First Ypres was over. To all four nations locked in battle in Flanders, its passing marked an end and a beginning. For Germany there would be no more variations on a Schlieffen theme, at least for a quarter of a century. The German army in Flanders was, in Falkenhayn’s words, a ‘broken instrument’ needing careful repair. With nearly 500 miles of trenches running from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier, troops steeled to attack had to learn the disciplined restraints of siege warfare on a national scale. Deep fall-back positions, with bunkers and well-sited machine-guns, were required behind the forward trenches. German superiority in artillery was never in doubt; the need was for specialized storm detachments of infantry, led by junior officers of initiative able to open and exploit any gaps made by the bombardment. For the moment, however, Germany could mount no major offensive in the West. Despite his mistrust of the Hindenburg–Ludendorff partnership Falkenhayn was prepared, reluctantly, for OHL to support their proposals for a decisive blow to be struck against Russia in the East. By mid-January he was again contemplating probing assaults in Flanders, with limited objectives, but for the next two and a half years the line of battle across Belgium and France did not move as much as 10 miles in either direction.
Before the year 1914 ended the French made a final attempt to avoid stalemate: in mid-December, Joffre approved a thrust by Foch in Artois and a near simultaneous attack in Champagne. Both battles were thwarted by rain, sleet, mud and fog and together added more than 10,000 names to the casualty list. Only after this harsh lesson did Grand Quartier Général, like OHL, recognize the need to curb the offensive spirit. Over the last decade before the war, teaching at the École Supérieure de Guerre had boosted collective self-confidence. Now, with ten of the republic’s 90 départements behind German lines, Foch’s doctrine of la guerre à outrance – ‘war up to the hilt’ – became dependent on Joffre’s propensity for grignotage, a ‘nibbling away’ at enemy defences by localized attacks. This strategy of attrition was wasteful and ultimately demoralizing; it imposed the burden of psychological endurance on an army in which 306,000 men had already died in five months of battle. At the turn of the year ‘Papa Joffre’, now at GQG in Chantilly, was still widely respected for having conjured up victory on the Marne, and no commander had as yet appeared who could challenge his rule over 430 miles of Front. But the length of the casualty lists made the more perceptive politicians uneasy. Amid Chantilly’s reflective peace, Joffre was said to be perfecting plans for the coming year with all his habitual calmness, but for some in Paris there was a fear that his legendary imperturbability might be drifting comfortably into complacency.
Belgium, like France, had suffered grievously. More than nine-tenths of the kingdom was under enemy occupation, and the remaining un-invaded segment formed a war zone: 30,000 soldiers were dead, an even higher proportion of males of military age killed than in France or Germany. The fighting along the Yser showed the value of light field guns, infantry mobility and adapting tactics to the terrain, aspects of military science neglected under the stultifying legacy of Brialmont. The resilience of the Belgian army owed much to King Albert personally, and he was held in high esteem abroad, especially in Britain. At Christmas the Daily Telegraph published King Albert’s Book, a collection of tributes that presented him as a chivalric figure, St George incarnate. In reality, the king was a shrewd, conscientious national commander-in-chief who lacked the resources to create a new model army without aid from his allies. Military dependence on France was fraught with dangers that they failed to comprehend. Although the king was at La Panne and the government operating from Normandy, political life continued within occupied Belgium through improvised institutions tolerated by the Germans. If the kingdom established in 1830 were to survive, it was essential for Albert to retain his prestige as a soldier–king to ensure that, once the war was over, Walloons and Flemings worked together as a united people. Already there was a Young Flanders movement, based upon Ghent, that sought German backing for the breakup of what they held to be a French-dominated Belgian state. Small wonder if at times in the coming year King Albert irritated Paris and London by asserting a haughty independence. ‘Brave little Belgium’ was not a nation to be patronized.
It was among the British, the people least materially harmed by the fighting, that the concept of warfare changed most. The experience of imperial adventures and colonial wars had served the BEF well during the retreat to the Marne, the pursuit to the Aisne and even the fluid early fighting outside Ypres. Although the internal-combustion engine, powering both aeroplanes and armoured cars, soon took over the horse’s deep reconnaissance role, cavalry had still provided a protective screen for the rear of II Corps on the exhausting march south and for a brigade of the 7th Division harassed by Bavarian troops on 26 October, near Zandvoorde. Moreover, both Mons and Langemarck confirmed the skills and value of the ‘15-rounds-a-minute’ riflemen. But the second phase of First Ypres – the fighting along the Menin Road and across Messines Ridge – showed the growing importance of good entrenchment as a buffer against assault. The hastily dug shallow ditches of early days had left troops almost as vulnerable to shrapnel as in the open. Like Falkenhayn, the British commanders saw the need for a systematic pattern of trenches in depth, well protected by barbed wire and parapets, zigzagged to lessen the threat from blast or flying shrapnel and served by sunken communication lines. Static warfare of this character ran counter to traditions cherished throughout the late Victorian and Edwardian era.
