Hands up! Capture of Germans near Langemarck by the Cameron Highlanders.
On October 23, 1914, about a hundred Germans had been compelled to take cover behind a mill and a small house. The house was rushed by a small force of the Camerons, who compelled the Germans to hold up their hands until a sufficiently strong guard arrived to take them to the rear.
From the picture by F. Matania. By permission of The Sphere.
It was on the 23rd October that Drummer William Kenny won the Victoria Cross for various deeds of gallantry, which will be related later on.
On the 24th, when the Germans were across the Yser, and the Belgians were preparing to open the sluices,[66] the enemy struck hard against the Allied line all the way from Dixmude to La Bassée. At 6 a.m. part of the 7th Infantry Division, which was holding a position near Gheluvelt, was very violently attacked. Mr. C. Underwood, an interpreter with this division, gives us a vivid picture of the terrible straits in which his brigade found itself, and of the arrival of reinforcements in the very nick of time.
"We got a message from headquarters," he writes in Blackwood's Magazine, "saying that we must hold out at all costs, as reinforcements were coming up as quickly as possible to our support. A corporal in charge of prisoners said that the Wiltshire Regiment had suffered terribly, as also the Scots Fusiliers, both having been badly peppered with 'Jack Johnsons,' which had buried many of them alive in their trenches.
"At 7 a.m. next morning (the 24th) Captain Drysdale came up to me and asked me to hurry up two battalions which were expected every minute from the First Army Corps. The position was most critical, as we had not one man left to support the firing line, which was being very hardly pressed, and might give way at any moment. At last, then, the long-expected supports were arriving. Our men had behaved like heroes all. This was the seventh day since we engaged the Germans, one division extending over an unheard-of front of eight miles, and holding up what I understood from one of our prisoners yesterday to be a force of three army corps—that is, 15,000 to 20,000 British against 150,000 Germans! The ordeal of the last three days had been terrible. These brave fellows actually had no sleep for seven days, and had never left the trenches, fighting night and day, sticking to them until they were literally blown out of them or buried alive. They were now becoming pieces of wood, sleeping standing up, and firing almost mechanically, with the slightest support from our guns, which were now outclassed....
"Having got on to the road, I found the Northumberland Hussars,[67] who had evidently been brought up with the idea of their taking possession of the trenches if the supports were not up in time. In ten minutes I sighted the head of a battalion swinging up the road, and ran down as directed to hurry them up. Found them to be the Highland Light Infantry and King's Own Scottish Borderers. I told the commanding officer the position, and he doubled them round the wood to the trenches which our fellows were holding with their last gasp."
On this day, 24th October, the point of the salient gave way. The gallant Wiltshires were driven in, and the Germans pushed into a wood west of Becelaere, where there was much desperate fighting for days to come. The Warwicks were ordered to make a counter-attack, in the course of which they lost 105 officers and men, including their colonel. He had been wounded in the foot three days before, but he nevertheless led his men in the charge with fiery courage. His horse was shot under him, but he found another, which was also shot, and this time Colonel Loring rose no more. In those dread days of struggle no regiment played a more heroic part than the Warwicks; they emerged from the ordeal a mere ghost of their former strength.
It was noticeable at this time that the Germans, though they repeatedly pierced our line, did not follow up the advantage which they had gained. Perhaps this was due to the rawness of the troops; perhaps to the fact that they were weary with much fighting; but more probably to bad leadership, for even the famous Prussian Guard, in later assaults, more than once came to a standstill after it had broken the British line. Whatever the reason may have been, the Allies had cause to be thankful that the enemy failed to "make good."
On the evening of the 25th the 20th Brigade of the 7th Division, which was then holding a position to the south of Gheluvelt, was forced to retire. The Germans broke through our lines, and the 2nd Scots Guards, after repelling the enemy, were pushed back with terrible losses. Thanks, however, to a splendid charge by the 7th Cavalry Brigade, the situation was saved. In these operations Lord Innes Ker, who led the advance guard, won great distinction. Meanwhile the Third Corps, resting on Armentières had been very hard pressed, and had been forced to fall back to a position of less risk.
A French line division and some Territorials were brought up on the night of the 24th-25th, and were concentrated about Zillebeke. Meanwhile the 2nd Division made good progress to the north-east, and captured some guns and prisoners. On the 27th Sir John French went to the headquarters of the 1st Division to inquire into the condition of the 7th Division, which had been marching and fighting for a whole month, and was becoming very weak. He broke up Sir Henry Rawlinson's command, and the much-tried 7th Division was absorbed into the First Corps.
