A counter-attack ordered by the officer in command of the defence and led by Lieutenant d'Albia had covered his escape. The eighth company, in reserve, reinforced by a section of the fifth company of the 2nd Regiment, under Commander Mauros and Lieutenant Daniel, entrenched itself behind the barricade at the level crossing on the Eessen road.[75] On all the roads leading to the Yser, and especially at the three bridges, sections strongly established themselves or helped to consolidate sections already there. Would these dispositions, hastily taken by Commandant Delage, be enough to save Dixmude? At most they could only prolong the agony. Her hours were numbered. After having driven its way through the hostile column which had reached the Yser, Lieutenant d'Albia's section encountered more Germans debouching from the Grand' Place and neighbouring streets. Germans and Frenchmen now formed nothing but a mass of shouting men. They shot each other at close quarters; they fought with their bayonets, their knives, their clubbed rifles, and when these were broken, with their fists, with their feet, even with their teeth. By three in the afternoon we had lost one half of our men, killed, wounded, or prisoners. The German columns were still pouring into Dixmude through the breaches in the defence. They pushed us back to the bridges, which we still held, which we were indeed to hold to the end. They were going to take Dixmude, but the little sailor was right: they were not going to pass the Yser. One more attack was organised to bring off the Mauros company, which was retiring under a terrible fire. The remains of several sections were brought together, and, led by their officers, they charged into the mêlée in the streets. One purple-faced, sweating Marine, who had seen his brother fall, swore he would have the blood of twenty Boches. He went for them with the bayonet, counting "One! two! three!" etc., till he had reached twenty-two. After that he returned to his company, a madman.
But what could the finest heroism do against the swarms of men who rose, as it were, from the earth as fast as they were crushed? "They are like bugs," sighed a quartermaster, and night was coming on. Dixmude had ceased to give signs of life. For six hours fighting had gone on over a dismembered corpse. Not a gable, not a wall, was left standing, except those of the flour factory. To hold these heaps of rubbish, which might turn into a focus of infection, was not worth the little finger of one of our men. At 5 o'clock in the evening, after blowing up the bridges and the flour factory, the Admiral retired behind the Yser.[76]
"Dear mother," wrote a Marine a few days later from Audierne, "I have to tell you that on the 10th of this month I was not cheering much at Dixmude, for out of the whole of my company only 30 returned. I never expected to come out, but with a stout heart I managed to get away. I had a very bad time. Many of us had to swim to save ourselves." These, no doubt, were the prisoners who had thrown themselves into the canal with the heroic Sérieyx.
All this time Lieutenant Cantener, who had taken command on the death of his senior officer, had been maintaining himself on the Beerst road, with three companies of Marines. At nightfall he had the satisfaction—and the credit—of bringing nearly the whole of his command safely into our lines. They had made their way by ditches full of water and mud up to their waists. They were 450 in all—450 blocks of mud—and they were not, as has been said, worn out and without arms and equipment, but steadily marching in fours, bayonets fixed, and as calm as on parade. They had their wounded in front, and each company had its rear-guard.[77]
Too many of our men were left beneath the ruins of the town or in the hands of the enemy, but they had not been vainly sacrificed.[78] After losing some 10,000 men,[79] the Germans found themselves in possession of a town reduced to mere heaps of rubbish with an impregnable line beyond. Our reserve lines had become our front, well furnished with heavy guns, and punctually supported by the inundation which stretched its impassable defence both to north and south. The whole valley of the Lower Yser had become a tideless sea, out into which stood Dixmude, like a crumbling headland. In taking it the Germans had simply made themselves masters of two têtes de pont. Even that is saying too much, for we still commanded the place from the northern bank of the Yser, and our artillery, under General Coffec, frustrated all attempts to organise their capture. Meanwhile thousands of Germans, between the Yser and the embankment of the Nieuport railway, watched with apprehension the water rising about the mounds up which they had hauled their mortars and machine-guns. In the immediate neighbourhood of Dixmude, where the Admiral had caused the sluice at the sixteenth milestone to be blown up,[80] a hostile column of some fifteen hundred men was overwhelmed by the water together with the patch of raised ground on which it had taken refuge.[81] A fresh inundation added greatly to the extent of the floods, and practically reconstituted the old schoore of Dixmude. All danger of the enemy's making good the passage of the river had finally passed away.
THE INUNDATION. OLD MILL AND FARMS ON THE YSER
