HKB
from Australia, and 2 of the Bermuda Volunteer Rifle Corps. In July, 1917, the Military Cemetery was opened 300 yards away, and in August, 1917, a third cemetery was opened.
Poperinghe was next visited. This agricultural town on the road between Ypres and Hazebrouck, situated among hopfields and dairy farms, was a haven of rest in the early days of the war. Although occasionally bombarded at long range, it was the nearest town to Ypres which was reasonably safe. It was at first a casualty clearing station centre. Later, in 1916, when shell fire increased, it was decided to move back the casualty clearing station to a safer zone, and Poperinghe became a field ambulance station. The earliest British graves at Poperinghe are in the Communal Cemetery, a walled graveyard at the entrance to the town. The old Military Cemetery was made in the course of the first Battle of Ypres, and was closed (so far as British burials were concerned) in May, 1915. The New Military Cemetery was made in June, 1915. It contains the graves of 596 soldiers from the Home Country, 55 from Canada, 20 from Australia, 3 from New Zealand, and 2 of the British West Indies Regiment.
Lijssenthoek was the last of the cemeteries on Belgian soil visited. This cemetery is at Remy Siding, on the south side of the Hazebrouck-Ypres railway line, between Poperinghe and Abeele. The site was first used for burials by a French military hospital, and there is a group of French graves on what is now the eastern boundary of the cemetery. The earliest British burial dates from June, 1915. This cemetery had to be repeatedly enlarged as the campaign levied its toll on our forces. It now contains 9,795 British and Dominion graves, 892 French, 2 Belgian, 52 American, and 32 Chinese. The majority of burials took place from the Canadian casualty clearing stations at Remy. Of the French graves, 10 are those of unknown soldiers and 689 will remain in the cemetery.
Going out of Belgium to France the sun was shining and the graciousness of Nature, covering with herb and blossom the ulcers of the old battle-fields, made this corner of Flanders seem a fair and human country. For those who now saw the district for the first time, the concrete forts lying like the bleached skeletons of strange monsters in the fields, and the serried ranks of the graves, coming up in line after line to give their mute witness, told something of what it cost to hold the Ypres Salient. But the King knew all that it had been in the long dark winters of the war, when the very abomination of desolation brooded over it, and in its pools of slime his soldiers struggled and choked that the fields of England might be kept free of the foe. He did not hide from those with him that the memory of it weighed heavy on him and that in his mind, with pride in the thought of such superhuman devotion, there was a passionate hope that never again in the world's history would men be called upon to suffer as these men had suffered.
Speaking, too, of the cemeteries, where general and private rest side by side beneath the same simple stones, equal in the honour of their death for duty's sake, he agreed that this was the only possible way.
III: "It was bare and hilly ground where once the bread-corn grew."