The full reality of war struck Ypres on 7 October 1914, the day Churchill arrived back in London from his Antwerp venture. Early that Wednesday afternoon about a dozen shells from German field guns heralded the approach of cavalry and an infantry battalion with cyclists down the Menin Road. The townsfolk were not surprised. As at Mons in August, tales of Uhlans on reconnaissance patrol had come in from neighbouring villages during recent days, for Falkenhayn was deploying his 4th Cavalry Corps northwards in a sweep to cut off French or British forces heading for the Flanders coastal plain. Most of the Germans who entered Ypres soon left, making for the railway junction at Hazebrouck across the French border, but several hundred remained in the town, resting horses overnight and awaiting clarification of their orders. Meanwhile they replenished supplies by the simplest of methods, confiscation. A levy of 65,000 francs (£2,700 – some £54,000 by today’s values) was removed from the municipal coffers as a guarantee of the citizens’ good behaviour. Individual shops suffered: a jeweller in the rue au Beurre, the road out of the Grand Place towards the station esplanade, lost watches worth more than £1,000; drapers subsequently complained of suits, trousers and underwear purloined; the post office till was rifled, though it yielded little.1 There were no atrocities or acts of punitive vandalism, but the townsfolk viewed the future with apprehension. A long occupation seemed likely; the nearest allied troops were some 20 miles away and as yet only in small numbers.
Falkenhayn, however, was a cautious commander. His Cavalry Corps, roaming large stretches of the Flanders plain, had become dangerously detached from the main German Sixth Army, attacking down a long front from Armentières southwards to Arras. Already Bailleul and the approaches to Hazebrouck were proving more stoutly defended than the towns of Belgian Flanders; British troops had been identified at Abbeville and were heading for the region in great numbers; Indian regiments were known to have come ashore at Marseilles in the last week of September and entrained for the north; from intelligence reports Falkenhayn learnt that the 7th Division was disembarking at Zeebrugge and could soon strike at his rear. On 8 October he decided to pull back his cavalry, rather than risk their being trapped by British forces converging on West Flanders from opposite directions. The cavalry would be absorbed in a new Fourth Army, forming in Germany. Flanders, he believed, merited a more systematically planned and executed offensive. After destroying Ypres’s telegraph system, the invaders withdrew. Thereafter, for the duration of the war, the only Germans to enter Ypres came as prisoners, often wounded and needing emergency treatment at improvised hospitals.2
The British arrived next Wednesday morning, 14 October, at nine o’clock. First down the road from Roulers came dragoons in the 6th Cavalry Brigade of IV Corps, as Sir Henry Rawlinson’s Antwerp Expeditionary Force had been renamed when integrated in the BEF three days earlier. After a week of autumn sunshine the weather broke on the previous evening, and they were greeted by steady rain, an ominous augury for the months ahead. The brigade – together with the Life Guards and Royal Horse Guards (the Blues) of the 7th Cavalry Brigade and supporting artillery and field engineers – formed General Byng’s Cavalry Division and had ridden from Bruges through Thourout and Roulers, covering the Belgian field army as it withdrew to re-form at Nieuport, where sluice-gates and locks held back the sea from the Yser flat lands. The main body of IV Corps comprised Capper’s 7th Division, which fell back from Ghent and Bruges through Aeltre and Thielt and, on the previous evening, had linked up with Byng’s cavalry at Roulers, a linen town with more inhabitants than Ypres but not deemed defensible.
Throughout the morning the 7th Division filed into Ypres: almost 18,000 men had disembarked at Zeebrugge on 6 October. By midday, as the clouds lifted, and the rain relented, the Grand Place was packed with some of the finest troops in the regular British army: Grenadier Guards, Scots Guards, Gordon Highlanders, Green Howards, Royal Scots Fusiliers, Royal Welch Fusiliers and the Rifle Brigade among them. There were battalions from the Royal Warwickshire, Bedfordshire, South Staffordshire and Wiltshire regiments, together with the Northumberland Hussars, a yeomanry regiment providing 7th Division’s cavalry squadron.
