The Battles in Flanders, from Ypres to Neuve Chapelle

by Edmund Dane

The Battle of Ypres had at one and the same time brought the second German plan of a Western offensive to the ground, and ensured the accomplishment of General Joffre's envelopment scheme. There was nothing now before the German Staff, therefore, but to attack that envelopment scheme while it remained, as they thought, still in its inceptive stages. If we turn to the day-to-day record of the operations as disclosed in the official reports we shall at once see that there was on the part of the enemy a series of attempted wedging movements. They tried by wedging to break the Allied front simultaneously at Roye and at Arras. This, had it been successful, would have forced out the section of the Allied front lying between those points, and have broken up the Allied position. The movement was not successful. Another movement of this kind was tried between La Bassee on the one side and the Yser on the other. This time the Germans did get a foothold on the west side of the Yser. They were driven out of it, however, by the Belgians cutting the dykes and flooding the country all along the lower course of the river. When the flood burst upon them large numbers of the enemy caught in their entrenchment diggings were drowned.[14] Many of their guns could not be recovered. A third of these wedging attempts was made between La Bassee and Arras. Though they led to desperate fighting, these efforts proved barren of result.

Let us turn to the side of the Allies. For them the first necessity was to solidify their front. If they could do that they would:

(1) Hold these German armies so that they would be able neither to advance nor to retreat whatever might be the developments of the war on the East front. That meant that the Germans must fight with divided forces, and feed the struggle on the East out of their last reserves.

(2) Bring into fullest play the Allies' superiority in field guns, and by imposing on the enemy the necessity of constant counterattacks, eliminate in the end his advantage in numbers. The effects of this elimination would be that his power in any event of resuming the offensive would progressively disappear, and that, as the process proceeded, the advantage in numbers would pass to the Allied side, and eventually make an Allied offensive both practicable and successful.

Now it is quite certain on the events which have since taken place that the German Headquarters Staff clearly recognised these possibilities. Not only is that shown by the heavy losses they incurred in the wedging battles, which lasted from the middle of November to early part of February, but in the adoption of tactics, designed, as their relative strength in numbers fell, to economise their force. In short, not being able to change the features of the situation, they made a virtue of necessity by trying as far as they could to convert their front into an impregnable barrier of defence, and concurrently doing their utmost to increase the Allies' losses.

Evidently both these means were calculated to delay the accomplishment of the Allied scheme. If at the same time there could be set on foot in the Allied countries the legend, not that the Germans had failed in their great invasion project, as they had, but that they were successfully withstanding an attempt of the Allied forces to push them back, then public opinion in the Allied countries might grow tired of the struggle, and at the finish withdraw from it, leaving Belgium in German hands. The Government of Germany well knew that in England more especially, where the misconception of military operations was profound, operations would be estimated on the, for the immediate purposes of this campaign, entirely false basis of a movement of the front from place to place. The object of the Allied commanders, and the conditions of a successful Allied advance would, in all probability, be alike misunderstood. Experience has shown that these calculations were only too well founded. The nearer the Allied scheme approached to accomplishment, the more energetic became the efforts to propagate the notion that it was a failure.

The German plan of defence, which may be dealt with first, had then, apart from political calculations, two main features. The first was the fortification along their front of advantageous points in such a manner that they could be permanently held. The second was an elaboration of the tactics of trench warfare.

From Ypres southwards to the spur of Notre Dame de Lorette near Arras the German front followed approximately the "inland coastline" already spoken of, and the only break in it geographically of any consequence was the valley of the Lys, the flat stretch lying between the hills south of Ypres and the spur at Aubers south-west of Lille.

On the promontories of this "coastline" the enemy proceeded to fortify themselves. They did the same at other points along their front and notably on the ridge across Champagne, and on the hills to the south-east of Verdun, as well as on the eastern spurs of the Vosges. Simultaneously in the trench warfare they revived grenade throwing, and the use of the trench mortar, expedients which had disappeared from military operations for 200 years. These devices were accompanied by systematic sniping. As skill with the rifle is not a strong point with the German army, a prismatic telescopic sight was invented. This reduced sniping practically to a mechanical trick. If the object fired at was centred on the prism a hit became a certainty—wind permitting. Sapping and mining were also persistently carried on, and the front became for mile after mile a monstrous network of pits, barbed-wire entanglements, electric alarm traps, and obstacles of every sort. In short, what the Germans lacked in comprehensive military skill they made up in laborious detail.

If now we glance at the activity of the Allies, we find that the hardest part of their work was that of solidifying their line in order in the first place to make it invulnerable against German counter-attacks. Those counter-attacks were, as we have seen, to begin with heavy. In support of them the advantage which the enemy then had in howitzers was utilised to the full. During the first weeks of the winter campaign the Allied troops had to hold trenches for the most part hastily made in the stress of battle, and hold them both against this prodigal bombardment with heavy German shells, and through bitter conditions of wet and cold. To reach their trenches along the flooded area in Flanders men had in some places to cross stretches of country on planks, the targets in coming and going for the enemy's shrapnel. The weather, too, was sometimes so severe that the water in the men's drinking bottles turned to ice. The trenches were frozen puddles.