With our army in Flanders

by Valentine Williams

Map to illustrate the second battle of Ypres.
From “The Times,” by kind permission.

The second battle of Ypres has been called the second German thrust for Calais. It may have become so in the upshot; it was not at the outset. There is no doubt that the Germans were preparing an offensive, the main object of which was to test the efficacy of their asphyxiating gas, one of their great devices of “frightfulness” with which the German Government, through its newspapers and its agents, was wont to make our flesh creep. Their offensive was certainly in the nature of an experiment, and it seems probable that the large number of troops which, as my friend and colleague, Mr. James Dunn, Daily Mail correspondent at Rotterdam, a week before the battle, warned us, were being transported through Belgium and massed on the Western front were intended to press home any advantage that might be won by the asphyxiating gas.

A decided lack of vigour on the part of the German infantry at Ypres has been attributed, and is probably due, to the fact, clearly established by the statements of prisoners, that the German soldiers were terrified of their gas-cylinders, and showed the utmost reluctance to advance immediately behind their gas-cloud. That they had good reason to look askance at their new instrument of frightfulness is shown by the circumstance that, both at Hill 60 and farther northward in the salient, more than once the gas-cloud was seen to drift back into the German lines. Shortly after the second battle of Ypres I was told by an unimpeachable witness, a Belgian who had escaped from Ghent, that there were German gas victims in the military hospitals there, and that their sufferings had caused the military authorities the greatest embarrassment, owing to the effect thereby produced on the German wounded in the wards. The German soldiers’ dread of their unholy ally may to some extent account for the enemy’s failure to press home his advantage, but in my own mind I am convinced that the real explanation is that the German plans were entirely upset by our offensive at Hill 60 on April 17.

As the result of the dashing feat of arms by the 1st Royal West Kents and the 2nd King’s Own Scottish Borderers in capturing the hill, the German offensive was forestalled. The second battle of Ypres, in a figure of speech, went off at half-cock. The German General Staff may well have believed that the attack on Hill 60, instead of being a purely local affair as it really was, was the precursor of a vigorous offensive by the Allies.

The Germans had their pipe-lines laid and their gas-cylinders embedded in front of their trenches in the northern part of the salient. They obviously had no gas at Hill 60, otherwise, seeing that from April 22 on the wind was favourable, they would have gassed the 13th Brigade off the hill immediately the position fell into our hands, instead of waiting until May 1, when they gained a footing on the hill by means of their first gas attack (against the Dorsets), and May 5, when they overwhelmed the Duke of Wellington’s and recaptured the position. Believing, then, that the attempt was to be made to pierce their line at Hill 60, they naturally turned their hand to the best offensive weapon they believed themselves to possess—namely, the line of gas-cylinders installed ready for their experiment in the northern part of the salient.

They had been accumulating a formidable concentration of artillery in anticipation of their attack. Their plans were certainly not ripe, for during the battle they had to bring down heavy naval guns from the Belgian coast to reinforce their artillery. Fortune favoured them in respect of guns.

The second battle of Ypres was an artillery battle. As I have said, the German infantry showed want of vigour. Its attacks, when they were made, were half-hearted and comparatively easily repulsed. Their strength lay in their artillery, of which they possessed guns of all calibres, and used them with a reckless expenditure of ammunition that must have struck our gunners, starved of high-explosive shells, hot with angry envy. From April 22 until May 13 they pounded our men in their trenches, wherever they were, night and day, with relentless energy until the trenches were obliterated in places and choked with débris. They stretched a curtain of fire right across the salient, over Ypres (from which all the main roads radiate like the spokes of a wheel) and far beyond, and the brigades rushed up into action had to traverse this inferno before they came into the fight.

It was a battle of machinery. It was scientific slaughter—death and destruction poured out from miles away. There was a British brigade in the fight that lost all its Colonels but one, and battalions that lost heavily without ever seeing a German. For the Germans not to have won through, against an enemy thrown into confusion by a foul and diabolical surprise and out-gunned from start to finish, is in itself a defeat. Their failure to blast their way through to the sea, which was their objective as the battle developed for them with such unexpected success, must be counted a signal triumph for the Allies—not only for the British troops that held the salient, but also for the gallant French, whose counter-attacks were instrumental in delaying the onrush of the German hordes down the western bank of the canal.

The balance of the second battle of Ypres cannot have been agreeable reading for the Supreme War Lord. On the credit side the gain of a mile or two of a position which we could hardly have hoped to hold against a really strong thrust, on the debit side an expenditure of ammunition, only exceeded by the colossal Austro-German bombardment before Przemysl, and extremely severe casualties. The battle marked the end of all German offensives on the Western front for months, and in this theatre the war relapsed into the state of stalemate, in which Time, most valued ally of the Western Powers, can make his assistance most efficaciously felt against the enemy of mankind.