‘More than once,’ Grey recalls Kitchener as saying to him, ‘ “I don’t know what is to be done – this isn’t war!” ’ Yet the commanders in the field were more conservative than the secretary of state for war. Kitchener’s mind was cautiously receptive to new ideas in weaponry and strategy. Long ahead of French, Haig or GQG he recognized that the German defences across Belgium and France formed a fortress impervious to frontal assault and incapable of complete investment. He accepted the primacy of the Western Front in the grand strategy of the war in Europe, but he never became a totally convinced continentalist.
‘The defence of Ypres is the chief glory of our old army, which in its performance practically ceased to exist,’ reflected the Oxford historian and Territorial veteran Cruttwell 20 years later.1 Approximately a third of the original BEF were dead by December 1914. Some battalions were left with no more than one officer and 30 men from among those who crossed the Channel in August. Three brigadiers and 18 colonels were among the Ypres dead. In all, some 54,100 officers and men of the regular army fell during First Ypres. They were drawn from 88 infantry battalions, 22 cavalry regiments and 95 artillery batteries. The BEF’s fully trained ‘part-timers’ – four regiments of yeomanry and seven Territorial battalions – suffered another 4,000 casualties. Hardest hit of all the divisions was the 7th, even though it did not sail from England until after the Marne and the Aisne and was withdrawn from the line before Falkenhayn’s final push. Of 17,948 men in the division who landed at Zeebrugge on 6 October, 9237 were dead, missing or incapacitated by 5 November.2
When the year ended another 16 Territorial battalions were serving in or behind the Western Front, all integrated in existing divisions. In the months ahead more and more Territorials would come up to the Salient, but the first entirely Territorial division – the 46th North Midlands – did not cross the Channel until early spring. Other reinforcements were in camp on Salisbury Plain. The full might of the British Empire overseas was being marshalled to fight in Europe for the first time. Four infantry and two cavalry divisions of the Indian army were already in France. Now some 30,000 Canadian volunteers had reached England, having disembarked at Plymouth in the third week of October 1914. The vanguard, a battalion of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, landed at Le Havre three days before Christmas and were attached to the 80th Brigade of the 27th Division. All were veterans of the Boer War, raised and commanded by Major Hamilton Gault, a wealthy businessman from Montreal. The remaining Canadians encamped on Salisbury Plain.
Also in England but retained for further training and fitting out were the four ‘New Armies’ of recruits who had responded to the call, ‘Your Country Needs You’. But the great recruiting marshal at the War Office hesitated over their use. French and Haig hoped the New Army would swell the BEF by coming as battalions to be incorporated in existing corps instead of as divisions, each with a newly constituted staff. Kitchener, however, always kept his cards close to his chest. Rather than consign 24 embryonic divisions prematurely to the cauldron in Flanders and France, he saw them as a reserve, either to redress the balance in the West at a later date when his allies were exhausted or to strike decisively against German interests in a more distant theatre of war.3 In early spring 1915 he reluctantly sent two of these New Army divisions to augment the BEF and two to Egypt, either to protect the Suez Canal or support the landings on the Gallipoli peninsula. There was as yet no shortage of men; the great concern was the dwindling supply of ammunition. The shell problem, in particular, was soon to intensify.
As late as 9 October, Colonel Weygand, Foch’s chief of staff, had written in his diary, ‘I think that we shall be home by Christmas.’4 That lingering hope dissolved for French, British and Germans alike in the smoke and fury of the next three weeks. As the days shortened so the casualty lists lengthened. Berlin, Paris and the West End of London maintained a brittle gaiety, but away from the forced frivolity of the bigger cities it became a sombre winter, especially in England. Vera Brittain, returning home to Buxton in Derbyshire after her first term at Oxford, found Christmas ‘strange and chilling . . . A good many people have decided they are too poor and too miserable to remember their friends,’ she observed.
