CHAPTER IIITHE FIGHT FOR THE SALIENT
The grass has grown up thick and long about the little graves strung out in a great semicircle about Ypres, marking the line of the famous salient, in the defence of which so many thousands of Britons and Frenchmen cheerfully laid down their lives. Spring and summer have smiled on the wooded and undulating plain about the ruined towers of Ypres, and the profusion of wild flowers, the wealth of green foliage, which their gentle caress has brought forth, has so transformed the land that the awful battle-pictures these green pastures have seen now seem like a far-off dream.
With wise strategy we drew in the horns of the Yser salient on May 3, and fell back to the position we now hold, at the beginning of August, from the Yser Canal, north of Ypres, through Wieltje, Verlorenhoek, and Hooge, back to the foot of Hill 60, and thence down toSt.Eloi. Thus a great part of the battlefield, which was the scene of the tremendous struggle lasting from April 17 until May 13, is now in German hands—St.Julien, sacred for ever in theEmpire’s history in memory of Canadian gallantry there;St.Jean, where the gallant Geddes died; Zonnebeke, where, by the light of candles stuck in beer-bottles, those gallant doctors, Ferguson and Waggett—Waggett, the throat specialist of Harley Street, now Major Waggett, R.A.M.C.—in the cellars of the ruined houses worked for hours over the wounded, and brought them safely away.
Yet I have contrived to visit in person many corners of the battlefield of Ypres, sometimes a day or two after the great contest had raged itself out. On thechausséeby the Yser Canal, north of Ypres, I have seen the humble graves, many of them nameless, in which the poor French victims of the first great gas attack were laid to rest, their rusting rifles and blood-stained uniform close at hand. I have stood in the emplacements of our guns about Ypres amid the putrefying carcasses of horses and piles of empty shell-cases. I have walked through trenches dug across the battlefield where, through fissures in the ground, one yet might see the dead, buried as they died, in uniform.
I have looked upon the hill ofSt.Eloi—the Mound of Death—that tumulus of glory of the Princess Pat.’s. I have seen the brown and scarred top of Hill 60, where in the yawning craters rent by our mines 2,000 Britons and Germans are yet lying awaiting the Last Trump, where shells and bullets have stripped the trees of their last leaf, and where chlorine gas has stained the herbage yellow.
I have talked with the Generals who directed the fight, who spoke eagerly of its strategy and tactics, andof the undying heroism of our men. I have spoken with the humble privates, whose only recollection of this classic struggle is of long marches over the hard and gallingpavéof the Belgian roads, of such an inferno of shell-fire as no man ever dreamt of before, of hours spent, hungry and thirsty, with nerves benumbed, in narrow trenches where comrades cried sharply “Oh!” and “Ah!” as fragments of shell or bullets struck them, where dead men sprawled around, where wounded sighed and died, where one fired and loaded and fired and “stuck it,” because, avowedly, one wouldn’t go back for no bloody German—in reality, because one was British.
I have been among the Canadians who went through the gas horror with a gallantry that made the Empire ring. I have talked with soldiers to whom, but five days out from England, the hell of fire that swept the salient night and day was their first taste of war, and with veterans fresh from the fight on whose breasts the discoloured medal ribbons spoke of former service in the field. From all I have seen myself and all I have heard from others, my mind has focussed so sublime a spectacle of heroism, of pluck undaunted by adversity, of resourcefulness never foiled by confusion, that I have felt impelled to try my hand at painting the picture of that battle which history will set down as one of the crucial struggles of the war.
Map to illustrate the second battle of Ypres.
Map to illustrate the second battle of Ypres.From “The Times,” by kind permission.
The second battle of Ypres has been called the second German thrust for Calais. It may have become so in the upshot; it was not at the outset. There is no doubt that the Germans were preparing an offensive, the main object of which was to test theefficacy of their asphyxiating gas, one of their great devices of “frightfulness” with which the German Government, through its newspapers and its agents, was wont to make our flesh creep. Their offensive was certainly in the nature of an experiment, and it seems probable that the large number of troops which, as my friend and colleague,Mr.James Dunn,Daily Mailcorrespondent at Rotterdam, a week before the battle, warned us, were being transported through Belgium and massed on the Western front were intended to press home any advantage that might be won by the asphyxiating gas.
A decided lack of vigour on the part of the German infantry at Ypres has been attributed, and is probably due, to the fact, clearly established by the statements of prisoners, that the German soldiers were terrified of their gas-cylinders, and showed the utmost reluctance to advance immediately behind their gas-cloud. That they had good reason to look askance at their new instrument of frightfulness is shown by the circumstance that, both at Hill 60 and farther northward in the salient, more than once the gas-cloud was seen to drift back into the German lines. Shortly after the second battle of Ypres I was told by an unimpeachable witness, a Belgian who had escaped from Ghent, that there were German gas victims in the military hospitals there, and that their sufferings had caused the military authorities the greatest embarrassment, owing to the effect thereby produced on the German wounded in the wards. The German soldiers’ dread of their unholy ally may to some extent account for the enemy’s failure to press home hisadvantage, but in my own mind I am convinced that the real explanation is that the German plans were entirely upset by our offensive at Hill 60 on April 17.
As the result of the dashing feat of arms by the 1st Royal West Kents and the 2nd King’s Own Scottish Borderers in capturing the hill, the German offensive was forestalled. The second battle of Ypres, in a figure of speech, went off at half-cock. The German General Staff may well have believed that the attack on Hill 60, instead of being a purely local affair as it really was, was the precursor of a vigorous offensive by the Allies.
The Germans had their pipe-lines laid and their gas-cylinders embedded in front of their trenches in the northern part of the salient. They obviously had no gas at Hill 60, otherwise, seeing that from April 22 on the wind was favourable, they would have gassed the 13th Brigade off the hill immediately the position fell into our hands, instead of waiting until May 1, when they gained a footing on the hill by means of their first gas attack (against the Dorsets), and May 5, when they overwhelmed the Duke of Wellington’s and recaptured the position. Believing, then, that the attempt was to be made to pierce their line at Hill 60, they naturally turned their hand to the best offensive weapon they believed themselves to possess—namely, the line of gas-cylinders installed ready for their experiment in the northern part of the salient.
They had been accumulating a formidable concentration of artillery in anticipation of their attack. Their plans were certainly not ripe, for during the battle they had to bring down heavy naval guns fromthe Belgian coast to reinforce their artillery. Fortune favoured them in respect of guns.
The second battle of Ypres was an artillery battle. As I have said, the German infantry showed want of vigour. Its attacks, when they were made, were half-hearted and comparatively easily repulsed. Their strength lay in their artillery, of which they possessed guns of all calibres, and used them with a reckless expenditure of ammunition that must have struck our gunners, starved of high-explosive shells, hot with angry envy. From April 22 until May 13 they pounded our men in their trenches, wherever they were, night and day, with relentless energy until the trenches were obliterated in places and choked with débris. They stretched a curtain of fire right across the salient, over Ypres (from which all the main roads radiate like the spokes of a wheel) and far beyond, and the brigades rushed up into action had to traverse this inferno before they came into the fight.
