"Flandern 1918 Prosit Neujahr!" — Happy New Year! from Flanders, 1918, a church steeple is in the distance, woods, and a green field. In the foreground ruins of a building and a bare tree. German watercolor.
Flandern 1918 Prosit Neujahr!Happy New Year! Flanders, 1918.
"At the moment of midnight, December 31, 1917, I stood with some acquaintances in a camp finely overlooking the whole Ypres battlefield. It was bitterly cold, and the deep snow all round lay frozen. We drank healths, and stared out across the snowy miles to the line of casual flares, still rising and floating and dropping. Their writing on the night was as the earliest scribbling of children, meaningless; they answered none of the questions with which a watcher's eyes were painfully wide. Midnight; successions of coloured lights from one point, of white pendants from another, bullying salutes of guns in brief bombardment, echoes racing into space, crackling of machine-guns small on the tingling air; but the sole answer to unspoken but importunate questions was the line of lights in the same relation to Flanders and our lives as at midnight a year before. All agreed that 1917 had been a sad offender. All observed that 1918 did not look promising at its birth, or commissioned 'to solve this dark enigma scrawled in blood.'"
Edmund Blunden, English writer, recipient of the Military Cross, second lieutenant and adjutant in the Royal Sussex Regiment, fought in the Third Battle of Ypres, one of the most murderous battles of the war. The battlefield and the city itself were, and are, in Flanders, where Blunden had passed the prior New Year's Eve.
Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden, pp. 233–234, copyright © the Estate of Edmund Blunden, 1928, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: November 1928
1917-12-31, 1917, December, New Year's, New Year's Eve, Ypres, Neujahr, Flandern 1918 Prosit Neujahr
