With Cavalry in 1915
by Frederic Coleman · English · Gutenberg #51285 · 383,289 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: With Cavalry in 1915
Author: Frederic Coleman
Release date: February 23, 2016 [eBook #51285]
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Language: English
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WITH CAVALRY IN 1915
[Illustration: THE AUTHOR
_Frontispiece_]
WITH CAVALRY
IN 1915
THE BRITISH TROOPER
IN THE TRENCH LINE
_Through the Second Battle of Ypres_
BY
FREDERIC COLEMAN, F.R.G.S.
(_Author of "From Mons to Ypres with French"_)
_ILLUSTRATED_
LONDON
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON & CO., LIMITED
1916
LONDON:
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
DUKE STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E., AND GREAT WINDMILL STREET, W.
Dedicated
TO
MY WIFE
Whose bravery and self-sacrifice in the face of trying
circumstances made it possible for me so long
to continue to do the little that lay
in my power to help the
Cause we both
thought
JUST AND RIGHT.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE.
The more than kind reception that Press and Public accorded my first
book on the War, "From Mons to Ypres with French," has encouraged me
to put together a chronicle of further events.
"With Cavalry in 1915" takes up the thread of its narrative where its
predecessor left it--with the closing days of 1914.
If some notes of frank criticism have been included in this volume,
it has been with no unkindly feeling, or with any other object than
to try to give a fair picture of things at the Front as I saw them.
My unbounded admiration for the splendid soldiers of the British
Army, gained in the darker days of the Great Retreat from Mons, has
never wavered in its allegiance to them.
Never have I had occasion to change my opinion, formed in the first
few weeks of the War, that the British Tommy is worth five or six of
any German soldiers with whom he has yet come into contact.
In the machinery and organisation of war, the small British Army was
at a disadvantage, particularly when faced with the necessity of
great and rapid expansion. That mistakes should have been made was
more than natural--it was inevitable.
I would not be so presumptuous as to criticise so freely, but
that "the old order changeth": to write of the past is, I hope,
permissible, and likely to lead to no misconstruction. I mean no more
than that which the plain interpretation of my simple phraseology
will convey. I have no axes to grind.
The right men are in the British Army, and the right men are at the
head of it.
For its work to be crowned with complete and lasting victory, it has
but to have the undivided Empire behind it, and that, thank God, it
has.
The man who cannot see that the Allies will win this war, and win
it conclusively, is indeed blind to what the future holds for
civilisation.
FREDERIC COLEMAN.
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA,
_June, 1916_.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
JANUARY.
PAGES
General De Lisle and the 1st Cavalry Division Staff--Resting--Wet
winter campaigning--Echoes of the Christmas truce--A would-be
Hun prisoner--A visit to Furnes--A Belgian Officer's
standpoint--Luncheon with Colonel Tom Bridges--The Belgian
Army--Nieuport-les-Bains--The trenches along the Yser Canal--The
ruined lighthouse in the sand dunes--Snow's 27th Division in the
line in Flanders--Bad feet--Wrecked Vermelles--The devastation
of "75" shells--"Le Sport"--General Robertson appointed Chief of
Staff 1-36
CHAPTER II.
FEBRUARY.
Army Service Corps vagaries--Motor cars at the
Front--Poperinghe--French Chasseurs--The equipment of the French
foot-soldier--Belgian peasants--Flemish fatalism--The selection
of trench positions--A cavalry counter-attack--French Staff
work--British Staff officers--A run to Ypres--Scenes in the
old Flemish city--On duty in the Salient--The Menin Road--A
humble shop in the shell area--Ypres shelled--Belgian funerals
under fire--The trench-line--General De Lisle has a narrow
escape--The ruined Cloth Hall and Ypres Cathedral--Disappearing
mural paintings--An Irish giant-powder experience--Wonderful
marksmanship of the French "75's"--The way to the firing
line--Past "Cavan's House"--Under fire--Brigade Headquarters in
a dug-out 37-73
CHAPTER III.
MARCH.
Through the mud to the trenches--French reserves in the
woods--Hidden batteries--Unwise photography--Shrapnel
too close for comfort--Chased by shell-fire--In Hooge
dug-outs--Reminiscences of the first Battle of Ypres--A tour
of the first-line trenches in the rain--Loopholes--Views by
periscope--Sharpshooting--A mouthful of glass--Photographs in
Zillebeke Churchyard--Calling down shrapnel fire--A scamper
out of Zillebeke--Hooge at night--A mine explosion--Mixed
plans--Storming the mine-crater--Amusing German prisoners--The
London "'bus" abroad--A timely evacuation of a house in
Ypres--General Haig's order before Neuve Chapelle--Heavy British
gunning--The taking of the town of Neuve Chapelle--The failure to
go on--The reasons--The blame--German attack on St. Eloi--Fine
work by the Rifle Brigade--Territorials--Ploegsteert and the
Ploegsteert Wood--A run from Kemmel to Dickebusch--A shell in
La Clytte 74-120
CHAPTER IV.
APRIL.
Rumours--Lord Kitchener's visit--A horticultural joke--German
hate manufactured in Lille--Red Cross assistance--The peculiar
exploit of Mapplebeck of the Flying Corps--A joy-ride through
Ypres and up the Menin Road--The commencement of the fight for
Hill 60--The first coming of the German gas--The plight of
the French Reservists--The magnificent work of the Canadian
Division--In support of the French line--Tangled traffic on
the road to Ypres--Shelled in Elverdinghe--Deadly howitzer
shells--Poperinghe bombarded--Belgian refugees--The aviation
park evacuated--The want of traffic organisation--The 200
Canadian heroes in St. Julian--Conflicting reports about the
capture of Lizerne--International failure to coincide as to the
results of battle--British infantry attacks to win back the lost
ground--Children at play near a battle-field--Artillery work in
modern warfare--An attack on Lizerne by British field guns and
French Zouaves--The ethics of gun-fire--Lizerne proves a hard
nut to crack--British counter-attacks along the salient line
abortive--17-inch Hun shells--A big shell lights in a château
garden--Shell plus chandelier--A car in a Belgian ditch--Billets
in Wormhoudt--Welcome rest 121-177
CHAPTER V.
MAY.
The shortening of the Ypres Salient--More Hun gas--Strange
equipment for fighting the gas--The eve of Rawlinson's attack
along the Fromelles road--Great hopes of winning through to
Lille--The 1st Cavalry Division sent to Ypres--The French
attack at Arras--The British horseshoe around Ypres--Through
the ruined town of Potijze--Scenes of devastation--Under the
shells--Awful smells--Streams of wounded--Shell-splinters--The
G.H.Q. line--The St. Jean dug-outs--The hell of constant enemy
howitzer fire--Preponderance of numbers of German heavy guns
over British--The Auber ridge attack fails--Splendid examples
of heroism among the wounded--The French attack fails to
break through--Holding on at Ypres--Discovery of a dug-out at
Potijze--The solitary old woman in wrecked Ypres--Wonderful
pyrotechnic displays at night in the trenches--Blocked by
shell and conflagration in Ypres--Unable to get through--An
abandoned attempt at photography under bursting shells--A
scared collie--The last inhabitants to escape from the ruins
of Ypres--The "Princess Pat's"--A "Mother" gun and aeroplane
artillery observations--General De Lisle given command of
the eastern portion of the Salient--The remnants of the
Northumberland Brigade--To bed by the light of the fires in
Ypres--The composition of the Salient line on the night of
May 12th 178-222
CHAPTER VI.
MAY (_continued_).
The great German attack on May 13th--Twelve hours of Hun
howitzer fire--Terrible and awe-inspiring spectacle--The niagara
of shell-sound--Around impassable Ypres to Potijze--Close
work by a coal-box--Through a black shell-cloud--The York
and Durham "Terriers"--Bombarded in a Potijze dug-out--The
shell-swept line--Colonel Budworth's wisdom and the German
General's lost opportunity--The super-human work of the
Queen's Bays saves the line--The Life Guards shelled from
their trenches--Bits of position lost wholesale--Good work by
an armoured car--Accurate and invaluable gunning by British
Artillery--German attacks dispersed--Heavy casualties among the
18th Hussars--The splendid charge of the Blues, 10th Hussars and
Essex Yeomanry--David Campbell's 6th Brigade holds a line of
obliterated trenches--Reports of heavy losses--The remnants form
a new line--A talk with two of the Blues on the battle-field--A
plucky Essex Yeoman--Over 1,600 casualties in the two cavalry
divisions engaged--A lost despatch case--In the "huts" near
Vlamertinghe--An unnecessary run up the Menin Road at night--The
flotsam and jetsam of a divisional relief in the dark--A cellar
headquarters on the Menin Road--The position at Hooge--Cheery
K.R.R. cyclists--A gunner's curious story--The composition of
the Salient line on the morning of May 24th--In the thick of
a Hun gas attack--The 28th Division lose their line--The 18th
Hussars outflanked--A "Gas Diary"--The 9th Lancers hold the
trench-line--Fine work by the York and Durham Territorials--The
15th Hussars win laurels--Gas everywhere--A shell demolishes an
ammunition limber--A brave Cheshire sergeant--A wounded Tommy
and his yarn--Huns refuse to take prisoners--A counter-attack by
the Royal Fusiliers--D.S.O.'s and Military Crosses--18th Hussars
casualties--Captain Grenfell and Captain Court of the 9th Lancers
buried at Vlamertinghe--General De Lisle given command of the
29th Division and leaves France for the Dardanelles 223-296
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
THE AUTHOR _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Members of the Staff outside the headquarters of the
1st Cavalry Division 8
Between Philosophe and Vermelles; on the left, the
château wall 9
A bird's-eye view of shattered Vermelles, January, 1915 28
Major Desmond Fitzgerald of the Lancers and a gas-pipe
trench-mortar 29
A Winter Cavalry shelter in France 32
Construction of Cavalry shelter in France 33
The Rue de Menin in March 1915, looking west over the
Menin Bridge across the canal moat 54
Officers under the stone lion on the Menin Bridge at
Ypres 55
The Grande Place at Ypres and the Cloth Hall, March,
1915 66
The Choir of the ruined Ypres Cathedral 67
Scenes of battle of olden time in colours on the shattered
walls of Ypres Cloth Hall 70
A communication trench leading to the front line position
in the Sanctuary Wood 71
Officers of Lancers in their dug-outs in the front line
trenches 86
A dug-out in front of Zillebeke 87
The Zillebeke Church, March 1915 92
German prisoners in Ypres, captured after the explosion
of a British mine near Hooge 93
Damage caused by a 17-inch shell in Poperinghe, April,
1915 150
Red Cross ambulances on the coast 151
A French "75" in the mud of a Flanders beet-field 172
An ambulance which was struck by a shell while carrying
wounded from east of Ypres 172
View showing depth of 17-inch shell-hole in the garden of
a château between Poperinghe and Elverdinghe. 173
Staff Officers at lunch 176
Looking east over the Menin Bridge at the edge of Ypres 177
Dragoon Guards resting in the huts at Vlamertinghe 212
Graves of Capt. Annesley, Lieut. Drake, and Capt. Peto,
all of the 10th Hussars, in a graveyard on the Menin
Road 213
Officers of the Cavalry Corps 218
A typical farm in Flanders, in which British soldiers were
billeted 219
Hussars' cook-house, Vlamertinghe huts, Vlamertinghe. 248
Group of Cavalry Officers at the huts at Vlamertinghe. 249
View of the 13th century château at Esquelbecque 260
"Jeff" Phipps-Hornby and Frederic Coleman comparing
underpinning outside Ypres, May, 1915: the thinnest
and thickest "supports" in the 1st Cavalry Division 261
Map 296
WITH CAVALRY IN 1915.
CHAPTER I.
January 1st, 1915, found me in damp, sodden Flanders. I was one of
the dozen remaining members of the original Royal Automobile Club
Corps, which had joined the British Expeditionary Force in France
before Mons and the great retreat on Paris.
I was attached, with my car, to the Headquarters Staff of the 1st
Cavalry Division, Major-General H. de B. de Lisle, C.B., D.S.O.,
commanding. The Echelon A Divisional Staff Mess consisted of General
de Lisle; Colonel "Sally" Home, 11th Hussars, G.S.O. 1; Major Percy
Hambro, 15th Hussars, G.S.O. 2; Captain Cecil Howard, 16th Lancers,
G.S.O. 3; Major Wilfred Jelf, R.H.A., Divisional Artillery Commander;
Captain "Mouse" Tomkinson, "Royals," A.P.M.; Captain Hardress Lloyd,
4th Dragoon Guards, A.D.C.; Lieutenant "Pat" Armstrong, 10th Hussars,
A.D.C., and myself.
We were housed in a château between Cassel and St. Omer. In the
latter town General French and General Headquarters (G.H.Q.) were
located.
The 1st Cavalry Division contained the 1st and 2nd Cavalry Brigades.
The 1st Brigade, under Major-General Briggs, was composed of the
2nd Dragoons (Queen's Bays), 5th Dragoon Guards and 11th Hussars.
Brigadier-General Mullens commanded the 2nd Cavalry Brigade, in which
were the 4th Dragoon Guards, 9th Lancers and 18th Hussars.
These troops were billeted in Flemish farms and villages north of the
road that led from Cassel to Bailleul.
Sir John French's army in the field at that time was composed of
the 1st Army under General Sir Douglas Haig, and the 2nd Army
under General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien. The corps units were as
follows:--1st Corps, General C. C. Monro; 2nd Corps, General Sir
Charles Fergusson; 3rd Corps, General Pulteney; 4th Corps, General
Sir Henry Rawlinson; Cavalry Corps, General Allenby; Indian Corps,
General Sir James Willcocks; Indian Cavalry Corps, General Rimington;
and the Flying Corps under General Henderson. Of the new 5th Corps,
which was to be under the command of General Sir Herbert Plumer, only
the 27th Division was as yet "out," though the 28th Division was
ready to embark.
Most of the news parcelled out to those who were "resting" in billets
back of the line came from the London newspapers.
Typed sheets, dubbed "summaries of information," and issued by
G.H.Q., were distributed daily, but were never valuable and rarely
really informative.
The G.H.Q. information sheet of January 1st, 1915, read: "The Germans
made an attack on the right of our line, south of Givenchy, yesterday
evening, and captured an observation post. This post was retaken by a
counter-attack early this morning, but later on was again captured by
the enemy. The line has now been reorganized."
A friend in the 1st Army, which was covering the part of the line
thus attacked, showed me the 1st Army summary of 7 p.m., January
1st, which added the following to the news on the situation: "All
is quiet in front. Fighting on right of 1st Corps last night was
not as serious as at first reported. Casualties in Scots Guards
believed to be about five officers and fifty other ranks. Most of
these casualties occurred owing to the regiment pushing on beyond
the original trench, and attacking the enemy's position. This wet
weather is entailing great hardship on the men, who are fully engaged
repairing trenches, some of which have had to be abandoned owing to
water. The Germans are reported to be no better off."
Such brief, dry, official summaries applied to most of the wet days
of January, 1915. Trench warfare in winter has a very stoggy sameness
about it.
A 3rd Corps advance in front of the Ploegsteert Wood resulted in
several of our men being drowned while attacking, so deep was the
water in the submerged shell-holes in the flooded area.
Discipline, the capacity to go forward in pursuance of an order, in
spite of the fact that doing so seems utterly futile, is possessed
by the British troops to a remarkable degree. Small operations,
comparatively unimportant in scope and result, served to demonstrate
daily the splendid spirit of the men under inconceivably trying
conditions.
One trench at Givenchy was taken and retaken time after time, and the
men ordered to capture the trench were ever found ready to "go up"
in the same dashing way, though they knew to a man that the assault
meant inevitable loss, and would more than likely be followed by a
further enforced evacuation, by their own comrades, of the untenable
position.
The Huns were well supplied with trench-mortars, bombs and
hand-grenades, and used them with great effect. Our men had
practically none of these indispensable attributes to trench warfare,
or at least had so few of them that their use produced comparatively
negligible results.
The Christmas truce between British and German units confronting
each other in the trenches produced echoes for weeks. The order from
General French stating clearly that "the Commander-in-Chief views
with the greatest displeasure" such fraternizing with the enemy had
produced a partial effect, but instances still occurred where the
Huns took the initiative in the matter of peace overtures for short
periods.
A visit to one part of our front line unearthed the following story:
The opposing trenches were separated by a highway, across which, one
morning, a German soldier shouted, "Let's have a truce for to-day. We
don't want to kill you fellows. Why should we kill each other? We are
to be relieved by the Prussians to-morrow night. You can kill them if
you like. We don't care. We are Saxons."
The extraordinary proposal was taken in good part, and the truce kept
for thirty-six hours. No men of either army left their trenches, but
not a shot was fired from German or English trench at that point.
A few miles from the scene of this incident the men of the opposing
armies became quite accustomed to calling across the intervening
ground to their enemies. Each side, one day, boasted of the
excellence of its food supply. A British Tommy declared his lunch
ration included an incomparable tin of sardines. A German soldier
shouted his disbelief that Tommy possessed any such delicacy.
Thereupon an empty sardine tin on the point of a bayonet was raised
above the British trench parapet in proof of Tommy's statement.
"That's a sardine _tin_," yelled a Hun derisively, "but there is no
sardine in it, mein friend."
A few minutes passed, then a tin of sardines, unopened and temptingly
whole and sound was thrown from the English trench towards the trench
of the enemy. It fell short. Over his parapet vaulted a big German,
who dashed at the tin with outstretched hand. As his fingers were
closing over it, it jumped from his grasp. Again he stooped and
reached for it. Again it leaped away. Tommy had attached a thin but
stout line to his sardine tin, willing to prove his assertion, but
with no idea of losing his luncheon.
Two or three times the big Hun grabbed wildly at the elusive prize,
amid the shouts and laughter of the men of both armies, who cheered
in unison as Hans was at last convinced of the futility of further
effort and retired in confusion to his trench.
In the early hours of the New Year a trench full of Westphalians
and a party from a section of our line held by the 4th Corps,
fraternised to such an extent that visits were paid by each
contingent to the "no-man's land" between the trenches. When the
British soldiers returned to their trench, they found a man curled up
in the bottom of it. Investigation showed him to be a German soldier.
"'Ere, git out o' this," said Tommy indignantly. "You're bloomin'
well in the wrong 'ouse."
"No," said the Hun decidedly, "me prisoner, prisoner!"
"Not you," was the indignant reply. "Play the gime, you silly old
'Un, an' 'ook it."
But such was not the intention of the Saxon lad. With hands in air
to indicate his abject surrender, he insisted he was a prisoner and
refused to budge.
Nonplussed, the Tommies shouted over to the Germans: "'Ere's one o'
your chaps 'ere as won't go 'ome, the silly beggar. 'E's lorst 'is
way, poor chap, an' don't know where 'e are."
"Send him back to us, please," was the prompt request from the
Deutschers.
[Illustration: Members of the Staff outside the headquarters of the
1st Cavalry Division]
[Illustration: Between Philosophe and Vermelles; on the left, the
château wall]
But not a move would the Hun make, until at last half a dozen stout
Tommies hoisted him over the parapet with the butts of their rifles.
Still he tarried. With an oath a burly British corporal called two of
his comrades. They leaped out of the trench, grabbed the hesitating
Hun, and marched him at quick time to his own lines. There they
turned him over to his officer, presented arms in salute, wheeled and
marched gravely back to their own trench.
"What did the German bloke say when you chucked the chap to him?" was
asked the corporal.
"Thynks," laconically replied that worthy, "an' no more, except
to sye, 'We'll fix the rotter.' An' so they bloomin' well
should--desertin' durin' a bally troose that wye--the dirty dog."
As the 1st Cavalry Division was "resting," visits to points of
interest were the order of the day. On Monday, January 4th, General
de Lisle, Captain Hardress Lloyd, and I ran, _viâ_ quaint old Bergues
and Dunkirk, to Furnes, where King Albert of the Belgians had his
Headquarters.
Belgian sentries were plentiful after Dunkirk. They frequently
stopped us, but generally the word "Anglais" was a sufficient
passport. Now and again Lloyd produced a British pass, at which the
Belgians would invariably look blandly, if uncomprehendingly, then
salute and urbanely wave us on our way. Any sort of pass would have
served with ninety-nine out of a hundred such sentries.
The coast district in Belgium was not interesting in itself. Roadways
ran between sluggish, morbid-looking canals and flat, dispirited
fields--a sad, soggy, flabby land, in very truth.
Furnes was a picturesque relief. The architectural beauties of the
Hotel de Ville and one or two other buildings in its fine old square
were undeniable. Not long after our visit Furnes was viciously
shelled by the Huns. Later it was practically devastated by big
howitzer shells. Three or four days before our visit to the town a
Black Maria had landed in a busy spot near the square one noontide,
killing ten people and wounding a dozen others.
