The Belgian Front and Its Notable Features

by Willy Breton

The Front to be Held—The Task before the Belgian Army—General Features of the Country to be Organised for Defence.

After their failure to trample upon the remnants of the Belgian Army and take Calais, the Germans had transferred their activities to the Ypres district, where they hoped that attacks pressed home with the utmost fury would enable them to effect their purpose. This second stage in the battle of Flanders ended in the enemy experiencing a second check as costly as the first. While it was in progress, the Germans, with the double object of holding the Allied forces on the north and of trying to force the Yser at that point, renewed their assaults on the Dixmude bridgehead. On November 10th, 1914, the weakened French and Belgian troops, whose muddy trenches had been blown to pieces by the bombardment, had to give ground before the enemy's pressure and fall back on to the left bank of the Yser, leaving the ruins of Dixmude in the hands of the Germans. But all attempts of the enemy to cross the river were fruitless. The Germans encountered so stubborn a resistance that they soon abandoned a project which had already cost them frightful losses.

With the approach of winter, fighting gradually died down all along the Flanders front. The two opponents were exhausted, and were obliged to reconstitute their forces and organise their respective positions. From this time onwards there was nothing to record save a few local engagements of short duration, though fierce and always entailing heavy casualties. The enemy's artillery, however, took advantage of its numerical superiority and greater weight in the Belgian sector to keep up a ceaseless and destructive fire upon our works, now in their earliest stages, and on the villages which acted as cantonments for our wearied troops. One after the other, the humble townlets of the Yser front crumbled into dust, shot to pieces by shell and devoured by fire.

It was in this devastated and desolate region, and in the depth of a severe winter, that the hastily reformed Belgian Army—as yet hardly recovered from its terrible experiences and still lacking a thousand necessaries—had to set to work to convert into a solid rampart the weak barrier on which the enemy's attacks had been broken only by prodigies of heroism.

The front entrusted to its care extended from the outskirts of Nieuport to the old Knocke fort at the confluence of the Yser with the Yperlée. Passing round the east side of Nieuport, it rejoins the railway to the south of the town and then follows the railway embankment to Dixmude, separated by the inundation from the Yser itself. To the south-west of Oud-Stuyvekenskerke the front curves inwards to meet the Yser dyke at the 16th milestone, and runs along the left bank of the river, skirting the lands which the flood waters, working steadily southwards, have converted into swamps.

As fast as the Belgian Army regained its strength the front was extended further, along the Yperlée and the Ypres canal, to the north of Steenstraat in the first instance, and then to Boesinghe. So it is really the Belgian Army which has definitely organised the whole front up to the latter place, over a distance of at least 31 kilometres.

If one considers only the portion which had to be defended by the army in the early stages—that between the sea and Fort Knocke—it is clear that a heavy strain was put upon the weak effectives left in being after the battle of the Yser—a strain all the greater because the gaps in the ranks could be filled but slowly and with great difficulty.

The inundations certainly protected a large part of the front and made the enemy's attacks less formidable. But the protection might be nullified by frost. A great deal of work was, therefore, needed to enable the area of the inundation to be regulated at will, to prevent the water invading our own trenches, and to make it impossible for the enemy to use the inundation against us.

It would be a serious mistake to assume that this sheet of water formed an impassable obstacle at all points. Where it seemed to give the greatest security—between the Nieuport-Dixmude railway and the Yser—the roads and tracks, which are causeways in all weathers, and the small risings in the ground near the buildings and farms scattered about the country, stood out of the great lagoon and offered chances of getting across, or formed islands that might usefully be occupied.