Punch sought to amuse its readers with ‘news from behind the Front’, light-hearted titbits served with a heavy hand. Black humour tinged the cartoons: over breakfast a well-scrubbed prep-school boy tells his mother, ‘I hope I shan’t die soon. It would be too awful to die a civilian.’ But Punch could also be sombrely reflective. The Christmas number included a fine drawing by Sir Bernard Partridge. Under the caption ‘The Children’s Truce’ the Angel of Peace peers down with compassion through a window at a children’s party: ‘I’m glad that they, at least, have their Christmas unspoiled,’ the Angel says.5
As so often in his work Partridge reflected a sentiment common to all people: the grief of war forged social cohesion. Yet across Britain class barriers persisted. Officers’ families would receive telegrams to inform them of loved ones killed in action, missing or gravely wounded. The families of other ranks were dependent on the postman: buff-coloured envelopes pushed through a letter-box might contain the gas bill, an income-tax demand – or grim news from Flanders. The daily papers gave prominence to names familiar in Society gossip columns before the war, particularly the scions of the great families: the sons of the Duke of Westminster and the Earl of Dudley, Hugh Grosvenor and Gerald Ward; Lord Bernard Gordon-Lennox and Lord Congleton of the Grenadier Guards, killed at Zillebeke, and Lord Charles Worsley who was a son of the Earl of Yarborough and had recently married Lady Haig’s sister. Many, including Worsley, Grosvenor and Ward died at Zandvoorde on 30 October in the engagement in which Fabeck’s infantry trapped two squadrons of Household Cavalry already dazed by a heavy bombardment.
Other names listed as dead or missing recalled news items from earlier years. ‘Captain A. E. J. Collins’ of the Royal Engineers, killed on 11 November, is still remembered as the 13-year-old cricketer who in 1899 scored an unmatched record innings of 628 not out in 6 hours and 50 minutes for his house at Clifton College, Haig’s old school. ‘Lieutenant G. Archer-Shee’ was the naval cadet expelled from the Royal Naval College at Osborne for allegedly stealing a postal order but vindicated in a court case brought by his parents against the Admiralty. His parents’ dogged fight to clear their son’s name gripped the newspaper public for several months during 1910 and, long afterwards, it formed the basis of Terence Rattigan’s play and film, The Winslow Boy. Young Archer-Shee, unable to return to the Royal Navy, was commissioned in the army on the outbreak of war and killed in October’s fighting. His body was never found. Like Lord Grosvenor and the Hon. Gerald Ward, Archer-Shee’s name is carved on the Menin Gate, in this instance among late additions on Panel 37, at the top of the main steps. Immediately above his name, the panel honours Captain J. F. Vallentin of the South Staffordshires. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for leading an attack that recovered a vital trench at Zillebeke on 7 November, one of the few days officially described as ‘quiet’ amid the turmoil.
As Christmas approached, there seemed a prospect of longer days of genuine ‘quiet’ ahead. The mirage of victory was fading, and war weariness spread among survivors of the battle and their families at home. In England the wish for an end to the fighting was reflected in the local press rather than in national newspapers, but the political leaders were well aware it existed.
As First Ypres began to lessen in intensity Churchill received a letter from a friend in the Oxfordshire Hussars. Captain Valentine Fleming MP wrote of ‘an English line battalion marching back from the trenches . . . a limping column of bearded, muddy, torn figures slouching with fatigue . . . but able to stand the cold, the strain, the awful losses, the inevitable inability to reply to the shell fire, which is what other nations can’t do’. Fleming concluded: ‘On both sides every single man in [the war] wants it stopped at once.’ Churchill forwarded this ‘impressive letter’ to his wife on 23 November with the reflection, ‘What wd. happen I wonder if the armies suddenly and simultaneously went on strike and said some other method must be found of settling the dispute!’6
A dramatic down-tools strike was, as yet, unlikely, but a pause in the fighting had become a distinct possibility. Some form of Christmas truce was championed by neutrals in Catholic Spain and Protestant Holland and by an influential United States senator. On 7 December the newly elected Pope Benedict XV called for ‘the clang of arms’ to cease ‘while Christendom celebrates the Feast of the World’s Redemption’. Germany accepted the proposal, provided all the other belligerent governments agreed to observe a truce. They did not: a German ruse was suspected, a means of lulling the enemy into inactivity while secretly massing troops for the next offensive. Moreover, as a senior British staff officer wrote to his wife from Ypres, ‘If accepted, I don’t think hostilities will be resumed.’7 There were many combatants who longed for an end to the fighting, as Captain Fleming’s letter to Churchill had shown, but a de facto armistice after five months of war would have left a huge segment of France and most of Belgium under German administration. That was unacceptable to London and to Paris. ‘Our Christmas initiative has not been crowned with success,’ a saddened Pope Benedict admitted on 13 December.