Nieuport, not far away, was under a heavy bombardment when we arrived
in Furnes. Three days before sixty French soldiers had been killed
in one day in Nieuport, which had proved so great a death-trap that
all troops had been moved to dug-outs outside the town.
I had a chat with one of King Albert's Staff whom I had previously
met in London. He was a very outspoken critic of the Belgian
officers, and of the policy that had resulted in the Belgian
evacuation of Antwerp before such a _débâcle_ was absolutely
necessary.
We had lunch in Furnes with Colonel Tom Bridges. I had seen much of
Bridges during the first months of the War, when he was attached to
the 4th Dragoon Guards as a major. He led a charge at Tour de Paissy,
on the Aisne, which saved the British line. Promoted to the rank of
Colonel, he was given command of the 4th Hussars. A very few days
afterwards, while on a night march, he was sent for by General Sir
John French. Arriving at G.H.Q., Bridges, who had been the British
Military Attaché in Belgium prior to the War and knew the Belgian
Army well, was given certain instructions, placed in a Rolls-Royce
car, and at once started for Antwerp. He arrived late at night, after
a continuous run of over 600 kilometres, and saw King Albert, who at
once convened a Council of War. Bridges then jumped into the work at
hand without a moment's delay.
Tom Bridges arrived in Antwerp on November 3rd. The city was
evacuated by the Belgians on November 8th.
Having heard so much of the prominent part Bridges had played in
the affairs of the Belgians, I looked forward with all the more
anticipation to again meeting him.
Major Prince Alexander of Teck, attached to Colonel Bridges' mission,
and Mrs. Bridges, who had recently been at work in the Duchess of
Sutherland's hospital at Dunkirk, were at luncheon.
Colonel Bridges talked of King Albert. "The King gives to a stranger
the impression that he comes to a decision slowly. I have heard men,
who have met him, say they thought him extremely deliberate, but all
recognise his solid foundation of determination. But for that rock
on which the King's stern determination is set, there would be but
little Belgian Army left to-day. To King Albert personally much more
is due than is likely ever to be known."
The more I saw of the Belgian Army along the Yser, the more I
appreciated what Bridges had said of the King.
After luncheon, I drove General de Lisle, Colonel Bridges and
Hardress Lloyd to Nieuport-les-Bains, once a sea-coast summer resort
at the mouth of the Yser. The Allied trench line was roughly the line
of the canal. On the coast in the sandy dunes, the Allies' trenches
had been pushed a bit to the Ostend side, but Dixmude was still in
German hands.
Not a single inhabitant of Nieuport-les-Bains was in the town--not
a man, woman or child. The French Tirailleurs d'Afrique, part of
a splendid division of French Colonials that had been sent by
Foch to "stiffen" that part of the line, occupied the ruins of
the summer resort that was. The typical French summer hotels in
Nieuport-les-Bains were, for the most part, shapeless piles of
_débris_.
The Huns never succeeded in actually penetrating the town, though Von
Beseler's troops tried hard to take it. The Germans reached the river
bank which formed the town's boundary on the north.
The main thoroughfare was blocked at frequent intervals by great
barricades made from bathing machines, hauled in a row and filled
with sand and paving stones. Asphalt tennis courts were scarred
with shell-holes. No open space had been spared during the weeks of
itinerant bombardment.
As we approached the town French batteries of "75's" were firing hard
from positions in the dunes by the roadway.
The French General Officer Commanding arrived as we alighted from our
car. But one house was standing in the northern edge of the town.
Into it we filed on the heels of the French General, up its stair
to the garret, and still up a rickety ladder to a point of vantage
under the very eaves. Through shell-holes in the tile roofing, French
observers directed the fire of the batteries below. Across the Yser,
in front of us, we would see the French and German trenches among the
low sand hills. For long spaces they ran but fifteen to twenty yards
apart and in one sector a German sap was but five yards from the
French escarpment.
For a time we watched the shells from the "75's" bursting over the
German trenches. Descending, we crossed the Yser practically at
its mouth. A pontoon bridge, vaunting a placard showing it had been
christened the "Pont Gal Joffre," led between twin piers. The bridge
swayed and tossed like the deck of a channel steamer as we picked our
way gingerly across it. Some months later a Jack Johnson, luckily
placed by the enemy, entirely smashed that pontoon bridge.
Gaining the northern bank we zig-zagged through deep trenches in
the sand, reinforced here and there with timbers and stone. An open
crater and a pile of _débris_ marked what had once been a lighthouse.
Dug-outs, shelters in miniature, lined the sides of the crater
nearest the Huns. The open bowl of sand was about forty feet in
diameter. Near its centre gaped a shell-hole in the soft sand made by
an unwelcome visitor which had come less than a half hour previously.
Digging for a few moments, I unearthed the still warm timing-fuse of
the 105-millimetre shell that had made the hole.
The lighthouse position was, the sergeant of Tirailleurs said, a
_mauvais place_. From morning until night of the day before the Huns
had shelled it. Many shells had fallen in the hours just preceding
our arrival. General de Lisle and Colonel Bridges left Hardress Lloyd
and me there, "for safety," while they walked through the front line
positions, which were from a hundred to a hundred and sixty yards
further forward.
I investigated the interiors of the tiny dug-outs during the
General's absence. No shell fell near, however, and soon we were all
retracing our steps to Nieuport-les-Bains. Once a sniper spied one of
the party, and a bullet from his rifle kicked up a spurt of sand a
few feet from my head. We acknowledged the attention by an additional
foot or so of "stoop" thenceforth.
Over a cup of tea at Colonel Bridges' headquarters, I met an old
acquaintance in Lady Ross, who had that day handed to the Queen of
the Belgians a cheque for £1,000 for Belgian sufferers. Lady Ross
told me of an interesting conversation with King Albert at luncheon.
After discussing at length the general subject of the difficulty of
realisation of war's hardships and atrocities by those whose homes
have been far from the actual scenes of war, the conversation
drifted to the refugee question. King Albert agreed that all
able-bodied Belgians of military age should be with the Army, and
declared emphatically his intention to press for steps that would
lead to such a consummation.
The result of my visit to Furnes and Nieuport-les-Bains was to
confirm my impression that the Germans had fortified their positions
along the coast, and so entrenched themselves that to take Ostend by
direct land attack was impossible, except at very great cost indeed.
The assistance that could be given by the Admiralty to such a project
was greatly discounted by the fact that the ships available were out
of range when outside the sandbanks that lay near the coast, and
outclassed by the enemy's land batteries when inside the banks.
Many folk visited the Belgian Army in the trenches during those
January days. Less than a week after we had visited Furnes, a couple
of us ran to Dunkirk on Sunday to buy some fresh fish, a delicacy as
rare as it was wholesome. While in Dunkirk I saw Lord Northcliffe
and my old friend Max Pemberton, who had come over for a "weekend at
the Front" with the Belgians. The next day eighteen German aeroplanes
flew over Dunkirk and dropped several bombs, doing some material
damage and killing one civilian.
On Tuesday, January 12th, General de Lisle ran to Boeschoeppe,
south-west of the St. Eloi area, to see General T. O'D. Snow and his
27th Division. While waiting for the General I had good opportunity
to see and talk to some of the newly arrived men. They had been
marched about fourteen miles before being put into the trench-line,
then marched back to billets when relieved. Some had come back from
eight to eleven miles on foot. As they were not supplied with changes
of socks or any sort of patent solution for their feet, and as the
trenches were at places knee-deep in water, a general epidemic of
frost-bitten feet could but be expected.
Limping along the frozen road, with socks wound about their poor
feet, I felt great sympathy for the Tommies. Before three days had
passed I heard that the 27th Division sick-list had been augmented
by over two thousand cases of "bad feet." One Brigade Major in the
Division told of over one thousand cases in his Brigade alone. A bad
business, entailing great suffering and more permanent disablement
than a little, all for want of proper foresight.
Small engagements with the enemy all along the line were constantly
taking place. Official reports teemed with briefly and baldly told
stories such as the following:--
"The following are details of the capture of a German trench to
the north of La Bassée on the night of the 3rd-4th January.
"Time--8 p.m. January 3rd, 1915.
"Artillery--Nil.
"Strength of attack--One officer, twenty-five men.
"Distance between opposing trenches--150 to 200 yards.
"Enemy's trench consisted of a short length of trench which had
been dug outwards from a saphead, and which was occupied by one
officer and twenty-five to thirty men. (Two sentries.)
"Attack--The attack crept forward noiselessly to the trench A A,
two German sentries were awake and were bayoneted, the occupants
were asleep and were all bayoneted; the officer's head was broken
in with the butt end of a rifle--not a shot was fired--some men
set to work at once and cut the ground A B, thus flooding the
trench A A.
[Illustration]
"The attackers were only fifteen minutes in the German trench and
left the bayoneted Germans in the water, which was then running
in from the water ditch. A A was only a short length of trench
without wire.
"British casualties--One wounded and two missing. The latter may
have since returned."
Quiet days found many a British soldier hard at work over a
French-English "conversation-book." Some of these were hurriedly
prepared and of a character truly extraordinary. One such book, made
up for the benefit of an industrious young man, contained a question
that, translated, ran thus:--
"Q. Where is the cat of my mother's aunt?"
"A. No, but the kittens are drowned."
In Vermelles, on January 15th, I took a dozen photographs showing the
devastation that can be worked by French high explosive shells.
Vermelles was an object lesson. Held by the Germans as strongly as
any town was held in front of the French position south of the La
Bassée canal, trenched and barricaded with wonderful skill, and well
supported by a mass of guns, its capture was only effected after
weeks of sapping and an artillery bombardment that had up to that
time been without parallel. Its ruins held texts for innumerable
sermons on the newer strategy of present-day warfare.
A French officer of standing had told me that he considered the
taking of Vermelles from the Germans a most hopeful sign that the
French could take any and all German positions in like manner, if
they cared to pay the price in men and ammunition.
Geographically, Vermelles was in what was bound to prove a "warm
corner." The German thrust westward from La Bassée, with Bethune as
an objective, had cost the British Expeditionary Force some of the
hardest fighting it had seen.
In that area our Second Corps, then the Indian Corps, and lastly our
First Corps, with the French troops at times in action with us, had
withstood a battering that no other point in the long line from the
sea to the Vosges, save possibly the Ypres Salient, had been called
upon to stand.
The German advance to the westward had reached Vermelles, and there
been held. Their farthermost line was in front of the western edge of
the town, and close to the main road that led through it. The enemy
was in possession of Vermelles for a couple of months.
As no English troops had participated in the taking of Vermelles from
the Huns, except for the assistance rendered by some of our heavier
batteries, we knew little of what had happened in that theatre
save that six weeks of sapping, a mad rush after an unprecedented
bombardment, and terrific hand-to-hand bayonet fighting in the
streets, had resulted in the French occupation of the town on
December 7th.
Our visit had been arranged for us by Captain Fresson, the French
liaison officer attached to 1st Cavalry Division Headquarters.
General de Lisle, Colonel Home, Major Hambro, Fresson and I were in
the party.
Coming out of Bethune, on the Lens road, we passed through Beuvry,
then through Shilly-Labourse.
In the fields by the roadside were trenches, increasing in frequency
along the road from Sailly to Noyelles-lez-Vermelles.
When Noyelles was passed, and we could glance across the slightly
rolling fields that led eastwards to Vermelles, a mile distant, a
little world of trenches met the eye. Some giant, prehistoric mole,
crazed with pain and bent on expending his agony on the surface of
Mother Earth, might have so ripped the fields.
Not rows of trenches, but curved and twisting galleries upon
galleries of them. For the first time I began to get an inkling of
what real trench warfare--the battles of the pick and shovel--meant.
At the headquarters of the French General who was in command of that
section of the line a most elaborate _déjeuner_ had been prepared
for the party, with the result that it was well into the afternoon
before we left the hospitable Frenchman and, in tow of a member of
his staff, commenced our tour of sight-seeing.
Most buildings thereabouts were shell-scarred; some were burned. No
inhabitants were to be seen. The boom of distant shells was ever
present, and now and then one burst in sight of us. Detachments of
French infantry marched past frequently.
We ran to Noyelles, which was full of hard-as-nails-looking French
soldiers.
There the party alighted, and guided by a young French infantry
officer, who had seen the fighting over that ground, walked across
the trench-scarred battle-field eastward to Vermelles.
I followed sufficiently far to gain an idea of the lie of the land,
then returned to Noyelles and took my car to Vermelles by road,
arriving in advance of the others. This allowed me a long stroll of
inspection, to be augmented later by a second tour in the company of
the General, with a French Staff officer as escort.
The German first line trenches to the west of the town were well
constructed. Though they had been considerably damaged by the rain
of shells that had been poured on them, they were not as badly
demolished as one might expect. Back of this first line of defence
was a second line, weaving in and out--here in front, now behind, now
through, the string of houses on the west of Vermelles' main street.
In the southern portion of the town were the ruins of the Château
Watteble. The grounds of the once imposing château allowed a
sufficiently clear space for still another formidable trench-line.
Behind that the enemy had placed other lines, burrowing here and
there at points of vantage through the town. Adjacent to the château
were piles of bricks that once had been a fine farm, the Ferme Brion,
and in front of it, completely demolished, and bearing no semblance
of shape or form that would indicate its original outlines, was
a chapel, where a German gun had been placed. This gun, a French
officer told me, had been served gallantly until the French were but
fifty yards distant, when a battery of the famous "75's" found the
range and totally annihilated the gun, the chapel, and any of the
enemy who were so unfortunate as to be in its vicinity.
The church, its square tower battered out of shape, was still the
most conspicuous landmark of the country round. Another sample
of devastation was the brewery, and attached to it an elaborate
dwelling, one portion of which was built over a metal frame. All
the covering had been torn from the iron girders, leaving the mere
skeleton of the framework practically intact, a weird sight.
The German trenches and communications burrowed so consistently
everywhere from the western edge of the town, and on through to the
eastward, that every foot of ground afforded opportunity for study.
These lines of defence, all connected and fed by approach trenches,
cleverly constructed, with their traverses and reserve off-shoots,
led away for hundreds of yards to the rear of the front line.
That, then, was the town the French had to face, defended by
machine-guns in splendid emplacements, every position well manned.
The first line commanded an open front of slightly rising ground,
clear of all obstacles and capable of being swept for 800 to 1,000
yards. Military science in trench construction had been aided by
ingenuity of a high order, and hours of wandering over and through
the rabbit warrens made for men, as cleverly as ever rodent designed
his burrow, found one discovering new wonders at every step.
The trenches proper were for the most part deep and narrow, stout of
wall, reinforced with every manner of material likely to strengthen
the defensive ramparts and bastions. Here the thickness of a piece of
house wall had been doubled by sandbags. There the face of a trench
had been reinforced by huge stones, interspersed with all sorts of
receptacles, such as water-buckets, cooking utensils, wheel-barrows,
and all manner of tins, filled with brick, small stones or cement.
A woman's bodice neatly tied about a few pounds of stone, the wooden
cover of a household sewing-machine, loaded with brick, and even
a stout brown-paper cardboard box full of mortar, caught my eye
as I searched the stoutly-built wall curved round and back and
round again through what had once been a house-yard. Traverses that
demanded admiration from the most apathetic student of engineering,
loops of trenches that commanded every front, approach trenches that
wriggled like some great yellow-brown snake off toward the rear, were
perfect each one in its own way.
Practically every point in the town could be reached by a German on
tour of inspection of its defences, without the necessity of his
leaving cover, save to cross the roadway of the main thoroughfare.
Beside all this under-the-surface protection, the shelter of the
buildings, all constructed of brick or stone and strongly built, was
by no means to be despised.
Truly, when the French officer said no place could be made more
secure, there was some reason for his words. But strong as it was,
and in spite of its splendid artillery support, the position was
one that the French had to take, whether or no. Six long weeks of
constant work was represented by those torn and wounded fields that
stretched away westward to Noyelles. Sapping their way, entrenching
and consolidating every forward step, the little men in red and
blue crept up to a line varying by from one to two hundred yards, and
even nearer at one point, to the German front.
[Illustration: A bird's-eye view of shattered Vermelles, January, 1915]
[Illustration: Major Desmond Fitzgerald of the Lancers and a gas-pipe
trench-mortar]
But sapping and mining, and entrenching and consolidating, so
valuable in themselves, responsible for the finely fortified position
of the Germans in Vermelles, and the splendid mole-advance against
them by the French, was not the chief factor that was to play the
decisive part in the war-game that culminated in the capture of the
town on December 7th.
Gun-fire was the decisive element. To the beloved "soixante-quinze"
was to go the chief honour. Only a careful personal inspection of
the town could tell one the real story of Vermelles as I saw it on
January 15th. The camera might assist, and, in spite of the dull
weather, I obtained a few pictures with that end in view, but the
camera could give one the story only haltingly and in part.
Not one building in all the town was unwrecked. The French "75's,"
with some aid from the British howitzers, reduced Vermelles to ruins
in the most literal and complete sense. Every edifice, from the
piles of brick around the few tottering walls that was once a proud
château to the humblest barn or outbuilding, was in itself a study.
The evidence left by such shell-fire of its power for evil is of
fascinating interest owing to its infinite variety. One wall had
withstood half-a-dozen punctures of varying diameter, holes four or
five feet in width, some of them, while its fellow beside it had
crumbled into a formless mass of _débris_. Side by side were two
houses, one with front practically intact, its roof gone and its
interior and back portion blown to bits, the other minus front wall,
but still standing, its roof at a crazy angle, resting insecurely on
the remainder of the building, which, save for a scar here and there,
escaped comparatively untouched.
It is this caprice of shell-fire that makes such a veritable hell of
it.
Trenches with sides blown in; here a hole like a good-sized cellar;
there a traverse filled to the level of the ground around it; a
gap in the defence wall in front; iron-work twisted into grotesque
shapes; stone-work pulverised; _débris_ in piles; with clothing,
bedding, household implements, farm machinery and gear, child's
toys, religious emblems, personal effects, and bundles of every
description, all jumbled together in such an odd, unnatural way, that
a laugh and a catch in the throat often came together.
Vermelles on that sodden day in January was full of French soldiers
in reserve--men of the 131st and 262nd Infantry Brigades, some from
16th and some from 18th Corps units. The firing line proper was from
three to four kilometres to the eastward. On the west side of the
town a French battery was firing regularly, the shells singing over
our heads. The German shells were falling frequently half a mile in
front of us.
It was my good fortune to discover a French soldier who had seen the
actual final bayonet attack which won the position. His story was
graphic, but told in few words. The creeping up to the forward French
trenches, the fierce bombardment, the wild charge, the discovery
that in spite of the fact that the place had been literally blown to
bits, and German dead strewn everywhere, some defenders still held
on and manned the murderous machine-guns, until they felt the cold
steel--it all seemed so matter-of-fact, and such a matter-of-course
sort of story in such surroundings.
In each of the yards of the better-class dwellings and farms,
including the grounds of the château and brewery, were graves of
German soldiers. Many of these were marked with rude crosses bearing
touching inscriptions. One such epitaph that caught my eye described
the dead soldier as a good comrade; another as a brave man who had
died for the Fatherland. Many of them bore a simple religious touch.
One grave covered a German officer, buried by the French after the
capture of the town. The French soldiers had marked his name and a
respectful word or two on the rude cross above it, in obvious keeping
with the inscriptions the Germans had written on adjacent crosses
raised while they were in occupation.
In an effort to tell me how full the redoubts were of German dead,
when Vermelles was at last taken, my soldier guide found that words
failed him. They were everywhere, he said.
[Illustration: A winter Cavalry shelter in France]
[Illustration: Construction of Cavalry shelter in France]
Many of the graves, particularly those of the French soldiers buried
thereabouts, were headed by black or white metal wreaths.
"It cost dear," said my soldier, "and we paid. But a Boche who lived
through the last few days of the fighting here, and escaped from that
last charge, will be able to tell a story."
The deep cellar of a ruined house--a mere brick arched cell of a
place without a ray of daylight--had been quite habitably fitted up
as a cave-dwelling by the Germans, who had saved a piano from one of
the wrecked rooms above and cosily stowed it away in a corner.
One or two underground caves just back of the German front line of
trenches, bomb-proofs for the officers apparently, were ingeniously
secure.
Though Vermelles at the time of our visit had been in French hands
for more than a month, one could find many such souvenirs as
shell-heads and timing-fuses without troubling to stir the piles of
wreckage.
I could, I thought, sit in Vermelles and write reams of detail in
description of the terrible havoc of war, but I found that mere
generality as to the scenes of desolation wrought in the town soon
used up my vocabulary. The place was no less a graveyard of brave men
than of strenuous human effort, none the less to be admired because
it proved abortive. Over all brooded the horror of war and the more
specific and tangible horror of gun-fire. "Low trajectory and high
explosive are twin demons, and this is their devil's work," the
shattered town seemed to say.
