One who was there thus describes what followed:—
"The Germans were taken completely by surprise. Their horses started to rear and plunge, and many men and animals went over into the stream, being carried away. The motor wagons could not be stopped in time, and they crashed into each other in hopeless confusion. Into this confused mass of frightened men and horses and wagons that had run amok the Lancers now charged from two separate points, setting up the most awful cries in English where they didn't know any other language, but as some knew a little French and others more Irish they joined in, and all that added to the confusion of the Germans, who must have fancied that the whole Allied Army had come down on them. The Lancers made short work of the escort at the head of the column, and the officer in command agreed to surrender all that was under his direct control, though he said he couldn't account for the rearguard."
CHAPTER III
CONTEST FOR THE CHANNEL COAST[ToC]
IMPETUOUS DASH OF LEINSTERS AND ROYAL IRISH, AND GRIM TENACITY OF IRISH GUARDS AND RIFLES
It had become evident that the design of the Germans, then hacking their way through Belgium, was to reach Calais and Boulogne so as to cut the direct communication of the British with the Channel coast of Belgium and France. With the view of frustrating these plans, Sir John French, early in October, withdrew his forces from the orchards and woodlands by the banks of the Aisne to French Flanders, on the north-west, a mingled industrial and agricultural country. The British Commander had also hoped to be in time to outflank the right wing of the enemy, but in this he was disappointed by the fall of Antwerp, which enabled the Germans to sweep quickly round to Ostend, higher up the Belgian coast.
The British lines now ran, first from the historic French city of St. Omer in a south-easterly direction to the smaller towns of Bethune, Givenchy, and La Bassée, towards the great French manufacturing city of Lille, prominent on the landscape with its forest of tall chimneys; and, secondly, from St. Omer again north to Ypres, the ancient and beautiful capital of Flanders. Here, for months to come, many most desperate and critical battles were to be fought, in an extraordinary tangle of railways, canals, roads, industrial villages, mills, breweries, dyeworks, machine-shops, brick-fields, lime-kilns, and intervening patches of intensive agriculture—the most densely crowded area in the world—with the ultimate result that the advance of the Germans to the Channel coast was stopped by impregnable lines of British trenches.