It was a battle of machinery. It was scientific slaughter—death and destruction poured out from miles away. There was a British brigade in the fight that lost all its Colonels but one, and battalions that lost heavily without ever seeing a German. For the Germans not to have won through, against an enemy thrown into confusion by a foul and diabolical surprise and out-gunned from start to finish, is in itself a defeat. Their failure to blast their way through to the sea, which was their objective as the battle developed for them with such unexpected success, must be counted a signal triumph for the Allies—not only for the British troops that held the salient, but also for the gallantFrench, whose counter-attacks were instrumental in delaying the onrush of the German hordes down the western bank of the canal.
The balance of the second battle of Ypres cannot have been agreeable reading for the Supreme War Lord. On the credit side the gain of a mile or two of a position which we could hardly have hoped to hold against a really strong thrust, on the debit side an expenditure of ammunition, only exceeded by the colossal Austro-German bombardment before Przemysl, and extremely severe casualties. The battle marked the end of all German offensives on the Western front for months, and in this theatre the war relapsed into the state of stalemate, in which Time, most valued ally of the Western Powers, can make his assistance most efficaciously felt against the enemy of mankind.
As, in my opinion, the capture of Hill 60 by the British was in reality the starting-point of the fight for the salient, no account of this historic battle would, I believe, be complete without the story of the capture and loss of the hill, a chaplet of stirring incidents in which the 13th Infantry Brigade won immortal glory. In order to make a connected narrative, I will group together the incidents marking the capture and loss of Hill 60, though, in reality, the fight for the salient had begun before the hill was finally lost.
Hill 60 lies in an isolated position on the extreme western ridge of the Klein Zillebeke Ridge with the Ypres-Comines railway-line, which here runs througha deep cutting, spanned by a small bridge on the one side and the Klein Zillebeke-Zwartelen Road on the other. It is a low hill, with a flattish top, about 45 feet above the surrounding country. The Germans held the upper slopes and the summit of the hill, while our trenches ran round the lower slopes.
Diagram of the Hill 60 area
For some months before the events which I am about to describe the trenches round Hill 60 were held by a division whose General was not slow to recognize the strategical advantage which the possessionof the hill conferred. He accordingly began to make his plans to this end, but before he could bring them to fruition his division was ordered north to take over some of the line from the French.
It fell to the lot of the 13th Brigade to put to the test the plan for the capture of the hill. Like all successful offensives, the attack was the object of the most minute preparation in advance. It was decided that the summit of the hill should be mined, after which the infantry should advance to the capture of the hill. While underground the mining operations went forward, the Brigadier reconnoitred the positions in person. Finally everything was ready for the attack, which was timed to be launched at seven o’clock on the evening of April 17.
The 1st Royal West Kents, otherwise “The Gallant Half-Hundred,” and the 2nd King’s Own Scottish Borderers, who were for so long in garrison in Dublin, were entrusted with the initial attack. Officers and non-commissioned officers received their instructions as to the order in which the storming parties were to go forward, ammunition and bombs were laid ready, the doctors selected their regimental aid-posts, where first aid is administered to the wounded, and all along the line the requisite measures were taken for the replenishment without delay of the supplies in men, ammunition, and provisions as the wastage of the fight should make itself felt. So it is before every engagement. Meanwhile the West Kents and the K.O.S.B.’s spent a long day in the trenches on the fateful April 17, waiting for the shadows to fall and the hands of the watch to point to 7 p.m. When anattack of this kind is impending men’s nerves are strung up tight. It speaks well for the discipline of these two battalions that they stood the test without a trace of nerves.
Thin blue threads of smoke were rising from the German trenches into the clear evening air when, with a dull, low thud, accompanied by a billowing quiver of the earth, the summit of Hill 60 was blown sky-high in an immense black spout of earth and débris and human fragments. Immediately afterwards, with a deafening roar, the second mine went up—exploding, it is believed, a German mine with it, so loud was the report. In the space of a minute or two five mines were touched off, and immediately after our artillery opened rapid fire on all the German positions in the vicinity, on the woods in the rear, on the ruins of Zwartelen village on the left (see map), and on the railway cutting. As our guns spoke, Major Joslin, who was commanding the West Kents’ storming party, standing beside the Royal Engineers officer who fired the mines, blew the charge on his whistle, and the attack got away, the bombers in front.
The Germans were as completely surprised as they were at Neuve Chapelle. Their trenches had been practically obliterated, and in their place appeared five yawning craters, the largest of which measured about 50 yards across by 40 feet deep. These gulfs were filled with dead and wounded men. A few Germans made a show of resistance, but were speedily accounted for. Many who fled headlong across the open behind their trenches were mown down by our machine-guns,which had been expecting this development. The West Kents went through the craters and bombed their way down the communication trenches into the German support trenches, while digging parties of the K.O.S.B.’s set about making trenches across the lips of the craters.
At 7.20 p.m. Hill 60 was ours.
The loss of the hill was a bad shock for the enemy. He did not recover from it that evening at any rate. After a rather feeble bombardment with “whizz-bangs,” he attempted three counter-attacks in the small hours of the morning, but they were easily smothered by our machine-gun fire.
As the night wore on, however, his bombardment began to increase in violence. The K.O.S.B.’s, who came up to the relief of the West Kents about 2.30 a.m. (April 18), came in for it badly. It was pitch dark, and the going was made difficult by the holes in the ground, the dead bodies scattered around, and the innumerable strands of broken barbed wire strewing the Hill. Major Joslin was killed, so was the company commander of the relieving party, while Major Sladen, the commanding officer of the K.O.S.B.’s, was wounded and his Adjutant mortally wounded. It was a subaltern who finally took the K.O.S.B.’s into their new trenches on the hill-top.
By this time the German bombardment was extremely severe. High-explosive shells were bursting in regular volleys on the exposed slopes, and the Germans, whose trenches in some places were but a few yards distant from ours, separated by only a sandbag barrier thrown across a communication trench,kept up a merciless fusillade of bombs. The flares broke in a gush of green light over the battered hill, showing the green and yellow eddies of smoke from the bursting projectiles. But the K.O.S.B.’s, swathed in choking smoke, their trenches clogged with the dead and wounded, kept a brave heart. Some of them actually whiled away the night in song, shouting in chorus that ditty which is, above any other, the song of our fighting-men in Flanders:
“Here we are! Here we are!Here we are again!Tommy, Jack, and Pat, and Mac, and Joe!”
Dawn stole with lemon streaks into the sky, and found them there amid the bursting shells. But they had had to give ground a little and abandon the trenches on the far side of the crater on the extreme left of our position.
Their condition was rather precarious, and the West Kents sent a company up in support. The officer commanding the company described how he found the K.O.S.B.’s Captain dead in the crater between the British and German trenches, on top of a pile of dead and wounded men so thick that “hardly a portion of the ground could be seen.”
At 11.30 a.m. the Duke of Wellington’s (The West Riding) Regiment, 2nd Battalion, arrived to relieve the K.O.S.B.’s and West Kents, who by this time had been able to retain possession of only three of the craters on the near side of the hill (the three right-hand craters in the map). “The Duke’s,” as they are called, did magnificently that day. “The Old Duke would beas proud of you to-day as he was when he commanded you,” the Brigadier said afterwards in addressing the shattered remnant of the battalion that came away from the hill. Despite the rain of shells and bombs, they held on grimly all through the day. By the early afternoon the Germans had recaptured the whole of the hill save only for a section behind the second and third craters (counted from the right in the map), where “The Duke’s” still resisted. Their General saw them clinging to the brown, scarred ridge “like a patch of flies on the ceiling.”