Eight of Capper’s 12 battalions had been serving overseas when war was declared and were brought hurriedly home from South Africa, Egypt, Malta and Gibraltar, in some instances well ahead of their equipment. Kitchener retained the remaining four battalions of the 7th Division when the BEF crossed to France, partly as a safeguard against invasion but also to help train his ‘New Armies’. Many of the men thronging the centre of Ypres had fought in the Boer War. All except the yeomanry were professionals, sharing the confidence and superb marksmanship shown by I and II Corps at Mons nine weeks previously.3
As yet Capper’s men had seen little fighting, although Byng’s cavalry clashed several times with patrols on the march southwards from Bruges. ‘We are getting fed up with all this waiting, and all are anxious to get in action,’ Gunner Burrows of the Royal Field Artillery noted in his diary next day.4 Sir John French, with his distaste for fortress inactivity, had every intention of capitalizing on the division’s eagerness and mobility. The commander-in-chief had conferred with General Foch at the weekend and agreed with him on a general strategy of counter-offensive, a grand design for rolling back the invader from the lower Yser and upper Lys to the Belgian heartland.
French required Rawlinson to push forward and establish a line from the ridge west of Roulers to Menin, with Courtrai, Oudenarde and Brussels as ultimate objectives. Allenby’s Cavalry Division was at that moment consolidating its hold on the rising ground west of Messines, and Sir John anticipated that II Corps and III Corps would support the main French attack to recapture Lille by extending the line southwards through Armentières, Neuve Chapelle and La Bassée. Haig’s I Corps, the last to be relieved by the French on the Aisne, would then give support to Rawlinson and possibly to the Belgians around Nieuport and Dixmude, but it was not expected to reach the Ypres region for another three days.5
Less than 18 hours after entering Ypres, Capper and Byng were on the move out again, the cavalry trotting cautiously over cobbles made slippery by rain and persistent mist, the humbler work horses hauling 18-pounders towards the eastern hillocks that form the rim of the Ypres saucer. Behind trudged the infantry, passing forlorn columns of refugees seeking safety in the west and often blocking the road. To Capper’s left were French Territorials, shipped from Le Havre to Dunkirk to help plug the gap between the BEF and the Belgians along the upper Yser. From the south came the sound of heavy firing: II Corps was heavily engaged west of La Bassée and III Corps around Armentières (with a gravely wounded Lieutenant Bernard Montgomery among the casualties at Méteren, some 9 miles southwest of Ypres). 6
Towards Roulers and Menin there was no sign of the enemy; Samson’s armoured cars, reconnoitring well ahead of the 7th Division, reached the outskirts of Menin itself unchallenged. Most of the division spent two nights in the fields or found cover in the clusters of farm buildings or small villages. On Friday afternoon (16 October) the Life Guards and the Blues – the Household Brigade that in peace formed the sovereign’s ceremonial escort – found billets in a larger village on a ridge 300 feet above sea level and a little over 7 miles from Ypres. The village bore a name that as yet meant nothing to the British army: Passchendaele. There the brigade remained for two nights.7 It formed a vantage point commanding the countryside from Roulers in the east to Kemmel (a ‘mount’ 520 feet above sea level) and, below it, a ridge between Wytschaete, at 260 feet, and Messines, slightly more than 5 miles south of Ypres.
