On 17 May 1915 John Buchan (1875–1940) reported the following in the London Daily News (1846–1930):

Just over the Diekebusch pond [Dikkebusvijver] there is a wooded slope with a skeleton house at the top of it. That was once the chateau of Hollebeke, and to the left of it is the hamlet of St. Eloi, which we held in November fighting, and again in March in the counter-attack after Neuve Chapelle. There begins the famous salient of Ypres, which is likely to be regarded by future generations as the classic battleground of the British Army. Every field and spur and farmstead is famous.

With its impressionistic tone, this paragraph reads like the beginning of a fictional text, a novel perhaps, as the gaze of Buchan lingers over the scenery in front of him. As Buchan wrote these lines, the pastoral landscape had already become the site of enduring battles and was utterly transformed by them. There is, arguably, an epic quality to this rendition, as the scene described seems already anchored in the grand ‘messianic’ flux of time that is evoked by the feeling of witnessing a sublime event as it unfolds: ‘Every field and spur and farmstead is famous.’ This is not a report of facts; it is a testimony to the power of war to transcend individual agency, and to the power of the newspaper medium, as it oscillates between the narrative modes of reporting and representing, to shape the memory of the First World War. Here, the ephemeral, transitory nature of newspaper reporting engages in a fruitful interplay with the desire to frame the war in transcendent, mytho-poetical terms: the Ypres salient is rendered a veritable ‘realm of memory’ – a place and space that is highly symbolic of British First World War cultural memory – as the war is raging on.