The score of Pathans who had gone out in advance had silently slain the German pickets, and the main body had thus been enabled to get right amidst the sleeping foe unchallenged. The slaughter was terrible, and only ended when the Germans, thoroughly aroused to their peril, bolted and ran. Then their swarthy assailants, glutted with their night's work, came back briskly, but just as silently, to their original post.
The threatened German attack had been turned into a bloody defeat. For hours afterwards the furious Germans poured a hail of shrapnel and shell into our trenches, in the hope of obtaining some revenge for their terrible punishment.[11]
Besides this a variety of ruses were resorted to. Men dressed in French or British uniforms stole singly through the British lines to cut field telephone wires. Others employed themselves as eavesdroppers. Germans dressed in imitation uniforms of the British staff more than once appeared and tried to give false orders.[12]
On the main ridge to the south-east of Ypres, the Germans massed a number of batteries with which they tried to rake the British lines. The ridge, however, was an exposed position, and both the French and British guns were concentrated upon it with marked effect. Describing this "Eye Witness" states:
The south two villages (Kortewilde and Kostzelhoe) which the enemy had captured and their line on the ridge close by were heavily bombarded by the British and French artillery. From the high ground to the west the effect of this cannonade could be seen to some extent, though the villages under fire were partially obscured from view by the smoke of the bursting shells, and resembled the craters of volcanoes belching fire and fumes. At one place the gaunt wreck of the old church tower and the blackened remains of a few houses round it would emerge for a moment only to be again blotted out in the pall of smoke. The long straggling villages, when they became temporarily visible, seemed to melt away and assume odd and fantastic shapes as the houses crumbled and the blocks of masonry were thrown hither and thither by the blasting effect of lyddite and melinite.
There can be no doubt the change in tactics was due in part to the fact that owing to the shock of defeat a continuance of the mass attacks had become for the time impracticable. Of the feeling, at any rate, on the part of some of the enemy the following extract from a German soldier's diary picked up on the battlefield throws a certain light:
2nd November.—Before noon sent out in a regular storm of bullets by order of the major. These gentlemen, the officers, send their men forward in the most ridiculous way. They themselves remain far behind safely under cover. Our leadership is really scandalous. Enormous losses on our side, partly from the fire of our own people, for our leaders neither know where the enemy lies nor where our own troops are, so that we are often fired on by our own men. It is a marvel to me that we have got on as far as we have done. Our captain fell, also all our section leaders and a large number of our men.
Moreover, no purpose was served by this advance, for we remained the rest of the day under cover and could go neither forward nor back, nor even shoot.
It is simply ridiculous, this leadership. If only I had known it before! My opinion of the German officers has changed. An adjutant shouted to us from a trench far to the rear to cut down a hedge which was in front of us. Bullets were whistling round from in front and from behind. The gentleman himself, of course, remained behind.
Still in the trenches. Shells and shrapnel burst without ceasing. In the evening a cup of rice and one-third of an apple per man. Let us hope peace will soon come. Such a war is really too awful. The English shoot like mad. If no reinforcements come up, especially heavy artillery, we shall have a poor look-out.