Sir Henry Rawlinson’s orders for Sunday, 18 October, were to push forward on Menin. He was, however, suspicious of German troops reported moving westwards from Brussels to Courtrai and, to Sir John French’s anger, postponed the attack, pending reports from reconnaissance patrols.8 But before dawn on Monday, Capper’s division moved down into the plain and on towards Menin while the French cavalry descended in force on Roulers. At first all seemed to go well. Soon, however, IV Corps encountered much greater resistance than had seemed likely on the Sunday. Heavy cloud ruled out aerial reconnaissance until mid-morning, but when the planes were eventually airborne the RFC reported columns of men, horses and guns on the plain west of Courtrai. They threatened to cut the Menin Road and to mount a full-scale assault on Ypres itself Rawlinson at once ordered Capper’s advance troops to pull back, much to the frustration of the Royal Welch Fusiliers who were within 2 miles of Menin town.9
Byng’s cavalry brigades took up positions between Zandvoorde and the Kruiseik crossroads, on the Menin Road, and then along the paved road that followed the ridge for 5 miles to Passchendaele. There, as dusk fell, the villagers could see the flames of Roulers lighting the night sky, the town fired by a bombardment that forced a brigade of French cavalry to withdraw.10 Sadly, families packed clothes and blankets on to dogcarts and prepared to swell the trail of refugees, some farmers making sure their family had a cow with them. Next day – Tuesday, 20 October – the remaining British troops pulled out of Passchendaele and down the ridge to join the defensive concentration in the plain, where trenches were being dug. Thus, almost haphazardly and as a temporary expedient, the Ypres Salient began to take shape. The trenches were not, as yet, a systematic network like the German experiment above the Aisne. They were primitive improvisations, often hardly more than a sandbagged ditch at the edge of a sodden field of beet or turnips.
Sir John French remained wedded to the idea of an offensive. On Monday evening the commander-in-chief received Haig at GHQ and ordered him to press forward, capture Bruges, ‘defeat the enemy and drive him on Ghent’. Confidently, French assured Haig that ‘he estimated the Enemy’s strength on the front Ostend to Menin at about one corps, not more’.11 This was an extraordinary miscalculation, flying in the face of intelligence reports. In reality Falkenhayn had already concentrated a force twice that size and more troops were on their way by train from Munich, Augsburg, Stuttgart and Dresden.
The grey columns that the RFC observers sighted west of Courtrai on Monday were the main body of the new Fourth Army, essential to realizing the hopes Falkenhayn continued to cherish of early victory in the West. The army, commanded by Albrecht, Duke of Württemberg, comprised five reserve corps, four of them newly raised, hurriedly trained and short of equipment; the other corps was formed by Beseler’s victorious troops from Antwerp, who took Zeebrugge on 14 October and Ostend a day later. There were 130 infantry and rifle battalions in the German Fourth Army and 20 cavalry squadrons, but its strength lay in guns, for the artillery was supplemented by 16 heavy mortars that had bombarded Antwerp. The official history of the campaign shows the army had no less than 176 medium or heavy guns.12 Even without this intimidating assembly of fire-power the Germans were far stronger than their opponents. Together with the reformed Sixth Army south of the French border – five corps under Rupprecht, Crown Prince of Bavaria – they went into battle with twice as many infantry divisions in Flanders as the allies and could count on five more corps arriving before the end of the month.
Falkenhayn’s neo-Schlieffen Plan envisaged an advance by the Fourth Army down the coast ‘to cut off the fortresses [sic] of Dunkirk and Calais’ and sever links with England while the Sixth Army would break through in the centre around Arras.13 It was essential for him to launch the Flanders offensive with an assault on the left of the allied line; on Saturday, 17 October, German artillery shelled Nieuport while Beseler’s cavalry reconnoitred the canalized Yserlee as far south as Dixmude, some 12 miles inland.
The allies, too, attached great importance to the lower Yser. This was the region in which King Albert was seeking to restore order and fighting efficiency in regiments that had completed the demoralizing retreat from Antwerp. It was also a sector of great interest to General Foch: he saw the Dixmude–Ypres line as the springboard for a manoeuvre that would turn the German right flank by swinging across to Courtrai, on the River Lys 20 miles to the northeast, with the BEF pressing ahead to Ghent. As early as 13 October, King Albert issued a stirring proclamation calling on the army to uphold ‘our national honour . . . Let anyone who talks of retreat be deemed a traitor to his country,’ he declared. Over the following days Albert impressed on his five divisional commanders his determination to resist the German onslaught: any general whose men fell back would be instantly dismissed; officers claiming to be sick would face court martial. Marksmen were placed behind the lines with orders to shoot any men who abandoned their posts in panic.14
Albert set up his headquarters at Furnes, 5 miles behind the Front, although he made his home, with Queen Elisabeth and their three children, at the Villa Maskens on the edge of the dunes at La Panne. The Belgian 2nd Division was concentrated close to Nieuport, the 1st around Schoorbakke; the 3rd held at first in reserve at Lampernisse; the 4th straddled the Yser from Tervaete down to Dixmude, while the 5th and 6th were thinly disposed for 8 miles along the canalized Yserlee from Dixmude as far as Boesinghe, a village some 3 to 4 miles north of Ypres. On mobilization in August the Belgian field army had numbered 117,000 men. Now less than half of that number was in the line along the Yser, with the certainty of heavy casualties when the fighting was resumed with full intensity.
