The First Battle of Ypres was not only remarkable for its long duration, but also for the mighty armies that were arrayed against each other. Never before in the history of the world have such huge forces struggled for victory. During the battles of the Seven Years' War the combatants on both sides did not exceed 120,000, and in the Napoleonic wars the opposing armies at no time reached a total of 450,000. At Waterloo there were but 170,000 engaged, and at Inkerman, in the Crimean War, there were not 90,000. Some 320,000 men fought at Gravelotte[98] during the Franco-German War of 1870-71, and at Mukden, in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, the forces engaged totalled about 510,000. These numbers sink into insignificance compared with the multitudes who fought in Artois and West Flanders during the thirty days of the Ypres battle. Germany alone had not less than a million men.
Great was the price of victory. Britain lost at least 40,000 men, the French and Belgians 70,000, and the Germans probably 250,000—that is, 360,000 in all—a number far exceeding the total of the whole armies engaged in any single battle of modern history down to the close of the nineteenth century. Whole battalions of the British army disappeared—the 1st Coldstreams, the 2nd Royal Scots Fusiliers, the 2nd Wiltshires, and the 1st Camerons were practically wiped out. One regiment went into the campaign 1,100 strong, and came out with only 73. Another took 1,350 to Flanders, and had but 300 when the Battle of Ypres was won.
The Defeat of the Prussian Guard near Ypres on November 11, 1914. (See page [143].)
(By permission of The Sphere.)
You have already heard how the 7th Division was reduced to a shadow of its former strength. Sir Henry Rawlinson tells us that when the division was withdrawn to England to refit it was found that out of 400 officers who set out from England there were only 44 left, and out of 12,000 men only 2,336. One general, two brigadiers, nearly a dozen staff officers had fallen, and eighteen regiments and battalions had lost their colonels. Junior lieutenants frequently found themselves in command of a battalion, while a brigadier was left with one or two companies. History records no such tale of slaughter. More men fell in the Battle of Ypres than the North lost in the whole of the American Civil War.[99]
Two striking features of this long series of contests must detain us for a moment. The first is the extraordinary valour of the boys and elderly men who formed a large part of the German levies. They charged in mass again and again, and went to death in droves. The second is the even more extraordinary defence which the British—never more than 150,000 in number—made against overwhelming odds. There have been instances of armies holding forces which outnumbered them four or five times for a single day; but the British resisted for weeks against forces five times as great. Around Ypres during the worst part of the fighting we had but three divisions and some cavalry to meet five army corps, three of them belonging to Germany's first line. For the best part of two days the 7th Division of 12,000 men held a front of eight miles against 120,000! In all the long fighting annals of Britain no such feat had ever been performed before.
The Allies merely held their lines, yet really they won a great victory, because they had achieved their object. They had defeated a turning movement and a piercing movement, and had blocked the German advance to the sea. Thereafter in the west the enemy was not free to move, save at the will of the Allies; he was besieged from the Vosges to the North Sea.