The Northumberland Fusiliers (the Fighting Fifth) beating off a German Attack.
(From the picture by Philip Dadd. By permission of The Sphere.)
"It was in the early hours of morning that the Germans began to attack us in force. They battered our entanglements and our trench breastwork for some time, and part of the entanglements was actually blown across the trenches. Fortunately, we were able to meet them with steady and continuous rifle fire, and stopped the rush. . . . . In some cases the Germans were so bunched together that our men simply fired into the brown, it being impossible to miss them at such close range."
The great battle was now ebbing away into a series of lesser engagements. As we shall learn later, the Allies had begun to make a big thrust near Festubert and towards Lens. The Germans had been obliged to send some of their heavy guns to the south, and the artillery fire on the Ypres salient consequently slackened. But before the battle ended the Germans made one more attempt—and this the most terrible of all—to shatter our lines. Again they used the foul weapon by which they had won ground at the outset of the struggle.
On the early morning of Monday, 24th May, when the sky was cloudless and a light north-easterly breeze was blowing, they released gas against our front from Shell-trap Farm to the lake. The wind carried the poisonous vapour towards the south-west, and it rolled over nearly five miles of our trenches in a cloud which in some places was forty feet high. For four and a half hours the gas surged towards us. Where our men were quick to don their respirators, they were able to hold their ground; but where there was delay, they suffered horribly. After the gas came a violent bombardment from three points of the compass, and in various places our line was pushed in until three dangerous salients appeared. British steadfastness, however, prevailed. Except in two places, our lines remained intact. The 9th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, the 2nd Royal Irish, and the 9th Lancers lost very heavily. Amongst those who fell was Captain Francis Grenfell, who had already won the Victoria Cross for a splendid deed of pluck and coolness, which I described on page 88 of our second volume.
The Second Battle of Ypres was over. It was not so full of danger to us as the first battle, but it will be ever memorable because, for the first time in the warfare of civilized men, a foul and deadly weapon had been used. You must have noticed, in reading these pages, how the Germans relied on machinery to overcome us. High-explosive shells and poison gas—these were the weapons which they believed would give them victory. During the Second Battle of Ypres the German infantry made few serious attacks, and when they did so they were almost destroyed to a man. Cannot you imagine the anguish of our brave fellows assailed by gas and shell fire and unable to reach their foes? Many of them, goaded to madness, stood up on their parapets and challenged the enemy to come on. Some of the Germans accepted the challenge; our men cheered, and then swept them to earth. It was the Second Battle of Ypres which taught us how inferior we were to the Germans in machinery, and our bitter experience had much to do with the formation of the National Government and the setting up of a Ministry of Munitions.
We lost ground in front of Ypres, and we lost tens of thousands of gallant men; but we had something to be proud of when the end came. We knew that our soldiers, man for man, were superior to the Germans, and we were specially proud of our Territorials—not only of the Canadians, but of the miners of South Wales and North England, the hinds and tradesmen of the Scottish Lowlands, the shepherds and gamekeepers of the Highlands, the clerks and tradesmen of our great cities. A few short months ago they had been working in the mine, the field, the factory, the shop, and the office, never dreaming that they would be called on to ply rifle and bayonet in a life-and-death struggle for all that they held dear. But in front of Ypres they bore themselves as though war had ever been their business, and they fought and died with a heroism that must never be forgotten. They went down into the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and some of them came out of it silent, weary, sick at heart; but no man of them felt his faith falter, and all were determined that never, while God gave them the strength to pull a trigger, should the foul foe prevail.
The beautiful little city of Ypres, famous as far back as the days of Chaucer, and adorned with old-time buildings that were the gift of the ages to the modern world, was now a heap of ruins. German guns had shattered it beyond repair. It resembled a city destroyed by an earthquake—a rubbish heap, with here and there a few gaping walls and shot-rent towers brooding over the desolation like gaunt skeletons. Never while our Empire endures—and God grant that it may be for aye—can Ypres and the blood-sodden meadows that lie eastward of the city be anything but holy ground to the British people. For ever the city and its neighbourhood will be sacred to the memory of our glorious British dead.