In talks with Foch the king emphasized that Belgium was waging war as an associated power; the army would remain an independent, unified force under his command. He agreed, however, to co-operate with the French, establishing a similar relationship to that of the commander-in-chief of the BEF. Foch promised support and on 22 October a special army group, General d’Urbal’s Détachement d’armée de Belgique (DAB) came into being. It eventually comprised four full-strength corps and two cavalry corps and was committed to close collaboration with the Belgians. On 23 October the vanguard of the DAB, General Grossetti’s 42nd Division, reinforced the defenders of Nieuport.
One French unit was already assisting the Belgians when the German guns first opened up along the Yser. The 6,000 French Marine Fusiliers, originally assigned for the defence of Antwerp but slow to move north, were officially attached to the Belgian army on 13 October and covered the approaches to Dixmude. The marines came from Brittany. Like Churchill’s Naval Divisions they were surplus seamen, with little training in land warfare, but their enterprise, ingenuity and collective courage compensated for the lack of fighting experience ashore. Their commander, Rear-Admiral Pierre Ronarc’h was also a Breton, a torpedo specialist. He had, however, seen service ashore in China 14 years earlier with the French contingent of the international force sent to relieve the Peking legations in the Boxer Rising. It was in the same expedition that Major von Falkenhayn, accompanying the much larger German contingent, gained his reputation for ruthlessness.15
For many years British studies of the Ypres campaign tended to ignore the early fighting along the canalized river, at best treating it as a separate ‘Battle of the Yser’, more often dismissing it in two or three sentences. It was left to Professor Strachan in 2001 to emphasize that ‘the crisis on the Yser was part of a larger encounter battle, pivoting on the city of Ypres’, a battle in which ‘Dixmude, tenaciously held by the French marines, became the key to the movements of both sides.’16 What happened along the river from Nieuport to Dixmude determined the strategic character of First Ypres and the fate of the BEF. Had the Germans broken through at this point it would have been impossible to hold the city or sustain British armies in Flanders. For the Germans to have faltered and fallen back would have brought Foch’s grand design closer to fulfilment.
The region was ill suited for battle. This was land wrested from the sea, criss-crossed by canals and ditches and permeated by constant dampness, with water never far below the surface of the polders. The Yser estuary, running for a mile and a half down to the sea beyond Nieuport, is flanked by sand dunes that offered some protection to troops sheltering from German shelling; they continue along the coast through La Panne and on to the outskirts of Dunkirk. Inland the Yser was backed by an embankment 10 feet high, carrying the railway to Ypres and as straight as a yardrule. But there were six bends along the canalized river between Nieuport and Dixmude, so that in places the embankment stood more than 2 miles back from the river. During the fourth week of October these dank, mist-covered fields, oozing mud with every step, formed a fragile crucible for the fiercest fighting on the most northern sector of the whole Western Front.
The main German attack on the Yser began on 18 October, the Sunday on which Capper’s 7th Division and the Household Brigade moved cautiously forward along the Menin Road. The Belgians and the Marine Fusiliers offered fierce resistance during the first four days, throwing back assaults on Dixmude, but they were gradually forced to abandon outposts east of Nieuport town, despite the courage of the 14th Regiment of the Line, who lost no less than 900 men. A Royal Navy flotilla, commanded by Rear-Admiral Hood (who had accompanied Churchill to Antwerp), stood off shore and began responding to the German bombardment on the Sunday morning.
