The first days of May found me with but little work to do.
I spent some of my time running up into the Salient and hearing talk
of preparations for a withdrawal of our line to a smaller horseshoe
around Ypres. This was to be done as soon as all was ready for the
move, and the utmost secrecy enveloped the operations.
I saw Rex Benson, of the 9th Lancers, who was acting temporarily
as liaison officer with the French troops along the canal north of
Ypres. Rex said the French had made but little progress towards the
Pilkem ridge and General Putz had apparently decided to concentrate
his position and give up open assault for the present.
The Hun howitzer fire was so fierce along the roads when I skirted
Ypres on May 1st that I decided to desist visiting the Salient. In
short, I got "cold feet" about the Ypres roads, and decided to do my
joy-riding in other directions.
Romer Williams, of the 4th D.G.'s, and I went to St. Omer on the 2nd
and brought out a couple of Romer's Red Cross friends, one a San
Franciscan, named Sherman, at whose billet we had found marvellous
cocktails. We all dined at General Mullens' headquarters, a gay party.
As we were feasting, the Huns in front of Ypres were up to more
devilment. They let loose a heavy gas attack on the evening of the
2nd and made the British trenches south of St. Julien untenable.
Our men retired, but the gas hung stationary for a few moments, and
prevented an immediate German advance. This fortunate pause gave time
for a concentration of all our guns on the spot. When the gas had
dispersed sufficiently to allow an advance by the enemy, our gunners
threw a _barrage de feu_ across the German front as it emerged from
St. Julien and the little wood to the west of it, and effectually
stopped the way. Meantime, our men had regained their trenches.
The 2nd Cavalry Division, dismounted, was called up as support during
this attack. To reach the trenches into which they were ordered they
found it necessary to advance across an enemy _barrage de feu_. The
4th Hussars and 5th Lancers were the regiments engaged. For a time it
seemed they would be badly cut up, but luckily they got through the
curtain of shells with only forty killed.
So _some_ cavalry units had been thrown into the actual line, after
all.
On the 3rd the 1st Cavalry Division moved back to its previous winter
billets, the Headquarters Staff again repairing to the La Nieppe
château.
The Huns attacked our Ypres line all day on the 4th, but with no
success. That night the evacuation of the extreme eastern section of
the Salient was carried out without serious casualty.
The enemy patrols that poked through the Polygon Wood at daybreak
on the 4th, and discovered the British retirement to a line further
west, must indeed have been surprised.
The fighting of the previous ten days had cost the Allies over
thirty square miles of ground and more than 20,000 casualties, but
the British Army had undoubtedly gained in morale, nevertheless.
Colonials and Territorials, as well as old line regiments filled
with new reserve men, had fought shoulder to shoulder with the
veterans of Le Cateau and the Aisne, every unit gaining strength
unconsciously as each contingent rose in the other's estimation.
Mutual admiration and mutual confidence had welded the Army all the
more closely together.
On a call at 5th Corps Headquarters at Abele, west of Poperinghe,
I saw a couple of what appeared to be divers' helmets. These were
loaded into a car, with a good-sized roll of rubber tubing and a
homely pair of bellows attached to each of the grotesque pieces of
headgear.
Curious, I asked a "Q" officer, standing near by, just how this
paraphernalia was to be used.
"People get strange ideas about fighting gas," he said. "These
outfits were designed and forwarded to us to be sent up front, so up
front I am sending them. They are provided to allow some of our men,
say about 3 in every 10,000, so far as present supply goes, to stay
in the gas-filled trenches while some pals with the bellows pump good
air to them through a few hundred feet of hose.
"If the gas area should be of considerable extent the chap with the
bellows would soon be pumping chlorine into his fellow-Tommy, and die
pumping at that, or else take to the woods and let the diver himself
get what air he could find.
"Many accidents might befall the tube. A Hun might sit on it. I hate
to think of myself, squatting in a trench with one of those things
over my head, praying for air, with the bellows man pumping his heart
out trying to get ozone through a rubber tube on top of which some
fat Boche had plumped, while he potted away at one or the other of us.
"A shell, too, would have an interesting time with such a tube.
Imagine the chap in the helmet hollering, 'Pump away, you lazy
beggar, I'm not getting enough air to keep a flea alive,' and all
the good old oxygen pouring out of a jagged hole in the bally pipe,
hundreds of feet from him.
"Then, suppose a man, coming up before daylight, got his foot caught
in that length of tube," he continued enthusiastically--but I
realised I had started something I couldn't stop, and fled.