Knots of French soldiers or visiting British officers walked about
sombrely and spoke in low tones, as if in the actual presence of the
dead, in spite of the weeks that had flown by since Vermelles had
echoed to the crash of a bursting shell.
The French soldiers were a tough-looking lot of customers. A bit
nondescript as to uniform, and universally campaign worn, unshaven,
and mud-plastered, they looked stout and fit for anything. A friendly
class of men, respectful to British officers to a degree, a fact that
spoke not only of good discipline, but of fine French traditions of
politeness. They impressed me as splendid war material, and more, as
men of fine character and indomitable determination.
Sport behind the lines began to assume quite a healthy state in
January. Packs of beagles and hounds and pairs of greyhounds were
brought "out" by enthusiasts, and cross-country courses with rare
jumps were carefully mapped out.
Alas! for "Le Sport." An order came along one day from G.H.Q. which
stated that "the Commander-in-Chief regrets that it is necessary to
prohibit any more hunting, coursing, shooting, or paper-chasing. This
order comes into effect at once."
The 2nd Cavalry Brigade drew up a splendid steeplechase programme,
which the state of the ground would not have allowed, had no order
from G.H.Q. been promulgated.
A card of "beagle-meets" was issued, and formed the following
somewhat pretentious propaganda:--
"THE 2ND CAVALRY BRIGADE BEAGLES WILL MEET--
SUNDAY Jan. 3rd, C Squadron 4th Dragoon Guards.
TUESDAY Jan. 5th, St-Jans-Cappel, Berthen, Cross Roads.
THURSDAY Jan. 7th, Headquarters 9th Lancers.
SATURDAY Jan. 9th, Berthen.
MONDAY Jan. 11th, H Battery.
WEDNESDAY Jan. 13th, Headquarters 18th Hussars.
FRIDAY Jan. 15th, St-Jans-Cappel Church.
SUNDAY Jan. 17th, Headquarters 4th Dragoon Guards.
Each day at One o'clock."
The Prince of Wales ran more than once with that pack of beagles, and
ran well.
Football matches were allowed, and were daily fought out between the
various regimental teams.
General Robertson succeeded General Murray as Chief of the Staff
at G.H.Q., a change generally welcomed, as Robertson was held in
very high esteem throughout the Army. Many of us considered him the
greatest man the British Army had produced throughout the campaign.
That is certainly how I should describe him.
CHAPTER II.
Broken car springs on February 1st took me to Poperinghe, where a
Belgian carriage-maker made a villainous repair for a considerable
charge.
Motor car repairs were fearfully and wonderfully executed at the
front in the earlier stages of the war. The G.H.Q. shops were not
bad, and once in a while I found clever, conscientious young chaps
in charge of a road-side repair shop attached to a division, an
ammunition supply column, or some such unit, who had managed to
organise a very creditable "first-aid and emergency hospital" for the
ills a car was heir to.
All too often some A.S.C. officer in charge, however, knew as little
of the mechanism of an automobile and how to put it in order as one
could well imagine. I remember one youth, possessed of a wonderful
opinion of his own efficiency, whose mechanical experience had been
gained in a railway workshop. He ordered repairs to be done in
weird fashion at times. As soon as he had delivered his dictum and
departed, his chief non-commissioned officer would put the men right,
generally by a complete reversal of the youngster's orders, and all
would go happily until he might again put in an appearance, when
the work would suffer proportionately to the time he spent in its
vicinity.
Stories of the excellence of the performance of individual cars were
often marvellous. One big limousine, which had been "out since the
first of the show," was ever the boast of the Major to whom it was
assigned and of his faithful chauffeur. At tea one day it transpired
that the car, which the Major was always ready to declare had run
_sans repaire et sans reproche_ during the whole campaign, was
in the repair park for its "initial derangement." Calling at the
repair lorry early next morning, I was astounded to hear the A.S.C.
sergeant-major in charge say to the major's chauffeur: "So you have
done in the old girl again, have you? Let's see, that's the third
time this month, ain't it? Why the Major hasn't sent the bally old
wreck in months ago to get her put in decent shape, I don't know.
Not a bit of use tinkering at her all the time. She's given us more
bother than any car in the division."
How we did chip the Major! Motorists' yarns bear some odd
relationship to fishermen's stories, so I have heard.
Taken generally, the British cars at the Front ran most creditably.
The conditions could not have been more trying, and the Daimlers and
Rolls-Royces lived up to their reputations in fine style. Cars of
half a score of makes were attached to the 1st Cavalry Division while
I was with it, and I studied their performances with close attention.
For reliability and lack of trouble a large Daimler easily bore away
the honours.
Cold forges and a disinclination on the part of the smith to light
them on an afternoon necessitated my spending a night in Poperinghe.
The town was crowded with Belgian inhabitants and refugees, and
with French troops of the 16th Corps, which was at that time being
relieved from the trench work by British soldiers, and was mobilising
in Poperinghe to be sent south and east, detachment after detachment,
to its own dear France.
A winter in Flanders, particularly in Flemish trenches, is not a
happy experience. The French were therefore openly delighted at the
prospect of departure to more pleasant and congenial climes.
I should have had to sleep in my car but for the kindly offices of a
French Staff officer, who procured for me a clean, soft bed in the
Hotel La Bourse.
An evening among French soldiers, though they might be tired,
trench-stained and campaign worn, was sure to be a pleasurable
one. Songs from _chansons d'amour_ to grand opera, from poor Harry
Fragson's "Marguerita," to swinging marching airs of older wars, were
sung with a vim.
The French troopers possessed a suspicion of the grand air when
drinking a toast, carolling a love-ditty, or roaring out a rousing
chorus. One or two veterans I met in Poperinghe might have stepped
from a volume of Dumas. An elder one was a bachelor of arts and
science, a man of studious and thoughtful mien. His comrade was a
true Gascon, and a third of the group was blessed with powers of
mimicry that made us laugh long and loud before the night was over.
Every man of them was proud and fond of his British allies.
French soldiers did not pay the same attention to cleanliness of
uniform and kit that was given to such details by the British Tommy.
An English battalion, relieved from muddy trenches, at once smartened
its external appearance to a degree that had to be seen to be
believed. Tommy worked wonders in a day.
The long-tailed blue coats of the French infantry were difficult to
clean, once they became mud-caked.
The amount of equipment, and its variety, that the average French
foot-soldier strapped upon his back, was wonderful. I saw one
black-bearded "poilu," with a typical load, start off with his
company for a long, long march, with literally as much as he could
pack about him, fastened securely by ingenious means. Over either
shoulder was a strap supporting two good-sized canvas haversacks, one
on each hip, both bulging with food. To his belt were attached two
ample cartridge-pouches, one in front and one behind. A water-bottle
dangled against a haversack. His principal pack, hung at the
shoulder, was, he told me, full of spare clothing. A blanket, rolled
in a sheepskin jacket, surmounted this and towered above his cap. A
cooking-pot adorned the back of his pack, while to one side of it
was strapped a tin cup of ample dimensions, and to the other a loaf
of bread, already become soggy in the steady drizzle. A bundle of
firewood at his side, and a roll of clothing, holding an extra shirt
or two, at the other, flanked him.
My examination of his equipment concluded, he said he must be off,
and picked up his rifle with a cheery smile. A comrade rushed up and
handed him a sort of leather portmanteau. He grabbed it without a
word, threw the strap over his head, settled his various pieces of
baggage into place with a strenuous shake, and stamped away sturdily,
with a firm step and head held high.
He left me wondering that this sort of soldier should make marching
records of which any army in the world might be proud, yet such was
undeniably the case.
In billets, the British cavalry were having a thorough course of
instruction in the work of the foot soldier. Dismounted attack,
trench digging, musketry instruction, bomb-throwing classes, and all
manner of miscellaneous tutelage progressed steadily.
I had a look at Ypres one morning. It was again peopled with a
sufficient number of civilians to give me a sense of forgetfulness as
to its proximity to the German gun positions.
Of all the attributes of the Belgian people, their persistence in
making back to their homes in a shelled area, as soon as the shells
ceased falling, was the most prominent.
Many of the peasants pursued their daily round of labour under
shell-fire. Many others left the bombarded fields or villages, albeit
reluctantly, only to return as soon as the shell splinters had ceased
to spatter about.
What feeling actuated them was a psychological study. They were
phlegmatic as a people. I have seen Russian soldiers perform feats
that were described by different observers of the same episode as
bravery or stupidity, according to the reading of the onlooker. Was
the Belgian who drifted back to his own or some other man's home in
shell-ruined Ypres brave or thick-headed? I left one opinion for
another, only to abandon it in turn. A study of various types in
Flanders helped me but little.
Hard-worked toilers, whose lives have been one continual round of
labour, are, more often than not, fatalists. Such lives produce
men and women who accept conditions blindly and uncomplainingly. A
peculiar love of the soil which they have tilled, and from which they
have sprung, seemed to take the place in many Flemish peasants of the
more definite and definable Anglo-Saxon or Gallic spirit of intense
patriotism. Many poor folk seemed possessed of a blind instinct
that "home" was safest, and once "home" was lost, nothing worthy
of preservation remained. Their attitude toward death bordered on
indifference.
Motor-buses were bringing the 28th Division to the Ypres Salient as I
passed on my homeward journey.
Rumours of an attack on the German line flew from lip to lip. That
night I read from an eminent French military authority that "to
attack, unless with a definite object in view, with a very reasonable
chance of success, and with the surety that you can hold what you
gain if the attack succeeds, is a crime."
In the second week in February, at a dinner in St. Omer, a member of
the French Mission at British Headquarters told me that eighty-seven
French general officers had been "relieved of their command" since
the commencement of the war. These generals were "sent down" for
incompetency, evidenced in various ways, to command the troops under
them. The extremely small number of British generals who had been
"replaced" stood out in very sharp contrast to this total, with which
fact should be remembered the complete difference as to policy with
reference to such replacements between the French and British War
Office methods.
Early in February, the 1st Cavalry Division staff was blessed with
the arrival of Major Desmond Fitzgerald (11th Hussars), who took
Major Hambro's place as G.S.O. 2.
The total tally of British casualties was announced during the first
week in the month as 104,000, having exceeded, in less than six
months of warfare, the numerical strength of the original British
Expeditionary Force.
A day "in front," with the engineers, mapping out new trenches and
reserve positions, showed to how great an extent modern gun-fire had
changed military theory.
Before the War, a trench line was sought in a position that commanded
a good "field of fire," _i.e._, that had in front of it as much open
ground as possible.
This war had taught that the most important item in the selection of
a trench position was the extent to which the line could be hidden
from the enemy gunners. The space commanded by the occupants of the
trench and the nature of the terrain were secondary to the cardinal
point of keeping the trenches well out of sight of enemy observers.
Thus engineers might, years ago, select a hilltop as a trench
position, the line commanding the receding slope to the valley
below. After the experience of the greatest of all wars, they would
preferably place it fifty yards behind the summit. More than fifty
yards of "field of fire" was desirable, but not absolutely necessary.
A fifty-yard space could be so covered with wire entanglements as
sufficiently to delay an attacking enemy. Deep, narrow trenches with
traverses to restrict the area of damage from shells bursting in
the actual trench, and to protect from enfilade fire, were demanded
by the newer conditions, but great care had to be taken that they
should not be constructed in ground of so soft a nature that howitzer
fire could too easily cave in the trench sides.
We found it possible to select a trench line that could be well
concealed, which, if taken by the enemy, would be under perfect
observation from our own gunners and by them easily rendered
untenable for the Huns.
That the British were clever in this work of placing trenches
in invisible positions was proven by the following report of an
interview in Courtrai with a wounded German officer, whose regiment
had been badly handled when attacking an English position in the
Ypres Salient:--
"Our artillery cannonaded incessantly the enemy trench which our
company was to storm--we could see it in the distance. Towards
evening we were ordered to advance. We marched forward without
taking cover, confident enough, because not a shot came from the
British trench. We thought it had been abandoned after the terrible
bombardment to which it had been subjected all day long. To make
things quite safe, when we were 200 metres from the trench our
mitrailleuses were brought into action and we gave the silent enemy
another good peppering. Still there is no reply. The place must
certainly be empty. Shouting 'Hurrah,' we rush forward to seize it,
but we have not gone more than 100 metres before our whole front rank
is stricken down by a volley from a point much nearer than the trench
we had been shelling, and in addition to this terrible infantry fire
the British quick-firing guns are brought into play, and simply
mow our men down. Six times we reform to continue our assault; six
times we are knocked to pieces before we can get going. At last such
officers as are left realise that there is nothing to be done, and we
retreat to our original position.
"This is how the English work it. The entrenchment, visible from
afar, which we had bombarded, was not the spot where their troops
were to be found. They were stationed in small subsidiary trenches
in front of the principal trench, with which they were connected by
means of narrow passages. The little advance trenches were concealed
to perfection, and the troops sheltered beneath sheets of metal
on which our German bullets ricocheted. So we had been shelling an
unoccupied trench and had done no damage to the place where the enemy
actually was hidden. Hence it is not surprising that our 'assault'
should have proved to be--for us--a veritable massacre."
Careful study of German methods of counter-attack were productive of
many an idea.
The Hun counter-attacks were delivered immediately after the loss of
a position--as successful counter-attacks must be.
A trench which was thought a good defensive one by its occupants was
sometimes attacked by the Germans, taken, and immediately transformed
into a good defensive trench from the other point of view. The way in
which the German first line of attack was followed by a second line,
bearing shovels, barbed wire, bombs, and grenades, and the manner
in which this second line was put to work, showed that the brain
conducting operations was close at hand, if not actually on the spot.
The planning and carrying out of some of these small attacks were
worthy of great praise. Our troops soon caught the idea and put it
into practice with increasingly beneficial results.
On Sunday, February 21st, the 2nd Cavalry Division were in the
trenches in the Ypres Salient. The Huns exploded a mine in front
of Zillebeke and took sixty yards of trenches that were occupied
by the 16th Lancers. A counter-attack, delayed a bit, was launched
unsuccessfully, and cost the cavalry four officers killed, one
died of wounds, one missing (thought sure to be killed), and four
wounded--ten officers in all, and about fifty per cent. of the men
engaged.
The Canadian Division arrived in France in mid-February--a splendid
lot of men.
Trench-mortars and bombs of various sorts put in an appearance
and classes were held daily to accustom the men to the new types
of trench weapons. A 3·7 affair of gas-pipe, throwing a 4½-pound
projectile, was the most prevalent mortar. Prematures and accidents
of all kinds accompanied its introduction, and more than one good man
was killed before the troops learned the intricacies of the bombs.
General Foch was at Cassel with his Headquarters. Dinner in Cassel
was always productive of a talk on instructive and entertaining
subjects. The average French Staff officer was wonderfully "keen on
his job."
The French system of espionage was by no means to be despised. The
reports from their "agents" were astonishingly accurate.
That Staff work should be the subject of many an after-dinner chat
was but natural. The French view of the difference between French and
British Staff work, compiled from many a conversation with officers
of all ranks, I understood to be generally as follows:--
British Staff work could not fairly be compared to French Staff work,
because of the lack of opportunity accorded the British Army, before
the War, to handle large bodies of troops. Furthermore, the English
Army contained many officers who entered the Army as something in
the nature of a pastime rather than a serious profession. Some of
these officers even went through the Staff School, though lacking
that devoted concentration on their profession as a life-work, which
characterised their French prototypes. Very few officers entered the
French Army and qualified for staff positions who did not look upon
a military career in a very serious light. French Staff officers
gained their steps by force of sheer merit and close application to
their work.
Nothing else counted, they said. Not a big staff, but one that was
efficient beyond all question, was the French aim.
The British soldier, I found, was in most instances frankly conceded
to be the best war material in the field--friend or foe. That the
British leaders often bungled was openly alleged, but by no means
always proven in argument, at least, to my satisfaction.
A failure to arrange support, a badly planned attack, bad Staff work
here and there, were quoted in more than one instance.
"It is the soldier who suffers," said one of the most brilliant
Frenchmen with whom I met. "He suffers in silence. Perhaps he what
you call 'grouses,' but he stands it. The French soldier would _not_
do so in anything like the same spirit. The waste of men and the bad
handling of them that once or twice I have seen on the British front,
would ruin a French commander for ever."
Universally the French officers praised General Sir Douglas Haig. He
had completely won their admiration at Ypres.
"But the best of the British Staff work," said another French
officer, "is that it is improving. The English are not afraid to
admit they don't know, and are quick to absorb new ideas. Give them
time."
I have quoted the more trenchant criticisms that came to my ears,
for they fell from the lips of the keenest and most brilliant French
Staff officers, invariably those who held the British Tommy in the
highest possible esteem.
These officers were from the class of man one would choose to put
in charge of a dry dock, a line of railway, a huge business or a
gigantic manufactory. They impressed me as good "business men." More
than a few British Staff officers I met, particularly in the Cavalry
arm of the Service, were equally clever, and every whit as keen on
their work, but no one who wished to be impartial could fail to
note the inclusion now and then, on the Staff, of men to whom one
would never dream of entrusting the management of a large commercial
organisation or the conduct of an important factory plant.
The 3rd and 2nd Cavalry Divisions having each done ten days of
trench occupation in the Ypres Salient, on February 23rd, the 1st
Cavalry Division moved to Ypres to take its ten days of duty in the
firing line.
The run to Ypres, _viâ_ Steenvoorde and Poperinghe, was a trying one.
The road surface was inconceivably damaged and very slippery. All
manner of French and British transport and general traffic filled the
highway.
[Illustration: The Rue de Menin in March, 1915, looking west over the
Menin Bridge across the canal moat]
[Illustration: Officers under the stone lion on the Menin Bridge at
Ypres]
In the western edge of Ypres, in front of the first cluster
of houses--buildings shell-marked and war-scarred from long
bombardment--three grimy mites were playing in the dirt at the
street-side. Further on, a trio of little girls in soiled black
frocklets were enjoying a game of tag. Across the street they darted,
under the wheels of cars and lorries, missing the hoofs of the
passing horses by inches. One bright-eyed little girl, out of breath
from dodging a fast-drawn artillery limber, took momentary refuge
in a ragged gap in a shell-shattered dwelling. As we approached the
Grand Place more children were to be seen, then a number of adult
townsfolk. Round the gaping ruins of the once beautiful Cloth Hall,
in the main square, the number of people in evidence might well
have led one to believe that the bombardment of Ypres was past and
done with. Ruins, the work of shells and conflagrations, were on all
sides, but no one noticed them. French and English soldiers and their
officers, with a liberal smattering of civilian Belgians, filled
the pavements. Down the Rue de Menin, at the approach of the Menin
Bridge, we found the headquarters of General Hubert Gough, of the 2nd
Cavalry Division, located in a brewery standing in the shadow of the
high moat wall. The trenches lay, roughly, three miles beyond the
city walls to the eastward. The junction of the British left with the
French right was south of the Menin Road, in front of Zillebeke. The
trenches we were to occupy ran east and west and faced south.
Detachments of sturdy French infantry marched past, their uniforms
faded to a pale blue. With swinging step, each individual marched to
his own time. I admired their fit and willing appearance. They were
campaign-worn as to kit and clothing, but campaign-hardened, rather
than worn, as to themselves.
A constant stream of people came and went. How long would the
civilian population of Ypres remain to pay its toll of dead whenever
the Germans decided further to shell the town?
Three women passed, two of them bearing month-old babies in their
arms. Noting my interested glance they smiled and waved as they
trudged on. What a place for a baby!
An old bent crone, crowned with a richly beaded bonnet of ancient
type, in odd incongruity to the ragged condition and mean original
state of the remainder of her apparel, hobbled along, pausing now and
again to pick up and store safely in her apron small pieces of coal
that had been dropped from a passing wagon.
More French soldiers passed. Then a couple of British officers rode
by in the picturesque uniform of some Scotch regiment of the line.
A transport wagon rumbled by, and behind it came a young girl, with
a bucket of water on her head, smilingly exchanging banter with a
soldier of the British military police, at the corner of the street.
It was a quiet Spring afternoon, a bit overcast. Hardly to be called
lowering, and yet of a stillness that seemed ominous. A day to fit
all the mixture of folk going stolidly, carelessly, gaily, or how
they would, about their daily tasks.
No one seemed to realise that they were in Ypres--the Ypres which
had so often been shattered by shell that the poor old town could
hardly be surprised by any sort of new shell-caprice. No one saw the
rent walls and gaping holes in every other building. I wondered if
they could hear the guns! I could do so. They were hard at it every
moment, all the time, from two to three miles distant. It was the old
story of familiarity breeding contempt; or perhaps they were true
philosophers, these Ypres folk.