The Front at Ypres on October 27, 1914.
On the 28th there was a lull before the coming storm. The enemy was preparing for a mighty onslaught upon our whole line. About 5.30 the next morning a wireless message was intercepted, telling us what the Germans proposed to do. The Emperor had given orders that the line in front of Ypres must be broken at all costs, and three German corps were being massed for the purpose. The critical moment was at hand.
Early on the morning of Thursday, the 29th, a mass assault was delivered against the crossroads one mile east of Gheluvelt. All morning the tide of battle ebbed and flowed. The 1st Division was driven from its trenches, and for a time the German thrust seemed to have succeeded. Mr. Underwood thus relates an incident which took place when the outlook was black indeed:—
"As I was watching the woods on our left front towards the Gheluvelt-Menin road, I saw the Yorks retiring and the Gordons advancing. I pointed this out to the general, who immediately sent to find out by whose orders they were retiring. Presently, to our consternation, the Gordons came back farther down the road towards Gheluvelt; before we could do anything, the Yorks came streaming over the open ploughed land. The general galloped down the road to stop the Gordons, and I tried to stop the Yorks, who persisted that the order had been given to them to retire. We concluded that the order must have been given by a German officer, and formed them up along the road under a terrible shrapnel fire. They were being bowled over like ninepins, as the Germans must have seen them crossing the open. We tumbled them into the ditch alongside the road, and it was a pitiable sight to see the poor fellows who were still in the open and badly hit trying to crawl along towards our headquarters to take shelter from the hail of shrapnel bullets.... They were by now all lying out under the wall of the farm, and the place looked like a shambles. It was a splendid sight to see Lieutenant Jardine of the R.A.M.C. running out under a hail of bullets and bringing in one wounded man after another on his back.... Presently the shell fire died down a bit, and the men in the ditches alongside the road, having had time to recover, advanced once more to regain the ground which they had lost.... One poor chap of the Warwicks whom I spoke to, and had been very badly mauled, said, 'Well, sir, England can't say we did not stick it to the last.'"
In the counter-attack to which the Gordons were now advancing nearly the whole of the First Corps was engaged. Some very gallant charges were made, in one of which Lieutenant J.A.O. Brooke of the 2nd Gordons won the Victoria Cross and lost his life as you will read later on. About 2 p.m. the enemy began to give way, and by dark most of the line north of the Menin road had been recovered. The same day the Third Corps was heavily assailed at Le Gheir, in what our soldiers call "Plugstreet" Woods,[68] and there was desperate fighting beneath its ragged larches. Here, again, trenches were lost and won. The Middlesex were driven out; but the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders nobly came to the rescue, and against great odds recaptured the trenches and slew almost every German in them.
The attempt to break through to the south of Ypres was repeated with even greater vigour on the 30th. In the gray dawn a heavy bombardment was begun on the trenches held by our cavalry at Zandvoorde, a village about a mile and a half south of Gheluvelt. So fierce was the fire that no living thing could remain in the trenches. One troop was buried alive, and soon the whole division was obliged to withdraw to a ridge about a mile west of the village. This meant that the troops on the right were uncovered, and were obliged to fall back to preserve the line. While this movement was going on, the situation was about as serious as it could well be. The enemy had been reinforced, and had now gained possession of Zandvoorde. The Scots Greys and the Hussars were hurried up, and the ridge was held until evening, when the 4th (Guards) Brigade arrived and took over the line. They held it in trenches with water above their knees for twenty-three days.
The salient was sharper than ever now, and therefore even more dangerous than before. The weakest place lay between Gheluvelt and the corner of the canal near Hollebeke. Had the Germans reached the canal they would have cut off the British holding the salient to the north, and nothing could have saved Ypres. The Emperor was on the field and he had told his men that if Ypres were captured the war would be over, and the victory of Germany would be complete. So desperate was the situation that Sir Douglas Haig determined to hold the line from Gheluvelt to the corner of the canal at all costs. He moved up reserves to the rear of the line, and made other preparations to resist the great assault of the morrow.
Farther south there was great peril too. The cavalry had been driven out of Hollebeke, and had fallen back on the Ypres-Armentières road, where there was heavy fighting. The line of the Third Corps had been broken, but the rent had been repaired by the gallantry of the Somerset Light Infantry. Reserves were called up, and were stationed at Neuve Eglise, about three miles south-west of Messines. With these reserves came the first infantry Territorial regiment to take the field—the London Scottish.