Allied naval participation in the battle continued for 11 days. At the peak of operations on 24 October the flotilla comprised 15 Royal Navy warships, headed by two ageing cruisers, two new shallow-draught monitors with howitzers and 6-inch guns and eight destroyers, together with five French destroyers. On 25 October the 15-year-old battleship HMS Venerable augmented the strength of the flotilla, broadsides from her 12-inch guns inflicting heavy casualties on Beseler’s infantry at a time when the Belgian artillery was becoming ominously short of shells.17 After a week’s continuous fighting, the Belgians were forced back to the railway embankment, though tenaciously holding on to Dixmude, and the Germans seemed poised to complete a breakthrough. Before the war Dixmude was an attractive pocket-size Bruges. Some 15 assaults were launched against the town during 24 October, leaving it ablaze and in ruins by the next morning. Nieuport, too, was again constantly shelled.
There remained one other natural defensive weapon. The proposal to create a sea-water barrier to halt the Fourth Army has been variously attributed to Foch, two Belgian generals, the chief lock-keeper at Nieuport and King Albert himself; perhaps it sprang from a common historical recollection of Dutch resistance to imperial Spain. To be effective the flooding needed high tides, winds from the northeast and the ability of the lock-keepers to man the sluices despite frequent shelling. On 23 October, Albert ordered his sappers to seal off 22 culverts under the embankment, preparatory to flooding the fields and villages east of the railway.
Simply to open the sluice gates at Nieuport was out of the question. To do so would put at risk the allied forces locked in battle across the low-lying fields. Controlled inundation was essential, and the work had to be done at night in order to take the Germans by surprise. Hendrik Gheeraert, who had spent all his life working the canals, was the only person who knew where the cranks for operating the sluices were stored. In collaboration with two lock-keepers, Karel-Louis Kogge and Feman Umé, Gheeraert set about controlling the inrush of water. On 26–27 October, Kogge sought to open the gates of the Furnes canal, the most seaward of three sluices at Nieuport (close to Belgium’s most cherished oyster beds), but he could not shift them before the tide began to ebb. Next night Umé and Gheeraert had more success at the Ypres canal and Comte canal locks, and by 29–30 October all three sluices were open and under control. During the week the tidal height increased day by day, to pass the 16-foot marker on the night that the sluices were finally opened, when there was a full moon. Very rightly, in Nieuport today, monuments and plaques close to the magnificent equestrian statue of King Albert honour the heroism of Gheeraert, his fellow lock-keepers and the Belgian military engineers who assisted them.18
Poor weather and frequent sea-mists during this last week of October gave greater cover as the operation continued, and at first the Germans attributed the worsening conditions in the fields to persistent rain. By 29 October, however, they perceived the threat that endangered their advance. They captured the small town of Pervyse, beyond the railway embankment, on that Thursday but the rising waters soon forced them hurriedly to withdraw. Next day, at Ramscapelle further north along the embankment, bugles rang out to rally the Belgian and French infantry to mount one last, stumbling, bayonet charge across the squelching clay and, as night fell on Saturday, 31 October, they threw back Beseler’s III Reserve Corps. The Fourth Army’s offensive ‘to cut off the fortresses of Dunkirk and Calais’ was at an end.
The Marine Fusilier Brigade, strengthened by two battalions of Senegalese and backed by Grossetti’s 42nd Division moving up from Furnes, still held Dixmude itself. For 11 more days the town formed an outpost above the rising waters on the right bank of the Yser, until the XXII Reserve Corps, commanded by Falkenhayn’s elder brother, Eugen, launched a powerful assault on 10 November, backed by heavy bombardment from massed field guns. By nightfall Dixmude had fallen.19
Thereafter for three and a half years a muddy, yellow or green moat over 20 miles long and from two to two and a half miles wide separated the opposing armies. Occasionally the Germans raided the sector facing Dixmude, using small boats or rafts and backed by fire from grenade launchers and mortars. The Belgian defences on a promontory across the Yser, a mile northwest of the ruined town, were so exposed to bombardment and assault that they are singled out today for remembrance as the ‘Trenches of Death’. The black, gold and red national flag flies proudly over them.