The day wore on and “The Duke’s” still held out. It was decided to relieve the pressure on them by a counter-attack with artillery support. The King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry were brought up, and at six o’clock “The Duke’s,” their numbers thinned, it is true, by heavy casualties, particularly in officers, were over the parapet and away, their fellow county men of Yorkshire at their heels. Behind came some of the K.O.S.B.’s and the “Q. Vic.’s” (the Queen Victoria Rifles, that well-known London Territorial battalion). These young Londoners covered themselves with glory in this day’s fighting and later. Second Lieutenant Woolley, one of their subalterns, won the Victoria Cross for a magnificent display of endurance and gallantry.
“B” Company of “The Duke’s,” on the right, reached the German trenches, and established themselves there with slight loss; “C” Company had to cross open ground, got badly hammered, and only Captain Barton and eleven men reached their objective. They never stopped to see how many menthey had lost, however. They went for their crafty enemy with bayonet and bomb, and killed or routed every man in the trench. Their blows would have been struck doubly hard had they known what stood before. “D” Company, on the left, had also a patch of open country to traverse. All its officers were killed or wounded in its passage over the broken ground swept by shell and machine-gun fire, but with the help of the stout-hearted Yorkshire Light Infantry it managed to secure the trench.
Hill 60 was ours once more. It would still be in our hands to-day but for the German crime against civilization and humanity, the nameless horror of the asphyxiating gas. Sir John French said as much in his despatch on the second battle of Ypres (dated “Headquarters, June 15”). Referring to the loss of Hill 60, the Commander-in-Chief wrote:
“The enemy owes his success ... entirely to the use of asphyxiating gas. It was only a few days later that the means, which have since proved so effective, of counteracting this method of making war, were put into practice. Had it been otherwise, the enemy’s attack on May 5 would most certainly have shared the fate of all the many previous attempts he had made.”
On the morning of the 20th, in the small hours, the 13th Brigade, exhausted by its spell of hard fighting, was relieved by the arrival of another brigade, which took over the hill. The East Surreys and the Bedfordshires went into the trenches, and forthwith had to bear the brunt of a whole series of most desperate efforts made by the Germans to recapture the hill, or,failing that, to prevent us from consolidating the positions gained. Desperate hand-to-hand fights, bombing encounters, and point-blank rifle and machine-gun fire, together with an incessant stream of shells, marked the whole of that day and the following night, when the Devons came up and relieved.
The East Surreys and the Bedfords fought most gallantly, and were splendidly seconded by the 6th King’s Liverpools, a Territorial battalion, which, notwithstanding the terrific fire, rendered very real support to the regulars in the front line by carrying up stores of all kinds throughout the fighting. A quartermaster-sergeant of the Bedfordshires paid a fine tribute to the work of these gallant Territorials. “The approaches to our positions,” he wrote to me, “were swept by a storm of bullets and shells of all kinds, and they (‘The King’s’) had a large number of casualties, but they never flinched, and it was largely owing to the manner in which they kept up the supply of hand-grenades and ammunition of all kinds that we were able to hang on and finally drive back the enemy’s attacks.”
The losses of the East Surreys and the Bedfordshires were very severe, but two V.C.’s and many other decorations were afterwards awarded to the two battalions in recognition of their fine behaviour.
In the meantime the 13th Brigade had marched off to its rest-billets, looking forward to a spell of well-earned repose. But it was not to be. Hardly had the brigade settled down in its new quarters before urgent orders reached the Brigadier to push it up with all speed through Ypres to the Pilckem Road insupport of the French, who had been driven in by the German gas attack, and of the Canadians, whose flank had been left “in the air” by the French withdrawal.
The Germans could not do without Hill 60. They wanted it notably as a vantage-point from which to sweep the Ypres salient with a rain of fire to support the tremendous effort, which they were just developing, to pierce the Allied line. “Necessity knows no law” is a saying that served to justify in German eyes the murder of Belgium. It served equally well to explain (if the moral aspects of the question were ever discussed, which I doubt) the employment of gas to wrest from our grasp the hill we had won and held with untarnished weapons.
On May 1 the gas appeared on Hill 60. The Dorsets held the line. It was in the early hours of the morning that a low greenish cloud came rolling over the top of the hill on to our trenches. Our men were taken unawares, unprepared. Of respirators they had none. Respirators were only just beginning to arrive at the front as the result of an appeal made to the women of England after the gas attack against the French and Canadians on April 22 and 24. In a minute or two the gas had got the Dorsets in its grip, and they were choking with its stifling fumes. The Germans came on at them behind their gas-cloud, but the Dorsets were ready for them. Half-asphyxiated as they were, they scrambled on the parapet of the trench and swept down the advancing files with machine-gun and rifle-fire.
That day the spirit of England, as enshrined in the begrimed and mud-stained exterior of these Dorsetshirelads, rose superior to the menace of a hideous and long-drawn-out death. Again and again throughout the morning and afternoon messages came down from the Dorsets on the hill to the Devons in support asking for machine-gun ammunition. All day long the Devons waiting in the woods heard the brave tap-tapping of the machine-guns on the hill, and knew that the Dorsets were keeping their end up.
The Devons went up in relief that night, cleverly led to our trenches without the loss of a man. They still speak with reluctance of the sights that met their eyes on the way, for the fields were strewn with many gallant Dorsets who had crawled into the fields and ditches to die. The men cursed the Germans savagely as they stumbled over the prostrate forms.
The 13th Brigade had not taken “The Duke’s” into action with them at Ypres, and on May 4 this battalion relieved the Devons on the hill. The following morning the Germans made another and stronger bid for the position. At eight o’clock in the morning of a balmy May day they opened their gas-cylinders behind the crest of Hill 60, and presently, “like mist rising from the fields,” in the words of an eyewitness, the vapours came creeping up in greater volume than ever. At the same time the German guns opened a heavy bombardment.
The gallant “Duke’s” were overwhelmed. The ordeal was too severe. They were forced to give ground. Alone they stood the full brunt of the attack, officers and men sticking to the trenches until the sandbags fell in upon them, until there was no room to move for dead and wounded men and débris.Standing at the entrance to his dug-out in the rear that morning, the Adjutant of “The Duke’s,” as he afterwards told me himself, saw an officer and an orderly staggering towards him. The officer spoke in a gasping voice. “They’ve gassed ‘The Duke’s,’” he said. “I believe I was the last man to leave the hill. All the men up there are dead. They were splendid. I thought I ought to come and report.” The officer was new to the regiment, having been detached from the 3rd East Yorks for service with “The Duke’s” after the heavy losses of the latter at Hill 60 on the 18th. The high spirit of duty that impelled him, a dying man, to struggle down the hillside and make his report is characteristic of the British regimental officer. He died at the field ambulance that night, a hero if there ever was one. He was Captain G. U. Robins.
The situation was highly critical. The Devons in support at the foot of the hill collected every man they could find, and lined them up in anticipation of a German rush. It never came.