On May 5th I found E. F. Lumsden, of the A.S.C., an old friend with
a passion for car repair of all sorts, who had charge of the lorries
and motor workshops attached to the 7th Brigade Royal Garrison
Artillery Ammunition Park. His lot were in Estaires. I turned my
car over to them for rejuvenation while I hied myself to London to
purchase an alarmingly large collection of parts with which to assist
the somewhat extensive rebuilding Lumsden had gleefully planned.
I was back with a heavy load of hardware and empty purse by the night
of May 7th, and by midnight on the 8th left Estaires with my chariot,
which was in a greatly chastened mood.
While I was on leave in England the troopers of the 1st Cavalry
Division had spent their nights in the Ypres Salient digging reserve
line trenches and making barbed wire entanglements. Ypres on fire,
the trench line alight with flares and the flash of constant
shell-bursts, made this work more spectacular than pleasant. Once or
twice a shell fell sufficiently near the troopers to wound one or
two. One Black Maria unfortunately dropped among a squadron of the
18th Hussars, killing two of them and wounding a couple of dozen more.
Lunching on the 8th with a gunners' mess on the Laventie front, I
learned of a big "push" ordered at dawn on the 9th. The Auber ridge
was to be attacked from the south-west by two Indian Divisions, and
from the north-west by the 8th Division and the 7th Division, with
the Northumbrian Territorial Division and the newly arrived West
Riding Territorial Division somewhere about. Something like 120,000
men were thus to be engaged. The Canadian Division was in reserve, in
addition, and the 9th Division, the first of the "K" troops to reach
the Front, was expected by rail that night.
The 6th Division, in the Bois Grenier area, was ready and eager to
push forward toward Lille if the Auber ridge attack proved successful.
Instructions had been given, in anticipation of any misunderstandings
which might tend to lead to another fiasco like the battle of Neuve
Chapelle. Orders were issued that troops in certain areas were to
push on and not delay, because telephonic communication had not
been established. The order of the day asked the troops to "break a
hole in the enemy's line," and assured the attacking Divisions that
the whole Army was behind, ready to deal sledge-hammer blows on the
broken German front.
My gunner friends confidently expected to sleep in Lille on the night
of the 9th, and proceeded jocosely to mark on a map of that city the
houses each one chose as his billet. Roads to Lille had been selected
for the ammunition columns, and orders given which would ensure a
supply of shells that far forward, in case the attack "got through."
All was excitement when I left that front in the small hours of the
morning of the 9th, and greatly would I have loved to stay and see
the Auber Ridge attack at daybreak. But at early morning light on
Sunday, May 9th, the 1st Cavalry Division, placed under the orders of
General Plumer, who had taken General Smith-Dorrien's place as the
General Officer commanding the 2nd Army, was once more to be sent to
Ypres.
Things had not gone well in the Salient on the 8th. The 5th Corps,
then under General Allenby, who had been promoted from Cavalry
Corps, was composed of the 4th, 27th and 28th Divisions. These troops
had been driven from their first-line trenches by a strenuous German
attack, and had fallen back to the next line with heavy casualties.
The 2nd Cavalry Brigade had been rushed early on the 9th into the
reserve trenches east of Ypres, and were in readiness from Potijze
south to the Menin Road. The 1st Cavalry Brigade and the 9th Cavalry
Brigade were near Vlamertinghe, west of Ypres, waiting orders.
The Huns had begun a ferocious onslaught on that perfect Sunday
morning, and the roar of battle around Ypres drowned, in our ears,
the noise of the 1st Army attack towards Aubers.
That 9th of May was to see bitter fighting on many fronts. The enemy
attack on the Ypres Salient, and our "push" against the Auber ridge,
were pregnant with bloody work, but away to the south, in front of
Arras, the French Army was commencing the second day of the biggest
attack it had yet planned since the winter mud had limited the
fighting to trench warfare.
Five hundred thousand men and 2,000 guns were hammering at the German
front, in an effort to break through to Douai, and though it was too
early to expect a detailed report of the onslaught, word had come
that the soldiers of France had won through in three places.
On the Russian front the German arms were crowned with success on
that day, in a gigantic conflict, and the day before saw the sinking
of the Lusitania and the sacrifice of its load of women and children.
One seemed to live many hours in a few minutes in those May days.
All-engrossed with the work in hand, we were none the less anxious to
hear of the great movements about us, in which our interests were not
less keen than in the fighting in our own immediate area.