* * *
The battle for Dixmude coincided with the opening three weeks of First Ypres further south. It was on 21 October that the fall force of the Fourth and Sixth German Armies was turned against the BEF and the French in front of Ypres, and for the first time the line of the Immortal Salient was clearly defined on the map. From Bixschoote a curved 36-mile front ran eastwards in a bulge through Langemarck, southeastwards down to Zandvoorde, curving round southwestwards between Hollebeke and Houthem, to straighten out along the Messines Ridge and then down to the French border east of Armentières.
For ‘Wednesday 21 October’ Haig’s diary records a day of ‘uncertainty, excitement and despairing messages’.20 In seeking to fulfil French’s order to ‘defeat the enemy and drive him on Ghent’, the British 2nd Division pressed on eastwards, with ‘hard fighting and bayonet work’, but the enemy seemed ‘to have been advancing when our attack took place’. In the afternoon Rawlinson visited Haig’s headquarters in the Hotel de la Châtelaine, to let him know that ‘hostile infantry and guns’ were heading for Ypres from another direction, south-southeast along both sides of the Comines canal. Soon there was more perplexing news for Haig. ‘Now’, he writes, ‘without warning the French cavalry guarding our left flank is ordered to retire west of the [Dixmude–Ypres] canal’ and confront a German division reported to be moving down from the north.21 These laconic jottings go far to explain why First Ypres caused such devastation and cost so many lives. The commitment of Foch and French to a drive from the Yser northwards into central Belgium clashed with Falkenhayn’s neo-Schlieffen project. The battle became a head-on collision between two armies set on the offensive.
Personally, Haig doubted the wisdom of pressing forward beyond the first objectives without careful reconnaissance. He was prepared to call a halt, at least temporarily. All, however, depended on the field marshal out at GHQ in St Omer, some 30 miles from Haig’s hotel in the Grand Place. Sir John French was uneasy. The strain of adjusting his mind to a different concept of warfare was wearying him. He mistrusted Kitchener and was angered by the War Office’s failure to respond to his pleas for more ammunition for his 18-pounders and howitzers. His mercurial temperament swung from over-confidence to depression and back again in the course of a single day. He admitted that the discovery of five German corps in a region where he thought there was only one had come as ‘a veritable bolt from the blue’.22 Joffre, visiting GHQ on that Wednesday morning, found French pressing for work to begin on an entrenched camp at Boulogne capable of sustaining the whole BEF should it be forced into retreat.
But the gloom soon passed, once Sir John’s staff began to feed him better news. The promise of an additional French corps in the Ypres zone, reports of fresh troops arriving to build up III Corps and the coming of the Lahore Division as vanguard of an Indian Corps strengthened by battalions of Sherwood Foresters and the Manchester Regiment, all lifted Sir John’s spirits. That afternoon he motored into Ypres and conferred with Haig, approving his decision to delay the advance. Once back at GHQ, his orders determined the tactics for the coming week: ‘Action against enemy will be continued tomorrow on general line now held, which will be strongly entrenched.’23 As on the day before Mons, French’s telegram to Kitchener that evening was an up-beat nightcap, ‘In my opinion the enemy are vigorously playing their last card, and I am confident they will fail.’24
Throughout the next three days the Germans sought desperately to break through to Ypres. More than 1,500 of them perished in the meadows, copses and burning villages around Bixschoote and Langemarck. Thousands more passed into captivity, among them some 800 in one small village: Kortekeer on the Dixmude Road, southeast of Bixschoote, was attacked at first light on 23 October by five battalions of 2nd Brigade. Some 29 years later Lieutenant Hyndson of the 1st Loyal North Lancashires recalled ‘the glorious sight of masses of grey-coated men standing up to surrender’.25 The abiding British memory of the three days’ fighting was of blazing villages, ‘heavy rifle fire all round and heavy shelling’ and of the German infantry advancing line after line as steadily as on manoeuvres.26