The British Army has passed through some stern trials in this war, but I doubt if any were more terrible than the ordeal of May 5 at Hill 60. The sun shone hotly out of a cerulean sky on the slopes of the hill, where the dead lay in thick clusters on the grass stained yellow by the gas-fumes. The railway cutting was a shambles, dead and wounded lying in places so thickly that men had to move them out of the way in order to pass. Our soldiers, who went along the cutting where the shells were crashing with reverberating explosions, were positively sickened at thesights they saw, and filled with fierce anger against the fiends who had perpetrated this nameless crime.
The men at Hill 60 had their fight to fight out alone. Farther to the north one of the greatest battles of the war was raging. The horrors of the hill and the railway cutting were but an incident in the mighty struggle of nations which was swaying to and fro in the fields and woods about Ypres. Yet it had cost in lives many more men than the costliest battle of the South African War.
Now the 13th Brigade, which had shortly before come out of the inferno about Ypres, returned to Hill 60 with orders to counter-attack and recapture it if possible. We were back in our old positions on the lower slopes of the hill. The work had to be begun again. It was tired men who had to do it. Such is the fortune of war.
West Kents and K.O.S.B.’s were again to furnish the storming parties. It was a pitch-black night. Not even a flare rent the inky curtain which had descended on the hill. Craters and holes innumerable, dead bodies, fragments of timber, splintered barbed-wire posts, miles of barbed wire in inextricable tangles, made a forward rush impossible. But the hill had to be taken, and the army had entrusted the gallant “Half-Hundred” and the lads of the Kilmarnock bonnets with the task. So on the stroke of ten they were ready to go, the West Kents on the left, the K.O.S.B.’s on the right.
It was a desperate undertaking, and it failed from the outset. As the first files of men clambered out over the parapet, the Germans, as though they had been waiting for the attack, opened a storm of shellon them, while the air fairly whizzed with machine-gun bullets. Only a few officers and a handful of men reached the German trench, and were there shot down or took cover in the numerous shell-holes dotted about.
With the first light of daybreak another attempt was made to gain the hill. The Yorkshire Light Infantry and the Cheshires attacked, supported on either side by the bombers of the Irish Rifles and the K.O.S.B.’s respectively. Two companies of the Yorkshire Light Infantry, despite a murderous fire, fairly burst their way into the Zwartelen salient, a very strong German redoubt, and were never heard of again. The Germans in their stronghold enfiladed the Cheshires on the right, and after a desperate struggle we had to fall back to our trenches. Throughout the night heavy fighting, often at close quarters with bomb and bayonet, went on amid a terrific bombardment, whilst from the north the guns thundered incessantly.
That was our last attempt to capture Hill 60. Honeycombed with mines, eviscerated, battered, and blasted, the summit of the hill lay abandoned and desolate when I visited the positions in July. The dead were still lying in the craters, huge yawning chasms of crumbling brown earth, the edges strewn with a wild jumble of rags of uniform, haversacks, splintered rifles, and barbed wire. Just below the summit the German trenches, with sandbags of brown and blue and red and green, wound their way round the side of the hill, seeming to tower above our narrow trenches which clung to the lower slopes.
The afternoon of April 22 was drawing to a close, and a fresh breeze was blowing from the north-east, when the German Supreme Command decided that the moment had arrived for the perpetration of the crime that will brand the German Army with infamy until the end of time. Our line about Ypres ran, more or less as the first great German thrust for Calais had left it in November, in a wide semicircle about Ypres. The French were on our left on the east bank of the Yser Canal, along a line running eastward through Langemarck to the point where our line began. Here the Canadian Division was in the trenches which went through Kersselaere along the Gravenstafel ridge to a point adjacent to the cross-roads at Broodseinde, where the 28th Division under General Bulfin held the line as far as the outer, the eastern, edge of the Polygon Wood. Here the 27th Division under General Snow took over the line which bent back westward down to where the 5th Division was in position about Hill 60.
This, then, was the famous salient of Ypres. It was in the northern part that the Germans launched their first gas attack, and one can imagine with what eager expectation their gas engineers throughout that fine April day fingered the taps of the cylinders embedded in front of their trenches, where our outlook men had observed them working for several weeks before. We have never heard the French version of what happened after 5.15 on the evening of April 22, when the fatal greenish-yellow cloud, the significanceof which no man could fathom at that time, rising to about man’s height, began to roll sluggishly forward from the white and blue sandbags marking the German line. We only know that our artillery observation officers in their different coigns of vantage in this region saw a mysterious greenish haze hovering over the French lines, and that presently down all the roads leading from the canal to Ypres and Vlamertinghe and Poperinghe a stream of French infantry and Turcos appeared, most of them with terror in their faces, with streaming eyes and gasping breath, in the grip of a horror they feared because they did not understand it.
It was a grim and awful ordeal to be the first to endure a method of warfare so diabolical in its conception, so fiendish in its effects, that its equal has hardly been encountered in all the blood-stained history of man. The whole British Army applauded the noble words in which its Commander-in-Chief alluded to the conduct of the French on that occasion. In his despatch of June 15 Sir John French said, referring to the gas attack on the French: “I wish particularly to repudiate any idea of attaching the least blame to the French Division for this unfortunate incident. After all the examples our gallant Allies have shown of dogged and tenacious courage in the many trying situations in which they have been placed throughout the course of this campaign, it is quite superfluous for me to dwell on this aspect of the incident, and I would only express the firm conviction that, if any troops in the world had been able to hold their trenches in the face of such a treacherous andaltogether unexpected onslaught, the French Division would have stood firm.” We know now that many of our brave Allies, both officers and men, stayed and died at their posts, victims of slow asphyxiation. You may find the graves of many of them to-day, among other places by the canal bank, around Ypres, and in a little burial-ground close to a road leading out of Poperinghe.
Fortunately, the healthy respect the Germans had for their new ally delayed their advance, and enabled the news of the overwhelming of the right of the Allied line to reach General Headquarters, where it was received with amazement. Prompt measures were taken, for it was at once recognized that the Canadian left was dangerously exposed.
The fact that the Germans had, on April 20, started bombarding Ypres with 17-inch shells had aroused the suspicions of General Bulfin, commanding the 28th Division, which was on the right of the Canadians. Knowing that most of the practicable roads from west to east led through Ypres, he very wisely ordered everything to come east of the city, in anticipation of some German move which at that time he was unable to fathom. The most urgent need of the moment, after the retirement of the French, was to fill the gap left in the line between the French who had escaped the poisoned gas and were still in their old positions and the Canadian left. Colonel Geddes of the Buffs was accordingly put in command of four battalions in reserve east of Ypres—the Buffs, the Middlesex, the 5th King’s Own, and the Yorks and Lancaster—and two Canadian battalions in billets atWieltje, and sent up to stop the gap. At the same time the 13th Brigade, which had just emerged exhausted from the fighting at Hill 60, was rushed up from its rest-billets to support the French and the Canadians along the Pilckem Road.
It was a critical night for the Canadians. The Germans, realizing at last that the French trenches opposite their gas-cylinders were unoccupied, and that their experiment had succeeded beyond their widest hopes, had advanced, and were now threatening the Canadian flank. Advancing with the utmost gallantry, Geddes’s strange conglomeration of British and Canadian troops had succeeded in capturing by assault a small wood west of the village ofSt.Julien, in which four 4·7 guns—the 2nd London Heavy Battery—lent to the French some time before, had fallen into German hands. The 10th Canadian Regiment and the Canadian Highlanders made a most spectacular and splendid charge through the wood that night, routing the Germans and recapturing the guns. Unfortunately, the “heavies” could not be brought away, so the breech-blocks were removed and the guns otherwise rendered useless.