General de Lisle ran to Potijze, to the headquarters of General
Lefebvre, who commanded the French 18th Division. It seemed ages
since I had been in Potijze. Our headquarters were not far beyond it
in November, 1914, during the great first battle of Ypres.
On the way from Ypres along the Zonnebeke road we passed bunches of
odd little French horse transport wagons. The road was very bad. We
progressed in crawfish fashion, most of the way. The _pavé_ was torn
terribly by shell-fire, and there was sufficient mud and slime on it
to make it extremely slippery. French soldiers were billeted in the
dwellings along the road. At the edge of Potijze a dozen young boys
and girls stood outside a house.
Returning to General Gough's headquarters we "took them over," as
that night we were to relieve the 2nd Cavalry Division troopers in
the trench line.
General de Lisle and Colonel Home ran up the Menin Road a kilometre
or so, and, leaving the car, walked across the fields past the ruins
that will always bear the name of "Cavan's House."
The General told me to put the car in the shelter of a house on the
south side of the road, as shell-fire and the Menin Road were never
strangers for long. I settled down to wait until the General had
concluded his rounds of the prospective positions.
The Ypres-Menin Road will be remembered oh! so long, and oh! so well.
It saw rough times.
Field guns near by started to work, and now and then German shells
dropped in a field beyond.
The house behind which I was sheltered, in case of a stray shell,
was a one-storey affair of modest mien.
Those of its windows which were not shattered were shuttered. Half
of the roof had been shorn of its tiles. A shell had wrecked the
interior of one end of the building. A glance out of a rear door-way
showed a whole collection of shell-holes in the yard a few feet
distant.
A door that still remained in position bore four lines of legend:
"Vin a vingt
Sous la Bouteille.
Confiture, allumettes.
Bougies, chocolate."
Glancing through one of the remaining panes of a window by the
door, I saw a glass jar containing a couple of sticks of chocolate,
beside it three jars of jelly, a box of French matches, a blue paper
packet of half a dozen candles, a score of small oranges in one
box, and in another, alongside it, seven or eight very dry-looking
kippers. Peering through the partly-obscured glass one could see a
stolid-looking, red-faced, albino-haired woman.
"Business as usual," with a vengeance! Such an odd curiosity shop
as this was not to be passed without examination, so I entered and
talked to the woman.
Her whole stock-in-trade was what I had seen through the window. She
was cheerful enough, though she huddled for warmth over a fire by
which sat a despondent-looking brother. She chatted laconically about
the situation, and told me she had been there continuously throughout
the fighting. The shell that hit the building was a shrapnel and came
a month before. Shells still came near, now and again, but that fact
seemed to be accepted by her as inevitable and not to be worried
about. These people had no means of existence except the sale of
their pitiable bits of provisions. They were in daily danger of their
lives. Yet they stayed on--odd folk. Typical Belgians.
The gun-fire dropped, then began again spasmodically. I could hear
the snipers at work. In the gathering twilight the rattle of rifle
fire and the storm of the rapid-fire guns sounded clearly on the
left. A fusillade on the right reminded me that the Ypres position
was a salient. Directly in front, down that Menin Road, which had
seen the taking of so many tens of thousands of lives during the
past months, a roll of rifle fire made waves of sound.
Night fell, cold and damp. The making of a light was not permitted;
so I waited in the dark, watching the night lights rise and fall over
the trenches, until the General and Colonel Home returned, when we
ran back to Ypres for dinner.
My first four days in Ypres were uneventful. On the fifth, I went up
into the trenches, and saw more of actual trench conditions than I
had seen for some time.
Our daily round led me out on the Menin Road, well towards Hooge,
or to Potijze on the Zonnebeke Road, several times each day. Shells
went over us now and again. Rarely did a day pass when the Huns did
not bombard the railway station in Ypres. As we were quartered in the
eastern edge of the town the shells aimed at the station bothered us
but little. Sometimes a Black Maria lit on the moat wall, where we
walked at times, but we timed our exercise so that our promenade and
the arrival of the big shells never coincided. Once or twice bits of
shell fell over the Headquarters buildings, or rattled down on our
paved courtyard, but rarely.
Every morning saw Ypres wrapped in a snow mantle, which was turned
before noontide, to a coverlet of black mud. No fires were allowed,
except small wood blazes in the open, as smoke from a chimney would
have invited a shell.
One day I was searching for a shop where bolts could, once upon a
time, be purchased. As I was going down the Rue de Lille, half a
dozen shells fell near. One demolished a house but fifty yards ahead.
I took shelter in a doorway, and as I did so a Belgian of woebegone
appearance, his most characteristic feature a pair of sad, drooping,
yellow moustachios, ambled past me down the roadway, pushing a
wheelbarrow. On it were three tiny tots, all under four years old.
They cuddled together for warmth. One, round-eyed, at the crash of
the howitzer shells, was hard at work with a nursing bottle. I warned
the Belgian of impending danger, but he stolidly trudged on. Luckily,
no more shells came for a time.
The Menin Road proper was never healthy. I spent as little time on
it as consistent with the proper performance of my work. I never sat
for an hour in its vicinity, waiting for the General, that some shell
did not fall near it.
One afternoon shrapnel fell for an hour near a fork on the Menin
Road, which all sensible men gave a wide berth to when convenient.
Fifteen minutes after the bombardment died down, a procession filed
by the fork, headed for a graveyard in the direction of Hooge. A
white-robed boy, with red-tasselled black cap, led the way, bearing a
cross. Behind him came a robed priest, then an ancient, dilapidated,
one-horse hearse containing a rude, black coffin. A score of
mourners, one or two of them men, the rest women and children,
dressed in their poor best, brought up the rear.
I wondered that they ventured down that shell-swept highway. Yet many
such pathetic little processions passed along that road in those days.
I saw one _cortège_ wait for a cessation of the shelling, then
proceed slowly over the ground that had but a few minutes before been
peppered with bits of shell. It was an odd sight. A tiny lad trotted
in front under a large wooden cross painted purple. A quartette of
little boys behind him bore a rude unpainted sort of stretcher,
apparently improvised from the nearest bits of shattered timber to
hand. The coffin, resting upon this frame, was covered with a dingy
white sheet. A mother, bowed and feeble, followed the coffin. A few
youths and a handful of little girls formed the straggling _cortège_,
tramping over the snow-covered cobbles, their eyes downcast and red.
Death was no stranger in Ypres in those days, but still the Belgians
stayed on.
The wall of a ruined building, across the road from the Cloth Hall,
fell one morning with a loud crash. A column of dust arose. That many
were not injured was surprising. One woman was killed and a couple of
passing French soldiers hurt, but post-card vendors were exhibiting
their wares under an adjacent wall, equally dangerous, an hour later.
General de Lisle went personally over the whole of the line held by
his Division. The 1st Cavalry Brigade was in the front trenches for
the first five days, the 2nd Brigade in reserve. Then the 2nd Brigade
took over the trenches and the 1st Brigade came back, for the second
five days, to the dug-outs.
At points in the line the trenches were knee-deep and sometimes even
waist-deep with cold mud and water. The amount of manual labour
required to get them into better shape was enormous. New trenches had
to be dug, the old parapets strengthened, the trenches drained, and
all the while certain mining work must be pushed on at a rapid rate.
In some parts of the line the parapets of sandbags had become so thin
that a Mauser bullet could plough through them easily. The German
snipers were at one place only thirty yards distant.
The drainage of the worst bits of trench, and the laying of a sort of
corduroy road from point to point, soon made the trenches much more
habitable.
De Lisle was most thorough. Only a couple of casualties occurred
when the 1st Brigade "took over," in spite of the constant sniping.
Careful preparations of foot baths and relays of dry socks saved the
Division from the epidemic of "foot-casualties," from which some
other divisions had suffered heavily. A dozen casualties per day
were inevitable from shells and snipers. Those who had to "go up"
with food and ammunition had to cross a dangerous zone, a certain
toll being taken day and night, in some localities.
Inspecting the trench-line, when the Division had occupied it but the
night before, was a precarious business. De Lisle and General Briggs
were going over the ground when a German sniper but fifteen to twenty
yards distant opened fire. Lieutenant Bell-Irving, General Briggs'
A.D.C., received a nasty wound in the hip. He fell in the deep mud.
Colonel "Tommy" Pitman, of the 11th Hussars, jumped out into the
centre of the trench, and strove to lift Bell-Irving clear, and get
him behind the protection of a transept. The bullets flew about the
Colonel, two cutting clean through his clothing, one on either side
of his body, but he escaped unhurt, and pulled Bell-Irving into
safety.
[Illustration: The Grande Place at Ypres and the Cloth Hall, March,
1915]
[Illustration: The choir of the ruined Ypres Cathedral]
But the trouble was by no means over. A sharp fire was kept up by
the Hun snipers, which prevented the removal of Bell-Irving to
the dressing station. Captain Moriarty of the R.A.M.C. came up at
considerable risk, and advised that the wounded officer be brought
back at the earliest possible moment.
There were no means of doing this save to construct a traverse of
sandbags, behind which Bell-Irving could be carried. The work must be
done under the heavy sniping fire. The troopers of the 11th Hussars
at once set about the work with a will, and soon accomplished it, but
not before a private had been killed and a sergeant wounded by the
German marksmen.
That night a bombing party "cleared out" the district near that
transept, and made the snipers' point of vantage untenable.
Each night a splendid pyrotechnic display showed the curved outlines
of the Salient. The German trench lights were far superior to ours.
Each night, too, Ypres was full of French or British lines of
soldiers marching on in the dark to relieve some of their fellows in
the trenches outside the town.
The ruins of the Cloth Hall, and of the St. Martin Cathedral by it,
formed interesting studies for my camera. The fine mural paintings
on the walls of the roofless Grand Gallery in the Cloth Hall were
crumbling to bits. My photographs were the last records made of
them, for they fell piece by piece not long afterward.
I watched operations at a French Divisional Headquarters one evening.
It was not more than a mile back of the line. Wagons were loading,
preparatory to being taken trenchwards at dusk. Timber, thousands on
thousands of empty bags, rolls of barbed wire, odd shaped completed
wire entanglements, metal shields varying from curved sheet-steel
bastions a dozen feet in length to small V-shaped iron castings,
all manner of wooden troughs, boxes, stands, supports, periscopes,
braziers, rolls of fine wire, boxes of trench bombs and grenades,
shovels, picks, and many peculiar tools were among the collection of
material that was to find its way to the firing line. I learnt much
of the business side of trench warfare that night.
The supply of ammunition and food and its distribution are most
methodically managed by the French.
Taking up giant powder for mining operation was an item of the day's
work. A story was told by one of our sappers, of a couple of Irish
troopers who had started across the fields in front of Zillebeke as
night was falling, with a good sized load of powder in a box. Shortly
after they left Cavan's House shells fell in profusion over the route
that they had chosen. Another group started trenchward, carrying
various types of grenades. Howitzer shells were falling, front and
rear, and shrapnel bursting a few hundred yards away.
A flash and a crash came from in front.
"Them fellers with the joynt powder was like to be in that shindy,"
said a member of the second party. "Close to 'em, it was, sure."
A moment later they came upon a strange sight. There in the field,
just visible in the gathering darkness, sat the box. Behind it
reclined the two troopers, snuggling close for cover.
"What are you doin' in this 'ere peaceful spot, Dan?" questioned one
of the second party as they reached the box.
"Takin' cover the whiles we do a bit of a rest-like," was the reply.
"The divils sent wan so clost, it shure jarred the wind out av us, it
did."
And they snuggled closer to the giant powder as he spoke.
Hour by hour I watched the "75's." Their marksmanship was wonderful.
The rapidity with which the guns were served was an eye-opener. The
French gunners burst shrapnel practically over the heads of our men
in the front trenches, to cover the area twenty-five yards beyond
them. One trooper swore a French shell, aimed to worry sapping
operations by the Huns a short distance in front of our trenches,
came so close that it knocked the top sandbag off our parapet.
Certain it was that the word was frequently passed to "lie low while
the '75's' fire just above us."
My day to go up to the trenches came at last. My guide was Captain
Bretherton, the Staff Captain of the 1st Cavalry Brigade.
[Illustration: Scenes of battle of olden time in colours on the
shattered walls of Ypres Cloth Hall]
[Illustration: A communication trench leading to the front-line
position in the Sanctuary Wood]
Leaving my car at the "Halte," a point where the railway crosses the
Menin Road, and the Zillebeke Road branches off to the south, we
were soon slipping, sliding and ploughing along through the muddy
fields. We followed no particular pathway, avoiding where possible
fields where enemy shells were falling. The rotting mangel-wurzels
dotted the ground all about us. Shell-holes in thousands, positions
where French or British batteries had made a stand, trenches in
lines and circles, and barbed wire entanglements, caught my attention
at every step. Sprinkled everywhere were all manner of pieces of
projectile--from complete 6-inch German shells, unexploded, to blue
shrapnel cartridges, bright-nosed timing fuses, and jagged bits of
all shapes and sizes.
Cavan's House was but a wall, a pile of shapeless bricks and mortar
beside it. Cavan's Dug-out, a series of holes in the road bank,
roofed with sandbags, held a signal party. Every day a storm of shell
visited the spot, and Hun snipers made one wary thereabouts.
We walked on, up the roadway, our objective the Sanctuary Wood. The
bullets sang over us, and shells burst in front with a continuous
din. A path led through the scrub. Entering the wood, we passed
innumerable little individual funk holes. The trees were in splinters
and tatters. Here I saw an abandoned shirt, there a khaki cap. My
foot hit against a regulation mess tin, and as it turned I saw a
rifle-hole drilled in its bottom. Now we were ankle, now knee, deep
in sticky mud. Bullets became more plentiful overhead.
A turn down a muddy path led us through a last piece of woods,
across sloughs of slime, over a creek, up a slight slope, and there
we were at General Briggs's Brigade Headquarters. These were a line
of dug-outs in the hillside, a corduroy road winding from entrance
to entrance. A deep approach trench, looking like a drain, led one
hundred and fifty yards further to the front trenches.
Shells fell all the afternoon on our right and behind us, and the
song of the Mauser bullets never ceased. At dusk, I was "safe" back
in Ypres.
On my way back through the woods, shell-smashed, that covered the
gentle hills through which the front line trenches ran, I saw a
burial party.
I stopped a moment, and watched the laying to rest of all that was
mortal of three troopers who had paid the great price.
Their comrades placed them reverently in the shallow graves in the
soft earth of the hillside, marking each grave with a white wooden
cross bearing each hero's name, his rank, and regiment.
Oh, those rows of rude wooden crosses! What thoughts their memory
brings to mind! Gone now, many of them, ploughed under by long
months of shell-fire, or trampled under foot by the ebb and flow of
battle, as the lines have swept back and forth with the tide of war.
Gone, perhaps, from the scarred and mangled hill-sides of Flanders;
but never to go altogether from the hearts of those who knew them,
and who realised their worth.
CHAPTER III.
On March 1st Captain "Babe" Nicholson, of the 15th Hussars, who had
joined General de Lisle's staff in place of Captain Cecil Howard,
16th Lancers, promoted to General Allenby's staff at Cavalry Corps
Headquarters, had to make a careful map of our trench position.
Captain Bennie Wheeler, 15th Hussars, in temporary charge of
Divisional Signals, also had duties that took him to the trench line.
As neither Captain Nicholson nor Captain Wheeler had made the
two-mile tramp across the fields and through the woods, I was
instructed to act as guide. To skirt one edge of a field was safety
of a comparative sort. To walk along its opposite edge meant dodging
snipers' bullets in plenty. To turn from the road to a path through
the scrub kept one out of sight of the Huns, while to proceed a dozen
yards beyond the turning would expose one to a fair chance of being
shot, at good range, by crack German marksmen.
Leaving our car at the Halte on the Menin Road, we essayed the route
past Cavan's House that I had travelled a couple of days before with
Bretherton.
Bang! bang! bang! bang! went a quartette of shrapnel just ahead.
"I don't think much of your route," said Nicholson.
"I'll change it with alacrity," said I. "Which way shall we go?"
"I know an old route that we followed in the days of the fighting
last autumn," Wheeler volunteered. "If we push down the Menin Road to
a point near Hooge, and then turn off, we can't get _far_ wrong."
"Lot of French were hit in Hooge yesterday," I reminded him. "The
Huns shell it two or three times every day, so best not go too close
to it."
We tramped down to the foot of the hill that led up to the ruins of
what was once Hooge, then passed through a demolished farm. For a
hundred yards, at every step, we sank knee-deep in the foul, slimy
mud.
Then we wound over trenches which were nearly inundated, and through
barbed wire entanglements that seemed to become more impassable
as they lost their original form, until at last, covered in
perspiration, we reached a dense wood.
A tiny creek ran deep through a sharp cutting, in the sheer banks
of which the French gunners had burrowed like rabbits. Battery on
battery of "75's" were hidden in the forest. Each gun was surrounded
by a little hut of mud and leaves, an aperture left for each slim,
blue-grey muzzle. We passed the first of these batteries without
seeing it. Close behind us it opened fire, causing me to jump as
if I had been shot. Before we left the wood, three other batteries
went into action about us. The din was terrific, but the sound of
the shells racing overhead was most fascinating. Each gun crew had
cleared a neat line of fire in the tree-tops in front of its position.
Over further fields and through another wood we came upon a most
picturesque cantonment. A French Infantry Brigade in reserve had
built hundreds of mud huts and dug-outs with charming ingenuity.
Dozens of veteran architects, past masters of rude shelter
construction, vied with each other in improving on previous designs.
As I took a snapshot in the dull light under the trees, the French
soldiers crowded forward in twos and threes, and smilingly invited me
to photograph their _maisons de luxe_.
Cavan's House, our landmark, we left well on our right, edging from
it the more as we saw it a very storm centre of fours and eights of
shrapnel that morning.
Snipers' bullets sang merrily above as we reached the reserve line
and Brigade Headquarters. My work as guide finished, I started back
with General de Lisle, who, having come up early in the morning, had
left his horse in the wood which sheltered the French reserves.
Mounting, the General pointed out a new route for my return, shorter
than the one by which I had come.
"Keep that rise of ground between you and the line of high ground
beyond," said de Lisle. "If you don't, the Germans will see you and
pot at you."
Crossing my first field, I seemed to be well in the line of
spent bullets, as several kicked up the dirt in the front of me
sufficiently close to make me imagine myself the target. I lost
little time for the first few hundred yards.
A maze of reserve trenches and wire pulled me up short. The only path
through was a quagmire. Safe beyond at last, I started collecting
German timing fuses, which lay thick on the surface of the muddy
field.
Not far on my left was a ruined farm. The sun came out amid the
swiftly-moving clouds. "A splendid example of what shells can do to a
group of buildings," I thought. "I must get a picture of the piles of
_débris_."
I circled the smashed houses, took my picture, replaced my camera in
its case, and turned to look sunward, as the clouds had cast a dull
shadow all about me. An open bit of blue was racing toward the spot
where the sun was hidden. Should I wait for it and essay a further
snapshot?
As my eyes sought the sun, a bright flash in front of me, in my very
line of sight, almost blinded me. A deafening explosion and the whirr
of scores of shrapnel bullets was followed by another flash. Crash!
The second shell seemed nearer than the first.
The pluck! pluck! pluck! flop! of bits of projectile striking in
the soft mud all about me came from every side. Little spurts of mud
and water were thrown up close around me. I imagined I could feel
the breath of passing shrapnel bullets. A bit of stick hit me in the
face, and a gob of black mud landed squarely over my mouth.
So many mud-spurts threw up in front of me, on my right, and on my
left, it seemed to me impossible I had escaped being hit.
I must have been in the very vortex of the shell's storm-centre.
Turning, thanking God I had so miraculously escaped when death had
seemed so near, I dashed off as fast as I could run, heading blindly
for the general direction of the Menin Road.
Fear lent wings to my feet as I realised I had, in my interest in
my photography, advanced into plain sight of the line of heights of
which General de Lisle had warned me.
I had not run a dozen steps when I thought of my heavy load, in
pockets and hands, of shell heads. I tossed them away as I leaped on,
tempted for a moment to hurl my camera after them.
Bang! Crash! Behind me came a second pair of shells, whose coming I
had dreaded every second. To my delight, but one or two bullets came
my way.
"I am gaining," I thought.
Bang! bang! another two burst overhead, throwing their deadly
contents beyond me in the direction in which I was running.
I ducked to the right and ran diagonally to the Hun line of fire.
Panting, I struck a deep bog. In I went before I realised it lay in
my path. In a twinkling I was in a pretty mess. My feet sank deep in
the slime and ooze. It took great effort to raise them. Well over my
knees in mud, I felt trapped, but struggled on.
At last I trod on firmer bottom, and soon was racing away at much
better speed.
