Four candles
Stars and fans have paid tribute to Ronnie Corbett, who died in March last year, at Westminster Abbey yesterday. Four candles, referencing the Two Ronnies sketch, and the 5ft 1in comedy actor’s famous armchair, above, were placed “centre stage”. Comedian Jimmy Tarbuck, in a moving tribute, called Corbett “a poet of comedy”.
TORNADO OF SHELLFIRE.
FROM PHILIP GIBBS. BRITISH HEADQUARTERS (FRANCE), THURSDAY. After the Battle of Arras and all that fierce fighting which for two months has followed the capture of Vimy and the breaking of the Hindenburg Line and the taking of many villages, many prisoners, and many guns by the great valour and the great self-sacrifice of British troops, there began to-day at dawn another battle, more audacious than that other one, because of the vast strength of the enemy’s positions, and more stunning to the imagination because of the colossal material of destructive force gathered behind our assaulting troops, it is the Battle of Messines. It is my duty to write the facts of it, and to give the picture of it. That is not easy to a man who, after seeing the bombardments of many battles, has seen just now the appalling vision of massed gunfire enormously greater in intensity than any of those; whose eyes are still dazed by a sky full of blinding lights and flames; and who has felt the tremor of earthquakes shaking the hillsides when suddenly at a signal the ground opened and mountains of fire rose into the clouds. There are no words which will help the imagination here. Neither by colour nor language nor sound could mortal man reproduce the picture and the terror and the tumult of this scene. Our troops are now fighting forward through smoke and mist – English regiments, New Zealanders, Protestant and Catholic Irishmen, fighting shoulder to shoulder in an invisible world, from which they are sending up light signals to show the progress they have made to the eyes of men flying high above the storm of battle and to watchers in the country, from which they went just as the faint rays of dawn flushed a moonlight sky. They have made good progress up the slopes of Wytschaete and Messines.
‘THE DAY GOES WELL.’
So far it seems that the day goes well for us, but it is early in the day, and I must write later of what happens on that ridge hidden behind drifting clouds of smoke. For two and a half years the Messines Ridge has been a curse to all our men who have held the Ypres salient – a great barrier against them, behind which the enemy stacked his guns, shooting at them every kind of explosive, directed upon these troops of ours. It is more than two years ago now that I saw an attack on Wytschaete. Standing upon the same ground to-day, watching another attack up those frightful slopes, I thought back to the other day, upon that early demonstration of our artillery covering an infantry advance, and the remembrance was amazing in its contrast to this new battle in the dawn. Then our shrapnel barrage was a pretty ineffective thing. In those two years our gun-power has been multiplied enormously so that at daybreak this morning the enemy’s country up there was upheaved by a wild tornado of shell fire, and the contours of the land were changed and the sky opened and poured down shrieking steel, and the earth was torn and let forth flame.