That night the Canadians bent back their left flank against the attack they knew could not be long delayed. Indeed, reports showed the Germans to be busy outside their trenches. The Canadians dug themselves in along their new line whilst the dawn came creeping up heralding the day that was to win immortal glory for the Maple Leaf. They knew that they must hold out against the arrival of the British troops which were coming to reinforce them, and ofthe French reinforcements which were hastening up to try and regain what had been lost.
It was at 4 a.m. that the gas was released. It came on in its sluggish rolling billows against the Canadians lined up behind their sandbags on the Gravenstafel ridge from a distance calculated by the Winnipeg Rifles (8th Canadian Battalion) to be about 200 yards. They had time to load and discharge two charges of their Ross rifles before the gas was on them, rolling over the parapet, creeping in and out of the sandbags and eddying into the dug-outs. Urgent messages were telephoned back to the batteries as the Germans were seen assembling in front of their main trench. The enemy waited ten minutes or so before attacking, and when they did come on were driven back by our guns and the rifles of the men who were still able to stand upright.
For the Canadians stood fast. As long as the Empire endures the story of their fight shall live. Stifled like wasps in a nest, battered incessantly by a terrific bombardment which increased in intensity as the day wore on, they held out grimly. The Highlanders in the wood west ofSt.Julien, badly enfiladed, as the flank was bent back here, got the full blast of the vapours, but they would not fall back. At one place where part of one battalion was forced to evacuate their trench, the survivors made an extraordinarily plucky attempt to reoccupy it in the face of a withering fire.
The Canadian left—the 3rd Canadian Brigade—was sorely pressed. Once the brigade sent word to its sister brigade—the 2nd Canadian Brigade—on itsright that the Germans were advancing unchecked on its trenches. Two platoons were despatched as reinforcements, and some of the Northumberland Fusiliers under Lieutenant Hardy. One of this officer’s reports was so characteristic of the circumstances of this epic fight and of the spirit in which our men went through with it that I think it is worth quoting textually. Here it is:
“The greater part of the officers and men are asphyxiated by gas. I understand that the enemy is on three sides of me. Unless I am reinforced fairly well, it will be impossible to do anything great.”
You observe no trace of panic, no heroics; just a blasé suggestion that, failing reinforcements, the “Fighting Fifth” might not be able to live up to its fine record anddo anything great.
Soon after noon word reached the Canadian left that it was to fall back. But the Brigadier, hearing that the other brigade was going to counter-attack, decided to stay where he was and await developments. He communicated this decision to his troops, whereupon the officers sent back word to say they would hang on as long as they had a man to line the parapet.
It now became clear thatSt.Julien and the wood could no longer be held. The Canadian left had withstood all through the day of the 23rd furious onslaughts from three sides, and a fresh gas attack on the morning of the 24th settled the question. The left brigade fell back on a line running fromSt.Julien to Fortuin whilst awaiting the arrival of reinforcements from a British Division, which was coming up with all speed through a deadly zone ofshell-fire. This was the morning of the 24th. By this time the Germans to the north had succeeded in establishing themselves on the west bank of the canal, having captured Steenstraat and some works south of Lizerne from the French.
On the 23rd Sir John French had had an important interview with General Foch, one of the most brilliant of the French Generals, who commands the left group of French Armies. General Foch gave the British Generalissimo a clear account of what had happened, informed him of his intention to make good the original line, and requested him to allow the British troops to hold on until the necessary reinforcements could arrive. Sir John French agreed to do this, but stipulated that he could not suffer his troops to remain in their present exposed position for an unlimited period of time.
It was now imperative to hold the Germans at all costs. There were two highly critical periods in the battle, and the first began now with April 24. On the canal bank Geddes’s detachment, reinforced by some battalions of the 13th Brigade, had been making a series of small attacks on the Germans at a heavy price but with good effect, for the Germans never got through here. The Lahore Division of the Indian Corps subsequently relieved Geddes’s gallant troops at the very moment that their intrepid leader, his work done, paid the supreme sacrifice. He was killed by a shell on the 26th in the upper room of a house in which the General commanding the 13th Brigade had established his headquarters, and where Geddes spent the night. The shells were bursting continually about the vicinity when Colonel Geddesarrived, and he was killed by one which entered the breakfast-room the next morning. The General commanding the 13th Brigade had a providential escape, as he had left the room to fetch a map a few seconds before.
The retirement of the Canadian left fromSt.Julien on the 24th had exposed the flank of the Canadian Brigade on the right, and it was essential to stop the gap. By this time General Hull’s 10th Brigade of the 4th Division, which was coming up to reinforce the Canadians, had reached the canal, and was on its way to Wieltje, where it arrived at 2.30 a.m. the following morning. It had been placed under the orders of the General commanding the Canadian Division, who sent an urgent message asking the brigade to attackSt.Julien immediately.
It was a desperately difficult undertaking. The night was extremely dark, the ground, which had not been reconnoitred, was honeycombed with trenches and strewn with barbed wire, and, moreover, the artillery had not been able to “register”—that is to say, get its range of theterrain. Just before the attack was launched word came back that some Canadians were still holding out in the village ofSt.Julien. Therefore the place could not be shelled. The guns, however, opened on the wood west of the village.
It was half-past four in the morning when the attack got away. The 7th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, a Territorial battalion that was on its trial that day, led with splendid dash on the right, the 1st Warwicks on the left. They were followed on right and left respectively by the 1st Royal Fusiliersand the 2nd Dublins, whilst the 2nd Seaforths were ordered to connect with General Riddell’s Brigade of the Northumbrian Division, which had been sent up to relieve the Canadians.
As soon as our men got out of their trenches they were met by a terrific machine-gun and rifle fire at close quarters, whilst the German heavy guns in the rear spouted a continual torrent of shells over the fields through which the assault was delivered. Our men dropped left and right, but they never wavered, and the Irish Fusiliers and the Dublins, Irishmen all, fighting shoulder to shoulder, actually got into the outskirts ofSt.Julien. The scattered ruins, the maze of trenches, and the barbed wire strung out everywhere, seriously delayed these two battalions and checked our advance. Two battalions of a brigade of the Northumberland Division, supporting the Dublins, lost their direction. These men had only been a few days in France, and were advancing over country which was totally unknown to their officers and themselves. On the left the Warwicks and on the other flank the Highlanders got to within 70 yards of the German trenches in front of the wood. Here they were hung up, and could make no further progress. They dug in, and were “properly hammered,” in the words of one who was there, by German high-explosive shells. Nevertheless, by this gallant attack, the gap between the Canadians east ofSt.Julien and north of Fortuin was filled.
The next day another attack onSt.Julien was delivered, but also without success. General Riddell, commanding the Northumberland Brigade of theNorthumbrian Division, received a pressing order from the Canadians to attack with the Lahore Division and a battalion of General Hull’s Brigade. There had been no time to reconnoitre. It was for this brigade a “boost in the dark,” but the urgency of the crisis admitted of no delay. So our men went forward again, three battalions of the Northumberland Fusiliers and the Indians, straight into an inferno of shell and rifle fire. All through the afternoon they struggled on under a terrific bombardment, the worst that the battle had brought forth up to that time. At half-past three the gallant Riddell was killed by a bullet as he was going up to see for himself the position of his battalions, who had dug themselves in 200 yards away fromSt.Julien.