The new British line around Ypres ran from the French right, 2,000
yards east of the Yser-Ypres Canal, and about the same distance north
of St. Jean, east for a mile or so to a homestead dubbed the Canadian
Farm, then south-east across the Ypres-St. Julien road, and across
another road that previously had served as a secondary route to
Passchendaele.
From that point the trenches led south, passing to the west of
Verlorenhoek, a town on the Ypres-Zonnebeke road. South again, and
a little east, they crossed the Ypres-Roulers railway, skirted the
western and the southern shores of the Bellewaarde Lake, took in the
grounds of the ruined Hooge château and the eastern fringe of the
woods that surrounded it, passed east of Hooge, and thus reached the
famous Ypres-Menin road.
On went the line, winding snakelike through the eastern edge of the
Sanctuary Wood, south of the Menin Road. Here the Salient reached its
furthermost eastern extremity.
Then began a south-westerly trend, less than a mile in front of
Zillebeke, reaching Zaartsteen before crossing the Ypres-Comines
railway and later the Ypres-Comines canal.
From the canal the trenches ran more west than south to St. Eloi,
then still on to the westward, until they circled south, away from
Ypres, in front of Vierstraat, Kemmel and Wolverghem successively.
There they faced, then passed Messines, reached the Ploegsteert
Wood, crossed the River Lys and bent round Armentières, on their way
through the Auber and Neuve Chapelle area, to the Festubert and La
Bassée fronts.
Early morning on that eventful Sunday found me driving General de
Lisle and Hardress Lloyd to Ypres, straight through the devastated
old city, out of the Menin gate, over the Menin bridge and on up the
Zonnebeke Road as far as Potijze.
From the railway crossing at the western edge of Ypres, past the
smashed cathedral of St. Martin, round the ruins of the Cloth Hall,
through the Grande Place, and down the Rue de Menin, dead horses and
men lined the way.
Ypres, which I had seen shelled so heavily time after time without
its semblance of a city being destroyed, was at last indescribably
in ruins. The slender pinnacles at the ends of the Cloth Hall still
stood, and the tower itself had not fallen, though it had been so
riddled it seemed in imminent danger of collapse. The tall torn tower
of St. Martin's, near by, was also standing.
I found great difficulty in picking my way through the square, past
shell-holes, piles of paving blocks, and heaps of dead horses. At
one end of the Grande Place a howitzer shell had burst directly on
an artillery limber, the horses and men being piled indiscriminately
together, every one instantly killed. They lay in a heap on the
broken stones of the square.
Our previous brewery headquarters was levelled to the ground, and the
house where we had slept when last in Ypres was smashed out of all
recognition.
Shells were falling in Ypres as we went through it. Across the Menin
bridge the road, once a broad highway, had been narrowed to a mere
path by pile on pile of shell-strewn bricks and stones. The houses
were one by one completely disappearing, as though the space they
occupied was required for other purposes, and the demolition of each
one of them was a preconceived part of a plan of extinction of all
signs of habitation.
Dead horses in dozens along the way lay close to the wheel track. We
passed an ambulance, its front portion torn away by a shell, and then
the remnants of a supply wagon, smashed to matchwood.
As we sped on, as fast as the continual obstructions and deep
shell-holes would allow, shells fell behind us, screeching overhead
every few seconds with strange, weird, discordant notes, culminating
in a reverberating bang! that seemed thrown back at us by the high
walls across the moat.
The dozens of dead horses became scores as we pushed on. Some fields
by the road were literally covered with them.
A signals corps man told me that at one point his orders for dark
night journeys across those fields were as follows: "Go down the
hedge till you reach the ditch, turn right, and go toward the big
pile of dead horses until you come to the gap in the next hedge."
Those instructions could be easily followed on the blackest night, if
one's olfactory nerves were in working order.
Every breath of air seemed to our unaccustomed nostrils to be charged
with noisome smells.
As we approached Potijze the infantry fire grew less in volume. The
Hun onslaught, the first of five distinct attacks to be pushed home
by the Germans that day, had failed, and the breathing space was the
more heavily punctuated by the howitzer shells for half an hour, as
if in a special spleen of disappointment.
Most of the British guns had been withdrawn from the Salient and
to the west of the canal. Two batteries of 18-pounders left near
Potijze were firing with the valour of one hundred as we came up.
But field-guns of light calibre, firing shrapnel, have less voice
in an argument than the heavy howitzers with their 6-inch, 8-inch,
or 14-inch high explosive shells. The Huns' howitzers on that Ypres
front must have outnumbered our heavy ordnance by at least twenty to
one that Sunday morning.
