saw the Ypres salient was from the shoulder of the Scherpenberg. The torn church tower of Dickebusch stood up darkly near a leaden gleam of water. From St.
In the south-eastern distance rises the spire of Menin church. And this is the Menin Road. How it haunted the war news for months and years, like a blood-stained presence! While to the south-east, I make out Kemmel, Scherpenberg, and the Mont des Cats and in the far north-west a faint line with a few trees on it Passchendaele! Passchendaele! name of sorrow and of glory.
May 19th, 1915: From the hospital we went to one of the most wonderful places in the theatre of war, a place of which I had heard a great deal, but not a word too much, from my guide. This was the Scherpenberg. Directly overlooking the plain in which Ypres stands are two hills, Scherpenberg and Kemmel.
Behind us, or rather, on the right of Scherpenberg hill, there was a big British gun which was firing steadily on the German trenches. The rush of the shell made a distinctly cheerful sound. My companion told me that the sound was anything but cheerful when the direction was reversed and the shell, instead of going from you, was coming towards you.
But as to the rest, I wish he could have stood with me, eight years after this conversation, on the Scherpenberg Hill, held by a Canadian division, the approach to its summit guarded by Canadian sentries, and have looked out over that plain, where Canadian and British graves, lying in their thousands side by side, have forever sealed in blood the union of the elder and the younger nations.
There were plenty of people moving up and down the road, which ran straight from the base of the Scherpenberg into Ypres, passing through "Dickybush." The ground all round was being tilled quite as assiduously as if there had been no war.
He was not in any kind of panic and was working hard in his fields. He meant merely to convey in gesture some expression like "those damned cutthroats of Germans." I left the Scherpenberg Hill with great regret. It was a wonderful "specular mount."
Word Of The Day