A loyal reply was dispatched by General Baldock, and on the same day parties of Officers and N.C.O.’s, followed on the 19th by complete platoons, from the Battalions of the 2nd and 3rd West Riding (147th and 148th) Infantry Brigades were attached to units of the 23rd and 25th Brigades, 8th Division, for instructional duty in the trenches. On the 22nd, the 1st (146th) Brigade moved from Merville to Estaires, and was attached to the 7th Division, and placed under their orders. Sir Douglas Haig visited units of the Division on the following day. Divisional Headquarters were moved on the 27th to two houses and a farm in Bac St. Maur, and at 6 a.m. on the 28th, the Division took over a front of its own at Fleurbaix, covering sections 3, 4, 5 and 6 of the IV Corps sector.
We may fill in a few details in this outline. After all, it was a wonderful fortnight in the experience of the men from the West Riding. A war on the Western front had been waged for more than eight months, but it was all strange to new arrivals. Take, for instance, the 1/6th Battalion of the West Riding (Duke of Wellington’s) Regiment, which slept at S. Martin’s Rest Camp, about three miles out of Boulogne, on the night of April 14th. The next day, which was fine and warm, they marched nine miles to Hesdigneul, and waited two hours at the railway station before entraining for Merville. The entraining of a thousand and fifteen men presented no difficulty to troops which had long since become expert in such drill. It was carried out in batches of eight-and-forty, with a frontage of six men, eight deep. At a given signal three men entered the truck; the centre man took the rifles of the rest, whom the two flank men helped in. Merville was reached at 10-45 p.m. and the Battalion, preceded by its Billeting party in a motor-car, marched four miles to their billets at Neuf Berquin, turning in after 3 a.m.: a long and tiring day’s work. The 16th and 17th were spent quietly. On the 18th there was Church Parade, and in the afternoon motor-’buses were provided for a party of fifty officers and N.C.O.’s to proceed to Fleurbaix, where they were attached to the 13th Kensingtons for twenty-four hours’ instruction in the trenches. Even instruction had its perils, and this trench-party returned one casualty; Sgt. T. Richardson, ‘slightly wounded.’ On the 20th, the motor-’bus came again for a party of twenty-six in all, and next day a platoon from each Company in the Battalion studied trench-warfare as pupils of the 25th Brigade. This instruction, which included bomb-throwing, was continued till April 26th, when the Battalion paraded at 4-45 p.m. and marched to new billets at Fleurbaix, reaching Rue de Quesne at 8 o’clock. The next night at 11 p.m. Pte. J. Walsh was killed by rifle fire, and on Thursday, April 29th, Fleurbaix was shelled by heavy guns, which found the billets occupied by this Battalion. A single shell killed two privates and wounded a third: ‘the dead were buried where the shell fell, owing to Pte. Pickles being so mutilated. No service: Chaplain not available.’
This unhouselled grave may be taken as the initiation of the Division into war, rumours of which, set flying in the Second Battle of Ypres, reached units of the Division in their billets.[29] Their turn was to come a little later, but the fighting throughout April and May was so much of one piece and with one object that we may start, as the battle started, on April 17th.
A straight line, 260 miles long, drawn from a point on the Rhine midway between Cologne and Bonn, and terminating at the French coast about six miles north of Boulogne, will pass through Brussels and Ypres. That heroic town, in other words, the ‘great nerve-ganglion,’ as it has been called,[30] was not merely the symbol and shrine of Belgium’s resistance to the invader; it was also a necessary stage in the German attempt at the Channel ports. They battered the line up and down, in the hope of breaking a way through, but their worst and heaviest blows were levelled at Ypres itself, which they wrecked but they did not capture. The second of these desperate assaults opened as we saw, at Hill 60, two and a half miles to the south-east of Ypres, where it flared into the horror of poison-gas on April 22nd. A week of heroism and endurance brought this episode to a close by the withdrawal of the defence to a depth of about two miles on a semi-circular front of nearly eight. An intensified fierceness of attack marked the renewal of the battle in May. The hottest days were the 13th and 24th, between which there was a kind of lull; and thereafter the centre of fighting sagged away a few miles to the south, where the 49th Division was in waiting. The assault on Ypres had failed. Exhaustion-point had been reached on either side, but the defenders had paid an awful price. Their casualties numbered tens of thousands, and thousands had died in choking agony. The salient or semi-circle of troops, Belgian, French, Indian, Canadian and English, which had never stretched more than five miles out from its diameter on the Yser Canal, was flattened in even at the furthest to as little as two or three. Langemarck, the pivot of the first episode, which had lain on the rim of the salient, now lay more than two miles outside it; Bellewaarde Lake, the pivot of the second, which had lain two miles inside the rim, was now on the edge of it or without. If the last stronghold of Belgium was to be saved, and the gate to the Channel ports kept locked, at least an equal power of resistance was required from the defenders in the next phase.
Moreover, we must look at a bigger map. Behind the actual fighting line lay Lille and Douai, railway-junctions of cardinal importance for the communication and supplies of the German armies. To strike at these towns through Lens, at the south-west corner of the triangle of which Lille formed the apex and Douai the heel, was an object desirable on its own account and full of promise for the succour of Ypres. If these plans, concerted with high hopes between General Foch and Sir John French, succeeded in threatening the railway-system behind, they were bound to react unfavourably on the German occupation of Belgium. And even if these larger plans failed, partly in consequence of the indentation of the semi-circle of troops guarding Ypres, there might still be a sufficient gain of ground and a sufficient slaughter of the enemy to affect his distribution of forces between the Western and the Eastern fronts. For the situation in Russia was already causing anxiety to her Allies.
Hostilities were opened on May 9th by an intense attack of French artillery to the south-west of Lens on the road from Arras to Béthune, between La Targette and Carency. ‘That bombardment,’ says a graphic writer,[31] ‘was the most wonderful yet seen in Western Europe. It simply ate up the countryside for miles.’ Unfortunately, the mileage was not wide enough to open the way to Lens, and day by day the French advance was held up, pressed forward and held again, in a series of almost Homeric combats, which were measured by yards, even by feet, and in which the conspicuous names were White Works, Notre Dame de Lorette, Ablain, the Sugar Refinery, Souchez, the cemetery at Neuville St. Vaast, and a terrible labyrinth of underground fortifications. The whole area, working up from the River Scarpe, was on a frontage of about seven miles, with Lens about six miles to the north-east. Each obstacle had to be surmounted not once only, but in many instances several times, and when, at the end of May, the German salient from the Lille-Douai road was flattened back at its southern extremity to the outskirts of Lens, which did not fall, the French success in the three weeks’ fighting seemed hardly commensurate with the cost. We shall be in a position to estimate it more precisely when we have taken into account the results which were attained further north.
The French advance towards Lens from the south-west was supported by a British attack on a front facing east-south-east and aimed through Festubert and Aubers towards La Bassée and Lille. We noted just now the triangle which is formed with Lille at the apex, Douai at the eastern and Lens at the western foot. On the Lille-Lens line of that triangle, another and smaller triangle will be found, of which La Bassée forms the westernmost angle. The French, we are aware, came up on a front converging on Lens from Arras and the valley of the Scarpe. The British advanced from the north-west with a view to investing La Bassée, and if Lens and La Bassée had both fallen, as the issue of these heroic endeavours, the double triangle, or kite, would have been rolled up to its apex at Lille.