Long straggling strings of wounded soldiers trickled past on the
Potijze road, making their way painfully around Ypres to the
north-west, for to linger long on the Menin road, over which we had
come, was to court sure death.
General de Lisle stopped the car not far from the Potijze château,
and he and Hardress Lloyd walked through a field to the dug-out
in which General Mullens had established 2nd Cavalry Brigade
Headquarters.
I turned the car and backed it between two walls of what once were
dwelling-houses. Sitting close to the bottom of the wall, beside
the car, I counted shell intervals while waiting. From two to three
shells burst near the Potijze cross-roads every minute, but by far
the greater number of Hun projectiles went on, over my head, to the
Menin bridge and Ypres.
A good-sized bough from a tree above dropped on my head, and a piece
of shell casing, quite hot, struck my foot as it fell, spent, beside
me.
For ten minutes splinters swept the roadway continuously, and the
stream of wounded ceased to pour by until the fury of the sudden
bombardment had spent itself. The constant shock of concussion was
nerve-racking.
After a quarter of an hour the shells fell less frequently, though
odd ones struck the road at intervals.
Behind the Verlorenhoek-Hooge line was a smaller Salient, called the
G.H.Q. line. It served as a support position, and between it and the
canal were whole colonies of dug-outs.
Much of the G.H.Q. line was so situated that a parapet of sandbags,
in full sight of the German observers, made it a frequent target.
On some days during the fighting that followed the casualties
in the G.H.Q. line rivalled those in the front trenches. It was
never a popular resting place, and was often the subject of much
vituperation.
General de Lisle and Lloyd returned to the car, and nearer Ypres made
another halt to visit the reserve dug-outs in the fields toward the
St. Jean road.
"Take good cover, President," said the General, as he started across
a shell-torn meadow.
Easier said than done, I thought.
The lee of a house wall sheltered an empty biscuit-tin, on which I
perched, under a lean-to of rough boards. The sky showed a fairy
blue through hundreds of holes in the sheet-iron roof of the
rudely constructed shed, evidence that a bursting shell above had
"scattered" splendidly.
In spite of shell interludes I had one or two interesting chats with
passers-by. A hospital corps sergeant told me the Huns shelled the
Zonnebeke road, beside which we were chatting, every time they saw a
transport on it.
"They give it hell when something moves over it," he said
impressively. "Just let us bring an ambulance up here in the daytime,
and see them get busy, the devils."
"That's nice," said I. "Do you think they could see my car when it
went up to Potijze?"
"Sure," he replied with conviction. "Sure. If they haven't shelled
you yet they _will_, all right, don't _you_ worry."
He left me cogitating, as he strode off whistling, evidently unaware
he had put anything but comforting ideas in my head.
All those who came from "up there" agreed as to one thing--the storm
of howitzer-shells made one's chance of living through a "turn in the
trenches" extremely slim. Many men were undeniably demoralised by it.
"The few of my poor chaps that are left," a 28th Division subaltern
told me, "seem to have the idea their number is up. They keep saying
that if they don't get it to-day they'll sure get it to-morrow.
Hardly any of them have much hope of getting out alive. I keep trying
to hearten 'em, but it's rotten work. Every time I rip out something
intended to be cheerful along comes a Jack Johnson and blows up a
whole bally section of trench, burying alive those it don't kill.
Then the poor beggars alongside just nod at each other and say: 'You
and me next, Bill,' and what in hell _can_ I tell 'em?
"Why in the deuce we don't have more guns up here _I'd_ like to know.
It does get sickening to be shelled, and shelled, and shelled, day
and night, and hear so little of the same sort of stuff going over
_their_ way. Damn the German guns, anyway."
I sympathised with him, and told him so.
"I would like to see what de Lisle would do if _he_ was running the
guns," I told him. "He would send some hell of his own making over to
those Huns if _he_ was doing it, from what I have heard him say."
Odd prophetic fragment of comfort, that. Three days thereafter de
Lisle was given command of the whole Verlorenhoek-Hooge front and all
the artillery east of the canal, a territory which he soon had "stiff
with guns." In spite of the preponderance of the Germans in heavy
ordnance our gunners gave the enemy good packages of the medicine
with which our hammered troops had been dosed for so many weary days.
The run back over the Menin Bridge and through Ypres safely
accomplished, we visited the headquarters of General Snow,
commanding 28th Division. While waiting there a Hun howitzer shell
ambled lazily over my head and exploded a couple of hundred yards
beyond, throwing up a great cloud of black smoke.
