One thing cannot be gainsaid. The men in the ranks fought like heroes. Nothing that men could do was left undone by them.
One officer who saw as much of Neuve Chapelle, and knew as much of the tragedy as any one man said to me: "The word 'concentrate' caused all the trouble. The troops that might so easily have come on had orders to concentrate along a certain road. That was the root of the mix-up. They concentrated, dug-in, and waited for orders, in accordance with their instructions. Those instructions did not come until half past four in the afternoon. The whole day had been wasted. The time had flown, and the great opportunity with it."
The cavalry would have had a fine part to play had all gone well.
The 2nd Cavalry Division was drawn up back of Estaires, the 3rd Cavalry Division in the Forest of Nieppe, and the 1st Cavalry Division was ready at its billets. A hole in the German line meant a strong push through by the three cavalry divisions.
On the right of the 7th and 8th Divisions the Indian Corps had hard fighting, the day of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle. The Gurkhas, one of their officers told me, took a wood, lost it, took it a second time, lost it again, and a third time took it, only to be driven out at last owing to the fact that no support was available.
On a visit to Bethune one day I heard dozens of stories of the fierce fighting on March 10th, on the 2nd Division front, where one Brigade lost twenty-five officers and seven hundred men in an abortive attack.
But the interest centred around the 8th Division fighting, that began so well, then hung fire until the Germans recovered from the demoralization of the smashing blow.
How utter was that demoralization we learned later from "agents" near Lille and Tournai. The Germans were actually "on the run" that morning, and pressing forward would have indubitably borne results that would have loomed large in the trend of events.
On March 15th, the 1st Cavalry Division was called out at dawn, and placed in support of the 27th Division at St. Eloi. Just before six o'clock on the evening of the 14th, the Huns had fired a mine at St. Eloi, and then poured a rain of high explosive shells over our trenches for half an hour. The howitzer shells exploded so rapidly, that one continuous roar ensued, the separate detonations being with difficulty distinguished.