Crash! Bang! I could see over my shoulder that the last two arrivals
had burst over the muck through which I had just floundered, throwing
spurts of liquid mud high in the air.
The Hun gunners were gradually increasing their range, though I was
well out of sight of them.
My breath came in great sobs, but I dared not slacken.
Bang! Bang! Two fell behind me again, but not so near. That
encouraged my flagging footsteps, and I jog-trotted on, until at
last the Menin Road was before me. Reaching it, I laid down, utterly
exhausted. The shells continued to burst nearer and nearer the road,
and came in fours after the first half-dozen couples, twenty-four
shrapnel having been fired in all.
Two British gunners, attached to a siege battery near by, hurried
past me as I lay recuperating.
"Bad place to be, this," said one of them. "They shell this bit
of road every day about this time. Those two holes were made
yesterday"--pointing to two cavities not ten feet from me.
So I pulled myself to my feet and pushed on for "home," arriving
safely enough, though completely tired out and literally plastered
with mud.
As I was resting at Headquarters, one of the Staff told me I had
"missed some fun" while "out front." Six Black Marias had landed
on the earthen wall of the moat, not many yards from our brewery
quarters, "shaking things up a bit," but fortunately hitting no one.
Examining my camera, I discovered, to my great chagrin, that the
shutter had been inadvertently set at "time" when I took the snapshot
of the ruined farm, away from which I retired in such a hurry. So
I missed getting the picture which cost me such a strenuous race
against the shells. As a solace, my photographs of the French
reserves in the wood, and of our Brigade Headquarters, came out quite
satisfactorily.
Shells fell not far from our Divisional Headquarters next day. More
than once the signals-men brought in pieces of shrapnel, quite hot,
that fell in the courtyard, which from that time began to lose its
popularity as a lounging-place for waiting orderlies.
A run to Hooge, and a wait there in a dug-out while the Huns threw
a dozen shells about it, was made memorable to me by Nicholson's
reconstruction of a bit of the fighting over that ground in November,
1914.
Nicholson had been with the 1st Infantry Division--a Division that
had Haig for a leader. At the beginning of the War it had come out
14,000 odd strong. In six months its total list of casualties had
reached 34,000.
In the first battle of Ypres its battalions had suffered cruelly. The
1st Coldstreams had been annihilated. The Queen's (West Surreys) came
out of the line with but fifteen men and no officers, the Black Watch
with but sixty men and one officer, and the Loyal North Lancashires
with but 150 men and two officers. When the Division came back to
billets, it was commanded by a brigadier-general. Every colonel
in the division had been killed or wounded, and the brigades were
commanded by officers of all ranks. A captain was in command of one
brigade.
It was in front of Hooge, between that town and Gheluvelt, that most
of the heaviest losses of the 1st Division were suffered.
Nicholson had seen some of it. One night the Prussian Guard broke
through the line on the Menin Road. Nicholson's squadron of the 15th
Hussars, acting as Divisional Cavalry, were sent to stop the gap.
Forty troopers and forty cyclists, eighty rifles all told, went up.
They had no trenches, as the Prussians held our original position.
So they lay in a sunken road near the Herenthage Château. The Germans
occupied a wood sixty yards away, though neither force knew of the
whereabouts of the other until dawn.
Nicholson sought out General Fitzclarence, commanding the 1st
Brigade, in the dark. Most of Fitzclarence's Brigade had been
killed. Efforts to clear up the situation had borne little result.
Every messenger he had sent out for information had been killed.
Fitzclarence said five brigades were to be sent to him, with which
he was to counter-attack. The five brigades came, and were found
to total 1,000 men all told. Yet with the remnants of his force
Fitzclarence counter-attacked at dawn. Though he himself was killed,
his wonderful men won through. The position was recaptured, and Ypres
saved.
A glorious page in the annals of the British Army, though it cost
England men who were indeed hard to replace.
Our 1st Cavalry Division had come into the line that night, and
supplied the reinforcements without which the exhausted troops could
not have held on much longer.
Consequently the ground over which those heroic battles had been
fought was of fascinating interest to those of us who had seen the
most strenuous struggle of the War.
"As to the losses of the enemy," Nicholson told me, "I once scouted
the wood in front of us. It was a terrible sight. In many places
among the trees I could not set my foot without stepping on a dead
German."
But the work of Haig and his super-men had been crowned with success.
We had held the Ypres Salient, and were still holding it--a glorious
record.
On the morning of March 3rd Nicholson found it necessary to go once
more over the line of our front trenches to verify his map. I was to
go with him.
Rain fell all morning, and we splashed over the cross-country route
to Brigade Headquarters and the reserve line without incident, bar
snipers and itinerant shells, most of which sang over our heads on
their way toward Ypres.
One portion of the approach trench leading to the firing-line was
so narrow that "Jeff" Hornby, of the 9th Lancers, A.D.C. to General
Mullens, waded through it at my heels, "to see the President (my
sobriquet) get stuck fast"
In spite of the rain, I procured a sufficient number of photographs
to show trench life as no written description could picture it.
The top of the hill was cut and seamed with trenches at all angles,
some narrow, some wide. The trench walls had been in a few places
reinforced with tree trunks, though, for the most part, from two to
half a dozen rows of sandbags served as protection. The line was
rarely straight for more than a few yards.
The troopers in the front trenches were either standing about, near
machine-gun or rifle, engaged in cleaning kit or accoutrement, or
sleeping in one of the tiny shelters that lined the trench sides at
the rear.
The fact that there was no uniformity to the trenches as to height,
width, or direction made caution necessary as we wound along them.
Expediency was the law that governed their original construction, and
experience the guide as to their alteration and development.
[Illustration: Officers of Lancers in their dug-outs in the
front-line trenches]
[Illustration: A dug-out in front of Zillebeke]
Loop-holes covered with bits of sacking were marked by pieces of
paper pinned above, warning occupants not to tarry in the line of
German fire.
By periscope we could see the Hun trenches, not many yards distant,
and dozens of dead Germans lying between the two lines. The smoke
from the enemy's cooking fires rose slowly in the damp atmosphere.
At corners, cautions to "keep down" were posted. Snipers' bullets,
heralded by a sharp bark and twanging musically, kept me down without
much warning.
A German sniper's position was pointed out to me, and I had some good
rifle practice endeavouring to dislodge him, but with questionable
success. The Hun riflemen had learned to lie very low in front of our
troopers.
We passed one of the 4th Dragoon Guards' marksmen, his eye along the
barrel of his rifle as it lay in a loop-hole. As we came up he fired.
"Got him?" asked Nicholson.
"No," laconically answered the sharpshooter. "Got one this morning,
though, sir. And I hope we are not shifted out of this for a day or
so, as there are a couple more of the beggars I'll get if I'm given a
bit of time."
Seeing a trooper of the 9th Lancers whom I had known since the Great
Retreat, I asked him how much longer his squadron was booked to be in
the front trench.
"Only twenty-four hours or so," was the reply. "But we could stick
this sort of thing for a week and not kick. They're behavin'
themselves much better as they go on," and he grinned as he nodded
his head at the German trench. "They're learnin'."
Now and then an enemy marksman sent a bullet through a loophole in
front of us or behind us as we proceeded down the line, until we
learned to pass these danger spots without loitering.
Once we found it necessary to double back along a shallow trench a
few yards behind the main parapet. The ditch we traversed was deep
with cold water, which ran over the tops of my high boots.
The damage to the trees was so extensive that shells might be said to
have literally cleared away the forest in some localities.
In spite of water in the trenches, the men were cheerily comfortable,
many of them gathering around glowing brasiers or cuddling close to
the wall of a cosy dug-out.
An enforced detour nearly landed us in an impasse. We had taken the
wrong turning. The trench parapet became lower, the trench narrower,
and the cold water deeper. Pressed for time, we pushed on. At last
Nicholson, who was leading, saw an angle of front line trench ahead,
and ran for it. I followed. Bullets sang overhead as the Huns got a
glimpse of us, but we ducked low and splashed through for dear life
in record time.
Nicholson became so interested in a view through a periscope that
I took a picture of him while thus engaged. A genial acquaintance
in the line offered to get a similar photograph of me. So I took
the periscope, waving it slightly back and forth, and carefully
inspecting the German trench forty yards distant. I detected a
movement on the enemy side of the line. Steadying my periscope, I
focussed my attention on the moving object.
As I did so, "Ping! smash!" came a bullet right through the top of my
periscope.
"A clean bull," said Nicholson, beside me. "Are you hit?"
I had been about to call his attention, when the sniper scored, with
the result that a shower of broken glass fell into my open mouth.
I was in great fear of swallowing some of it. Nicholson, seeing me
dance about and spying a fleck of blood on my lip, thought I had been
hit in the mouth by a glancing bullet.
He proffered help, I prancing about, gesticulating that I was all
right, spitting out glass, but afraid to speak until I had cleared
the last piece of broken mirror. The Captain entirely misunderstood
my dumb show, and we caused some merriment among the troopers near by
until I managed to eject the final bit and could explain that I was
not in the least hurt.
When I learned that one officer had suffered a badly cut eyeball,
threatening the loss of his sight, and another had been seriously
wounded in the jaw and neck by just such an incident as the one I had
experienced, I was thankful to have escaped injury.
The "trench stoop" was astonishingly fatiguing. Covered from head
to foot with yellow sticky mud, and very tired, we started to walk
to the Menin Road. The snipers were more alert than usual, and more
than one close call kept me from thinking of my weariness. Before we
reached our car the German batteries shelled madly at the very point
we were to pass, but considerately stopped firing by the time we
approached the spot where the shells were falling.
One morning "Mouse" Tomkinson and Hardress Lloyd had walked down
to Zillebeke, where folk rarely went in the daytime, to inspect
some of the graves in the Zillebeke churchyard. Hardress Lloyd's
brother-in-law, Colonel Wilson, of the Blues, was buried there.
I promised Captain Lloyd that if I could get off to do so, I would go
down to Zillebeke and take a photograph of Colonel Wilson's grave.
Hearing of my projected trip, Lord Loch, who was at that time
G.S.O. 1, on the staff of General Bulfin, commanding 28th Division,
asked "Babe" Nicholson to obtain for him, if possible, a picture of
the grave of Lieutenant Gordon-Lennox, which is also in Zillebeke.
Hardress Lloyd and Tomkinson told us they had been seen in the
churchyard by the German artillery observers, who had commenced
shelling. I was warned, therefore, that any photography I wished to
do in that locality must needs be done quickly.
On March 4th Nicholson and I set out to obtain the desired
pictures. I stopped on the way, at a cemetery on the Menin Road,
and took a photograph of the graves of three officers of the 10th
Hussars--Captain Annesley, Lieutenant Drake, and Captain Peto--who
had fallen in the first battle of Ypres.
Zillebeke was lonely. On one edge of it a couple of signal corps
men were laying a wire. Otherwise the town, which was in ruins, was
deserted.
We kept under cover of the houses as much as possible. I obtained a
good snapshot of the damaged church, and then took some pictures in
the graveyard, which was torn with great shell-holes.
"Remember what Hardress said about the Huns being able to see us
here," I said to Nicholson. "Let's get out of it."
We started. No sooner were we under cover of the first cluster of
smashed houses than four shrapnel shells burst right over the _pavé_
roadway, not fifty yards ahead of us.
[Illustration: The Zillebeke Church, March, 1915]
[Illustration: German prisoners in Ypres, captured after the
explosion of a British mine near Hooge]
I dodged into a house, the walls of which, minus roof, were still
standing at drunken angles. Doorless and windowless, the house seemed
to offer little protection.
"I don't like going up that road over the hill," said I. "We will be
in sight of the Huns for some distance. I wonder if this house boasts
a cellar?"
Examination showed a cellar existed, but it was nearly full of water.
"I guess the cellar steps provide the best roosting-place," was my
conclusion. "Me for the lowest one for a bit. Won't you share it with
me?"
"I don't like it," replied Nicholson. "We will be much better out of
it. Let's go."
We argued the various possibilities, but Nicholson was so strongly in
favour of departure that I acquiesced, and we started away.
We had gone about one hundred feet when a series of crashes close
behind us quickened my pace. Nicholson turned and looked. I called to
him, and he again came on.
As he came up he said: "Did you see where that lot landed?" "No," I
answered. "Too close to suit me, but just where I didn't notice."
"It interested me," said he, as we pushed on, "because all four of
those shells exploded in that rickety old house in which you were so
keen on taking cover. But little would be left of us by now had we
stayed, for the poor building collapsed like a house of cards."
The Germans shelled the road vigorously as we kept on, but luckily
the shrapnel fell behind us, and we were soon back in Ypres.
That day saw the German gunners increase their shelling all along the
Ypres front. The trenches occupied by our division were vigorously
bombarded, and several casualties reported. Ypres itself came in for
a heavy share of the Hun "hate." The windows rattled and our house
shivered as the howitzer shells smashed into all quarters of the town.
De Lisle visited the trench line, and both there and on his way back
across the fields the shells fell very close to him. As he entered
the headquarters house on his return, he said: "From what I can see,
most of the big ones are falling at least four or five hundred yards
from us thus far, but they may shell us out of this at any time."
The General suggested I should take a stroll with him along the
moat wall and watch the trend of the bombardment. As we walked along
the ramparts, the projectiles screamed overhead in dozens, seemingly
coming continually closer. The rumph! r-r-r-rumph! as they exploded
shook the high wall and made the whole city rock with the concussion.
The Rue de Lille was rendered impassable that day.
General Plumer called, and after his departure I again started for a
stroll on the ramparts. The shells searching for our batteries just
across the moat were a fascinating sight. As I ran up the steep path,
however, a crash came just ahead, and bits of metal showered about,
striking sharply against the trees beside the path. My curiosity
evaporated instantly, and I came down faster than I had gone up.
As dusk came, I took Major Fitzgerald to Hooge, from whence he went
through a wood to the trenches to make the final arrangements for the
explosion of a mine--the construction of which had been worked upon
feverishly for some days--that all might be completed and the mine
fired on that night, our last one in the trenches. The French, who
were to relieve us, had also constructed a mine on our left, and the
two were to be discharged at an interval of five minutes.
First the French mine was to be fired at 7·45 p.m., and 7·50 to the
tick of the watch was to be the time for the explosion of our mine,
less than a hundred yards away from the French one.
I was seldom in Hooge when it was not shelled, and that evening was
no exception. The French had built safe dug-outs under the buildings
still left standing. The château was completely ruined, as were most
of the houses in the village.
As I was being entertained by a French officer, who produced a glass
of splendid red wine, some thirty shells burst over us, most of them
of the 210-millimetre type. One of them knocked off a corner of the
building behind which I had sheltered my car.
Never was a locality more offensive to one's olfactory nerves than
Hooge. It fairly reeked with all manner of various noxious smells.
The English language contains words of too mild a character to allow
a description of that feature of Hooge.
The front line was less than a kilometre distant. Rifle fire swelled
and died away in long, rattling breaths. I became so accustomed to
the punctuation of my conversation with shell-smashes and periods
of heightened din from small arms and machine-guns that, when all
would die down suddenly for an instant, the stillness felt ominously
oppressive. The next spasm of sound came as a relief to the uncanny
moments of twilight silence.
A French engineer officer joined us. He told us General Lefebvre, the
French General in command of that section of the Salient, had issued
most elaborate written instructions for the joint explosion of the
two mines. The French mine, he said, had been ready for two or three
days, its charge lying at the end of a tunnel but two metres from the
German trench.
The hour for the discharge of the French mine came, but no sound or
shock of explosion came with it. The hands of the Allied watches,
carefully synchronised, crept round to 7·50, then to 7·55.
Just before eight o'clock a huge bang was heard by the British sapper
who was waiting in his tunnel, ready to fire his mine.
"At last," he murmured. "Now I must count off the five minutes to the
second."
A squadron of the Queen's Bays was ready to rush into the enemy's
trench. Ten of them, the forward storming party, were waiting in a
saphead.
One, two, three, four, and at last, _five_.
Boom!
The whole earth seemed thrown skyward. The shock was terrific. Nearly
one thousand pounds of blasting powder had tossed fifty yards of
German trench, not two hundred feet in front of our line, high in air.
The great smash came as a complete surprise to the Huns, but, alas!
an equal surprise to French and British.
The explosion which the British sapper, in his tunnel dug-out, had
mistaken for the discharge of the French mine, had been a huge German
_minenwerfer_, or trench-bomb, thrown by a trench-howitzer.
The French mine, inexplicably delayed, had not been fired.
For a moment confusion reigned. Three men of the half-score Queen's
Bays in the storming party were hurt. One suffered a broken arm, and
the others, hurled aside by the unexpected explosion of our own mine,
were badly bruised and strained.
In an instant, however, every man in the line realised what had
occurred, and the Bays went forward with a yell, occupying about
fifty yards of German first-line trench and the gaping crater left by
the mine.
Fortifying the captured position and installing therein a couple of
machine-guns, they met the enemy's counter-attacks staunchly.
For three hours and a half they kept the ground won, but at last were
bombed out. The Huns threw hundreds of grenades among them, while our
poor supply of trench-bombs ran out in but a few minutes.
I chatted with the remnants of the storming party when they came
back. Many gruesome tales they told. One German soldier was blown
high in the air, over a fringe of trees, and found some distance back
of our front line, quite 150 yards from his own trench.
A trooper noticed a movement near a pile of timber, earth, and
sandbags. Peering through the dim light, he saw a hand waving about
aimlessly. Grasping it, he pulled with a will. A comrade assisted,
and soon they unearthed a buried German.
The prisoner was a funny little fellow--a stocky Wurtemburger in
green corduroys and a knitted helmet. When rescued, he lapsed into
unconsciousness for an hour. He had been through the first battle of
Ypres, he said later, in which he was the only one of his regiment
to escape death or a wound. Blown high in air, very, very high, it
seemed to him, he felt a great mass of _débris_ fall upon him.
He told us, in a spirit of resignation to his fate, that to have
lived through the October and November fighting on the Menin Road,
and be thrown skyward by a mine, then buried, and still live,
entitled him, he thought, to spend the rest of the War, without
disgrace, in an enemy prison.
The French exploded their mine at one o'clock in the morning, and by
daybreak the 1st Cavalry Division had "turned over" to them, and was
on its way back from Ypres to billets in a more quiet locality.
Motor 'buses moved the men back, as they had brought the dismounted
troopers up. The long lines of London 'buses, with khaki-painted
windows, rendering their interior lighting barely visible, looked odd
in the black Ypres streets. No outside lights were permitted.
To hear one bell, see the dark shape of the clumsy vehicle slow down,
then hear the two bells that signalled departure, next the grinding
crunch of gears, and finally, to see the ghostly 'bus slide forward
in the night, brought strange parodies of London memories.
General de Lisle had planned to leave Ypres at twelve noon on March
5th. We left half an hour earlier, by chance. Next day we learned
that ten minutes after our departure a Black Maria struck the very
building we had occupied during our ten days' stay in Ypres, blowing
the back of it through its front, and generally demolishing the
premises.
One day, subsequently, I visited the house to learn if so strange
a coincidence of timely evacuation was true, and found that the
story was correct in every detail. The interior of the place was one
mass of smashed walls and partitions, the _débris_ bulging from the
doors and windows of the front of the building, which still remained
practically intact.
The handling of the Division during its occupation of the Ypres
trenches reflected great credit on General de Lisle.
We left our trenches in much better shape than that in which we had
found them. Some casualties were inevitable, but the total number of
men killed was only eleven during the ten days, a low percentage when
the strength of the Division, not far short of 2,500 rifles in the
line, was considered.
At daybreak on the morning of March 10th the British attack was
launched which was to become known to history as the battle of Neuve
Chapelle.
For several days the weather had been cold, raw and damp. On some
days it rained and blustered, while at night snow fell, and the wind
howled unceasingly. The morning of the 9th dawned clear and cold, the
stormy weather having been driven away by a hard frost. The Tommies
in the trench line were treated to every vagary of the treacherous
climate of Flanders in March.
My car indulged in periodical attacks of the dumps and finally
became a nuisance. Accordingly I ran to Sailly, where the Canadian
Divisional Headquarters were located, and sought the Divisional
Repair Park, which proved to be at Merville. On the 8th I left the
car in the hands of the Canadian boys for a few days' repair. On the
Canadian front I learned from an acquaintance of a projected attack
of considerable magnitude, spurring me on toward getting my car in
runnable shape at the earliest possible moment.
On March 9th, in Merville, I saw Sir Douglas Haig's Special Order to
the First Army, issued that day, which read as follows:--
"We are about to engage the enemy under very favourable
conditions. Until now in the present campaign, the British Army
has, by its pluck and determination, gained victories against
an enemy greatly superior both in men and guns. Reinforcements
have made us stronger than the enemy in our front. Our guns are
now both more numerous than the enemy's are and also larger than
any hitherto used by any army in the field. Our Flying Corps has
driven the Germans from the air.