Next day Captain Dillon of the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry wrote what Dr Ian Beckett rightly calls a ‘graphic account’ of a German attack as seen from the parapet of his trench: ‘A great grey mass of humanity was charging, running for all God would let them straight on us not 50 yards off . . . Everybody’s nerves were pretty well on edge as I had warned them what to expect and as I fired my rifle the rest all went off almost simultaneously.’ The rapid fire halted the attack. ‘A great moan’ was heard and Dillon saw men ‘with their arms and legs off trying to crawl away; others, who could not move gasping out their last moments with the cold night air biting into their broken bodies and the lurid red glare of a farmhouse showing up some clumps of grey devils killed by the men on my left further down. A weird awful sight!’27
One ‘grey devil’, who was in battle for the first time, was appalled by all he saw around him. ‘Corpses, corpses, and more corpses, rubble, and the remains of villages’, artilleryman Herbert Sulzbach noted: ‘The bodies of friend and foe lie tumbled together . . . A dreadful night comes down on us. We have seen too many horrible things all at once, and the smell of the smoking ruins, the lowing of the deserted cattle, and the rattle of machine-gun fire make a very strong impression on us, barely twenty years old as we are, but these things also harden us up for what is going to come. We certainly did not want this war! We are only defending ourselves and our Germany against a world of enemies.’28
Langemarck was soon to become a German patriotic legend. A High Command communiqué, circulated to the press on 11 November, paid tribute to the heroism with which young volunteers ‘surged forward against the front line of the enemy positions’29 singing Deutschland über Alles or Die Wacht am Rhein. Particularly singled out for praise were the 204th and 206th Reserve Infantry regiments and the many student battalions, some formed around university fraternities. A German cavalry officer, Rudolf Binding, writing a fortnight before the communiqué was issued, reported: ‘Our light infantry battalion, almost all Marburg students, have suffered terribly. In the next division just such young souls, the intellectual flower of Germany, went singing into an attack at Langemarck just as vain and just as costly.’30 By Christmas the German public was calling the battle der Kindermord von Ypern (‘the Massacre of the Innocents at Ypres’). In the 1930s, Nazi propaganda harnessed the legend, emphasizing the glory of sacrifice for the Fatherland rather than the tragic wastage of young lives. Inevitably, as with all Nazi manipulations of history, later scholars have subjected ‘the myth’ to close scrutiny, emphasizing in particular that older men returning to the colours considerably outnumbered the young.31 But there is no reason to doubt the courage and patriotism of the youthful volunteers nor their resort to song at such a time; across the lines, the 2nd Royal Welch Fusiliers heartened their spirits on 28 October with ‘Celtic harmonies and favourite hymns’ during a pause in the week’s heavy fighting.32 Today at the entrance to Langemarck Cemetery a memorial room perpetuates the student ‘innocents’, their names carved on oak panels, the archway carrying the crests of their universities.
The British too suffered heavy losses during the three days of battle. In Haig’s I Corps the 1st Division lost 1,006 men, and the 2nd Division was under constant bombardment. Capper’s 7th Division (IV Corps), astride the Menin Road around Gheluvelt, lost 2829 officers and men while the survivors (as one was to write) were ‘weary, unwashed, unshaven, short of sleep and sometimes of food’.33 Rapid movements of individual units, doubts of identity in autumn mists or under the artificial fog of bursting German shells led to confusion and chaos. British, French and Germans all fell victims to what a modern, sanative euphemism calls ‘friendly fire’. The full horror of war was unleashed on friend and foe and by friend and foe.
Just 12 miles south of the Langemarck–Bixschoote sector the battle for the Messines Ridge, which had been raging for nine days, also reached a new intensity on 21 October. Three crack German divisions of Rupprecht’s Sixth Army sought to drive Allenby’s two cavalry divisions back through the villages of Hollebeke and Wytschaete and into the small town of Messines, taking the ridge itself. The cavalry, fighting dismounted and in shallow trenches, survived heavy bombardment and stood firm, although the Germans took and briefly held Hollebeke.