"Enemy airmen spotted this little lot," said a passing "red-hat."
"Warm time coming for Snow."
His anxiety was unnecessary, however, for the next shell went much
further over us, and another two further still, as if searching for
moving troops far behind the line.
The 3rd Cavalry Division troopers, loaded in motor-buses, went
Ypres-ward during the afternoon. General Sir Julian Byng had taken
Allenby's place at Cavalry Corps, and General Briggs had been given
command of the 3rd Cavalry Division in Byng's place. The British Army
contained no finer soldier than Briggs. This left the 1st Cavalry
Brigade without a G.O.C., as General Meakin, who had been appointed
to that command, was in England on sick leave. Consequently Colonel
"Tommy" Pitman, of the 11th Hussars, was placed in temporary command
of the 1st Brigade. Pitman, like Briggs, was a born leader of men--a
tower of strength in himself.
Once during the afternoon my work took me to Ypres, but not beyond
it. A fresh attack was on, and the Boches were sweeping the Menin
Bridge and the road beyond with shrapnel.
Even Macfarlane's intrepid motor-cyclists could no longer go over it
with their signal corps messages; but were compelled to dismount,
leave their motor-bikes in Ypres, and proceed on foot to Potijze by a
roundabout route through the fields. Those cyclists generally used a
road long after it had been given up as impassable by everyone else,
and when they at last abandoned it as too dangerous for use it was
indeed time, in their parlance, "to give it a miss."
Our 2nd Brigade troops were under intermittent shell-fire all that
day, but came through with unusual good fortune. One shell lit in a
group of 18th Hussars, killed five and wounded eight, but the other
units escaped with extraordinarily few casualties.
At the headquarters of General Bulfin, Commanding 28th Division, Lord
Loch, who was G.S.O. 1, on General Bulfin's Staff, gave us a very
welcome tea.
From one of the 28th Division Staff I learned that the 4th, 27th and
28th Divisions had been through a more terrible time in the Salient
than we had known. Snow's Division, the 27th, were terribly depleted
in numbers. "Not many men left, and very few officers indeed," was
the sober way Snow had spoken of his lot that day.
The five heavy attacks of the 9th, in spite of the battered condition
of the heroic men who faced them, resulted in no real gains and the
Germans suffered severe losses.
We sought eagerly for news of the British attack along the Auber
ridge. Early in the morning word had come that the 8th Division had
made a splendid beginning by taking the German first line trenches in
front of them. In the afternoon we heard that the 4th Corps "got on"
well, but the Indian Corps and 1st Corps were held up by machine-gun
fire and had made no progress. A further attack was to be made at
4 p.m. on the 10th. On the 11th, the G.H.Q. information summary
remarked, laconically, that there was "nothing to report from the
1st Army Front." So the big attack, of which my gunner friends along
the Fromelle Road had such hopes, had fizzled out.
Weeks afterwards I heard the full story from the lips of men who
were in the front of the fighting, but our task in Ypres was growing
hourly sufficiently absorbing, so that the whys and wherefores of
Rawlinson's failure to break through were of less interest than the
question of repelling the German attack on the Salient.
As dusk drew on the conflagrations in Ypres lit up the eastern
sky. Our night headquarters were in a château not far west of the
unfortunate town.
Wounded still straggled back in small groups, and ambulances arrived
every few minutes at a dressing station hard by the gates of our
château.
Watching those ambulances unload made me proud to be an Anglo-Saxon.
The men were magnificent in their incomparable morale. Many a smiling
face hid teeth set hard in pain. Many a Tommy knows not only the
inestimable value of keeping a stout heart to help himself through,
but the immeasurably greater treasure of an ample store of cheery
words and light-hearted jokes wherewith to lift a comrade from
pain-racked despondency.
Broken bodies, broken limbs, and many a broken head were there in
plenty, but one looked far to find a broken spirit.
Before we went to sleep, good news came from the French. All the way
from Loos south to Lens, it said, and on through Thelus to Arras, the
German first-line trenches had been captured, save in two places. On
the 10th, the French reported having taken 2,000 prisoners and ten
guns. In spite of all, the succeeding days' reports whittled down
the final result to a tactical success, not a strategical one. The
break in the German line was made good by the enemy in short order,
and soon Gaul and Teuton were facing each other much as they had
done, previously, and the inch-by-inch battles of the Labyrinth were
soaking the ground of France's black country with French and German
blood.
