THE GRAVE OF H.H. PRINCE MAURICE OF BATTENBERG] [Illustration: YPRES TOWN CEMETERY] [Illustration: MENIN GATE, YPRES EXAMINING THE PLANS FOR THE MEMORIAL TO THOSE WHO HAVE NO KNOWN GRAVE] [Illustration: VLAMERTINGHE MILITARY CEMETERY] [Illustration: VLAMERTINGHE MILITARY CEMETERY THE BURGOMASTER'S DAUGHTER PRESENTING A WREATH] [Illustration: _Our King went forth on pilgrimage His prayer and vows to pay To them that saved our heritage And cast their own away._] [Illustration: "_I have been on a solemn pilgrimage in honour of a people who died for all free men_"] II: "_It was low and hollow ground where once the cities stood_" The King's route after leaving Tyne Cot Cemetery brought him to the salient where the British Army held Ypres as the gate guarding the Channel ports. The enemy rush to Paris had failed, and he was seeking a way to victory by a rush to seize the French side of the English Channel as a prelude to the invasion of England. In the first Battle of Ypres the enemy sought with enormous superiority of numbers to overwhelm the British force which barred the Calais Road. To hold Ypres was vital, and yet Ypres was, humanly speaking, indefensible, within a saucer-shaped salient dominated on three sides by the German artillery. The attack was pushed on with fierce energy from October 21st, 1914, onwards, and was met with heroic stubbornness by a woefully thin khaki line. At one stage there was no question of reliefs. Every man practically in the British Force, including cooks and batmen, was in the front line, and these men held to the trenches day after day, night after night, without sleep, with little food, with no intermission from rifle and shell fire. During the second Battle of Ypres, in the spring of 1915, the war took on a new phase with the enemy use of asphyxiating gas as a weapon. Of this odious and unexpected form of warfare the Canadians were the first victims, but withstood the surprise with a cool heroism which saved the day. There were other battles of Ypres, and all the land around was saturated with the blood of heroes. So this "low and hollow ground," stiffened with our dead, is holy soil to the British race. The King chose fitly to render there his homage to the dead of the Belgian Army who on the Yser held the left flank of the line through all the years of bitter fighting for Ypres. On his way to the Menin Gate of Ypres city, the King directed the cars to turn aside to the Town Cemetery, that he might stand silent for a few moments by the graves of Prince Maurice of Battenberg, Lord Charles Mercer-Nairne, Major the Hon. W. Cadogan, and other officers, some of those of his own personal friends whom the war claimed, and whose graves lie among those of their men, marked by the same simple memorials. * * * * *