With our army in Flanders

by Valentine Williams

The next day another attack on St. Julien was delivered, but also without success. General Riddell, commanding the Northumberland Brigade of the Northumbrian Division, received a pressing order from the Canadians to attack with the Lahore Division and a battalion of General Hull’s Brigade. There had been no time to reconnoitre. It was for this brigade a “boost in the dark,” but the urgency of the crisis admitted of no delay. So our men went forward again, three battalions of the Northumberland Fusiliers and the Indians, straight into an inferno of shell and rifle fire. All through the afternoon they struggled on under a terrific bombardment, the worst that the battle had brought forth up to that time. At half-past three the gallant Riddell was killed by a bullet as he was going up to see for himself the position of his battalions, who had dug themselves in 200 yards away from St. Julien.

Let us pause a minute here, and contemplate the work of this North Country Territorial Division. Landed in France on April 19, five days later the stout North Countrymen, the majority of whom were miners from Northumberland, Yorkshire, and Durham, were undergoing an ordeal of fire which tried the nerves of our hardiest veterans. They knew nothing of the country, they had had no practical experience of war. In the ordinary course of events they would have had a progressive course of acclimatization in the field before taking their turn of duty in the firing-line as a divisional unit. “Had they been only a couple of months in France,” a competent observer said to me after the battle, “their losses would not have been so heavy. There are things about this war which no amount of careful training at home can teach. But the need for reinforcements was imperative, and they had to go into the fight. They never flinched from their ordeal. They fought and died like men.”

That was a Territorial division, if there ever was one, men of the same mould, of the same speech, mostly led by the men they were wont to follow in their civilian callings. In battle, says the old German song, a man must depend on himself. That is what the Northumbrian Division did. On them, the untried battalions of but five days’ active service, devolved the proud honour of serving the Empire as a homogeneous unit, and they did not shirk the call. The mind dwells with a thrill on the advance of those sturdy, thick-set fellows suddenly confronted with the most hideous side of modern war, yet accepting the ordeal stolidly, unflinchingly, with many a rough word of encouragement and comfort bandied from mouth to mouth in their broad northern speech.

The abandonment of St. Julien had placed the Canadian right in a precarious position. Their position on the Gravenstafel ridge, which had now become the acute angle of the salient, was untenable. Another brigade of the Northumbrian Division having come up to their relief with great difficulty, the Canadians fell back on the night of the 26th to behind the Hannabeek stream. Alter that the Canadian Division was withdrawn, its place being taken by the Lahore Division, part of the 4th Division, and the Northumbrian Division.

Some battalions of the Durham Light Infantry of the Northumbrian Division which carried out the relief came in for a most tremendous hammering from German 8-inch guns. One battalion on the Gravenstafel ridge repelled an attack delivered by several German battalions at 2 p.m. on the 26th, losing all save one officer and fifty men, but then had to retire. The Germans, pressing forward, started to envelop, so our men fell back in good order to behind the Hannabeek stream. Other battalions of this regiment were sent to stop a gap where the Germans, pushing on after the Canadian retirement, had broken through at Zevenkote. They, too, suffered heavily from the terrific German bombardment, and, indeed, never caught a glimpse of the enemy at all. On the evening of April 26 they dug themselves in on a line near Zevenkote to the left of the railway-line skirting Zonnebeke.

The retirement of the Canadians from the Gravenstafel ridge had created a grave situation for the brigade on its right, the left-hand brigade of the 28th Division, which, you will remember, was holding the centre of the salient. When the Canadians fell back, the Royal Fusiliers’ flank was left “in the air,” as the saying goes. The 11th Brigade of the 4th Division, which had come to the relief of the Canadians, arrived most providentially, and the Hampshires were rushed up to get connection with the “Seventh” in their perilous position.

On the 25th the Germans delivered a furious attack against the East Surreys and the Middlesex, but the Londoners stood firm and beat the Boche back to his trenches, the Surreys capturing a number of prisoners. The order was to hold the line at all costs, and it was held. Both battalions behaved splendidly, but one must make particular mention of the gallantry of the 8th Middlesex, a Territorial battalion, which stood its first taste of modern war with admirable coolness.

All next day the Germans kept up a tremendous bombardment, and a gap appeared between the Hampshires and the Royal Fusiliers, the point of least resistance of our line here. It was eventually filled by the Shropshire Light Infantry at dusk. Some battalions of the Northumbrian Division were brought in to reinforce the line here.

Meanwhile on the extreme left the French had carried out their promise, and had counter-attacked. In conjunction with our gallant Indian troops, who fought most stoutly in this battle, they were able to push the enemy farther north. The French recaptured Lizerne, and made some progress at Steenstraat and Het Sas; but the Germans, profiting by the north-easterly breeze, which unexpectedly held in their favour during the greater part of the three weeks’ fighting, made free use of their gas-fumes, and little real progress was realized. All through the 27th, 28th, 29th, and 30th the Germans kept up a tremendous bombardment right round the curve of the salient. Our line now ran from the canal straight across the Ypres-Langemarck Road in front of St. Julien, through Fortuin to Zevenkote, and thence bent round Zonnebeke (for Broodseinde had had to be abandoned), through the Polygon Wood, back to Hill 60. The Germans made full use of their superiority of artillery, and swept the trenches with a never-ending deluge of heavy projectiles and mortar bombs, while all the roads leading through Ypres to the front were sprayed day and night with fire.

Not Meissonnier, nor Détaille, nor Werner, nor even Verestchagin, I believe, could have thrown on canvas an adequate impression of the awful ordeal which these endless days of pitiless bombardment imposed on our troops. They could have painted you a picture of the British in the trenches running through green fields and pastures and woods, with the wrecks of cottages and churches dotted about the landscape, and the grey ruins of Ypres, seen through bursts of black and white smoke, in the background. They could have shown you our men, unshorn, unwashed, their eyes shining whitely out of their faces, begrimed, burnt by the sun, standing at the parapet firing steadily, or digging, filling sandbags and piling them up to close the breaches rent in the parapet by the enemy’s shells bursting on every side. They could have shown you the dead, the pitilessly mangled, the hideously limp victims of the shells; they might have conveyed by a touch of the brush the indifference with which men in the firing-line will pass to and fro before the yet warm bodies of their comrades. They could have shown you the wounded, quiet, dull-eyed, the long processions of the stretcher-bearers dodging their way down to houses and barns and churches and stables, where, under the Cross of Geneva, the doctors were working swiftly and silently, without fuss.