The big French attack and the British "push" had equally failed to
smash the German line.
On our front British soldiers were to continue to show that their
line could hold as solidly as the Hun line had held to the south, in
spite of the hell of howitzer-fire that was daily to be let loose in
the Salient.
Rocked to sleep by the earth-tremble of bursting tons of high
explosive, day-dawn on May 10th seemed to come the next moment after
my head had hit the floor which served me as a pillow.
Before seven o'clock in the morning I was again in the Salient and
once more under shell-fire.
Taking Colonel Home through Ypres and over the Menin bridge, we were
not long in reaching Potijze.
The weather was perfect, hundreds of small birds hopping about the
roadways and twittering excitedly, as if protesting to each other
against the continual coming of the shells.
Behind a ruined house near the Potijze crossroads, I made a lucky
discovery. Someone had built a comfy little dug-out, six feet by
four and nearly three feet deep, into which I at once repaired.
Its earthen walls were reinforced by heavy planks, and a roof of
earth-covered timbers was edged with barrels and sacks of bricks and
mortar. Ponchos lined the inside of the walls, and the floor was deep
with straw. On a shelf stood the remains of a ham bone and a tin half
full of marmalade.
With thirty to forty jarring explosions in the vicinity every minute,
this habitation was little short of ideal, save for the smell, which
was fierce in its intensity and persistence.
The earth of the open spaces near by was thrown into yellow and brown
heaps by the hundreds of howitzer shells that had rained on them for
days. Dozens of dead horses, scattered about, offended the eye and
polluted the air.
A detachment of troopers, bent on rendering the trenches of the
near by G.H.Q. line a more safe shelter, had been spied by the Hun
gunners, who for hours sent a continual shower of shells over them.
I had not waited long before I found I was not the only occupant
of my shelter. My companions bit me surreptitiously, leaving red
blotches which burned irritatingly.
I sat in the open air for a few moments, deciding there was not
sufficient room in the dug-out for my small but persistent comrades
and myself, but a big shell landed near and sent such a spattering
horde of splinters all around that I ducked back underground and took
my chance with the less serious wounds of the busy little dug-out
folk, who seemed half starved, in spite of the ham bone and marmalade
that had been left to them.
A couple of worried, hungry mongrel dogs came nosing about fearfully,
heads cocked inquisitively when they caught sight of me. I gave them
the bone and was thanked by a series of tailwags from each.
A Hun shell set fire to a building not far distant, and soon immense
clouds of black and saffron smoke were rolling heavenwards.
Many shells came close to where I was tucked away, one throwing a
cart load of _débris_ over my car, but none of them in the least
disturbing the tranquillity of my snug quarters.
Returning through Ypres, we found the Menin Road and bridge had been
further hammered since we had come over it. At one or two points it
was almost impassable for a car. The carcass of a dead horse had been
blown right across the path, so that I was compelled to pass over
part of it.
Houses were smoking on all sides, and red flames rose skyward in
several quarters of the town.
A solitary old woman in black was picking her way tortuously past
the dead and over the tumbled piles of brick and stone. She was, we
thought, the last survivor of the civil population.
General Adeney, of the 12th Brigade, called at 1st Cavalry Division
Headquarters and told me of the heavy shelling on the front that his
brigade had held. The signal wire from his headquarters to that of
his Division was cut by shell-fire fifty-five times in one day. His
men had gone through a terrible time, but had stood it magnificently.
General Adeney had wide experience with the Hun gas, and assured us
its effects could be greatly nullified if care was taken to follow
out the instructions as to the use of the respirators and face-masks,
which had been issued to each man whose duty took him into the
Salient.
The 2nd Cavalry Brigade went from the G.H.Q. line to the front
position during the evening, but were relieved by the 1st Cavalry
Brigade before the next morning. The 1st Brigade spent the day in
dug-outs in a little wood near the Ypres-Roulers Railway, close to
the trenches. Shell-fire had cost the 2nd Brigade thirteen killed and
fifty-four wounded during its occupancy of the G.H.Q. line.
The 9th Cavalry Brigade reported itself "quite comfortable" in
splendid dug-outs near Wieltje, but the shells wounded four of its
officers and eighteen of its men, nevertheless.
From the windows of our headquarters château the fires of Ypres
could be seen burning brightly all night, a red splash on the
inky black of the horizon. Bursting shells and the flash of our
guns never ceased. Bright stars dotted the dark canopy overhead,
and brilliant trench-flares rose and fell in graceful arcs. The
wonderful, ever-changing sight and the continual diapason of the
heavy explosives was awe-inspiring.