Let us pause a minute here, and contemplate the work of this North Country Territorial Division. Landed in France on April 19, five days later the stout North Countrymen, the majority of whom were miners from Northumberland, Yorkshire, and Durham, were undergoing an ordeal of fire which tried the nerves of our hardiest veterans. They knew nothing of the country, they had had no practical experience of war. In the ordinary course of events they would have had a progressive course of acclimatization in the field before taking their turn of duty in the firing-line as a divisional unit. “Had they been only a couple of months in France,” a competent observer said to me after the battle, “their losses would not have been so heavy. There are things about this war which no amount of careful training at home can teach. But the need for reinforcements was imperative, and theyhad to go into the fight. They never flinched from their ordeal. They fought and died like men.”
That was a Territorial division, if there ever was one, men of the same mould, of the same speech, mostly led by the men they were wont to follow in their civilian callings. In battle, says the old German song, a man must depend on himself. That is what the Northumbrian Division did. On them, the untried battalions of but five days’ active service, devolved the proud honour of serving the Empire as a homogeneous unit, and they did not shirk the call. The mind dwells with a thrill on the advance of those sturdy, thick-set fellows suddenly confronted with the most hideous side of modern war, yet accepting the ordeal stolidly, unflinchingly, with many a rough word of encouragement and comfort bandied from mouth to mouth in their broad northern speech.
The abandonment ofSt.Julien had placed the Canadian right in a precarious position. Their position on the Gravenstafel ridge, which had now become the acute angle of the salient, was untenable. Another brigade of the Northumbrian Division having come up to their relief with great difficulty, the Canadians fell back on the night of the 26th to behind the Hannabeek stream. Alter that the Canadian Division was withdrawn, its place being taken by the Lahore Division, part of the 4th Division, and the Northumbrian Division.
Some battalions of the Durham Light Infantry of the Northumbrian Division which carried out the relief came in for a most tremendous hammering from German 8-inch guns. One battalion on the Gravenstafelridge repelled an attack delivered by several German battalions at 2 p.m. on the 26th, losing all save one officer and fifty men, but then had to retire. The Germans, pressing forward, started to envelop, so our men fell back in good order to behind the Hannabeek stream. Other battalions of this regiment were sent to stop a gap where the Germans, pushing on after the Canadian retirement, had broken through at Zevenkote. They, too, suffered heavily from the terrific German bombardment, and, indeed, never caught a glimpse of the enemy at all. On the evening of April 26 they dug themselves in on a line near Zevenkote to the left of the railway-line skirting Zonnebeke.
The retirement of the Canadians from the Gravenstafel ridge had created a grave situation for the brigade on its right, the left-hand brigade of the 28th Division, which, you will remember, was holding the centre of the salient. When the Canadians fell back, the Royal Fusiliers’ flank was left “in the air,” as the saying goes. The 11th Brigade of the 4th Division, which had come to the relief of the Canadians, arrived most providentially, and the Hampshires were rushed up to get connection with the “Seventh” in their perilous position.
On the 25th the Germans delivered a furious attack against the East Surreys and the Middlesex, but the Londoners stood firm and beat the Boche back to his trenches, the Surreys capturing a number of prisoners. The order was to hold the line at all costs, and it was held. Both battalions behaved splendidly, but one must make particular mention of the gallantry of the8th Middlesex, a Territorial battalion, which stood its first taste of modern war with admirable coolness.
All next day the Germans kept up a tremendous bombardment, and a gap appeared between the Hampshires and the Royal Fusiliers, the point of least resistance of our line here. It was eventually filled by the Shropshire Light Infantry at dusk. Some battalions of the Northumbrian Division were brought in to reinforce the line here.
Meanwhile on the extreme left the French had carried out their promise, and had counter-attacked. In conjunction with our gallant Indian troops, who fought most stoutly in this battle, they were able to push the enemy farther north. The French recaptured Lizerne, and made some progress at Steenstraat and Het Sas; but the Germans, profiting by the north-easterly breeze, which unexpectedly held in their favour during the greater part of the three weeks’ fighting, made free use of their gas-fumes, and little real progress was realized. All through the 27th, 28th, 29th, and 30th the Germans kept up a tremendous bombardment right round the curve of the salient. Our line now ran from the canal straight across the Ypres-Langemarck Road in front ofSt.Julien, through Fortuin to Zevenkote, and thence bent round Zonnebeke (for Broodseinde had had to be abandoned), through the Polygon Wood, back to Hill 60. The Germans made full use of their superiority of artillery, and swept the trenches with a never-ending deluge of heavy projectiles and mortar bombs, while all the roads leading through Ypres to the front were sprayed day and night with fire.
Not Meissonnier, nor Détaille, nor Werner, nor even Verestchagin, I believe, could have thrown on canvas an adequate impression of the awful ordeal which these endless days of pitiless bombardment imposed on our troops. They could have painted you a picture of the British in the trenches running through green fields and pastures and woods, with the wrecks of cottages and churches dotted about the landscape, and the grey ruins of Ypres, seen through bursts of black and white smoke, in the background. They could have shown you our men, unshorn, unwashed, their eyes shining whitely out of their faces, begrimed, burnt by the sun, standing at the parapet firing steadily, or digging, filling sandbags and piling them up to close the breaches rent in the parapet by the enemy’s shells bursting on every side. They could have shown you the dead, the pitilessly mangled, the hideously limp victims of the shells; they might have conveyed by a touch of the brush the indifference with which men in the firing-line will pass to and fro before the yet warm bodies of their comrades. They could have shown you the wounded, quiet, dull-eyed, the long processions of the stretcher-bearers dodging their way down to houses and barns and churches and stables, where, under the Cross of Geneva, the doctors were working swiftly and silently, without fuss.
But they could never have conveyed to you the overwhelming, unimaginable truth—that this little sketch of a few yards of trench must be repeated over miles and miles of front, with the same dusty figures at the parapet, the same headless and armless dead, the same suffering wounded, the same rain of shells,if one would bring home an impression of the second battle of Ypres.
One reads that the endurance of the men was wonderful. But one does not understand. I saw the men who came alive out of that hell in the salient, and they were as men transfigured. Not that they were shaken, depressed, or, on the other hand, exultant. They were just uncannily quiet, sitting about in the sunshine, rather limp, like men recovering from supreme fatigue. Talking to them, one felt somehow that their characters had changed; that they would never look on life again as they had done in the past; that they had acquired a new seriousness of mind, as though their glimpse into the dark valley had sobered them. And they all had a puckered, strained look about the eyes, the look one sometimes sees in men who have spent their lives in the open under a tropical sun. At first these symptoms used to puzzle me. They did after the battle of Ypres. Afterwards I found out that they were the badge of the modern battle, and that, with a week of rest and change of scene, they pass away.
