The Battles in Flanders, from Ypres to Neuve Chapelle

by Edmund Dane

On the left, however, it was not the same story—not by any means the same story. The 23rd Brigade was made up of the Scottish Rifles, the 2nd Middlesex, the Devons and the West Yorkshires. Against the part of the German line they were told off to attack the guns had not done the work thoroughly. The enemy's mass of entanglements here followed a dip in the ground; and the shells had mostly missed.

Let it here be said that an accident of this kind is always liable to happen. It does not of necessity imply remissness on the part of the gunners, and involve blame. Difficulties like this will crop up in carrying out the best scheme of tactics. Indeed no great battle has ever yet been fought in which the unexpected has not been encountered, and had on the instant to be provided for.

At the same time, in a scheme of attack of this kind it is, apart from accidents, the underlying assumption on which the whole is reared that every part of the area under fire shall in the first instance be equally and fully swept. If that be not done then the infantry have imposed upon them a task which no men ought to be asked to face, and which deliberately they would never be asked to face. That was the position in which the Scottish Rifles and the 2nd Middlesex, two battalions who are among the flower of the army, found themselves. Rushing forward, they in a flash saw before them in this hollow the German entanglements standing almost intact. The work in front of them was the impossible.

Imagine the tragedy of it. They were swept by the fire of machine guns, by rifle volleys discharged from second to second, and showers of shrapnel. To go back would have thrown the whole plan of assault into confusion. It might mean the loss of the battle.

On the other hand, it was impossible to re-range the British batteries. The guns were now thundering out their rafale upon Neuve Chapelle and the German second line. In Neuve Chapelle and along that line were the enemy's local reserves. These or part of these, if there were any break in the rain of fire, would charge forward to reinforce their first line. They were there for the purpose.

Part of the Scottish Rifles got through. The entanglements in front of them had been wrecked. They reached the section of the German trenches which was their objective and overpowered the defenders. The other part was held up by the barbed wire. Then began a frantic struggle to smash through the webwork with the butts of rifles, to stamp it down, or to crawl through it. The effort was in vain. The bomb-throwers of the company dashed round in the track of their comrades who had already reached and captured the adjacent German trench. Through this trench they reached that still held and daringly bombed the Germans out of it. Meanwhile the others, forced to lie down, were sprayed both by the machine guns and by the enemy's shrapnel. A subaltern and 150 men were all who later answered to the roll-call.

The 2nd Middlesex fared no better. The instant they surged into the open two machine guns, one at each end of the section of the German trench they were to take opened upon them. Under this fire they had to clear a space of more than 120 yards. It was strewn as they raced forward with their dead and wounded. To them also the startling truth was revealed that the enemy's entanglements were still almost undamaged. Like the Scottish they tried to stamp and tear their way through. The effort was speedily seen to be a waste of life. They lay down amid the hail of bullets. A second time, and then a third they tried to break through. A message, however, had been got through to the guns. Relaid on to the German trench the artillery this time cut the entanglements through and the position, aided by a bombing party, was carried.

Such was the attack upon the German first line. But for this disaster to part of the 23rd Brigade, the casualties in this phase of the battle would have been comparatively slight.

The 25th and the Garhwalis completed their work before the time allotted for the fire squall against the village and the enemy's second line had expired. When this tornado began Neuve Chapelle was, although damaged, still standing. When the shell storm ceased, it had, save for the broken walls of the church, totally disappeared. This fair-sized place, which formerly had had some 3,000 inhabitants, was now pounded into shapeless ruins. The shells had fallen as elsewhere upon the cemetery. Tombstones had been blown about in all directions; graves torn open; coffins ploughed up and scattered in splinters together with the bones they had enclosed. In the churchyard had been posted a German detachment intended to defend that approach to the village by rifle and machine-gun fire from behind the gravestones. Most of these men lay among their gruesome surroundings dead or wounded. The whole village and its immediate neighbourhood was wrapped in smoke and dust.

Into this the moment that the guns had ceased the Rifle Brigade dashed. The German defence had been smashed. Some of the enemy continued to snipe from behind bits of wall, broken tombstones, or the wrecks of carts. Among the ruins of a few outlying houses which had escaped complete destruction others put up a fight with machine guns and potted at the British from window spaces. They were speedily disposed of. The rest, bewildered by the blast, were collected from the cellars and dug-outs in which they had sought refuge, coming up with their hands above their heads.[16] From the opposite direction the village had been stormed by the 3rd Gurkhas of the Indian Brigade. On the way they had got in with their kukris among a German detachment who attempted with machine guns to defend a group of houses by the cross roads at the south end of the place. The two corps, Riflemen and Gurkhas, old comrades in former fights, and each now equally dirty and blood-bespattered, cheered each other with enthusiasm.