After nightfall on 25 October the predominantly Bavarian infantry encountered a new enemy, Punjabi sepoys in the Ferozepore Brigade of the Baluchis Regiment defending Wytschaete. Next morning the Indians went over to the attack, fighting for the first time in Europe under conditions for which no amount of training on the subcontinent could have prepared them. At Messines Ridge, and later across the French border at Neuve Chapelle, they fought with courage and enterprise. Within a week of going into action, Sepoy Khudadad Khan won a Victoria Cross at Hollebeke when, although wounded, he continued to fire a machine-gun after his four companions had been killed. Indian casualties were high: more than a third of the Baluchis perished on the battlefield itself or were mortally wounded.
As early as the evening of 23 October, Falkenhayn was concerned at the failure to dent the allied line northeast of Ypres. He ordered XV Corps to ‘march as quickly as possible’ from the Aisne by way of Douai and Cambrai to Lille, intending to use the corps’s two divisions to reinforce his northern flank.34 Meanwhile the offensive would continue with unremitting intensity, taking advantage of German superiority in heavy artillery, with the strongest assault made against the weary 7th Division. The 2nd Border Regiment, entrenched on the edge of the woods around the hamlet of Kruiseik, suffered an incredible dawn-to-dusk bombardment throughout 24–26 October, shells falling at the rate of two a minute and causing, on average, 150 casualties a day. Small wonder that on Monday (26 October) an attack by 15 German infantry battalions forced their dazed neighbours, the 1st South Staffordshires, back along the Menin Road towards Ypres.35 They were ‘terror stricken men’ of a ‘fine . . . division’, wrote Haig, who encountered them when he ‘rode out about 3 p.m. to see what was going on.’36 He strengthened the line with reinforcements from I Corps before the Germans could discover that the elusive breakthrough was almost theirs.
Next morning (Tuesday, 27 October) I Corps launched a series of counter-attacks, in a general move to press forward towards Roulers in partnership with the French IX Corps, whose immediate objective was the village of Poelcapelle, 2 miles east of Langemarck. Both armies were battle weary and little progress could be made.
Once the early mist cleared the 1st King’s Royal Rifles attempted to seize a spur on the Passchendaele ridge at Keiberg, above Zonnebeke. It was a valiant but costly undertaking, in which the battalion lost five officers and 115 men. Among those mortally wounded by shrapnel that Tuesday was 23-year-old Lieutenant Prince Maurice of Battenberg, son of the widowed Princess Beatrice and youngest grandson of Queen Victoria. When Victoria’s eldest grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II, heard of his cousin’s death he sent a message of condolence to the family using the Crown Princess of Sweden, another grandchild, as intermediary. Dynastic bonds were not yet severed by the mounting awfulness of the conflict.37
At OHL in Mézières on Monday evening Falkenhayn assessed reports of the three-day bombardment and, as so often in his years of command, was vexed by indecision. He had doubts over the plan he had begun to formulate four nights earlier. Was it a strategic error to assign reinforcements to the northeast of Ypres, where crack regiments of Haig’s I Corps held in reserve could stiffen resistance? Was the enemy more vulnerable south of Ypres? On Tuesday morning he left Mézières and reached Sixth Army headquarters at Douai by noon to confer with Crown Prince Rupprecht. The preliminary directive of 23 October was modified. A special task force of six divisions would be formed within the Sixth Army under the orders of General von Fabeck.
Back in Mézières that night Falkenhayn issued a new directive: ‘The attack will be launched on 30 October in a northwesterly direction from the general line Wervicq to Deulemont . . . All available Sixth Army heavy artillery will move up in support of the breakthrough . . . Concerted action by Fourth and Sixth Armies is essential.’ The character of the attack was to be unchanged: a preliminary ‘bombardment with heaviest calibre weapons on Messines and Ploegsteert Wood’ was recommended.38
The additional divisions gave Army Group Fabeck, backed by 260 heavy guns and field howitzers, a superiority of at least two to one between Gheluvelt and the Messines Ridge.39 Fabeck, whose military career had so far remained unexceptional, was determined to seize the opportunity to stamp his name on history. In an order of the day, circulated on 29 October, he stressed the ‘decisive importance’ of a breakthrough: ‘We must and shall therefore conquer . . . and strike the decisive blow against our most hated enemy,’ he proclaimed. His men were assured they could win the glory of ending the war and thus ‘settle for ever the struggle of centuries’.40