To the inhabitants of this amphibious district water is a foe in peace and a friend in war. In times of great peril the sluices of the myriad canals can be opened, and the whole flat district from the railway embankment to the Yser and beyond can be flooded, and thus rendered impassable for an army. You can easily understand that the Belgians would not flood the country until every other means of defence had failed; for the land so submerged would be ruined for agriculture, and years of labour would be necessary to restore it to its former condition. The sluices were opened in the days of Marlborough, and again in 1793-94. You are soon to hear how the progress of the Germans was similarly stayed in 1914. The idea of calling in the aid of water as a defence has long been familiar to Belgian soldiers, and a scheme for flooding the country had been prepared before the war broke out.
I have already described how the Allies held the avenues to the Channel ports at Arras and La Bassée. Two other efforts were made by the Germans to break through the line of defence—the one at Ypres, the other between Dixmude and the sea. All these four attacks were going on at the same time, and all were closely connected; but for the sake of clearness they must be described separately. We will now see how the Belgians and the French barred the road to Calais by way of the Yser, and in a later chapter I will describe the great struggle which took place round Ypres.
When the retreating Belgians were driven out of the Forest of Houthulst on 16th October, they retired to the eastern bank of the Yser. All that was now left to them of their native land was but one-tenth of its surface; they were battle-worn and weary; their surviving countrymen were in bondage; their wrongs cried aloud to Heaven, but their spirit was still unsubdued. No longer were they fighting alone. Britons and Bretons, Indians and Canadians, stockmen from the Antipodes, and tribesmen from the Atlas had come to their succour, and with a new heart they prepared to defend the last few miles of territory which they could call their own.
On the morning of the 17th the Belgians were strung out along the east bank of the Yser from Nieuport to Dixmude. In the ditches by the village were 5,000 Belgians and 7,000 of Ronarc'h's Marines. The total force numbered some 40,000, and against them von Beseler was now advancing with 60,000 men, while the Würtembergers were rapidly moving from the south. Early on the 17th two Belgian divisions in the centre were driven across the river, but they managed to regain the right bank in the course of the night. Early on the morning of the 18th von Beseler, with his right resting on the sand dunes, began a fierce attack that was full of danger. Everybody, from general to private, knew that the critical hour had come. If von Beseler could push back the Belgians beyond the railway embankment on the west side of the Yser, he would be in Dunkirk in two days, and in Calais the day after; the last narrow strip of Belgian soil would be lost, the Allied army at Ypres would be surrounded or forced to retire, and all the bloodshed farther south would have been in vain. The prospect was enough to make the stoutest heart quail.
Fiercely the Belgians strove to hold their line in the unequal combat, but they were forced back step by step, and disaster seemed to await them, when suddenly succour came—from the sea! The guns of British warships began to rake the German trenches, and in their roar was the stern warning, "No road this way."
History was repeating itself, as it has so often done during this war. More than two and a half centuries ago, when the French and English beat the Spaniards at the Battle of the Dunes,[61] which was fought on this very coast, Cromwell's fleet shelled the enemy's wing, and greatly helped to bring about the victory.
As soon as the danger showed itself at Nieuport, King Albert begged our Admiralty for naval assistance. It was, of course, impossible to send ordinary warships to operate on this coast, because the sea is shallow, and cumbered with many a sandbank—"a very dangerous flat, and fatal, where the carcasses of many a tall ship lie buried." The Germans knew this well; they had examined the charts, and they had no fear of molestation from the sea. They believed that no warship could come sufficiently near to the coast to get within range of their trenches.
Now it happened that when the war broke out there lay at Barrow three ships of light draught but very strong gun power which had been built for the Brazilian Government. Such ships are known as monitors, after the name of the first of the type, which was built in 1862, during the American Civil War. Really, a monitor is little more than a low, moving gun platform, carrying a little fort, in which one or two heavy weapons are mounted. Each of the three monitors at Barrow displaced 1,200 tons, and carried two 6-inch guns mounted forward in an armoured barbette, two 4.7-inch howitzers aft, and four 3-pounder guns amidships. They were protected by stout armour, and as they drew only four feet seven inches of water, they could move in the shallows where ordinary ships would run aground. These ships were taken over by the British Government at the beginning of the war, and were called the Humber, the Mersey, and the Severn.