The papal seeds did not, however, fall on stony ground. In the closing days of First Ypres a change had been made in the disposition of the BEF, partly to await the arrival of reinforcements from England but also to avoid the confusion that arose when French regiments were inserted at points in the British line. On 22 November the French added the defence of Ypres from the northeast to their existing responsibilities, allowing the BEF to regroup along a 21-mile sector from Wytschaete southwards across the border to Givenchy and including the Messines Ridge, Ploegsteert and Armentières. This realignment led, coincidentally, to a mainly Franco-Prussian confrontation in the north while the troops facing the British in the south came largely from Roman Catholic Bavaria and Baden or Württemberg (where there was a sizeable Catholic minority) or Saxony (Lutheran, though with a Catholic royal family). The pope’s appeal for a truce had received much publicity across all of Germany, and it is hardly surprising that in the last days before Christmas, patrol activity, sniping and the customary intermittent shelling died down in the Messines–Ploegsteert southern sector of the line. The British were puzzled, but held their fire.
On Christmas Eve, Henry Williamson, an infantryman serving in a Territorial battalion of the London Regiment, looked across no man’s land and ‘saw dim figures on the enemy parapet’. He also saw ‘with amazement . . . that a Christmas tree was being set there, and around it Germans were talking and laughing together’. Soon after midnight by German time ‘a rich baritone voice began to sing . . . Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht’. Soldiers manning opposing trenches only 40 or 60 yards apart began calling out Christmas greetings to each other and singing carols. On a ‘white-rimed Christmas morning’ they emerged from the trenches to talk together and exchange small gifts in no man’s land. Williamson was astonished to find himself ‘face to face with living Germans, some of them actually smiling as they talked in English’. By the afternoon impromptu football games were in progress, with at least one keen contest apparently won by Germany. In Williamson’s sector the truce ‘lasted for several days’; others have written of a pause in the fighting that continued into the New Year.8
News of these ‘most extraordinary sights’ soon reached homes in England by letters that, curiously, the censors seem to have ignored, provided no names of places or units were revealed. The provincial press printed extracts from letters supplied by proud parents or wives, but the London newspapers inflated the news, even The Times converted a football kick-about into an international. The truce was a localized affair, although there were instances of fraternization on the Eastern Front despite a difference of date for celebrating Christmas in the Orthodox churches. Effectively the truce was limited to one-third of the BEF’s line, no more than 5 or 6 miles on either side of the Franco-Belgian border. The French and Belgians were reluctant to fraternize with the invader: one French infantry battalion did respond to an invitation from Badenese troops to visit their trenches on Christmas Day but shelled them on Boxing Day. The truce was ignored by Haig’s I Corps and by 19 of the 24 infantry battalions in Smith-Dorrien’s II Corps. But men and junior officers in two divisions of Pulteney’s III Corps and two divisions of Rawlinson’s IV Corps participated, some with the tacit approval of more senior officers. Many ‘fraternizers’ were recent arrivals, Henry Williamson among them.
Veteran officers waxed indignant. ‘This is War, Bloody War, and not a mother’s meeting,’ 35-year-old Sir Morgan Crofton, a captain in the 2nd Life Guards, commented in his diary, ‘Boshy papers of the halfpenny type slobber over this rubbish, but everyone out here condemns it. I am glad to say that General [sic] French fired in a snorter which should put a stop to these unsoldierly antics.’ The ‘snorter’, sent from GHQ on New Year’s Day, warned all officers against any repetition of ‘unauthorized intercourse with the enemy’.9
Falkenhayn’s reaction was similar to French’s: further fraternizing would be treated as an act of treason, an Army Order of the Day sent out on 29 December declared. Corporal Hitler, who three weeks earlier had received the Iron Cross (Second Class) for bravery in the fighting on the Menin Road, strongly disapproved of the friendly exchanges and carol singing of his Bavarian comrades: ‘There should be no question of something like that during war,’ he told them.10 Several letters home to England showed surprise at the easy amiability of these ‘Bavarians’, though the word may have been used generically for all southern Germans. The British seem to have found Saxon troops the friendliest of their enemies. Some Saxons hardly bothered to conceal their dislike of Prussia and contempt for Prussian values.