Early morning usually came with a lull in the gun-fire on both sides,
unless an attack was in progress. We hurried through breakfast on the
11th, and lost no time in getting away for Potijze.
General de Lisle, Major "Bertie" Fisher, of the 17th Lancers, who had
joined de Lisle's Staff as G.S.O. 2 (in place of Major Fitzgerald,
promoted to G.S.O. 1 of the 2nd Cavalry Division), and Captain
Hardress Lloyd were my passengers.
The rumph! r-r-rumph! of itinerant Black Marias told us that German
hate still held against shattered Ypres. As we approached the town
one or two heavy explosions were followed by a cloud of dust and
smoke where the shells had fallen on a building already a heap of
_débris_ and scattered its remains high in the air.
At the railway crossing west of Ypres several newly made shell-chasms
made me pick my path warily. All the way to the Grande Place
shell-holes and gathering piles of rubbish and timbers made progress
difficult.
The space in front of the cathedral was knee-deep in loose paving
blocks and stones.
As we turned the corner of the Cloth Hall, and could see the battered
square, our sight was arrested by brilliant sheets of scarlet flame
edged black, that shot across the Rue de Menin ahead of us.
The bright morning sun and blue, cloudless sky above, the grey and
white ruins on every hand, and the blood-red, leaping, straining,
struggling patch of angry flame that roared in our faces as we drew
near to it, made a picture that would have delighted the heart of an
artist.
I stopped the car.
The General at first counselled rushing through the fire, but I
dreaded the result. Even should we have dashed past unscathed, the
thought of the petrol in the car made me hesitate.
Then, beyond the conflagration, we saw that a house at the western
approach to the Menin bridge had been knocked over by a shell, and so
fallen that it completely blocked the road. Half a hundred men must
work for hours before the Menin bridge would once more be open for
traffic, though fortunately the bridge itself was undamaged.
Reversing the car and regaining the Grande Place, I threaded my way
past deep holes in the _pavé_, and cautiously clambered over piles of
_débris_ as we sought another route eastward. Along a street where
desolation reigned supreme we went, until we reached the eastern moat
wall. Turning north, we sought an outlet on the St. Jean road.
Pushing over great fallen timbers, nail-studded and threatening a
puncture at every revolution of the wheels, over, by and into holes
in the paved road, it seemed impossible the car could surmount and
pass the mounds of wreckage and paving-blocks that filled the way.
Over the railway we crawled, and to the very northern edge of
Ypres. Just as we were congratulating ourselves on having won
through, in spite of apparently insurmountable difficulties, a
monster shell-cavity, thirty feet in diameter, and so deep as to be
absolutely impassable for the car, opened in front of us.
The road was wide, but the shell had fallen in its centre, heaping
the earth and stone at the edges of the gaping crater until it
blocked the street from side to side.
General de Lisle and his two companions dismounted and proceeded on
foot, instructing me to "be careful and get home safely."
Heading the way I had come was a task of some magnitude. Pneumatic
tyres were not made to traverse shell-torn roads covered with glass,
nails, and sharp bits of iron and stone, but my trusty Dunlops did
not fail me.
In the square I stopped to get a photograph of a fire that was
enveloping the houses at the back of the cathedral. Every building in
the district was burning, some smouldering and smoking threateningly,
while the flames raged fiercely from top to bottom of others standing
near.
As I pulled up, a fearful crash came from the Menin bridge not far
behind me, the shock of the concussion almost throwing me down.
Giving up all idea of procuring pictures under such circumstances, I
ignominiously fled as fast as it was safe to go.
Passing the cathedral, I saw a fine collie dog, his tail between his
legs, slinking along furtively. I called him, dismounting from the
car and trying to induce him to come to me, but he was scared so
badly he only ran the faster at my approach.
In the western edge of Ypres a worn, drawn-faced Belgian, with
a hunted look in his eyes, was slowly and carefully shoving a
wheelbarrow, on which was a rude pallet. Stretched upon it lay the
wasted form of a frail woman, close-swathed in as much bedding as the
method of conveyance would allow. Her skin was wax-white, her wide
eyes large and lustrous. She had not sufficient strength to prevent
her feet from trailing the ground. An aged crone shuffled beside the
sick woman, on her face a picture of agonised fear painful to see.
Big Hun guns were searching for little British ones not far away, and
at every detonation the poor old woman jumped nervously.
