‘The reputation which you have won for courage, determination and efficiency, during recent operations, has its very joyous aspect, and it is deeply precious to us all.’ The name of Ypres is inscribed in English history: like Khartoum, Kandahar, Trafalgar, and other names in older times, it has been adopted in the title of a British Commander. It belongs, by the same token, to the 49th Division, whom, twice in the course of the War, in the Spring of 1915 and of 1918, we have seen defending its trenches or fighting in the open for its safety, and to whom a Memorial is dedicated on its site. They had well earned the praises bestowed upon them. To them, with very gallant comrades, including our Belgian Allies, fell the part of guarding the approaches to the vital line of the Channel ports. On April 9th, 1918, when the course of the _Kaiser-schlacht_ was diverted from the Southern to the Northern front, Sir Herbert Plumer’s Second Army formed our last line of defence in Flanders. That line held at the end of April, after three weeks’ shattering blows, unsurpassed in impetus and severity; and, throughout those weeks, the 49th were in the line. CHAPTER XIV THE YEOMANRY The pace was too fast to be kept up. The Germans could not be doing it all the time, and pauses, lengthening in duration as the fury of the attacks increased, were bound to be interposed between one onslaught and the next. Here, again, as on previous occasions, the official German historians of the war will be able to correct the impression which their daily bulletins sought to create, and will tell an attentive world how the desperate courage of the invader broke on the final factor which no resources of science can permanently disguise—fighting men’s physical exhaustion. Such a pause, partly filled, as we shall see, by a transfusion of bloodshed to another area, occurred at the height of that darkest hour, which we followed in the last chapter; and, before pursuing our account of the West Riding Infantry Divisions through the last hundred days of the war, we may fitly utilize this interval to narrate, necessarily a little summarily, the fortunes and the disappointments of some of the West Riding Mounted Troops. For they, too, as Earl Haig has testified, ‘came forward at the beginning of the war to serve their country in the hour of need,’ and ‘performed their duty under all circumstances with thoroughness and efficiency.’ These words occur in an Order, dated September 9th, 1917, and addressed by the Field-Marshal to the 1/1st Yorkshire Hussars Yeomanry. ‘The Army Council,’ the Order starts, ‘has found it necessary to dismount certain Special Reserve and Yeomanry Regiments, and to utilize the services of Officers and other Ranks in other branches of the Service.’ Here we see the meaning of ‘under all circumstances,’ and the cause of the disappointments to which we have referred.