Ypres, Belgium: Pete Waterman remembers 'that infernal battle'

telegraph.co.uk ^ | 11 Nov 2010 | Pete Waterman

[smokingfrog]

Record producer Pete Waterman and his daughter Toni are profoundly moved by the battlefields where their forefathers fought during the First World War.

My grandfather, Walter Lord, the one I grew up with, taught me how to cheat at dominoes. When, a few months later, he discovered that I was indeed cheating, he chased me up the road until he couldn't run any farther.

I remember even in the Fifties he would never accept the third light of a match; his superstitious logic was that enemy soldiers in a neighbouring trench would spot the lighting of the first cigarette from a single match, aim as it was used to light the second, and fire when it came to the third. He had been honourably discharged from Artillery in 1918 aged 34 after a year of shell-shock ringing through his body. He had a great and profound influence on me.

My other grandfather, on the Waterman side, died as a result of the Great War – he would have laughed bitterly at that. "Now don't you get the wrong idea about what that Great really means," my grandmother recalled him saying. "That Great is for great waste and refers to the number of people who died in that infernal battle."

Three years after the war he died as a result of mustard gas poisoning, which worked its way into his system from the first attack in Passchendaele and left him lying on a bed in an isolation hospital in Swindon for the rest of his life.

Grandfather Lord mostly refused to talk about the First World War but I knew that he regarded the months that turned into years on the Western Front as the worst abomination in human history.

[smokingfrog]

[AEMILIUS PAULUS]

“In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,......”

[Doctor 2Brains]

How is YPRES pronounced?

[rwa265]

Go here http://www.howjsay.com/index.php?word=ypres

[xp38]

eee pruh or yee pruh is how I say it...not sure if it is correct though....you would need a local to be sure

[smokingfrog]

ee-pray or ee-prah?

I'm not really sure.

Wikipedia shows:
English: /ˈiːprə/;

[Jolla]

eh per a (when speaking french keep your mouth closed, never include the s at the end - Paris = Pari