Not all Crofton’s ‘boshy halfpenny’ dailies ‘slobbered’ with passing pacifism. One newspaper followed up tales of the truce with a diatribe against ‘wild beasts fighting under the German flag’. On 9 January the Daily Sketch accompanied a French report of alleged atrocities in Belgium with a double page spread of 24 pictures of the evil-doers: many were portraits of princes and generals from Bavaria and Würrtemberg. For once the invective spared specifically Prussian militarism, the customary target of hate propaganda. No German could be trusted, the Sketch insisted: ‘Incendiarism, murder and pillage form part of the German military equipment as definitely as do big guns.’ A headline splashed across page two reminded readers of the right patriotic response: ‘Can you still hang back? It may be your sister next.’11
The prime minister spent Christmas near Malmesbury but saw the New Year in at Walmer Castle, within sight of the leave boats crossing the Channel. Red boxes followed him constantly. Neither Colonel Maurice Hankey nor Churchill could give their minds a rest from the war: both sent Asquith long memoranda. So, more surprisingly, did his unmilitary chancellor of the exchequer, Lloyd George: he had visited the BEF sector on 19 October, where he met Foch though not French, who was preoccupied with the opening exchanges of First Ypres. All three memoranda – drawn up independently of each other – accepted that the Western Front was the decisive theatre of operations but argued that the war could not be won there by conventional frontal assaults without heavier and heavier casualties. Improved weapons and new devices, specifically designed for trench warfare must be found but, above all, ‘outlets’ in Europe or the Middle East were needed for surprise thrusts to take the enemy by surprise. ‘Are there not other alternatives than sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders?’ Churchill demanded with characteristic vigour.12
His personal choice was for a landing on the island of Borkum or the Baltic coast, with entry into the Dardanelles as the surest means of striking effectively at Germany’s Turkish ally. Hankey advocated co-operation with the Serbs in their resistance to Austria–Hungary or landings on Turkey’s Asiatic shore; Lloyd George argued in favour of ‘bringing Germany down by the process of knocking away the props under her’ either by an amphibious operation in Dalmatia or a Balkan campaign with the Serbs and Greeks, including sending ‘an advance force through Salonika to assist Serbia’. Asquith was critical of much contained in these memoranda, pointing out in particular the geographical obstacles facing any Balkan expedition, but he convened a series of ‘War Council’ meetings in the second week of January to examine the suggestions in detail. Also on the agenda was a plan that seems to have originated with the admirals at sea for a raid on Zeebrugge; after consultation with Sir John French, Churchill suggested developing it into a major joint operation to clear the enemy from the Belgian coast and advance from Dixmude to the Dutch frontier. The War Council blew hot and cold over the option, rejecting a land offensive on 7 January but having second thoughts when it seemed possible the ‘coast game’ (as Churchill unofficially dubbed the project) might tempt Holland to join the allies. On 13 January the War Council approved the Belgian option, at the same time proposing that the Admiralty should prepare for an expedition ‘to bombard and take the Gallipoli peninsula’ in February with ‘Constantinople as its objective’.13
Independently, on Boxing Day, Sir John French had suggested to Kitchener a bombardment by ‘big gun ships’ to support an advance northwards from Nieuport, and he was attracted by the proposed ‘coast game’. At Christmas he had secured reorganization of the BEF into two armies with Haig in command of the First Army (I Corps, IV Corps and the Indian Corps) and Smith-Dorrien the Second (II Corps, III Corps and the 27th Division). Both generals, and Allenby of the Cavalry Corps, were summoned to GHQ at St Omer on 4 January to discuss an advance in support of a landing near Ostend ‘before March’. They welcomed the idea, but the project soon ran into difficulties. The Admiralty had second thoughts; any bombardment of Zeebrugge should be postponed until new shallow-draught monitors were completed. The Belgians were unenthusiastic, not least because further flooding of Flemish farmland was anticipated in order to create a new water barrier once the coast had been secured. There was a feeling (well justified) that the British were interested not so much in liberating Belgian towns and villages as in denying the German navy facilities for U-boats at Ostend, Bruges and Zeebrugge. King Albert bluntly told French that ‘national unity would be imperilled’ if the Belgian army were placed under foreign command for operations over which neither he nor his government were consulted. Finally, Joffre came down firmly against a coastal advance that would require French troops needed for attacks he was planning in Artois and Champagne. GQC remained suspicious of projects that could strengthen Britain’s hold on the North Sea littoral: might ‘perfidious Albion’ seek the lease of a Belgian port or even Dunkirk in the eventual peace settlement? Away from the heat of battle, the Entente Cordiale looked at times extremely frail.
On 28 January the War Council in London shelved the Zeebrugge project. It reappeared in various forms over the next three years.14 For six months strategic planning revolved around the Dardanelles and the tragic frustrations of the Gallipoli campaign. French, who visited Chantilly in late January, felt obliged to commit at least one corps to potential ‘barbed wire chewing’ in support of Joffre’s planned attack in Artois. There had been intermittent fighting since October some 20 miles south of Ypres on the edge of the British sector, where ridges similar to the long hump of Wytschaete and Messines looked out across the industrialized plain beyond Lille. Shortly before Christmas the newly arrived 8th Division raided the German lines here, around the village of Neuve Chapelle, an operation in which Lieutenant Philip Neame of the Royal Engineers won a Victoria Cross for leading and rescuing a party of sappers caught in heavy crossfire.15 This was the region Haig selected to mount the probing attack French envisaged, pressing ahead with the planning even after Joffre postponed his proposed March offensive in Artois.