"On the Eastern Front, and to the South of us, our Allies have
made marked progress and caused enormous losses to the Germans,
who are, moreover, harassed by internal troubles and shortage
of supplies, so that there is little prospect at present of big
reinforcements being sent against us here.
"In front of us we have only one German Corps, spread out on a
front as large as that occupied by the whole of our Army (the
First).
"We are now about to attack with about forty-eight battalions
a locality in that front which is held by some three German
battalions. It seems probable, also, that for the first day
of the operations the Germans will not have more than four
battalions available as reinforcements for the counter-attack.
Quickness of movement is therefore of first importance to enable
us to forestall the enemy and thereby gain success without severe
loss.
"At no time in this war has there been a more favourable moment
for us, and I feel confident of success. The extent of that
success must depend on the rapidity and determination with which
we advance.
"Although fighting in France, let us remember that we are
fighting to preserve the British Empire and to protect our homes
against the organised savagery of the Germany Army. To ensure
success, each one of us must play his part, and fight like men
for the honour of Old England."
In the evening when I returned to 1st Cavalry Division Headquarters
I found the servants packing. My servant said on my arrival, "Your
kit is ready, sir. We are to shift out of this at six o'clock in the
morning. A big push is on."
The Cavalry was to "stand by," in case the infantry attack succeeded
and a hole was made in the German line.
The guns began before daylight, and hundreds of them, with an
amplitude of ammunition, made a pandemonium.
I begged a ride in a G.H.Q. car and found myself during the forenoon
near the headquarters of General Davies of the 8th Division.
Not many days before, General de Lisle had called at Estaires, and
we had been hospitably given lunch by General Davies, when we had
learned something of the general topography of the line on the 8th
Division front. The ground in that sector was so water-logged and
soft that it did not admit of the construction of a trench line such
as we had held in the Ypres Salient. Each small point of vantage to
the east of Laventie--a house here, or a rise of ground there--had
been made into miniature forts by the British or the Germans. A
trench line proper existed, but consisted, from the nature of the
terrain, of trench-works and parapets of sandbags, all above ground.
These were less impregnable than a trench line in solid ground, and
could much more easily be demolished by shell-fire.
The road from Estaires to La Bassée, on the morning of March 10th,
was full of advancing troops and returning wounded. General Davies'
headquarters were said to be at Rouge Croix, not far west of the town
of Neuve Chapelle.
I did not go as far as the cross roads at Rouge Croix, as that point
was under heavy German shell-fire.
Little could I see except the enemy's shells, and still less could I
learn. That the 8th Division had taken the front line German trenches
was common rumour.
Finally a wounded subaltern, a mere boy, came back, hysterically
cheerful in spite of a nasty wound in his arm. He belonged to the
25th Brigade--Lincolns, Dorsets, Rifle Brigade and Wiltshires.
"We took Neuve Chapelle," he said. "Many casualties? Yes, plenty. You
see, we had orders to take the bally town at all costs, and we did
it!"
He was sure his fellows had the ridge that commanded Aubers, and had
heard that our men on the right had reached a point a couple of miles
beyond La Bassée. Cheerful lad, that. Neither the Auber Ridge nor
La Bassée was to be ours, but it was not for lack of his sort. He
and his kind, with the men behind them that fought that day at Neuve
Chapelle, could have taken Aubers and Lille beyond it had someone not
blundered that 10th of March.
Weeks passed before the occurrences of that fateful day were
made clear to me. Every sort of rumour was afloat. On the 10th
and the 11th I was between Merville (where General Haig had his
headquarters), Estaires and Laventie, but no one seemed to know in
those days as to just why things had gone so badly when the promise
of success had been so great.
Later I knew.
General Haig had been quite reasonably correct in his estimate of the
enemy's strength. Our chance to break through the German line was the
finest opportunity of the whole war.
That, with such odds in our favour, with a preponderance of guns and
shells as well, we should have so signally failed, and lost over
18,000 men into the bargain, required some explanation.
The tragedy of Neuve Chapelle was a failure to take advantage of an
initial success. The 25th Brigade, with the 23rd Brigade on its left,
nobly did the work assigned to it. It took Neuve Chapelle itself, and
reached the position it had hoped to reach. The 24th Brigade was to
come up, through the 23rd and 25th Brigades, and as it advanced, the
20th Brigade, on its left, was to move forward. Still to the left of
the 20th Brigade the 21st Brigade was in readiness, and on its left
the Northamptonshire Yeomanry, which had been put into the trenches
previously occupied by the 20th Brigade, to free that command for the
attack.
Thus, once the preliminary ground-clearing was done by the 23rd and
25th Brigades on the right, and the town of Neuve Chapelle was taken,
the 24th Brigade was to come on and form the right of a line composed
of itself, the 20th and 21st Brigades, which were to pivot on the
Northamptonshire Yeomanry and sweep over the Auber Ridge.
On the left of the Yeomanry waited the 22nd Brigade, ready to jump
forward the moment this swinging movement had developed.
The initial success won, the whole line waited, eyes on the right,
for the signal to go on. Before nine o'clock in the morning all was
ready, and the road cleared.
All day the watchers waited in vain.
It was after four o'clock in the afternoon before the word came.
It was then too late.
The great opportunity had been lost, and lost for ever.
The Germans had rallied, filled farms with machine-guns, and mowed
down the gallant 23rd and 25th Brigades men who had so dearly won
such splendidly advanced positions.
The 24th Brigade had come on part way, then concentrated, and was
sadly cut up. That the line on the right had "dug-in," instead of
moving forward, had resulted in a defeat when a great victory was
within grasp.
And who was to blame?
A Brigade commander and the General in command of the artillery of
a certain division were promptly "Stellenbosched." A divisional
commander was reported sent home; his case reopened when he declared
the fault was not his, as could be proven by certain hitherto
unproduced papers from corps headquarters. A further inquiry resulted
in his being reinstated. His corps commander went to England.
"Sent home," said many. Shortly afterwards, back he came, to the
discomfiture of the prophets, and took up his old command.
Who was to blame?
It is too early to tell. Let the writers of the future dig the story
out of the tangled orders of the day, as between corps and division,
division and brigade.
No battle of such magnitude could be won without fine Staff work, and
the work of more than one staff on that 10th of March left much to be
desired.
One thing cannot be gainsaid. The men in the ranks fought like
heroes. Nothing that men could do was left undone by them.
One officer who saw as much of Neuve Chapelle, and knew as much
of the tragedy as any one man said to me: "The word 'concentrate'
caused all the trouble. The troops that might so easily have come on
had orders to concentrate along a certain road. That was the root
of the mix-up. They concentrated, dug-in, and waited for orders, in
accordance with their instructions. Those instructions did not come
until half past four in the afternoon. The whole day had been wasted.
The time had flown, and the great opportunity with it."
The cavalry would have had a fine part to play had all gone well.
The 2nd Cavalry Division was drawn up back of Estaires, the 3rd
Cavalry Division in the Forest of Nieppe, and the 1st Cavalry
Division was ready at its billets. A hole in the German line meant a
strong push through by the three cavalry divisions.
On the right of the 7th and 8th Divisions the Indian Corps had hard
fighting, the day of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle. The Gurkhas, one
of their officers told me, took a wood, lost it, took it a second
time, lost it again, and a third time took it, only to be driven out
at last owing to the fact that no support was available.
On a visit to Bethune one day I heard dozens of stories of the fierce
fighting on March 10th, on the 2nd Division front, where one Brigade
lost twenty-five officers and seven hundred men in an abortive attack.
But the interest centred around the 8th Division fighting, that
began so well, then hung fire until the Germans recovered from the
demoralization of the smashing blow.
How utter was that demoralization we learned later from "agents"
near Lille and Tournai. The Germans were actually "on the run" that
morning, and pressing forward would have indubitably borne results
that would have loomed large in the trend of events.
On March 15th, the 1st Cavalry Division was called out at dawn, and
placed in support of the 27th Division at St. Eloi. Just before six
o'clock on the evening of the 14th, the Huns had fired a mine at
St. Eloi, and then poured a rain of high explosive shells over our
trenches for half an hour. The howitzer shells exploded so rapidly,
that one continuous roar ensued, the separate detonations being with
difficulty distinguished.
The moment the German guns stopped their fusilade, the German
infantry rushed forward, the attack developing all along the 5th
Corps front. St. Eloi itself, the southern re-entrant of the Ypres
Salient, was soon in enemy hands.
By two o'clock on the morning of the 15th, a British counter-attack
was launched. By daybreak each force held some part of St. Eloi, and
the fighting grew fierce and fiercer. By night all the town was in
British hands save one point, a mound which had been transformed into
a kind of fort by the enemy.
During that fighting, the 4th Battalion Rifle Brigade was sent up
to take a section of trench out of which one of the other 27th
Division Battalions had been shelled. Once before, within the hour,
another battalion had essayed to recapture the lost position, and had
"retired" in considerable confusion.
The Rifle Brigade set its teeth and started for the hottest part of
the fray.
"You must cross that road," its commander was told, "though Heaven
only knows how anyone can get across it alive."
Sixteen Hun machine-guns were playing on the open space over which
the battalion must pass.
Over it they went. In less than sixty seconds eleven officers and two
hundred and fifty men were down, but the rest pushed on.
They reached the trench, some of them, cleared out the Huns with the
cold steel, and consolidated the position--a splendid performance.
The 5th Corps made good the ground the Germans had won without
calling on the 1st Cavalry Division troops for assistance, and thus
ended the last chance of our Division for active fighting during the
month of March.
Inspections in the Flemish mud, bright sunshine and spring zephyrs
one day, and snow the next, and more than once snow and sunshine
alternating throughout the span of a day, marked the passing of the
month.
Paris, Calais, St. Omer, Estaires, Lillers, Merville and Hazebrouck
were visited by enemy airmen as the days went by, and bombs dropped,
but without much damage to lives or property.
"The Huns don't care whether or not they hit anything," said one sage
"sub." "They only want to show Sir Douglas Haig they have a copy of
that March 10th Order of his wherein he said 'Our Flying Corps has
driven the Germans from the air.'"
On March 25th I spent the morning in Bailleul at 2nd Corps and 3rd
Corps Headquarters.
The Staffordshire Brigade of the North Midland Territorial Division
marched past to the music of their fine brass band, drawn up in the
square--the first band I had seen or heard since leaving England
seven months before. Crowds of soldiers and officers flocked to hear
it and see the sturdy Terriers march by with swinging step. They
created a splendid impression.
The next day my work was to take General Lowe and General Lumley
over the path of the early fighting in Flanders--from Meteren through
Bailleul to Armentières, thence to the line on the Ploegsteert Hill
and through the Ploegsteert Wood.
We stopped in the town of Ploegsteert, where, in the churchyard,
General Lumley's son, a gallant young officer in the 11th Hussars,
was buried.
The boy had been killed on October 17th, when our Division was trying
to force a way across the River Lys. At Le Touquet Lieutenant Lumley
was reconnoitring a position preparatory to an advance when a German
sniper's bullet struck him.
As the General visited his son's grave I learned from townsfolk how
things had fared with them.
Months before the 1st Cavalry Division had been the first British
contingent to enter Ploegsteert. The people told me of the severe
shelling the town had suffered, though the shattered church and a
black hole where the principal _estaminet_ once stood were surrounded
by many other evidences of the damage of the Hun gun-fire.
"We have been here through it all," said an old lady whose French had
a heavy Flemish accent. "We go into the cellars when the bombardment
begins, and when it ends we come out and go about our work. What else
could we do?"
Some townsfolk had been hit, but none killed, they said. The merry
baker, whose brown bread had been so greatly enjoyed by our mess, had
been hit by shrapnel bullet a few weeks before and killed. His wife
was running the bakery still, though in but a small way, she said,
sadly.
The Bois de Ploegsteert and the line in its vicinity was much the
same as when our Division had left it months before. The wood was
perhaps a little more smashed, the château a bit more flattened.
Our batteries fired regularly as we walked about, their shells
whirring over our heads without eliciting a single reply shot from
the Huns.
Down the corduroy roads through the Ploegsteert Wood and to its
trench-line, where the men were far from uncomfortable, the path
seemed sufficiently familiar to have been there for years instead of
months.
Next day, the 27th, my work took me still further afield. General de
Lisle, with General Briggs and General Mullens and one or two members
of their staffs, were to walk over the reserve line of trenches from
in front of Kemmel to Dickebusch. One of General Smith-Dorrien's
Staff officers was to accompany them.
Dismounting from the cars at the Station Inn, on the Neuve
Eglise-Kemmel Road, the party headed for the reserve trenches. I was
instructed to convoy the other cars in the party to a spot on the
Ypres side of Dickebusch.
"Don't stop at the cross-roads," said Captain Walker of the 2nd Army
Staff. "The Germans shell the cross-roads two or three times every
day. It's best to run up the Vlamertinghe Road a couple of hundred
yards and wait there. You are not so likely to be hit."
Past Dranoutre and Locre, and thence through La Clytte and Dickebusch
my route led. Familiar ground of months past, every inch of it. Here
and there fields had been ploughed well by shell-fire, and many once
familiar buildings along the way had been shattered or destroyed. It
was uncanny to find that more than one spot which I had in former
days selected as a daily stand for the car had become a great gaping
hole dug by a huge howitzer shell.
Huts beside the road teemed with Tommies.
As I entered La Clytte I well remembered my last day there, in
November, 1914. Major Steele, of the R.A.M.C., and Captain Baron Le
Jeune, a French liaison officer, both of them popular members of the
1st Cavalry Division Headquarters Staff, had been killed in La Clytte
by the same shell. Another shell had that day gone close over General
de Lisle and me as we were leaving the town.
Picking my way past a clumsy farm wagon, I thought of those days of
"close calls." I was thankful no shells had fallen near me _that_
morning.
As I drew past the cross-road in La Clytte, however, a scream sounded
over my head, and a shell burst in the field not one hundred feet
beyond me.
I was off like a flash, abandoning all thought of saving my car from
the rough bumping over the broken _pavé_. It seemed weird, that lone
shell, so close to me in La Clytte. No more came, or at least, if
they did so, I did not hear them, and I soon passed Dickebusch.
A two hours' wait in snow and sun and snow again saw the arrival of
General de Lisle, and we were promptly off for "home."
Such days were fair samples of my work until March winds had ceased
to blow, and April, with its promise of an early spring, had come.
CHAPTER IV.
On April 1st, I heard at G.H.Q. that within a few days the French 9th
and 16th Corps, which were in the Ypres area, were to be moved south.
The British were to take over the line from the Belgian left near
Bixschoote, and make a continuous British line from that point to the
left of the main French front near the La Bassée Canal. Events were
to happen which prevented the completion of this plan--events due to
a German initiative.
The days grew warmer, though rain fell with sufficient frequency to
keep the fields deep with mud.
Rumours of a "push" could be heard everywhere. It was timed by most
prophets for April 24th or 25th, though some declared it would
develop by the 20th.
Many there were who scoffed at the idea of an advance. One story
current at G.H.Q. told of a subaltern of an infantry battalion, which
had long occupied the Ploegsteert trenches, who paid a visit to a
brother officer in another division, which had been marooned in the
Kemmel trenches for what had seemed an interminable period.
"You will notice," said the Kemmel man, "my men are planting
daffodils on the parapets to hide 'em. We hope to have the line quite
invisible in the course of time."
"Humph," replied he of Ploegsteert, "you _are_ a lot of blooming
optimists. _My_ men have planted acorns in front of _our_ ditch."
On April 3rd, Lord Kitchener came to Boulogne by torpedo-boat. On
the next morning, Sunday, he landed, came through St. Omer, where
he was joined by General French, and proceeded to Chantilly, where
a conference with General Joffre was held. On the following day,
Lord Kitchener and General French met General Foch at Amiens. A dash
to St. Omer, where Sir John remained, then a rush to Boulogne, and
England's War Minister was again aboard his torpedo-boat and speeding
back toward Whitehall.
As news of this visit spread over the Army, rumour piled on rumour of
the new "push" that was to accomplish such great results.
True, sinister minds attributed Kitchener's visits to the large loss
in men and the small gain in ground of Neuve Chapelle, but they were
greatly in the minority.
We obtained a copy of the _Lille War Gazette_, a newspaper published
by the German Army in Lille, which contained many items of
interest. Chief among them was an article by a Hun named Kaden, a
lieutenant-colonel of a line regiment. The following is a translation
of this article, which caused much comment:--
FIRE.
BY LIEUTENANT-COLONEL KADEN.
As children, many of us have played with it; some of us have seen
an outbreak of fire. First a small tongue-like flame appears; it
grows into a devastating fury of heat. We out here in the field
have seen more than enough of it.
But there is also the fire of joy--of sacred enthusiasm. It arose
from sacrificial altars, from mountain heights of Germany, and
lit up the heavens at the time of solstice and whenever the home
countries were in danger. This year fires of joy shall flare
from the Bismarck columns throughout the length and breadth
of Germany, for on April 1st, just one hundred years ago, our
country's greatest son was born. Let us celebrate this event in a
manner deep, far-reaching, and mighty!
Blood and Iron!
Let every German, man or woman, young or old, find in his heart
a Bismarck column, a pillar of fire, now in these days of storm
and stress. Let this fire, enkindled in every German breast, be
a fire of joy, of holiest enthusiasm. But let it be terrible,
unfettered; let it carry horror and destruction! Call it hate!
Let no one come to you with "Love thine enemy!" We all have but
one enemy--ENGLAND!
How long have we wooed her almost to the point of our own
self-abasement? She would none of us, so leave to her the
apostles of peace, the "No War" disciples. The time has passed
when we would do homage to everything English--our cousins that
were!
"God punish England!"--"May He punish her!" This is the greeting
that now passes when Germans meet. The fire of this righteous
hate is all aglow!
You men of Germany from East and West, forced to shed your blood
in the defence of your homeland, through England's infamous envy
and hatred of Germany's progress, feed the flame that burns in
your souls. We have but one War Cry: "God punish England!" Hiss
this one to another in the trenches, in the charge; hiss as it
were the sound of licking flames. Behold in every dead comrade a
sacrifice forced from you by this accursed people. Take tenfold
vengeance for each hero's death!
You German people at home, feed this fire of hate!
You mothers, engrave this in the heart of the babe at your breast!
You thousands of teachers to whom millions of German children
look up with eyes and hearts, teach Hate, unquenchable Hate! You
homes of German learning, pile up the fuel on this fire.
Tell the nation that this hate is not un-German, that it is not
poison for our people. Write in letters of fire the name of our
bitterest enemy. You guardians of the truth, feed this sacred
hate!
You German fathers, lead your children up to the high hills
of our homeland, at the feet of our dear country bathed in
sunshine. Your women and children shall starve: bestial, devilish
conception. England wills it! Surely all that is in you rises
against such infamy!
Listen to the ceaseless song of the German forest, behold the
fruitful fields like rolling seas, then will your love for this
wondrous land find the right words, "Hate, unquenchable Hate!
Germany, Germany above all!"
Let it be inculcated in your children, and it will grow like a
landslide, irresistible, from generation to generation.
You fathers, proclaim it aloud over the billowing fields, that
the toiling peasant below may hear you, that the birds of the
forest may fly away with the message: into the land that echoes
from German cliffs send it reverberating like the clanging of
bells from tower to tower throughout the country side:
"Hate, Hate, the accursed English, Hate!"
You masters, carry the flame to your workshops. Axe and hammer
will fall the heavier when arms are nerved by this Hate.
You peasants, guard this flame, fan it anew in the hearts of your
toilers that the hand may rest heavy on the plough that throws up
the soil of our homeland.
What CARTHAGE was to ROME, ENGLAND is to GERMANY.
For ROME as for us it is a question of "to be or not to be."
May our people find a faithful mentor like Cato.
HIS CETERUM CENSEO, CARTHAGINEM ESSE DELENDAM for us means
"GOD PUNISH ENGLAND."
Some people laud the "thoroughness" of the German Army.
I wonder if they laud the "thoroughness" of its hate.
The Army under Sir John French was assuming considerable proportions
early in April. In addition to the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th,
7th, and 8th Divisions, the 27th and 28th, the Canadian Division
and the Divisions of the Indian Corps, as well as the 1st, 2nd and
3rd Cavalry Divisions and the Indian Cavalry Division, were well
seasoned. The North Midland, 2nd London and South Midland Territorial
Divisions were "out," and fast gaining experience and a good
reputation with it, while the Northumberland Territorial Division was
on the way.
G.H.Q. information summaries in the early days of April said
laconically, "Nothing to report on the British front," and were
generally fairly correct.
On the 8th and 9th the roads leading from the Ypres district were
filled with French troops moving southward. The veterans of the 9th
Corps limped past, frost-bite having visited most of them during
their long sojourn in the trenches of the Salient.
