_Not long ago a French general said to me that the Germans were attacking Verdun, and the French were defending it, not for strategical, but for political and dynastic reasons. "If they took Verdun to-morrow, they could not advance, but to lose Verdun would be for France a blow over the heart."_ _If we have pledged our honour to Belgium, we are pledged to the hilt to guard the soil of Ypres inviolate from the heel of the living enemy. It is only a heap of ruins, but it is an eternal memorial of British valour. It is only a shell-swept graveyard, but the graves are those of our heroic dead._ _To abandon Ypres now would tarnish our banners. It would be like offering our sister for violation because she had been bruised and buffeted with stones._ _Military strategy very properly takes into account political and moral prestige, and to "straighten out the Salient" by the voluntary abandonment of a single mile of ground would inflict upon us a moral and political loss equal to an army corps. If Ypres goes, Belgium goes, and if Belgium goes, whatever the final issue, something of glory passes from the Allied arms._ _It is a terrible responsibility to stand steadfast, but every soldier who has died in the Ypres Salient has yielded his life to protect his country’s honour. Vulnerable the Salient may be, but our troops are invulnerable. While they continue so, Ypres and this little remaining fragment of Belgian soil and the path to Calais are safe._ *IN THE YPRES SALIENT* *I.* *WITH THE BRITISH ARMY IN THE FIELD,* _June 3rd._ From the summit of the Scherpenburg the eye sweeps over a low-lying, gently undulating tract of country chequered by field and copse and traversed by roads. On the extreme left the crumbling towers of the city of Ypres upstand white in the morning sunlight. Far on the right the spires and chimneys of Menin loom on the distant horizon, Between these two points in the range of vision a broad swathe of naked red earth, torn and fretted and pitted with "craters," marks the eastern and southern boundary line of the bloodiest battlefield of the War--the Ypres Salient. The northern portion of this famous area, which is almost exactly bisected by the Menin road, is hidden behind the city. Here are Langemarcke, St. Julien, St. Jean, and Zonnebeke, the scene of Canadian valour thirteen months ago in the Second Battle of Ypres; the segment we now overlook touches just east of Hooge and curves along past Zillebeke, St. Eloi and Hill 60, which is the south-western extremity of the Salient.