For more than a month First Army’s staff meticulously planned a set-piece battle aimed in the first instance at recovering Neuve Chapelle, by now in ruins. The main objective, however, was Aubers, on the crest of a ridge a mile to the north. With carefully contrived concealment, the reconstituted 7th Division and the Indian Corps’s Meerut and Lahore divisions were brought south from the Salient to reinforce the 8th Division already holding the line. Pioneer aerial photography by the RFC provided clear intelligence over enemy positions. Officers were issued with large-scale trench maps. Some 500 guns, supplied with more shells than had been fired in three years of war in South Africa, were sited to bombard four and a half miles of German trenches. On 9 March, Haig’s eve-of-battle Order of the Day rang with confidence.16
The Germans were taken completely by surprise. There was no preliminary bombardment, always a clear warning that an attack was pending. Instead, the guns thundered with unprecedented intensity for 35 minutes before the infantry went forward. They then shifted their target to the rear, in order to prevent the enemy from bringing up reinforcements. On paper every advantage lay with the 14 infantry battalions Haig initially committed to the attack: they outnumbered the enemy by more than four to one.17
By half-past eight in the morning of 10 March the infantry had cleared the first trenches and broken the enemy line for the first time on the Western Front. At this point, however, they were frustrated by the rigidity of Haig’s orders. First Ypres had seen tactical decisions taken by commanders in the field, notably Fitzclarence in the fighting along the Menin Road: the attack at Neuve Chapelle had to conform to a strict timetable, each move forward determined by headquarters 5 miles behind the battle line. With telephone links destroyed by shelling, long periods of inactivity were inevitable. The Germans soon reorganized their defences. The British bombardment had failed to dislodge two nests of machine-guns northeast of the village, towards Aubers. The machine-guns mowed down several hundred men of the 2nd Middlesex and 2nd Scottish Rifles. West of Neuve Chapelle, some 9,000 Indians waited for orders to go forward for nine and a half hours. By half-past five, when the advance was at last resumed, darkness already enveloped fields where the shells had churned up the broken ground. No progress could be made. Despite the artillery preparation and the superiority in numbers, by nightfall the line had been pushed forward by a mere 1,200 yards along a front of less than 2 miles.
The battle continued for two more days. Falkenhayn sent down reinforcements from the approaches to Ypres, among them the 16th Bavarian Reserve Division (in which Corporal Hitler was a battalion runner). By the third morning 16,000 German troops blocked any advance towards Aubers Ridge. Both the British and the Germans attempted frontal assaults, with increasing loss of life. At last, long after nightfall on 12 March, Haig called a halt to the fighting. The British only held the village and the area taken in the first hours of the battle. Some 1,600 Germans were made prisoner, but casualties on both sides were heavy. Slightly over 11,600 British and Indian troops were killed, wounded or missing, 3,000 more than their enemy. Neuve Chapelle was an augury of what must come further north, around Ypres, unless new weapons, a speedier chain of command and inspirational tactics could break the deadlock of the trenches and restore mobility to the armies.18
Neuve Chapelle had repercussions within the Salient. Soon after midday on 12 March an assault was made on German positions along the spur of Spanbroekmolen, a mile and a half east of Wytschaete. The Bavarians were known to have withdrawn troops from this sector to defend Aubers Ridge, and it was hoped to overrun their trenches at relatively light cost and capture a strategic rise of value in planning a later offensive. In reality the Bavarian regiment that moved southwards came, not from the front line but from the reserve, and the hill’s defenders remained strong enough to offer spirited resistance, with one deep-cut trench in particular checking the advance. In desperation, Lieutenant Cyril Martin of the Royal Engineers led six sappers forward and cleared the trench with hand grenades. Although he was wounded, Martin then reversed the firing position and held the line until darkness fell and the attack was called off. For his valour and enterprise that afternoon, Martin received the Victoria Cross, but the crest of Spanbroekmolen remained in German hands. There were, however, lessons learnt from this relatively small-scale probing raid, in particular the effectiveness in trench warfare of the newly invented time-fused hand grenade; like Neuve Chapelle, Spanbroekmolen revealed the mounting sophistication of the German trench system.19
Two days later came another innovation: the war underground erupted. Already, on 20 December, the Germans had exploded ten small land mines around Givenchy, killing and wounding many Indian troops, but what happened on 14 March was on an ominously bigger scale. The hamlet of St Eloi, little more than 3 miles south of Ypres’s Lille Gate, had been the scene of intermittent fighting since the third week of October. By March it was in ruins, its inhabitants dead or fled, with a last echo of domesticity in the pathetic mewing of the few cats whose proverbial nine lives had carried them though shelling and bitter frosts. To the west of St Eloi was a disused brickworks, from which the spoil created a mound some 110 yards long and 30 feet high. This ugly hump provided the British with a good vantage point for a machine-gun section threatening the enemy lines out towards Hollebeke. For some weeks German sappers had been tunnelling under the mound, but their activity went undetected. Two large mines were exploded almost simultaneously at 5.30 p.m. on 14 March, destroying the machine-gun position and inflicting heavy casualties. Specially trained light-armed stormtroopers pressed forward across the newly made craters, using stick grenades to force back the dazed survivors, who came mainly from the 2nd King’s Shropshire Light Infantry (KSLI) and the 4th Rifle Brigade. Before the light faded all the defensive positions in St Eloi were in German hands. Support troops, again carefully trained for their task, speedily threw up barbed-wire barricades among the ruined buildings in the hamlet and set up machine-gun posts commanding the road intersection. There was none of that hesitancy in following up initial gains that had proved so costly for Falkenhayn during First Ypres.
