From Bapaume to Passchendaele, 1917

by Philip Gibbs

The men who did that were the King's Royal Rifles and Northamptons of the 1st Division, and this last stand of theirs beyond the Yser Canal will not be forgotten as long as human valour is remembered by us. It is wonderful to think that after three years of war the spirit of our men should still be so high and proud that they will stand to certain death like this. Those men who came back from the other side of the canal came back wounded, and had to swim back. They were a remnant of those who have stayed, lying out there now in the churned-up sand, or have been carried back to German hospitals. They were soldiers of the Northamptons and the Sixtieth. Among the King's Royal Rifles there were many London lads, from the old city which we used to think overcivilized and soft. Well, it was men like that who have shed their blood upon the sand-dunes, so that this tract by the sea is consecrated by one of the most tragic episodes in the history of this war.

It was on the seashore, when a high wind ruffled the waters on the morning of July 10, that the enemy began his attack with a deadly fire. His position was in a network of trenches, tunnels, concrete emplacements, and breastworks of thick sand-bag walls built down from the coast to the south of Lombartzyde. Facing him were other trenches and breastworks which we had recently taken over from the French. Behind our men was the Yser Canal, with pontoon bridges crossing to Nieuport and Nieuport-les-Bains. Without these bridges there was no way back or round for the men holding the lines in the dunes. The enemy began early in the morning by putting a barrage down on our front-line system of defences from a large number of batteries of heavy howitzers. Most of his shells were at least as large as 5·9's, and for one long hour they swept up and down our front, smashing breastworks and emplacements and flinging up storms of sand. After that hour the enemy altered his line of fire. There was a five minutes' pause, five minutes of breathing-space for men still left alive among many dead, and then the wall of shells crossed the canal and stayed there for another hour, churning up the sand with a tornado of steel. The guns then lifted to the front line again, and for another hour continued their work of destruction, pausing for one of those short silences which gave men hope that the bombardment had ceased. It had not ceased. It travelled again to the support line and stayed smashing there for sixty minutes—then across the canal again, then back all over again.

There was one interval of a whole quarter of an hour, and the officers had time to tell their men that it must be a fight to the death, because the position must be held until that death. There must have been few of them who did not know that after that bombardment they would meet the enemy face to face if they still remained alive.

The commanding officer of the Sixtieth became convinced by three o'clock in the afternoon that all this destructive fire was preparatory to a big attack. He saw that his bridges had gone behind him, so that there was no way of escape, and he saw that the enemy was trying to cut off all means of relief and communication. He tried to get messages through, but without success. Two shells came into his battalion headquarters, killing and wounding some of the officers and men crowded in this sand-bag shelter and dug-out in the dune. He took the survivors into a tunnel bored by the miners along the seashore, and here for a time they were able to carry on. But it was almost impossible to get out to reconnoitre the situation, or to give some word of comfort or courage to men standing to arms amongst the wreckage. Flights of hostile aeroplanes were overhead, and they flew low and poured machine-gun fire at any living man who showed. Away behind they were searching for our batteries.

At 6.15 all the German batteries broke into drum-fire and flung shells over the whole of our position for three-quarters of an hour without a second's pause. After all these previous barrages it reached the utmost heights of hellishness, destroying what had already been destroyed, sweeping all this wide tract of sand-dunes right away from the coast to the south of Lombartzyde with flame and smoke and steel, and reaping another harvest of death.

There are many details of this action which may never be known. No man saw it from other ground, and those who were across that bank of the Yser could see very little beyond their own neighbourhood of bursting shells. But a sergeant of the Northamptons, who had an astounding escape, saw the first three waves of German marines advance with bombing parties. That was shortly after seven o'clock in the evening. They were in heavy numbers against a few scattered groups of English soldiers still left alive after a day of agony and blood. They came forward bombing in a crescent formation, one horn of the crescent trying to work round behind the flank of the Rifles on the seashore as the other tried to outflank the Northamptons on the right.

A party of German machine-gunners crept along the edge of the sands, taking advantage of the low tide, and enfiladed the support line, now a mere mash of sand, in which some wounded and unwounded men held out, and swept them with bullets. Another party of the marines made straight for the tunnel, which was now the battalion headquarters of the Sixtieth, and poured liquid fire down it. Then they passed on, but as if uncertain of having completed their work, came back after a time and bombed it. Even then there was at least one man not killed in that tunnel. He stayed there among the dead till night and then crept out and swam across the canal. Two platoons of Riflemen fought to the last man, refusing to surrender. One little group of five lay behind a bank of sand, and fired with rifles and bombs until they were destroyed.

Meanwhile the Northamptons, on the right, were fighting desperately. Seeing that the German marines were trying to get behind them on the right flank and that they had not the strength to resist this, they got a message through to some troops farther down in front of Lombartzyde to form a barrier so that the enemy could not come through, and these fought their way grimly up, thrusting back the enemy's storm troops, and then made a defensive block through which the marines could not force their way.

The Northamptons fought without any chance of escape, without any hope except that of a quick finish. The German marines brought up a machine-gun and fixed it behind the place where the Northampton officers had established their headquarters, and fired up it. Our machine-guns were out of action, filled with sand or buried in sand. One gunner managed to get his weapon into position, but it jammed at once, and with a curse on it, he flung it into the water of the Yser, and then jumped in and swam back. Another gunner lay by the side of his machine-gun, hit twice by shells, so that he could not work it. One of his comrades wanted to drag him off to the canal bank, in the hope of swimming back with him. To linger there a minute meant certain death. "Don't mind about me," said the machine-gunner of the Northamptons. "Smash my gun and get back." There was no time for both, so the gun was smashed and the wounded man stayed on the wrong side of the bank.

The fighting lasted for an hour and a half after the beginning of the infantry attack. It was over at 8.30. The wounded sergeant of the Northamptons who swam back saw the last of the struggle. He saw a little group of his own officers, not more than six of them, surrounded by marine bombers, fighting to the end with their revolvers. The picture of these six boys out there in the sand, with their dead lying around them, refusing to yield and fighting on to a certain death, is one of the memories of this war that should not be allowed to die.