Lines of French guns ambled by, "75's," with their graceful light
grey lines, were eminently business-like, their gunners clad in dark
blue cape-overcoats that looked warm and comfortable.
The 1st Cavalry Division was given a new brigade, the 9th, which
consisted of the 15th Hussars, 19th Lancers and the Warwickshire
Territorial Battery.
Bumping over the bad roads at good speed meant frequent car trouble.
I was fortunate to find Harold Smith, the Royal Automobile Club
Engineer, one day at Boulogne, where he was superintending the
installation of a first-class motor repair plant for the Red Cross
Ambulances. Mieville, of the Red Cross, in whose hands were all
matters pertaining to Red Cross motor vehicles, proved a good
Samaritan. Between Mieville and Smith my decrepit car was given a new
lease of life.
The Army Service Corps would have done well to have "co-opted" Smith
and one or two more like him. His repair shop at Boulogne, when
completed, was so far ahead of any repair park possessed by the Army
in France that comparison made the Army shops look very bad indeed.
Yet Smith's work was done in three weeks or less and a building of
quite a temporary character utilised.
While I was in Boulogne an Army Service Corps captain came to
Harold Smith and said: "I have been told to lay down a foundry, and
unfortunately know nothing whatever about the bally thing. Do you
happen to know anything about a foundry?"
"Well," replied Smith, "have a fairly good idea of what you will
need. Suppose I draw up a specification of a foundry installation
to-night and let you have it to-morrow?"
"Delighted," said the captain. "It would be good of you."
So Smith set to work, duly completed the specification, and turned it
over to the A.S.C. man, who went away, quite happy, at once to put
in the specification as it was handed to him. He admittedly had no
knowledge as to its correctness and was quite satisfied to seek none.
I met Moore-Brabazon, of the Flying Corps, on the quay. With a few
days' leave in his pocket, he was as happy as a sandboy.
"We had a chap rejoin us a day or so ago," said "Brab," "who had a
remarkable story to tell. His name is Mapplebeck. He is an officer in
the Liverpool Regiment, attached to the R.F.C.
"Not long ago, Mapplebeck was up alone on a scout near Lille, when
his engine went wrong, and he had to make a descent. He knew he was
well inside the German lines, but was shocked to see a couple of
Huns, apparently doing sentry duty, not far from where he had planned
to land.
"The two Germans ran toward the machine as it came down, each
grabbing hold of the left wing. The biplane tossed and rolled and
pitched about as it came to rest. Mapplebeck tumbled out on the right
side, dived head first through a thick hedge a few feet distant, and
ran hot-foot down a deep ditch that led to a cross-hedge not far away.
"He lost no time in dodging through the further hedge, and was off
like a hare down another ditch. The Huns must have taken the wrong
turning when pursuing him, as he got clear away and hid in a dwelling
till night.
"Obtaining some peasant clothing, Mapplebeck made his way into
Lille. Though the town was full of Germans, his disguise was so good
he was not bothered in any way. Finding a loyal French business
man, Mapplebeck cashed a London cheque, for which he received
French notes bearing a German stamp. With these he bought a suit of
clothing, and started to tramp the road to Belgium.
"He reached Belgium safely, kept on, and eventually crossed the Dutch
border. Obtaining passage to London, he at once went to Farnborough
and reported. There he was given a new machine which was ready to
come to France. He lost no time in bringing it across the channel and
reporting for duty, just as though nothing unusual had happened.
"One by one we obtained from him the details of his experiences. He
was mightily modest about it all, and laughed at the idea that he had
done anything that was the least bit out of the ordinary."
On April 17th the 2nd Cavalry Division held a horse show at Vieux
Berquin. The horses and the riding were worthy of the best that
Dublin or Olympia could produce.
Sunday, the 18th, I had set aside for a joy-ride. Running to St.
Omer, I picked up Major St. Leger, of the Irish Guards, Assistant
Camp Commandant, and then called at a farm near Meteren, where the
9th Lancers' Headquarters were billeted.
Beale-Browne, "Bimbo" Reynolds, Rex Benson and Alex Graham, were out
enjoying the perfect morning, but we luckily found Captain "Algy"
Court, of the 9th, who had been in the hospital when the Brigade was
at Ypres, and thus missed seeing the Salient. This made him the more
keen to have a look at the famous Menin Road. Calling at General
Mullens's headquarters at Godawaersvelde, in the hope of annexing
"Rattle" Barrett, "Jeff" Hornby or Romer Williams, but finding the
Brigade Staff absent to a man, we pushed on to Poperinghe, where we
procured a very passable luncheon in a crowded hotel.
Finally we reached Ypres, ran through it, and out on the Menin
Road toward Hooge. Court was very anxious to run on to Hooge, but
I had been told a car could be seen by the Huns as it approached
that delectable spot, and I therefore counselled discretion. "Algy"
pressed hard for a visit to Hooge itself, saying he was most eager to
inspect the "trenches to the south of the road." St. Leger wavered,
but finally agreed with me that to "run into one" when joy-riding
would look bad, so we satisfied ourselves with watching the bursting
shells from a safe distance.
Only a few weeks later, "Algy" Court was killed in those very
trenches to the south of the Menin Road at Hooge, when the 9th
Lancers, badly gassed and heavily attacked on front and left
flank--all but outflanked, in fact--held on gallantly during a day of
the fiercest of fighting, and saved the line.
While we were on Menin Road little groups of wounded Tommies came
past. A Canadian Staff officer told us the K.O.S.B.'s, and the West
Kents had rushed a German position on a hill in front of Zillebeke,
after our engineers had exploded a mine under it. About 200 yards of
enemy trench had been taken, and fifteen prisoners, including two
officers, captured. From them it was learned that at least 150 Huns,
most of whom must have been killed, were in the destroyed trench.
"The K.O.S.B.'s and the West Kents," said the Canadian, "are hanging
on to the captured area, in spite of continual heavy counter-attacks
by the Germans. We had just had a message from our chaps asking for
help to hold on."
As he spoke a roar burst forth on the line not far away, seeming
to me to come from a point just south of Cavan's House. For fifteen
minutes Hun howitzer shells fell in scores on the luckless area of
the successful advance. The air reverberated with the crashes of the
huge shells, which fell in such rapid succession one could not count
them.
After we left Ypres, we heard still another fierce deluge of
shell-fire fall on that spot late in the afternoon.
Such was the commencement of the fight for Hill 60, near Verbranden
Molen, which was to be contested bitterly for many a day, costing
thousands of casualties to friend and foe. The next day, the 19th,
the Germans tried to win back the position at the point of the
bayonet, and succeeded in gaining a foot-hold on the southern
slope of the hill, only to lose it after a hand to hand fight that
afternoon.
The Huns also gave Ypres and the Menin Road a heavy shelling for an
hour on the 19th, just twenty-four hours too late to catch our "joy
party." The day of our visit was the last one that found the Menin
Road a safe place, for daily thereafter the 17-inch shells were busy
with the terrible work that was to end in the utter devastation of
Ypres--work which was to continue for the rest of April, through May,
and well into June, with but little respite.
A couple of days later the West Surreys had a fight for Hill 60 that
nearly swept away the battalion. The Germans brought up some field
guns and hammered away at our parapets at close range. When the
West Surreys came out, after gallantly holding the position until
relieved, a subaltern was the senior officer left in command. The
"Princess Pat's," too, were to leave the majority of their officers
there. Hill 60 took toll of all but a remnant of that regiment.
We dropped "Algy" Court at his billets, then hastened to St. Omer,
where a good dinner was awaiting us. St. Leger's mess was always
a cheery one, having among its members Surgeon-General O'Donnell,
Colonel Cummings, of the R.A.M.C., Colonel Warren, of the Army Post
Office, and Colonel Thresher, the Camp Commandant. That night Colonel
Father Keating and Captain Father Rawlinson were fellow-guests, two
greatly beloved "Padres," in either of whom was sufficient subtle
merriment and quiet humour to cheer up a whole corps of pessimists.
A captured German order gave rather gruesome details of a liquid-fire
thrower of sorts, intended, so the order said, for fighting in
streets and houses.
The German official report accused the British at Hill 60 of using
shells containing poisonous fumes.
Odd forerunners, these, in the light of subsequent events, for on
Friday, April 23rd, came the first German gas attack.
The 23rd dawned bright and clear, a perfect spring morning. Soon
after daybreak word came that the Germans had broken the French line
between Bixschoote and Langemarck. The 1st Cavalry Division was
ordered to concentrate between Ecke and Godawaersvelde, preparatory
to being sent up in support.
The Germans had sprung their first gas attack in the grey of dawn,
launching the asphyxiating fumes at a portion of the allied line held
by the 78th French Reservist Division.
The success of the new manœuvre had been extraordinary. That it far
exceeded the most sanguine hopes of the Germans was clear from the
fact that very few troops were available to take advantage of so
great a hole in the allied line. No German cavalry was sufficiently
near at hand to be utilised. That this point was brought well home to
the Huns was made clear to us within very few hours afterward, for
before the second gas attack the Germans had moved up a couple of
corps of cavalry to a point within call.
But the opportunity had passed. Gas, when its use was unexpected,
its effect multiplied by ignorance as to what it really was, and
vague conjecture as to what it might be, and gas when our troops were
expecting it and had been warned as to its objects and dangers, were
very different propositions.
That the German gas attacks were for some time most demoralising,
and often locally successful, was not to be denied; but some part
of the line invariably held, and made the local enemy gain of less
importance. Respirators assisted men to stay in their trenches
in spite of the coming of the noxious fumes. Of far more value
was the gradual realisation on the part of the men that gas could
be withstood, and might or might not envelope them in sufficient
quantity to produce a deadly effect.
Those French reservists who first were wrapped in the strange
greenish-yellow mist that left them gasping for air and dying of
strangulation, were not to be too greatly condemned for the general
scamper that ensued. Under the circumstances, the indefinable and
inexplicable horror would very likely have torn the line from the
grasp of the most seasoned troops of either the French or British
armies. Later I saw battalions of English veterans in utter
demoralization by the coming of the gas, and it was many a day before
the sight of a gas cloud failed to bring great terror to many a
soldier who had to face it.
By ten o'clock on the morning of the 23rd the situation seemed most
serious. Back from the Bixschoote-Langemarck line the French had come
to the line of the canal that leads south from Steenstraate to Ypres.
At a point not far from Boesinghe the Huns had actually crossed to
the west bank of the canal, were at the very doors of Boesinghe, and
had taken Het-Sas and Lizerne to the north. Lizerne was well to the
west of the canal, and on the main Dixmude-Ypres road.
Messages that reached the 1st Cavalry Division, explaining the
situation, were addressed to the Cavalry Corps, Indian Cavalry, 2nd
Army, and the new Northumbrian Territorial Division. All these units
were to be engaged on that front before many days had passed.
General De Lisle ran to 5th Corps Headquarters in Poperinghe before
eleven o'clock. We passed battalion after battalion of the North
Country Terriers along the road, trudging sturdily Ypreswards, or
lying in the fields for a breather.
Ambulances were continually arriving in Poperinghe, full of wounded
and gassed Tommies.
I met Major Moore, of the Canadian Division, who told me the
Canadians had been "at it hard." Another Canadian acquaintance, a
wounded officer, came past, and told me something of the situation.
The Canadians had won laurels that morning by an action which showed
clearly the great military value of individual initiative in the
private soldier. That is the quality that made British generals
think the Australian and New Zealand soldiers who were lost at the
Dardanelles the finest men that had yet been produced in the great
world-war.
In dug-outs in front of Wieltje and west of St. Julien, some of the
Canadians were unaware of the gas attack until the Germans had driven
the French well back and come on after them to such close quarters
that the grey lines were clearly visible to the surprised Canadian
eyes.
Grabbing rifles and ammunition pouches, with no time for company or
battalion formation, officers and men rushed toward the advancing
lines of Huns, and seeking such cover as could be found, opened a
fierce fire at short range. The natural, inborn individual fighting
spirit of men raised in the open--men to whose hands a rifle was no
stranger--met the situation with such instinctive cohesion of action
that the Huns were driven back and the line saved.
A 5th Corps Staff officer told us the Canadians had actually saved
the day and had established, during the early hours of the morning,
a crescent-shaped line from the Canal south-east of Boesinghe to a
point just north of St. Julien, the crescent bending southward as
the line crossed the Ypres-Langemarck road. From this line they were
gradually being forced south by heavy German attacks.
From one to two o'clock our Divisional Headquarters waited by the
roadside in the western edge of Poperinghe while our three brigades
came up, preparatory to a move toward the scene of battle.
That hour of inaction was crammed with scenes that told of the heavy
fighting ahead of us. Lyne-Stephens, convoying a couple of dozen of
the splendid Du Cros ambulances, full to overflowing with shattered
men, hurried past _en route_ for Hazebrouck. As a hospital train of
twelve coaches, every available corner containing a wounded Tommy,
steamed west, scores of motor omnibuses hurried eastward toward the
sound of the guns, every khaki-coloured 'bus with its complement of
the Lancashire and Yorkshire Terriers of the North Midland Division.
Refugees laden with cardboard boxes, pushing loaded bicycles or
pulling-carts groaning under tall piles of household effects, added
to the road's congestion. Detachments of infantry marching on,
guns rattling up, ammunition trains urging their claims to special
facilities for a clear road, added to the _mêlée_.
Over this highway, jammed with two lines of traffic bound in each
direction, the 1st Cavalry Division and its transport pushed its
way, through Poperinghe, where railway trains were debouching long
lines of blue-clad French regulars, and then on along the road toward
Elverdinghe, to the eastward.
General de Lisle went first to Woesten, which we found full of French
territorial troops. Shells had fallen in the village during the
morning, but none were bursting near when we arrived.
We started down the road toward Elverdinghe but had not gone far when
Bang! bang! just in front, then the whirr of shrapnel bullets, the
sharp crack as they struck the _pavé_ a few yards ahead, and spurts
of dirt and dust, told us that the roadway was receiving attention at
the hands of the Boche gunners.
I pulled the car up sharply, and as I did so two more shrapnel
burst a few feet above the road in front of us, the missiles from
the exploding shells singing past and striking all about with nasty
smacks, as if in boasting evidence of a creditable amount of velocity
and precision.
One regiment of our Division was assigned duty as a reserve for the
Belgian left, which was not far north of us. Another regiment was to
act as reserve for the French in front of us. The remainder of the
Division was a sort of general reserve, to be utilised wherever and
whenever necessity arose.
A run to Elverdinghe showed that it had been heavily shelled, the
church being riddled with great holes. Our line was pushed to
the east of the town. An ambulance driver who had been left in
Elverdinghe told me he was sure "someone will get it in this hole
soon," and he proved to be no bad prophet.
As dark closed we learned that the Canadians' line had been forced
back, but the support line had held firm as a rock, and our men were
counter-attacking most gallantly as the day ended. The rumph! rumph!
of the howitzer shells increased in frequency, the cannonade swelling
in volume as the night came.
A good sized château between Poperinghe and Elverdinghe housed our
Headquarters Staff for the night.
A run to Cassel at daybreak was a maddening experience, the road from
Steenvoorde to Poperinghe being packed and jammed with all manner
of horse and motor transport. A big five-ton lorry belonging to
the Canadians had broken down as it was being turned in the narrow
roadway. Result, an immovable barrier across the _pavé_.
If ever in my life I longed to tamper with a job that was "none of
my business," I did so on that 24th of April. Organisation of the
traffic on that congested road could have been so easily done with a
dozen assistants, and hours saved to all users of the road.
Thousands of light French _camions_ were waiting at Cassel for
train-load after train-load of French troops from Arras. The 9th
Corps, which had so few days previously left Ypres, after a sojourn
of there of many months, was being hurried back as fast as steam and
petrol could bring it.
That morning I was given a message for General de Lisle from the
French Corps Commander, to the effect that the British Cavalry was
required in the front line.
Temporary divisional headquarters had been established at the fourth
kilometre stone on the Elverdinghe road, to allow messages from
regiments or brigades easily to find it.
When I arrived with the message I transmitted it to Major Fitzgerald,
then set off to seek de Lisle, who, "Fitz" said, was making a tour of
the line, and could be found either in Woesten or Elverdinghe.
I chose the latter objective. The way was lined by great black French
Spahis, clad in variegated garb and wondrous head gear, for the first
couple of kilometres. As we approached Elverdinghe, all signs of life
vanished. An odd stillness brooded over the immediate vicinity, a
sort of local lull in the maelstrom of sound the shell-bursts were
making and had made throughout the night, a couple of miles to the
eastward.
A half instinctive pause in the edge of the village, and a moment
spent in tense listening, gave me an uncanny feeling of solitude. As
I stood, undecided whether to push on into the town or circle back
for Woesten, the silence was mashed to reverberating atoms by an
8-in. howitzer shell, which fell not far from the town.
Bang! rumph! r-r-r-rumph! Bang! Shrapnel and high explosive seemed to
come together.
Another and another shell followed, then a blinding crash as I
was turning my car and a shell burst in the square not far away,
showering bits of shell and _débris_ over me.
The pieces slap-slapped resoundingly against the metal panels of the
car, and one good-sized stone was hurled against my back.
As I raced away to safety towards Poperinghe, the shells still came
into the village and around it, and followed the road at my back,
urging me on.
Shortly afterwards I saw Captain Bertram Neame, the Adjutant of the
18th Hussars, who had been wounded in the right hand and arm by one
of the shells.
"An aeroplane marked with red, white and blue rings, but evidently a
German flying false colours, circled round over the battery near us,"
said Neame, "and half a dozen German shrapnel fell there at once.
Then the 'plane circled over the farm containing 18th Headquarters,
and another farm which was sheltering most of A Squadron. Immediately
afterwards shells poured into the two farms, and several of the men
were hit."
Months after I read the diary of Captain T. O. Thompson, of the
R.A.M.C., who was attached to the 18th Hussars.
His graphic account of the shelling in Elverdinghe that morning read
as follows: "A Squadron were in the next farm, and all their men
sleeping peacefully in the sunshine against the wall of a barn, when,
without warning, a 'coalbox' arrived and landed full on one man. They
found only an arm and a leg and his head. The next arrived later and
wounded two men. The inhabitants of the farm cleared at a run, and
some French territorials, who had been in that farm for seven months,
went like greased lightning.
"The Colonel (Burnett), and Adjutant (Neame), and Captain H.
(Holdsworth), walked about thirty yards up the road, when a shell
arrived and wounded the Adjutant in the hand and H. in the back. It
hit the Colonel on the back, fortunately on the belt, and slightly
wounded him in the thigh. It bruised the Major, who was twenty yards
away, on the shin.
"The Germans kept on putting shells along the road, and then started
on the village. They were the beastly 8·2 high explosives, and were
going just over us on to the Poperinghe road. Six horses were going
up this road when a shell landed about fifteen yards short of it.
One of the grooms was badly wounded, one killed, being lifted into
and left hanging in one of the trees by the roadside.
"Then the 4th Dragoon Guards came down the road on foot and passed
into the village, but came out again as a shell greeted them in the
square. They came off the road, and came along a hollow near the
stream toward us. The rear squadron was marching along a ditch behind
a hedge-row in two-deep formation when a beastly shell landed right
in the ditch and hurled four of them sixty feet into the air. Two
others were killed as well. Brown, a 4th D.G. Lieutenant, was one
of the four; his hand was found in the stream one hundred and fifty
yards away."
All things considered, I was lucky to get out of Elverdinghe unhurt
that morning.
I found General de Lisle as he was returning from Woesten with
Captain Nicholson; I then ran to Woesten with a message for General
Briggs.
General de Lisle was faced with the fact that he was acting as
reserve to the British left, and therefore suggested to the French
commander that the French reserves should first be used, and the
British cavalry only called upon to occupy the front French line when
no further French reserves were available, a suggestion of which the
French General at once saw the wisdom.
Returning from Woesten, Nicholson and I found we must make a
_détour_, as the narrow country road was completely blocked by French
horse transport.
Dashing into Poperinghe at high speed we were surprised to see the
townsfolk running hither and thither in great fright and confusion.
Six great shells had been thrown the long distance from the enemy
line and landed in the town. They had come but a couple of minutes
before, a scared Belgian told us.
I lost no time, swinging through the square and out on the
Elverdinghe road at high speed. No sooner were we clear of the centre
of the town than Hun shells screamed wickedly over us on their
way toward the railway station, exploding not far behind us with
tremendous concussion. Guns of large calibre were being used by the
Germans.
[Illustration: Damage caused by a 17-inch shell in Poperinghe, April,
1915]
[Illustration: Red Cross ambulances on the coast]
First Cavalry Division Headquarters was moved from the kilometre
stone to an _estaminet_ near by, as the inhabitants had brought up
two great wagons and decamped therein with bag and baggage.