The ruthless bombardment with which the Germans occupied the last days of April were the preliminary to a fresh onslaught on the troops holding the northern part of the salient. In the meantime, the French counter-attacks having made no progress, Sir John French, in accordance with his arrangement with General Foch, decided that he could not afford to hold on any longer to our present exposed position. He therefore gave orders to Sir Herbert Plumer, who was directing the operations of the army engaged indefending the salient, to fall back upon a new line which had already been prepared in anticipation of this emergency. The effect of the withdrawal was to diminish considerably the arc of the salient, the whole of the centre falling back to a line starting east of Wieltje on the Ypres-Fortuin Road, running across the Ypres-Frezemberg Road south of Frezemberg, cutting through the Ypres-Thourout railway-line, and then the Ypres-Menin Road east of Hooge.
Before the withdrawal could be begun, however—the day was May 2—the Germans, having obtained fresh supplies of chlorine gas in tank waggons from Belgium, launched a gas attack fromSt.Julien against the 12th and 10th Brigades, which, with the 11th Brigade, were holding the line round this village and down to Fortuin. By this time our men were provided with respirators of a sort, as the result of the appeal made by the army, and magnificently responded to by the women of Britain. Unfortunately the respirators were of rather a rudimentary pattern—they have since been replaced by an entirely efficacious model—and they did not serve wholly to protect our men from the poisonous fumes. Notably the 2nd Lancashire Fusiliers and the Essex Regiment got the full blast of the noxious vapours. Despite many acts of individual gallantry shown by officers and men of the Lancashire Fusiliers, they could not hold the trench, and the line was forced back.
It was here that Jack Lynn won the Victoria Cross, conferred posthumously, for this brave fellow did not survive his gallant action. He was in the machine-gun pit when the deadly cloud approached, but withoutwaiting to adjust his respirator he kept his machine-gun playing on the dense billows of greenish-yellow smoke. The cloud caught him and eddied about him, but his fingers never left the button of the gun, which barked on incessantly as the dimly descried forms of the Germans appeared creeping over the open. Choking and gasping as he was, Lynn hoisted his machine-gun on the parapet, and there, amid a storm of bullets, a lonely figure in a trench full of dead and dying, he kept his gun going on the enemy till he collapsed. The German infantry could not face the storm of fire, and returned to their trenches.
Lynn had collapsed by his gun when his comrades found him. They took him to a dug-out, half-conscious, but even then, when a machine-gun started barking near by, that gallant spirit struggled to regain his feet to get back to “his gun.” He died there in the sunset, with the din of battle ringing in his ears, only a Liverpool van-boy, “jes’ a little bet of a chaap,” one of his mates told me afterwards, but a man with a mighty soul.
The 2nd Seaforths were also badly gassed, but with true Scottish tenacity they stuck to their trenches until relief came. It was not long delayed. The Cavalry Division in support sent up the 4th Hussars, who executed a splendid charge side by side with the 7th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders (Territorials), who had already done so well atSt.Julien. Hussars and Highlanders went forward, head down, through the gas fumes straight into the Germans, ambling to what they imagined was an easy triumph. There was some swift and silent slaying, and theGermans went back the way they had come with sorely diminished numbers. Said General Hull to me afterwards with a chuckle: “We got the Boches on the hop that time.”
Fighting went on all that day and the next. It was essential to conceal from the enemy our withdrawal, which was timed to begin after dark. The continual counter-attacks delivered by these brigades effectually contrived to mask our intentions from him. As a result we were able to withdraw the whole centre of our line and take up the new position we had prepared almost without a casualty, and without the Germans being a penny the wiser. In fact, they continued to pour a devastating fire into our empty trenches until 3.30 on the afternoon following the withdrawal.
The retirement began at 10 p.m. on the night of May 3. The arrangement was that, first, part of the infantry should withdraw, followed after an interval by a portion of the remainder, each battalion leaving behind twenty picked shots to man the parapet and pick off any German that showed himself. It was a most delicate undertaking. The least mistake would have betrayed our move to the Germans. At some places—for instance, at Broodseinde—the trenches were only ten yards apart. Talking and smoking were forbidden. Our men just slipped away in silence through the darkness, the officers hoping in their hearts that they might get away undiscovered.
With a muttered “Good-night and good luck” to the lonely figures left at the parapet, looking out over the dreary expanse between the trenches, where spasmodic flares vouchsafed a glimpse from time totime of gaping shell-holes, a wild tangle of barbed wire and dead in uniforms brown and green, the first batch of troops silently filed out of the trenches. What a crew they were, with an eight-days’ beard, unwashed and unkempt, their faces and uniforms smeared with clay! With that peculiar hitch that Tommy gives to his pack behind when he starts off, they trudged out into the black night, their backs turned to the enemy.
Thus to turn the back on danger and face the unknown, worn out with fatigue and hunger, shaken by the loss of many dear comrades—what a test of discipline! The men were admirable; their officers were magnificent. The success of the withdrawal was, first and last, the work of the Regimental Officer, as those most qualified to speak readily attest. With most of the field officers killed or wounded or gassed, it was primarily the subaltern, the boy fresh from a public school or the Varsity, from Sandhurst or the O.T.C., or, in the Territorials, the young clerk or business man, who led his men down over unreconnoitred ground through the rain and the darkness, steeling them against the danger that always threatened by a fine display of nonchalance and good-humour.
Nothing was left behind. All the arms and ammunition and supplies that could not be taken away were destroyed. They tell of a Colonel who did away with a box of kippers rather than let them fall into the hands of the Germans. To his surprise at breakfast the next morning in the new line the kippers appeared on the breakfast-table (an ammunition-box on thebottom of a trench). The Regimental Sergeant-Major confessed that the sacrifice had been too great. He could not bring himself to take any chance of making a present of the kippers to the Germans. So he had clandestinely rescued them.
At midnight the last men quitted our front trenches, and, going “as they pleased,” made off through the pouring rain to rejoin their comrades. A private in the 2nd Cheshires got left behind. He remained at his post at the parapet with a waterproof sheet over his shoulders, firing at intervals at the German parapet opposite him. Presently he noticed that the trench had grown very still. He left his post and went round the adjacent traverse. Nobody there! He went round the traverse on his other side. Again a vista of empty trench! He hurried down the trenches for a hundred yards or so, and found that everyone had gone. He was, as he put it afterwards, “left to face the whole blooming German Army alone.” He lost no time in joining the retirement.
Many of the wounded of the days of heavy fighting had been taken to the ruined villages of Frezemberg and Zonnebeke, where the doctors tended them by candlelight in the cellars. During the evening, in anticipation of the withdrawal, by hook and by crook, seventy-six motor ambulances were got together. From dusk until half an hour after midnight, it had been found impossible to remove a single wounded man, as each would have had to be carried by hand over marshy ground through inky darkness, and without lights, for no lights could be shown. The Germans were shelling both villages heavily, and Ishould like to pay a tribute here to the splendid courage of the motor-ambulance drivers who sat imperturbably at the steering-wheel of their cars in the open street and waited for the wounded, with shells falling fast about them.
The evacuation of the wounded at Zonnebeke was the work of Colonel Ferguson, R.A.M.C., and of Major Waggett, R.A.M.C., the throat specialist of Harley Street. Thanks to the untiring devotion of these two officers, every wounded man was safely got away, with the exception of a few men with shattered limbs whom it would have been dangerous to move, and who were left behind with comforts and medicines, and two R.A.M.C. orderlies to tend them. Every man of the R.A.M.C., doctors and orderlies alike, worked like Trojans that night, and added fresh laurels to the rich harvest which the corps has gleaned already in this war.