In the small hours of the morning three battalions of Irish infantry (1st Leinsters and 1st and 2nd Royal Irish Fusiliers) were brought up from reserve to support the KSLI and the Rifle Brigade. Bayonet attacks in the dark were grimly effective, but the defenders had the advantage of cover from the gaunt walls of the old cottages. The 200,000 shells that fed Neuve Chapelle’s 500 guns had left the British short of artillery and munitions, and without field-gun support it was hard to break through the barricades. After more than 12 hours of confused fighting, the Irish cleared the Germans from the hamlet, but in a last assault to take the remaining improvised stronghold a Fusilier platoon was scythed down by machine-gun fire from a cellar aperture at ground level. Although the Germans fell back from St Eloi itself they could not be prised from what remained of the mound.20
The British and Irish sustained more than 800 casualties that day. Among the dead was Second Lieutenant George Llewelyn Davies of the 6th King’s Royal Rifle Corps. He was the eldest of the five Kensington Gardens children befriended by J. M. Barrie, the Scottish dramatist: he became their legal guardian when they were orphaned in 1910. George completed his schooling at Eton and was in his second year at Cambridge when the war began. As Barrie acknowledged, George inspired his best-loved whimsically sentimental play. Now, like so many young subalterns, George fell victim to a German sharpshooter, a bullet penetrating the temple while being briefed by his colonel. For the tenth-anniversary production of Peter Pan, at Christmas 1914, Barrie had already cut the mournful line ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure’, and it was not restored until the bloodshed was over. By then the inspirer of Peter lay in a war grave at Voormezele cemetery, on the road to Mount Kemmel.21
At Second Army Headquarters in Hazebrouck, Smith-Dorrien’s staff had been examining the feasibility of mine tunnelling for several weeks before the Germans seized the initiative at St Eloi. Mining was impossible during the winter months in the water-logged region east and northeast of Ypres, and tunnelling did not begin in the geologically more promising soil of the Messines Ridge until 1916. In February 1915, however, Second Army took over the Zillebeke sector from the French including Hill 60, the artificially created hillock beside the railway cutting to Comines and Courtrai (for the siting and creation of Hill 60, see chapter 2, p. 12). The British found preliminary work in progress on a small tunnel in which mines could be exploded to destroy the German observation post on the crest of the hillock. The Royal Engineers took over the dig, and as early as 17 February a small, experimental mine was blown without alerting the enemy.
In the first week of March the 173rd Tunnelling Company, Royal Engineers began cautiously digging here parallel tunnels. The main tunnel ran under the hill itself: two subsidiaries enabled mines to be planted under the approaches to adjoining trenches. Excavation proved both exhausting and harrowing. Near the surface the diggers unearthed the bones or putrefying remains of casualties from earlier fighting.
Beneath them the soil was in places little firmer than a child would find with bucket and spade on a beach, though there was also good solid earth thrown out by the navvies who built the railway. Tunnelling was dangerous on at least two counts: a tunnel could well collapse, burying the diggers; the Germans, alerted by subterranean sounds, might dig deeper and explode their own mine beneath the sappers. Once excavation was finished, 94 bags of gunpowder were hauled silently into position. In the main tunnel under the hill this necessitated a drag of 100 yards. On 15 April five charges were set: a pair of mines together in the centre and opposite the first German trench; a smaller mine outside the second line. The sappers’ activities remained a closely guarded secret within the BEF. The German garrison on Hill 60 – the 65th Royal Saxon Infantry Regiment – had no more inkling of what was happening beneath them than the British on the St Eloi mound a month previously.22
‘Things are fairly quiescent here in this sector,’ Sir Morton Crofton of the 2nd Life Guards wrote in his diary for Tuesday, 13 April. In the previous week Bishop Winnington-Ingram of London celebrated Easter communion for 200 officers and men in a barn behind the trenches and preached at a service where ‘aeroplanes circled about overhead to guard the attractive target of 4,000 kneeling officers and men with a Bishop in their midst’. Crofton reported signs of war weariness in Duke Albrecht of Württemberg’s Fourth Army; on Easter Sunday notes were thrown into the British trenches tied around stones: ‘Let us have Peace on Earth before the cherry blossom comes out, or do you want to go on for ever sitting in these damned trenches?’23
But Peace on Earth was not in sight. Soon after seven o’clock on 17 April, a gloriously fine Saturday evening, the five mines at Hill 60 exploded at five-second intervals: 150 Germans were blown to pieces or buried alive. Before the smoke had lifted the 1st West Kent (‘Buffs’) and 2nd Scottish Borderers stormed the Hill and secured it with, initially, light casualties. Their orders forbade them going down into the craters for at least half an hour because of poisonous fumes lingering from the compressed gun cotton used to fire the charges. The central crater was 60 yards long and 30 feet deep, about three times as big as the two outer craters.