North of Zandevoorde there was also great danger of disaster. A battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers found the troops on their right pushed back by sheer weight of numbers, and they themselves exposed to a most galling fire from machine guns on their flank. Their losses were terrible, but still they held on, and when the fight was over the battalion had almost ceased to exist. The Royal Scots Fusiliers suffered in like manner; but they and the remnant of the Yorkshires, bunched together into one battalion, held their trenches until dark. The Allied line was pushed back to the verge of Gheluvelt, and when night fell it seemed as though the Kaiser had spoken the truth when he declared, "Ypres will be mine by 1st November."
During the fighting around Ypres the Royal Flying Corps did splendid service. A Daily News correspondent tells of one young flying man who seemed to make a perfect hobby of his work. The following account of his doings will give you an excellent idea of how airmen direct the fire of guns. "From dawn to sunset," says the correspondent, "this young officer is up and about, doing the most wonderful things with the utmost coolness. The other morning, up ahead of the lark, he volplaned[69] from a great height right in the midst of the German lines, as though he meant to make a brief morning call for breakfast. The Germans were too astonished for the moment to do anything but gasp and gape at him, though he was easily within range. He impudently stopped his engine, dropped half a dozen 'puffs' (as our Tommies call the aeroplane bombs) into a cavalry cluster, waved his hand, and off and above he went again.
"Hundreds of rifle shots whirred around him as he fled; two of them struck him; and three minutes later he was down in the British lines once more, with blood trickling through the rents in his tunic. He was patched up and bandaged, had a good, hearty lunch, and before teatime he was up again in one of his mad frolics in the air. 'Surely you've had enough for one day,' said General ——; 'have a rest at least until to-morrow. We don't want to lose these matinée performances of yours; they're too fine for anything.' But the young aviator jammed his armoured helmet on his head, and said he couldn't resist making a flight, because it was great fun, and kept him fit. So off he went again.
"That afternoon he excelled himself. There was a well-screened German battery which was doing nasty work from behind a slight rise at the back of the enemy's trenches. This was the airman's quarry. Up and up he went in quick, climbing spirals, and when he was at a height of 2,000 feet he poised for a spell to spot the lurking-place of the battery. When he had discovered it he, flew above it, and signalled to our gunners to drop their shells immediately below him. They fired; the shells fell some distance to the right. He next signalled to the range-finders to swing their guns more to the left. Again they fired, but the shells went too far. A third time he signalled, and the first of our shells that fell in the new direction wrecked the limber of the foremost German gun, smashing up horses and men alike. Good! Instantly the airman indicated that the range had been found, and then shell after shell burst over and among the battery which had been flogging us so mercilessly earlier in the day. In five minutes all that was left of it broke away from the cunning screen which masked it, and fled across country. The general, who had been watching the affair through his field glasses, cried, 'Splendid! Magnificent! The best show I've ever witnessed. That man must have a heart of steel in a body of iron.' When the daring aviator descended the general warmly congratulated him, and shook him by the hand. 'You're almost too good to last,' he said. The airman only laughed."
An Admiral of the Air. Photo, Cribb.
Wing-Commander C. R. Samson, R.N. See page [74].
In the account of the fighting round Ypres nothing has been said of our artillery. Sir John French thus writes concerning it: "I cannot speak too highly of the valuable services rendered by the Royal Artillery throughout the battle." He also tells us that, though the enemy brought up guns of great range and power, our artillery overmastered them. Splendid work was done by a number of young artillery officers, who in the most gallant manner pressed forward in the vicinity of the firing line in order to direct their guns at the right targets, and at the right moment. Here is a story which illustrates the skill and courage of these young officers.
"In many instances," says a Times correspondent, "artillery subalterns have taken up dangerous positions well in advance of the front line of infantry, and, telephone in hand, have given the range to the gunners with perfect calmness. I was told of an incident which is typical of the splendid devotion of these men. A young lieutenant had posted himself in a tower a few hundred yards from the German trenches. He had telephoned his orders regularly for half an hour. Then he said, without any trace of excitement, to the operator on the other side, 'I hear the Germans coming up the stairs. I have my revolver. Don't believe anything more you hear.' With these words he dropped the receiver, and he has not been heard of since."