On our right centre, where the men had stood for days a very heavy bombardment, the troops were very loth to fall back. Some of the men left insulting messages addressed to the “Germs,” as they call them, pinned on to the trenches. One man was seen going round “tidying up” his section of trench, “just to leave things clean for the Germs,” as he naïvely explained!
The enemy did not let us remain in peace for long. After a few days’ shelling, during which it was observed that his 6-inch howitzers were “registering,” at 5.30 on the morning of May 8, he made a sledgehammer attempt to smash in the front of the 5th Corps. He started as usual with a terrific bombardmentfrom north of Passchendaele and from Zonnebeke, which gradually concentrated on the front of the 28th Division between north and south of Frezemberg.
The General commanding this division told me that it was the most terrible bombardment he had ever listened to. The German shooting was marvellously accurate, and their guns simply wiped out our trench line. “This fire,” in the blunt phrase of Sir John French’s despatch, “completely obliterated the trenches and caused enormous losses.”
It was an awful ordeal. The men who came out of it alive told me in awed voices that the shelling was like machine-gun fire, an incessant rain of high-explosive shells that fairly plastered the whole of the ground. The din was ear-splitting, the earth trembled, the air was unbreathable with the fumes from the explosives, and in the space of a minute or two the trenches were reduced to broken heaps of rubbish crowded with dead and wounded men. At one place a trench became impassable with the dead, so the survivors filled it in and planted a cross on top—surely the finest grave for a soldier!
A heavy infantry attack followed the bombardment. It was too much for our men. Some battalions had been for a fortnight in the firing-line without the chance of a wash (“A lick and a promise was all the cleaning up we did,” a Colonel of one of these battalions said to me afterwards, “and, by Jove! it was a long promise”), with a scant supply of drinking-water, and salt beef and hard biscuit the only food. Most wires were cut, and the only connectionbetween the firing-line and the Brigade Headquarters in many cases was by orderly. The gallantry of the despatch-bearers in these terrible days was beyond all praise. They were shot down by the dozen, but there were never lacking volunteers “to have a shot” at getting through when no word had come back from the last man sent back.
Isolated, battered, worn, our men could do no more. The line broke. First it went on the right of a brigade near Frezemberg. It was 10.15 on May 8. Then the centre of the same brigade gave, and then part of the left of the brigade in the next sector to the south. It was here that the Princess Pat.’s Light Infantry, the colours that their graceful patroness had embroidered for them with her initials flying throughout the battle over their regimental headquarters, sustained their trial by fire. Their own Record Officer has given to the world their story of matchless heroism, has told how they held their fire-trench until it was annihilated, then fell back to their support trench, and held it until the Shropshires relieved them, a battered handful, 150 strong. I have seen the peaceful graveyard near Voormezeele where many of the dead of that gallant stand are sleeping, and it was as though the soul of the Empire was beating beneath the rows of white crosses.
North of the Frezemberg Road that Saturday morning the first battalion of the 1st Suffolks trod the blood-stained path to glory. They held out in their trenches under the terrific bombardment and against repeated assaults by the Germans until they were surrounded and overwhelmed. Of the 500 men thatwent into action of that gallant regiment, only seven emerged unhurt. North of the Frezemberg Road the 1st Yorkshire Light Infantry, which the army dubs the “ K.O.Y.L.I.’s,” likewise got a terrible hammering. Supported by a company of Monmouth Territorials, they stayed on till night, when the 12th London Regiment (The Rangers) going up to relieve were practically destroyed by shell-fire, only seventy surviving.
At half-past three in the afternoon a strong counter-attack made by the 1st Yorks and Lancs, the 3rd Middlesex, the 2nd East Surrey Regiment, the 2nd Dublin Fusiliers, and the 1st Warwicks, reached Frezemberg, but was eventually driven back, and finally remained on a line running north and south through Verlorenhoek. The Middlesex lost their Colonel, who, as he fell, cried, in the words of the Middlesex Colonel killed at Albuera: “Die hard, boys!” A charge by the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders side by side with the 1st East Lancs towards Wieltje connected up the old trench-line with the ground won by the counter-attack.
May 9 and 10 saw the continuation of the hellish bombardment. The enemy, who had lost heavily on the 8th, notably against the 2nd Essex Regiment, which let a party of Germans come close up to their trenches and then simply wiped them out, furiously attacked the trenches of the 2nd Gloucester and the 2nd Cameron Highlanders, but were repulsed with heavy casualties. There was ding-dong fighting of the severest description about the trenches on either side of the Ypres-Menin Road, where a gas attack deliveredon the 10th was driven back by the 2nd Cameron Highlanders, the 9th Royal Scots (Territorials), and the 3rd and 4th King’s Royal Rifles. The Rhodesian detachment serving with the 3rd K.R.R.’s had their baptism of fire in this fight, and suffered very heavily.
The following day the Germans concentrated their artillery fire on a point a little more to the north, against the 2nd Cameron Highlanders and the 1st Argyll and Sutherland; but the Scotsmen, as tenacious as ever, gave a good account of themselves, though the Germans attacked in force. A brilliant charge by the Royal Scots “Terriers” ejected them from a section of trench in which they had gained a footing. In the afternoon there were two more spells of shelling, each followed by an attack, but the first attack was beaten off, and, though the Germans gained ground in the second, the lost trenches were recovered during the night.
Meanwhile desperate fighting had been proceeding in the northern part of the salient, where, as has been seen, the Germans were making a tremendous effort to smash in our line. A great rambling Flemish homestead, situated west of the Wieltje-St.Julien Road, and called by our men “Shell-trap Farm,” was the centre of some of the hardest fighting of the war. The place owed its curious name to the sheer incredible number of shells which the Germans fired into the old red-brick buildings surrounded by a deep, broad moat. At one period 117 shells a minute were counted at this spot. Nevertheless, “Shell-trap Farm” proved too much for the authorities who regulate the nomenclature of places on the map, and afiat went forth that the place should be known as “Mouse-trap Farm.”
As “Shell-trap Farm,” however, it will remain in the memory of the men who fought there. The farm changed hands several times during the fighting, finally remaining in our possession. With its wrecked walls, its shell-pitted front and splintered shutters, and its floors strewn with empty cartridge-cases, it reminds one of theMaison de la Dernière Cartoucheon the field of Sedan.
The Germans got into the farm, but the 2nd Essex got them out in quick time. The enemy was shelling heavily at the time, but the Essex, advancing “as they pleased,” literally dodged the shells and rushed the farm. Theirs was a most inspiriting charge, and the Rifle Brigade, whom they passed on their way up, were so thrilled that they stood up in their trenches and gave the Essex a cheer. Presently the Germans regained possession of “Shell-trap Farm.” Then the East Lancs drove them out. By this time the farm and its approaches were a shambles, and the moat was full of dead men.
We held the farm that night. The next morning it was lost again. This time a Territorial battalion—the 5th South Lancs—won it back for us, and kept it. While the South Lancs were in possession a shell came into the farm, and laid out every officer and non-commissioned officer in the place. Thereupon a private sprang into the moat, swam across, and reported the situation to the commanding officer at Regimental Headquarters. The message he took back with him to “Shell-trap Farm” was that the Colonelhoped the men would hang on. Presently a bandolier was flung out across the moat bearing the Territorials’ reply. It ran: “We shall hold out.”