Tales of Canadian prowess and fine work by the 13th Infantry Brigade,
which was sent to their support, were mingled with conflicting
reports of the number of guns captured by the Germans. First, the
loss of a couple of dozen was admitted by the French. Before a week
had passed we knew the number actually taken by the Germans was much
greater.
Ypres, we heard, had been so heavily shelled the day before that the
entire town had been evacuated.
All the morning I watched ambulances full of wounded French soldiers
_en route_ for Poperinghe, file past war-worn batteries of "75's,"
pushing toward the front. The begrimed French gunners, with their
cheery faces, seemed to know the esteem in which we held them and
their splendid guns, and to be keen to get into action and stem the
advance of the Germans, which was slowly but steadily surging towards
us though our men were fighting hard every inch of the way.
The Belgian refugees poured back, forced off the road by the
lorries, ambulances and guns. Slight mothers with numerous progeny,
one, or sometimes two, of the lesser units in arms, toiled by.
Each person, young or old, capable of carrying a load, bore heavy
burdens. Bicycles with huge bundles balanced on the saddle, were
pushed westward haltingly, as road-space permitted. One lad passed on
crutches, flanked by two grand-dames carrying blue buckets crammed
tight with portions of the family wardrobe.
Most of the faces of the refugees bore a stolid, matter-of-fact
expression. Some were quite cheerful. Many seemed stoically numbed
to all feeling. The strong wind tossed their unwieldy bundles,
and they stumbled awkwardly out of the path of hurrying traffic,
their feet bruised against the loose stones that edged the _pavé_.
Tired, dirty, buffeted by the gale, with strained and aching muscles
and broken feet, fleeing from death or worse, and in their flight
abandoning their worldly all, I wondered there were not more signs of
heart-sickness and despair on their thin faces.
Shells screamed over us and ploughed great holes in the British
aviation park east of Poperinghe. After the first half dozen of such
visitors, the Flying Corps packed up and took its departure for safer
quarters.
A wounded Canadian said the 2nd and 3rd Canadian Brigades in front of
us were wiped out as a fighting force. Their trenches, he told us had
been literally blown to bits. A counter-attack by the Canadians, the
13th Brigade and the French 45th Division on their left, had started
well, but failed to achieve much. German batteries and machine guns
greatly outnumbered ours and were taking heavy toll as the battle
surged backwards and forwards.
Before the day was over the French reported that they had recaptured
Lizerne.
Night closed with an increasing din from the arms of all sorts and
calibres on our front, never to cease for the whole night through.
I was sent after dark to G.H.Q. at St. Omer, a journey that meant
many a long hour of tedious waiting in the midst of the tangled skein
of traffic along the way.
Returning at daybreak on Sunday, the 25th, I planned a round-about
route from Steenvoorde to Poperinghe, circling well north of the
main road. I had travelled but a few kilometres when I found the
narrow, muddy road in front of me completely blocked by a train of
French lorries, laden with troops. Some of the vehicles were mired,
and the block bid fair to be immovable for hours. By sheer luck I
stopped opposite a farmyard, in which I turned the car, and not
far back gained a cross-road. A mile beyond the route was rendered
absolutely impassable by two detachments of British transport, which
had met face to face on a road barely wide enough for one.
"We have been here a divil of a toime," said a cheery Irish driver at
the rear of the column, "and from the look of it beyant there, we'll
be slapin' here in the mud this night."
Nothing daunted, I turned, pushed by willing hands when deep mud
made assistance necessary, and headed the other way. But fate was
unkind. Again I found the road barricaded, this time by two signal
lorries that had, like me, tried a _détour_. One had skidded sideways
and stuck fast. The other was trying to pull his fellow back on to
the roadway. Disheartened, I soon tired of what threatened to be a
long wait, and returned toward Steenvoorde. A new convoy of French
troop-lorries closed this avenue of escape, but after an hour of
floundering through almost impassable lanes, I reached Abele, on the
main road, and was soon thereafter in Poperinghe.
Truly an ounce of prevention in the way of road organisation and
route selection by some competent authority would have been worth
many pounds of the condemnation poured forth with volubility by all
road users in those days of tiresome traffic tangles.
Our headquarters moved to an _estaminet_ just outside Woesten.
I learned, on arrival, that at midnight word had come from the French
Commander, General Putz, whose headquarters were but a few hundred
yards distant, to the effect that a mistake had been made in a
previous report, and Lizerne was still in the hands of the enemy.
The roads were filled with French troops moving up, and relieved
reservists coming back, while battery on battery of grey "75's"
wheeled past.
"I don't know where they are going to put any _more_ guns," said
Budworth, our Divisional C.R.A., "the whole country round is stiff
with 'em now."
Fresson, the French liaison officer attached to the 1st Cavalry
Division, sought at French headquarters an explanation of the
situation on the extreme French left, where the Belgian right joined
it.
"Lizerne was attacked by French and Belgians, and Pilkem by French
only," said Fresson, on his return. "The mix-up in the report was
due to the Belgians. The story of Lizerne is indefinite, except
that the Germans were not driven out, as reported. As to the Pilkem
attack, this failed utterly, due to wire, machine-guns, and general
concentration by the enemy of the position they had captured.
"A further attack," continued Fresson, "is to be made this morning at
10.30., when the Pilkem ridge is to be again stormed."
The Pilkem ridge was east of our part of the front, not far distant
from the canal itself. The sounds of battle from the line facing it
were continually in our ears.
General Smith-Dorrien drove by. One of his Staff told me that at ten
o'clock on the night before (Saturday night) 200 Canadians were
still in St. Julien, though the line had been pressed back, leaving
the little band cut off and surrounded by Germans. All night they had
fought on, and were still fighting.
Some of our men had gotten up sufficiently close to hear the
Huns call out to the gallant Canadians in a lull in the firing:
"Surrender, Canadians! We are around you! You have no chance!"
"See you damned first! Come and get us," was the answer sent back in
the night by a clear young Canadian voice, and Bedlam was again let
loose.
That was the spirit of the men that Canada sent to France to fight
for the Empire.
On the Sunday morning, said the Staff officer, a determined effort
was being made to relieve what remained of the gallant 200.
All our attacks that day and those of the French as well failed.
Lizerne remained in enemy hands, and the last of the heroic two
hundred Canadians had evidently fallen in St. Julien before night,
for all sounds of firing from that direction ceased. Strive as they
would, our troops had been unable to reach and succour them, though
costly efforts were not wanting. Weeks and months afterwards anxious
ones waited for word from some of that noble little band in St.
Julien, but no word ever came from German hospital or prison camp.
They had fought on to the last man, to the bitter end!
At night the Germans attacked Broodseinde, east of Zonnebeke, with
great ferocity, but were driven back by our 5th Corps troops.
What was left of the Canadian 2nd Brigade was holding Gravenstafel,
just north of Zonnebeke, and not far to the south-west of
Passchendaele. The Huns poured mass on mass against the depleted
ranks of the Canadians, who were compelled to fall back, evacuating
Gravenstafel, but stubbornly disputing every foot of ground lost.
The night of Sunday, the 25th, closed in, with little in the
situation to cheer us, except the knowledge that the entire vicinity
of the Ypres Salient and the line to the north of it was crowded with
fresh French and British troops and battery on battery of guns.
By Monday night the London Sunday papers had reached us.
What was our surprise to see that the London press was greatly
cheered by the meagre French and British official reports, and
united in condemning the German official reports, which were flatly
characterised as lying inventions.
The German official reports were, as a matter of fact, in that
particular instance, more correct than either the French or British
official reports.
The French report declared Lizerne and Het-Sas to have been taken
from the Huns. The Huns had never been driven out of either town.
The British report was vaguely optimistic, evidently bent on
minimising the German gains. It was so worded that 999 men out of
1,000 would understand from it that most of the ground lost on the
23rd and the days immediately following had been won back from the
enemy. Certain it was that no one would gain the idea from the
British official report that the Huns had been steadily forcing our
line back, that our counter-attacks had failed, and that the Ypres
Salient was then so threatened that no one but a madman would deny
that further reconstruction of our line around Ypres, involving the
giving up of a large section of our front line had become a military
necessity, to be performed at the earliest moment such a manœuvre
could be carried out. Indeed, the section of our line to be abandoned
must needs be far greater than that the enemy had won by his surprise
gas attack against the French.
I do not wish to give the impression from the foregoing that the
German reports were, as a rule, more correct than French or British
official _pronunciamientos_. I think they were by no means so to be
described. In matters of fact, as to captures of men or guns, or
details as to bits of line lost or won, the Hun official reports
were less often incorrect than some might think. Now and then, when
dealing with some matter of conjecture, such as an estimate of our
casualties, they were absurdly wide of the mark. The average French
official report might err slightly as regarded detail, but was
in the main most dependable. Our chief quarrel with the official
reports as issued by the War Office to the British Press was that
they were at times subject to more than one interpretation. Escaping
actual inaccuracy, they did not always convey the impression at Home
warranted by the facts at the Front.
On the morning of the 26th I ran toward Wieltje, and obtained details
of the exact position of the lines.
The French left touched the Belgian right along the Yser-Ypres Canal
north of Lizerne, where the German line was pushed to its further
western point. The French line ran close to Het-Sas and crossed to
the east of the canal a few hundred yards south of Boesinghe.
At a point a couple of thousand yards east of the canal the British
left joined the extreme French right.
From that junction our line ran eastward through Fortuin, a village
half a mile south of St. Julien, then north-east toward Gravenstafel,
then south-east to Broodseinde.
At two o'clock that afternoon a grand attack was planned, all along
that east-and-west line.
The 13th Brigade was on the left; two companies of the Rifle Brigade
and the East Kents came next; five battalions of the 10th Brigade
and a battalion in reserve were near Fortuin; on their right was
the 11th Brigade; east of them were the York and Durham Territorial
Brigades. The Northumbrian Territorial Division was in the Wieltje
area in reserve, and the Lahore Division was coming up to the north
of Verlorenhoek, on the right of the Northumberland Terriers.
Our forces, to be sent forward in attack, numbered over two score
battalions, say, 40,000 men.
The Canadians had been withdrawn from the Salient to take stock of
their battered remnants and fill their ranks with reserves from
England. They had been tried in the fire and could be proud of having
gained the name of one of the most brilliant fighting contingents
that had been seen on the British front since the commencement of the
War.
The French were again to attack the Pilkem ridge at two o'clock,
when the British line, between four and five miles long, was to push
vigorously northward in a desperate attempt to drive the Huns from
the ground gained by gas attack three days before.
Our share in the show was small. The following order was issued to
the brigades:
"At two p.m. to-day the French will attack Lizerne and Het-Sas. The
1st Cavalry Division are ordered to support the left flank of the
French, acting in reserve. The Division will be saddled up by two
p.m. and the horses of the 1st Cavalry Brigade collected in the area
south-west of Woesten. By two p.m. the 1st Cavalry Brigade will
assemble, dismounted, north of the Woesten-Oostoleteren road, about
the nineteenth kilometre stone, ready to support in the direction
of Pypegaale, if required. The 2nd and 9th Brigades will remain in
their present positions, ready to support the 1st Cavalry Brigade
dismounted."
This gave vague promise of a bit of fun, as Pypegaale was only a mile
from the coveted Lizerne, to which the Huns were holding so doggedly.
But our participation in the mill was only to take place in the
event of the French attack ending in disaster or resulting in such
extraordinary success that the Germans would be put to absolute rout.
The shells fell all about in those days, and rarely did I visit the
support positions--which I did scores of times each day--when the
air was not full of the droning shells of our own and the French
batteries, pounding the enemy's positions on the canal.
Shell-fire; aeroplanes, British, French and German; anti-aircraft
shells, both ours and those of the enemy, and passing troops and
batteries became such common sights as the hours went by that one
hardly bestowed on them a passing glance.
A Belgian woman was caught, near a battery position, flashing signals
with a piece of bright tin to a Hun airman high overhead. The French
took her away, one stout soldier to each arm, to summary execution.
Children were at play at the roadside. A dozen boys were engaged in
a mock bombardment. A bottle served as the hostile town. Stones made
good shells. All waited for the order, "Fire!" and then rained shots
at the target with a will. Now and then one of the children would
say, "Rumph! rumph!" mockingly, as a Black Maria fell near enough
to jar them, but for the most part they paid scant attention to the
fierce cannonade in progress all about.
In a field by the road a man was ploughing stolidly. A woman was
hanging her washing on the line, singing as she worked. A 13-pounder
anti-aircraft shell buried itself a few yards away, but she evinced
no interest in it, and did not even allow its coming to interrupt her
song.
Artillery work in modern warfare is carefully organised. It was
difficult to realise in the midst of such an inferno of shell-fire
that every gunner, who was so hard at work in those April days, had
some definite objective when launching shells enemy-ward.
Major Budworth was directed to conduct the artillery attack on
Lizerne. In other words, the guns of H and I Batteries of the Royal
Horse Artillery were to pave the way for the French infantry attack.
General Putz was anxious to retake Lizerne and Steenstraate as
well. The latter town was on the canal, a few hundred yards east of
Lizerne, and astride the Dixmude-Ypres highway, along which German
reserves, to meet the attack on Lizerne, must be brought.
Budworth placed the batteries near Woesten, about 3,000 yards from
Lizerne, which was surrounded by country so flat and so dotted with
groups of trees that artillery observation was difficult.
A couple of gunners were sent into the French front trenches at
11.30 a.m. to observe the range-finding shots.
The Lizerne attack had been timed for 2.30 p.m. All watches had been
most carefully synchronized. At 12.15 p.m., to the very second, H
Battery fired three shots, then, after an interval, three shots more.
Five minutes after the second trio had been sent Hun-ward, I Battery
also fired six shots in groups of three. The observation officers on
reconnaissance 'phoned back to the batteries from the French line,
and gave minute details as to errors in range of the dozen shells,
adding such information as would allow a more correct setting of the
timing-fuses.
Errors in direction at such range--3,000 to 4,000 yards make an ideal
range for the British 13-pounder and 18-pounder field-guns--were
rare, in view of the fact that our gunners were provided with
accurate large scale maps from which the range could be splendidly
laid.
To get the guns closer to the enemy than 3,000 yards made it possible
that the gunners might be subjected to hostile rifle fire, if the
line should be forced back slightly. At such close range as 2,000
yards so low a trajectory was necessary that cover was rarely
possible. Further, the supplying of ammunition to the guns was,
under such circumstances, a most difficult problem. If an artillery
commander could place his field-guns within 3,000 yards of the enemy
position he considered himself fortunate.
Budworth was compelled to use shrapnel, as the 13-pounders at the
Front at that time had not been provided with high explosive shell,
although it had been repeatedly promised. Had high explosive shell
been available, one battery would have sent it hurtling against the
walls and houses in the little village of Lizerne and the Germans
hiding behind them. The other battery would have simultaneously swept
the streets and open spaces with shrapnel. With no high explosive,
the only alternative was to use long fuses in the shrapnel, which
then burst on percussion against the buildings behind which the Huns
were sheltering.
The observation from the front line was chiefly valuable as a guide
to the timing of the shrapnel that was to be used to scatter the
hundreds of bullets over the open spaces. A 13-pounder shrapnel
contained about 285 bullets, an 18-pounder, 365. The timing fuses
burst none too accurately, at best. Atmospheric conditions frequently
affected the burning of the fuses, and even the heating of the gun as
it went into action sometimes did so.
H and I Batteries, having obtained the desired information from their
observers as to the range and timing of their twelve shells, waited
patiently until half past two o'clock.
At that hour, 400 shells were fired into Lizerne. For the first
five minutes each battery fired four rounds per minute, then came
a two-minute interval. For the next five minutes every one of the
twelve guns in the two batteries fired five shots per minute. A
second lull of two minutes was followed by still more rapid fire for
another five minutes, six rounds per sixty seconds blazing forth
from each of the dozen field-pieces, seventy-two shells per minute
falling in the village. Thus they continued, the spasm of firing and
the brief interval of stillness alternating, until the 400 shells had
been fired.
That the work of the Horse Artillery was well done was apparent from
the result. Its efficiency was confirmed later by captured Germans
wounded in Lizerne, who termed the place "Hell itself" while the
initial bombardment was in progress.
But the work of the guns was by no means ended. The salvo died down
at the appointed time. The French Colonial Zouaves rushed forward,
bayonets in hand, with wild cries, and then the gunners were set to
their task.
They fired another 400 rounds at the road from Steenstraate to
Lizerne, a second road leading to Lizerne from the south-east, and
a third road connecting the two. These three roads were the avenues
most likely to be utilized by the Huns for bringing up reinforcements
to meet the attack. "Searching" the roads and a couple of special
points, one just back of a rise of ground, where it seemed possible
reinforcements might be gathered, kept the gunners hard at work.
Shrapnel rained over such spots, bursting from twenty to thirty feet
above ground, and spreading death all about.
Watching the two batteries in action gave me a high opinion of their
abilities. Nothing in modern warfare was so fascinating a study as
that of guns in action.
France, with her faith pinned to low trajectory and high muzzle
velocity as exemplified in her wonderful "75's," and Germany's
gun-religion, centring on weight of shell, made a formidable contrast.
The making of a field-piece was ever a compromise between those two
schools--a gun firing a light shell straight and fast, or a gun
in which speed and direct line were sacrificed to gain weight of
projectile.
A 35-pound howitzer shell and an 18-pounder shrapnel, such as that
fired by the British field artillery, were sent on their mission of
death from guns of practically the same weight. Thus greatly did
an increase in muzzle velocity mean a corresponding increase in
avoirdupois.
Thirty-eight hundredweight was generally agreed by gun-experts the
world over to be the weight permissible for field pieces; this limit
being imposed by questions of mobility and transport.
It was to gain those assets so great to the French military mind,
low trajectory and high muzzle velocity, that the weight of the "75"
shell was dropped to 15 pounds.
Howitzer against field-gun, with high explosive shell for both, was
German practice against French practice. As one who became very
tired of the continuous rain of big German howitzer shells, I must
confess a wholesome respect for Hun theory in relation to questions
of modern artillery. But no German gun, light or heavy, could, to my
mind, compare with the wonderful "75."
A return to General Putz's headquarters found the French staff
in possession of a report from the Front, to the effect that the
Algerian Brigade had taken Lizerne, held all the trenches on the west
side of the canal, and were preparing to cross the canal at Lizerne
and Het-Sas.
Later developments showed the French officers in the fighting line
had again been optimistic to a point of inaccuracy in reporting
Lizerne captured. The next day it was discovered that the Germans
still held two houses on the western edge of canal, and had "dug
themselves in" in an entrenched bridge-head on the canal bank.
The French troops were in a semicircle, 300 yards distant, and
were bringing up, under cover of the night, "75's" on either side
of the miniature German fort, and preparing to batter it down by
high-explosive shells fired at point-blank range.
The 1st Cavalry Division left the reserve line before Lizerne was
finally wholly clear of Germans.
All day the din of battle on the long front had been maddening.
Ear-drums became tuned to it for a time. But periods of acute
sensitiveness would recur, in which the sound seemed to beat against
one's brain with a dull ache, punctuated with sharp pain from the
constant concussion.
An evening message from 5th Corps Headquarters told of the
failure of the great attack at 2 p.m., owing to gas fumes from
the German trenches. A later attack had been organised, in which
the Northumbrian Territorial Division had won from the enemy some
trenches south-west of St. Julien, and then pushed on and captured
St. Julien itself. The Manchesters, too, had taken some German
trenches east of St. Julien.
But the good work was to be undone. That night the Huns won back St.
Julien, and by daybreak on the 27th the line was practically where it
had been twenty-four hours earlier, in spite of sad losses.
[Illustration: A French "75" in the mud of a Flanders beet-field]
[Illustration: An ambulance which was struck by a shell while
carrying wounded from east of Ypres]
[Illustration: View showing depth of 17-inch shell-hole in the garden
of a château between Poperinghe and Elverdinghe]
April 27th saw another strenuous effort by our gallant troops on that
front. The southern edge of a wood, situated less than a mile west
of St. Julien, was penetrated, but later the men returned to our
original line.
The German official report said that the Huns fairly mowed down
British troops when they advanced near St. Julien, and their
artillery caught our men as they were retiring and inflicted
frightful losses. Unfortunately, there was no exaggeration in that
report.
Arriving at our headquarters château, east of Poperinghe, we found
that half an hour earlier a dozen or more 17-inch shells had fallen
in and about the town.
Poperinghe was being shelled daily, eleven townsfolk having been
killed on the afternoon before. Most of the population had sought a
more salubrious locality.
Of great interest to us was a huge shell-hole that had just been made
in the château garden, fifty yards from our sleeping quarters. It was
over thirty feet in diameter and ten or tw
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