Four battalions made the initial assault, but such was the level of enemy resistance, and the difficulty of moving through the tangled wasteland, that two more battalions were fed into the mix over the coming days. A subsequent investigation concluded that the initial attack failed to secure all its objectives ‘owing to casualties and the broken nature of the ground’. This meant that the final objective ‘was reached by only small detached parties who were too weak and scattered to resist the immediate counter-attacks made by the enemy on both flanks’.¹³ An account of what happened was recorded by Captain George Rawlence of 6/Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry (14th Division). They started their march to the line, down the dreaded Menin Road, at 1 a.m. on the morning of 22 August. ‘We had an awful time’, he remembered. ‘The Hun was smashing it to pieces and mixing gas shells with the bombardment. I had to order gas masks on and you can imagine what it was like; pitch dark, glass goggles, which continually fogged with the heat of one’s body to look through, great holes in the road and shells bursting all round.’ They made one attack, but then in came the enemy counter-attacks, ‘again and again rushing up his storm troops in motors and throwing them in recklessly, all the while keeping up a terrific artillery fire’.¹⁴

Rawlence’s men were eventually relieved on 25 August. ‘We are all absolutely done [in] and one feels in that condition when all the events of the past few days appear like a far away dream’, he admitted.

You see we were on the go at all hours and dropped off to sleep on the floor when opportunity offered. Yesterday [24 August] was the worst day of all… The battle raged backwards and forwards all day and finally finished[,] we having given way about 200 yards, but still holding the crest of the ridge and well over it. Two fresh battalions of ours came up then and pushed through us and on into the line we had held during the morning, finding practically nothing but dead and wounded Boche in front of them.

Yet no matter how hard they fought, 14th Division just could not hold on to Inverness Copse. That day elements of 34th and 32nd German Divisions finally cleared the battered remains of the wood, leaving Jacob’s II Corps with nothing to show for three days of ceaseless, draining combat. It was, in a sense, an apt summation of the Battle of Flanders as a whole.

The loss of Inverness Copse, after so much blood had been spilled, inevitably provoked a bout of introspection. According to Brigadier-General P. R. Wood, whose 43 Brigade had taken the brunt of British casualties, the failure was ‘entirely a question of concentration’. For him, the key lesson was the importance of overwhelming force. Where ‘the objective is, though small, of the highest tactical importance and possession is necessary to facilitate future operations, it is wiser and cheaper in the long run to make dead certain of getting it by employing at least 50% greater strength to capture and hold it than would normally be deemed sufficient in the case of an attack forming part of a larger operation on a broad front’. He recommended battalions being deployed in depth, thus ‘ensuring greater driving power’ with enough strength to resist counter-attacks. Moreover, only one brigade (of four battalions) had been initially tasked with the mission, while six battalions had eventually been drawn into the fighting. ‘Had these 6 battalions been available from the first, so that their full weight could have been brought to bear, instead of being thrown into the fight piecemeal,’ Wood noted, ‘I am certain that complete success would have resulted.’¹⁵ He had put his finger on something. The British were slipping back into old habits: a lack of preparation; inadequate time for reconnaissance and planning; little or no coordination with flanking units; rushed, penny-packet attacks; heavy losses for little gain. The curse of the Somme was returning.

In stark contrast to the urgent investigations then underway into British failure, there was a recognition that the fighting in late August brought out the best in the German Army. Theodor Oechsler, an NCO with 23 Reserve Infantry Regiment (12th Reserve Division), was personally congratulated by General von Armin after capturing an entire tank crew on 22 August, when he was deployed around Saint-Julien. He described what it was like to come under heavy shellfire and then face the clanking iron monsters that threatened to overrun their position:

Early at 6 o’clock, the hellish artillery fire began, and the resulting smoke was such that we barely had a few metres of visibility in our craters. Yet we all waited for a visible attack. Finally, the English stormed forward, and we greeted them with our rifles, in such a way that those who weren’t dead surged back in retreat. We had barely accomplished this when we saw a tank approaching us on the road behind us. Threatened by the tank, we left our craters and found a suitable place behind the road. Suddenly, to our delight, the tank got stuck in a crater and could not go any farther. Together with Lieutenant Schulz and Musketeer Krügel from the same company, I attacked the monster. But it was in vain! We used hand grenades and rifles–we used everything. But there was not a single hole. The crew was also firing continuously with the guns that were there. I ignited a charge comprising six hand grenades under the gun, but this did not help either.

Later that evening, Oechsler and his men crawled up to the tank again. After sliding several grenades through a small opening they found in its armour, Oechsler shouted, ‘Get out of the box, or it’ll explode!’ Immediately the small side hatch opened and the eight crewmen clambered out as quickly as they could, begging for mercy.¹⁶

At Courtrai, Crown Prince Rupprecht felt an enormous sense of pride in how well his units were coping, particularly given what they were up against. The fighting on 22 August, he noted, ‘lasted into the night’. So heavy was the demand for shells that his reserve had shrunk to only seven ammunition trains.¹⁷ Nevertheless, he was confident that morale was holding. On the morning of 24 August, he met some officers and men of 5th Bavarian Division, which had fought at the Battle of Langemarck.