Canada in Flanders, Volume I

by Baron Max Aitken Beaverbrook

Another prisoner had been a hairdresser in Dresden. The General questioned him, and he gave an entertaining account of his experiences as a soldier.

"I am a Landwehr man," he said. "I was in Germany when I was ordered to entrain. Presently the train drew up and I was ordered to get out, and was told I had to go and attack a place called Neuve Chapelle. So I went on with others, and soon we came into a hell of fire, and we ran onwards and got into a trench, and there the hell was worse than ever. We began to fire our rifles. Suddenly I heard shouting behind me, and looked round and saw a large number of Indians between me and the rest of the German Army. I then looked at the other German soldiers in the trench and saw that they were throwing their rifles out of the trench. Well, I am a good German, but I did not want to be peculiar, so I threw my rifle out also, and then I was taken prisoner and brought here. Although I have not been long at the war, I have had enough of it. I never saw daylight in the battlefield until I was a prisoner."

Some of the prisoners were brought along by the Indian troops who had captured them. They complained bitterly that they, Germans, should be marched about in the custody of Indians! They did not understand the grimly humorous reply: "If the Indians are good enough to take you, they are good enough to keep you."

The Indians smiled with delight, for they are particularly fond of making prisoners of Germans. Most of them brought back their little trophies of the fight, which they held out for inspection with a smile, crying, "Souvenir!"

The stream of prisoners and of wounded passed on. The fury of battle relaxed. Now and then some of the guns still crashed, but the machine guns rattled further and further away, and the crackle of the rifle fire came from a distance.

The British Army had traversed in triumph those "six kilometres to Neuve Chapelle."

At Neuve Chapelle it halted, and there halted, too, the hopes of an early and conclusive victory for the Allied forces.

The enemy's outposts had been driven in, but beyond these, their fortified places bristled with machine guns, which wrought havoc on our troops, and, indeed, brought the successful offensive to a close. Controversy has arisen over the disappointing results which were achieved. For a month after the battle, Neuve Chapelle was heralded by the public as a great British victory. But doubt followed confidence, and in a few weeks the "victory" was described as a failure. The truth lies between these extremes.

The object of this battle of Neuve Chapelle was to give our men a new spirit of offensive and to test the British fighting machine which had been built up with so much difficulty on the Western front. Besides, if this attack succeeded in destroying the German lines, it would be possible to gain the Aubers ridge which dominates Lille. That ridge once firmly held in our hands, the city should have been ours. That would have been a great victory. It would probably have meant the end of the German occupation of this part of France. In any case it must have had a marked effect upon the whole progress of the war.[[1]]

That was what we hoped to do. What we actually accomplished was the winning of about a mile of territory along a three-mile front, and the straightening of our line. The price was too high for the result.