The 1st Hampshires beat off one German attack by killing every man that approached within fifty yards of their trenches. They and the men of the 1st Rifle Brigade and the 1st Somerset Light Infantry actually stood up on the parapets and defied the Germans to come on! The London Rifle Brigade, that holds so high a place among the London Territorial regiments, here earned battle honours that in years to come will figure proudly on its colours. They were practically overwhelmed by shell-fire, but stuck to their trenches through it all. They kept sending back cheerful messages to the rear. “Our trenches are irrecognizable,” ran one such report, “but we are quite cheerful.” When it was suggested to them that it might be as well if they evacuated their trenches, which were falling in on them, the reply was that they would be damned if they would. It was in this fighting that young Douglas Belcher, salesman of Waring and Gillow’s, of Oxford Street, won the Victoria Cross by holding a section of trench with a few comrades when the Germans had forced back the cavalry on one side of him. His daring bluff saved our left flank, and his decoration was indeed well earned. But I have anticipated.
The battle was nearing its close. What result had the Germans gained by their unprecedented expenditure of ammunition? By their “unquestionably serious losses”? (Sir Herbert Plumer, quoted in Sir John French’s despatch). Certainly they had inflictedcasualties, very heavy, enormous casualties, on us, and had gained ground in the salient, which, however, had exposed us to danger as long as we held it. But they had not broken our line, despite two tremendous blows (those of April 24 and May 8), nor had they in any sense of the word defeated the French or the British armies. Our line was intact. Their effort had failed. No wonder that there has been less written in the German newspapers about the second battle of Ypres than about any other engagement of the war. For this two motives are responsible—the one the desire to hide from the German public the fact that the initial advantage was won by a treacherous breach of the Hague Convention, the second the desire to conceal what must be reckoned tantamount to a German defeat, since the plan of the German Generals was not realized.
On the night of May 12 our line was reorganized, the 28th Division, which on May 8 had undergone such a tremendous ordeal, being withdrawn, its place being taken by two cavalry divisions, dismounted, which, with the artillery and engineers of the division relieved, formed, under the command of General de Lisle, what was known as “De Lisle’s Force.”
At 4.30 on the morning of May 13 the Germans opened the heaviest bombardment yet experienced in the battle on the trenches occupied by two cavalry brigades on a line running from the Ypres-Roulers railway to the Bellewaarde Lake. The Germans shelled mercilessly the whole triangle between the railway and the lake, while Bellewaarde Wood was enveloped in dense masses of smoke from the burstingshells. The cavalry trenches were simply obliterated (one of the lessons of this battle is that no trench will stand a really heavy bombardment). The 3rd Dragoon Guards were buried, and though the North Somerset Yeomanry held on with magnificent endurance, the line could not be held, and here we fell back about 800 yards. The Royals (1st Dragoons) were rushed up to reinforce, and suffered heavily on the way. Presently news came back that on the right the Life Guards had been buried in their trenches, and had had to fall back, but that the Leicester Yeomanry were holding out. The 2nd Essex Regiment managed to fill one of the gaps by a fine charge, and held out until relieved by the cavalry supports.
A counter-attack was organized. It was preceded by a very heavy bombardment of the German positions with all available guns firing high-explosive shells. Then—it was 2.30 p.m.—the attack went forward. It was led by the 10th Hussars, who went forward with such splendid dash that at the sight of them the gallant Leicester Yeomanry, reduced in numbers as they were, could not restrain themselves, but tumbled out of their trenches and joined in the rush. The Essex Yeomanry and the Blues (Royal Horse Guards) also took part in the attack. The behaviour of the Blues has been described to me as particularly fine. These magnificent men went forward under a very heavy fire of shrapnel and high-explosive as steady as on parade. The Germans were routed out of the trenches they had won from us. The Germans fairly bolted, in some instances with the cavalry after them.
Our armoured motor-cars, great heavy vehicles, played a part in this counter-attack. It was, I believe, their début in the war. Some of them, under Lieutenant Cadman, dashed down thechausséesand opened fire on the Germans in their trenches in the roadside woods. For a little while it was as though we had returned to the war in the open. But the position we had won was untenable.
The trenches were merely holes half filled with dead and débris, and the German shell-fire was pitiless. So our men had to fall back to “an irregular line in rear, principally the craters of shell-holes,” to quote Sir Herbert Plumer once more. That night our line remained intact in its former position, with the exception of a small distance lost by one cavalry division. Later the line was advanced, and fresh trenches dug slightly in the rear of the original line, but in a less exposed position.
May 13 may be reckoned the last day of the second battle of Ypres. It is too early to say how many men “went west” in the interval that elapsed between the April evening when we blew up the mines on Hill 60 and the May afternoon when almost for the first time for twenty-six days the inferno of fire abated in the woods and pastures about Ypres. It was not a battle like the first battle of Ypres, when our men met the flower of the Prussian Army face to face, and withstood a succession of onslaughts delivered with an incredible disregard of human life. The second battle of Ypres was a battle of machinery, in which the German infantry skulked behind their gas-cylinders and machine-guns, and waited for theirheavy guns to prepare for them victory at a cheap price.
The moral of the battle, brought home to every man that took part in it, was that the ultimate victory in this war will lie with the nation that best organizes itself to provide its armies with the sinews of war. If at Neuve Chapelle we bitterly felt our shortage of shells, at Ypres we realized even more intensely the enormous advantage which the enemy’s superiority in artillery and high-explosive ammunition gave him. The fighting at Neuve Chapelle and Ypres, and later on at the Fromelles ridge, showed us that the principal weapon of modern warfare is the heavy gun, and gave us due warning that the next German attempt to break our line will be preceded and accompanied by an artillery bombardment even severer than that inferno of fire which played for more than three weeks on the Ypres salient, and failed to pierce our front. Artillery fire can only be crushed by artillery fire, so we have our lesson. And because that lesson has at length been learnt, the thousands of Britons who made the supreme sacrifice at Ypres will not have died in vain.