The German response showed no trace of that lowering of morale Crofton thought he had detected among the Württembergers. After a short respite, their guns began a heavy bombardment that continued throughout the night. It was followed by a counter-attack after dawn on Sunday and two hours of hand-to-hand fighting, not only on the hill but also along the ‘Caterpillar’ and the ‘Hump’, neighbouring earthworks thrown up by the navvies who cut and laid the Courtrai railway. About 8.30 a.m. the Duke of York’s Regiment – Yorkshiremen from the West Riding – brought relief to the Buffs and, three hours later, to the Borderers, but they suffered heavy casualties. So too did six other battalions in the Infantry Brigade that reached the line during the next 24 hours: Queen Victoria’s Rifles (QVR), Territorials in the London Regiment who had been serving in France or Flanders for five months; the 1st Bedfordshire, 1st Cheshire, 1st Devonshire, 1st East Surrey and 1st Norfolk regiments. On Monday, 19 April, the intensity of the fighting eased, only to be followed by two days and nights of grim encounters at close quarters, with the QVR Territorials and the East Surreys holding the craters despite hailstorms of grenades and shelling by field guns barely 300 yards away.24
Three Victoria Crosses were won by two officers and a private in the East Surreys for acts of valour at Hill 60 during 20–21 April: Second Lieutenant Benjamin Geary for improvising defences in an outer crater and holding it through heavy bombardment; Lieutenant George Roupell who ‘though wounded in several places’ kept his company together and beat off one of the strongest German attacks; 19-year-old Private Edward Dwyer who, after rescuing wounded comrades beyond the trench parapet, won what was virtually a hand-grenade duel with the attacking Saxons. In the QVR, Lieutenant Harold Woolley became the first Territorial to receive the Victoria Cross. For several hours on the Tuesday night he was the only officer on the hill, organizing resistance in two of the craters until he and the 14 QVR men still able to walk were relieved by a company of the Devonshires. Like Geary, Woolley became a priest in the Church of England after the war.25
Captain Andrew Johnston, the commanding officer of the signals company at 5th Division headquarters, commented in his diary entry for 22 April on a lull in the fighting around Hill 60. The previous night had been ‘fairly quiet’; with the return of ‘heavy guns’ from Neuve Chapelle ‘our position ought to be more secure’. A few German bombers on the broken ground north of the hill ‘are rather a nuisance’, he admitted, but in general he wrote as if Hill 60 were already won. It was not. Soon the fighting for the artificial knoll became absorbed in a greater clash of arms.26
By now there were signs that the Germans might be about to launch a spring offensive. On 19 April they sealed off the Dutch frontier in a bid to prevent knowledge of their activities reaching allied intelligence agents and foreign journalists in Amsterdam and The Hague. Yet there were no reports of any concentration of troops. On cloud-free mornings – though there were few of them – the RFC and RNAS flew deeply into Belgium, as on the eve of First Ypres. But on this occasion their observers saw no signs of military build-up, and the aerial photographs revealed nothing unusual. Could it all be an elaborate feint to cover the movement of divisions away from the West, to serve under Hindenburg, Ludendorff or the highly gifted General von Mackensen in Galicia on the Eastern Front? Then, soon after midday on 22 April, Ypres suffered the heaviest bombardment since 11 November. The shelling reached a new intensity in the late afternoon, with the roads into town from the Belgian sector the main target. Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, the commander of the Second Army, who had been visiting the 14th Infantry Brigade a mile beyond Ypres, was surprised by ‘the terrific bombardment’ as he walked back to his car in the town. It seemed unlikely the cautious Falkenhayn would open an offensive in the fading light of an April evening: would he launch one at dawn next morning? But even before Sir Horace’s car left the town, Second Ypres had begun – and in a dramatic form.27