The result of this signal success was that the front was restored nearly to the line it had occupied at the beginning of the day. Many of the enemy still remained in the woods. The 6th Cavalry Brigade was given the work of hunting them out. "They advanced," says Sir John French, "with much dash, partly mounted and partly dismounted; and surprising the enemy, succeeded in killing large numbers and materially helped to restore the line."

If the chance of victory passed from the German arms with their fatal hesitancy on the preceding day, this crushing defeat of their main attack made efforts to retrieve their fortunes hopeless. The attacks against Hollebeke and round Messines continued all through this day, and as already said, through the following night. They were wasted. The hammering went on too against the front down to Givenchy. Though by one of their battering-ram assaults the enemy had driven the Indian troops out of and to the west of Neuve Chapelle, the hope of piercing the front was not realised. The Indians, probably thought an easy proposition by comparison, turned out also to be stuff too tough to be broken. The Gurkhas and the famous Corps of Sappers and Miners were brilliant, and justly won the honourable mention given them in the Commander-in-Chief's dispatches.

CHAPTER VII
THE BATTLE OF YPRES—FINAL PHASE

In its final phase the great battle lasted for another eleven days. Holding now the main ridge of hills from Zandvoorde to near Wytscheate on the Ypres-Lille road, a distance of five miles, and in possession of the village of Hollebeke, or rather of its site, the Germans appear to have decided that the effective direction for their attack was through Wytscheate and the sector of the Allied front following the Lille road from near Wytscheate through the village of Messines to Armentières. And this decision on their part was without question strategically sound. Could they have carried it out, they would not only have compelled the British forces to fall back from the west of Lille, but to evacuate Ypres. They would have won the battle. Moreover the victory must have been decisive, for on the north it would have cut off an important part of the British and French forces, together with the Belgians, from the remainder of the Allied line, and on the south it would have turned the flank of that line. The mistake, a fatal mistake, lay in not having made this the real objective from the first, and in wasting force and incurring defeat, with its inevitable demoralisation, in attempts to break through into Ypres across the belt of woods on the east and the south-east.

There the only lines along which attacks in great strength could be thrown were roads running into Ypres like spokes into the hub of a wheel, but the farther in any one of these attacking columns moved, the more were its flanks exposed. The precaution against flank attack, advance in echelon, was made by the character of this woodland belt out of the question. We have seen that, appreciating these capabilities of defence, the British Commander-in-Chief had crushed a gigantic onset. It is manifest now that the Germans had believed that by weight of numbers they could prevail over the difficulties, and the chances those difficulties gave of holding this sector with a comparatively small force, but that had merely involved them in enormous losses, a risk inseparable from their tactics.

Having now realised their mistake, they attempted to throw an immense wedge of troops against the two miles of British line between Wytscheate and Messines. Here again, however, they found themselves anticipated. The front was no longer held merely by a single rank of cavalry. The bemudded, dirty, unshaven ragged, and almost unrecognisable yet victorious survivors of that band of heroes had been relieved. Part of the 16th French Army Corps, General Conneau's cavalry, a division of the Indian Army Corps, and a part of the British 2nd Army Corps were on or behind it. Sir John French was taking no unnecessary risks. To these troops, some 50,000 in all, therefore, he added as a reserve units of the Territorials recently arrived from England. It was certain that they would have to meet German forces four if not five times as numerous, and it was certain that those German troops would fight to the last gasp.

The Germans lost no time. Their attack against Wytscheate and Messines was made concurrently before daybreak. They had taken advantage of the darkness to carry out mass movements which could not be sighted from aeroplanes. The onset was both heavy and sudden, and it formed probably the greatest night operation on record. Darkness, it was now held, afforded the best protection against British rifle power. As this was an attack which had to succeed at all costs, the enemy took the heavy punishment inflicted by a furious resistance. A proportion of these German troops were lads of 17 and even younger. They had been used to fill up the gaps left by casualties, and mingled with the older men drove forward on the order of their officers and faced death at the muzzles of British rifles and the massed guns of the British Horse Artillery by hundreds. Both Wytscheate and Messines fell into the enemy's hands. At the same time with the evident object of arresting the movement of reserves assaults were made along the British line to the south of Messines past Armentières and along the valley of the Lys. This part of the attack was, of course, no more than strategical. For the purpose it was useless. Round both Wytscheate and Messines the enemy found himself confronted by quite unexpected forces. He could make no further advance from either. So costly indeed had been his attack upon Wytscheate, that the French infantry, launched upon a counter-attack with the aid of a British cavalry force, cleared him out of the place at the point of the bayonet.

It was during the fighting on this day, a Sunday, that there occurred the episode which earned for the London Scottish Territorials the special acknowledgment of the Commander-in-chief. Transported in motor omnibuses from the base at Boulogne to Ypres, where, on arrival, they were quartered for the night in the Hôtel de Ville, they had been sent forward in the first instance to Neuve Eglise, and then to Messines to support the front line. This was during the crisis of the German attack on October 31. The battalion fought its way forward from Messines to a position east of the Ypres-Lille main road. There, under heavy fire, it dug itself in, and for five hours repulsed a series of determined assaults. Resolved at any price to be rid of these fellows in kilts who had thrown themselves right athwart the line of advance upon Messines, the Germans, at two o'clock in the morning of November 1, renewed the onset with a crushing superiority of numbers. While the battalion was resisting the attack in front, another force of the enemy developed an attack in flank. Others, getting between the first and second British lines of trenches opened an assault from the rear. These set on fire an adjacent house. The flare from this building lit up the combat and the bayonet charges in which the companies of the reserve dashed into and defeated the Germans who had got round the position. By their gallantry the reserve prevented the battalion from being surrounded.

Unable to carry the position by assault, the Germans now tried to wipe out the battalion by an enfilade fire from machine guns. This had now at length made retirement imperative. The corps had to cut its way out with the bayonet. Inevitably the losses were heavy. The striking fact, however, is that the first unit of the Territorial Force which had taken part in battle had saved itself in a situation and in a manner which would have done honour to the most famous and veteran regiment in the Service. Indeed there are few episodes in British military annals more dramatic or more brilliant. Naturally this episode, apart from its immediate military effect, attracted great attention because it afforded a proof of the quality of the Territorial Force, a proof which that Force has since amply upheld.

The effect of the delay opposed to the German advance by this unlooked for and obstinate resistance was serious. Without question it upset their plans and prevented the attacks upon Wytscheate and Messines from being, as they had been designed to be, simultaneous. The result was both that the attack upon Wytscheate failed to stay, and that the attack upon Messines effected nothing more than the occupation of the ruins of that village. That trifling outcome needless to say was not the German aim.