The 2nd Cavalry Division, dismounted, was called up as support during this attack. To reach the trenches into which they were ordered they found it necessary to advance across an enemy barrage de feu. The 4th Hussars and 5th Lancers were the regiments engaged. For a time it seemed they would be badly cut up, but luckily they got through the curtain of shells with only forty killed.
So some cavalry units had been thrown into the actual line, after all.
On the 3rd the 1st Cavalry Division moved back to its previous winter billets, the Headquarters Staff again repairing to the La Nieppe château.
The Huns attacked our Ypres line all day on the 4th, but with no success. That night the evacuation of the extreme eastern section of the Salient was carried out without serious casualty.
The enemy patrols that poked through the Polygon Wood at daybreak on the 4th, and discovered the British retirement to a line further west, must indeed have been surprised.
The fighting of the previous ten days had cost the Allies over thirty square miles of ground and more than 20,000 casualties, but the British Army had undoubtedly gained in morale, nevertheless. Colonials and Territorials, as well as old line regiments filled with new reserve men, had fought shoulder to shoulder with the veterans of Le Cateau and the Aisne, every unit gaining strength unconsciously as each contingent rose in the other's estimation. Mutual admiration and mutual confidence had welded the Army all the more closely together.
On a call at 5th Corps Headquarters at Abele, west of Poperinghe, I saw a couple of what appeared to be divers' helmets. These were loaded into a car, with a good-sized roll of rubber tubing and a homely pair of bellows attached to each of the grotesque pieces of headgear.
Curious, I asked a "Q" officer, standing near by, just how this paraphernalia was to be used.
"People get strange ideas about fighting gas," he said. "These outfits were designed and forwarded to us to be sent up front, so up front I am sending them. They are provided to allow some of our men, say about 3 in every 10,000, so far as present supply goes, to stay in the gas-filled trenches while some pals with the bellows pump good air to them through a few hundred feet of hose.