An offer of assistance met with no response, as if they were past all
capability of communication. The horrors they must have gone through
for weeks in some cellar in that stricken town baffle imagination.
They were undoubtedly the last of the residents of Ypres to leave the
town alive. If others remained, it was but to be buried under the
falling walls of their hiding places, or to meet a worse fate in the
flames that were raging from one end of the city to the other.
Vlamertinghe received a sharp shelling that forenoon, and a few
minutes afterward I took General de Lisle through the town to the
headquarters of General Wilson of the 4th Division. As we ran through
Vlamertinghe, Tommies were busy sweeping the roadway clear of
_débris_ thrown about by the shells five minutes before.
When at General Bulfin's Headquarters _estaminet_ a quarter of an
hour later, I saw Hun shrapnel again begin bursting in twos over
Vlamertinghe, which was gradually becoming an unhealthy locality.
The clear air brought out dozens of aeroplanes, which kept the
anti-aircraft guns busy. The Germans sent up a couple of weird
"sausages"--anchored observation balloons of peculiar shape.
The amount of ammunition used in the continuous shelling of the
trench line was stupendous.
[Illustration: Dragoon Guards resting in the huts near Vlamertinghe]
[Illustration: Graves of Captain Annesley, Lieutenant Drake and
Captain Peto, all of the 10th Hussars, in a graveyard on the Menin
Road]
On one run toward Ypres I passed the "Princess Pat's" (Princess
Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry), fresh from the 27th Division
trenches, and on their way to a rest in billets. They were indeed a
sturdy lot. All forenoon the Huns shelled our front line from the
Menin Road to the north as it passed the Hooge Château and circled
the Bellewaarde Lake. Wounded men poured back through Ypres from the
Front, marvelling that they had escaped death in the trenches, and
wondering still more that they had not been blown to atoms as they
trudged back along the deadly Menin Road.
A wounded trooper of the 11th Hussars reported his regiment
unpleasantly situated in bad dug-outs in a wood, between the
Ypres-Roulers Railway and the Bellewaarde Lake. The dug-outs were not
of sufficient size to accommodate the whole of the 11th, and when
a detachment of Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders claimed shelter
therein as well, the congestion became dangerous. The Hun shells
burst immediately over the dug-outs, and some casualties had occurred
before morning dawned. So little accommodation seemed available that
one squadron of the 11th had been sent back to the G.H.Q. line, where
it had been badly hammered by howitzer fire for hour after hour as
the morning passed.
Romer Williams and I walked from our château to a "Mother" gun,
concealed under a screen of dry branches in a near-by farmyard. The
big 9·2 howitzer was throwing its 290-pound projectiles, filled with
lyddite, into the Hun trenches in front of Hooge, nearly 9,000 yards
distant. The five-mile journey was accomplished by each shell in
35 seconds, a rate of more than 500 miles per hour. Dodging a shell
which was coming at such speed would be something of a feat.
Yet, standing directly behind the breech, we could distinctly see the
9·2 shell as it left the muzzle and started on its sinister errand.
For so huge an engine of war its paraphernalia was simple. The
howitzer stood on a platform built into the farmyard. Rows of shells,
each a load for four men, lay in a ditch behind it. On a log, under
a tall tree, sat the captain gunner, by his side a non-com. busy
figuring out mathematical equations, and another poring over a
large-scale map. With his back to the tree crouched a Royal Flying
Corps man, his receiver to his ear, and an elaborate box of wireless
telegraphic tricks beside him. Across the road a slender pole, a
score of feet in height, completed his wireless installation.
"Fire!" said the captain, sharply.
Flash! bang! "Mother" recoiled with a shock and returned leisurely.
Not a big noise or a very trying one on the ears of those near by,
unless in front of the "business end." The crew stood close at hand
as each round was fired.
Before an unsophisticated onlooker would imagine the great shell had
reached its destination, the wireless man, listening attentively to
the message from an aeroplane observer high over the Huns, and out of
our sight, sang out "150 yards over."
A cabalistic sequence of numbers was shouted in staccato tones by one
of the non-coms, repeated by a man at the breech, and flash! bang!
went "Mother" again.
"Well placed. Right into them," said the wireless operator, as the
approving message was ticked from his fellow in the 'plane.
Flash! bang! the work went on, comforting the battered men in our own
trenches, and harrying the Germans in theirs.
"Had nine direct hits on their trenches yesterday," said the captain
gunner, "and have got the range pretty well to-day. Managed to get a
couple into one of the German batteries this morning, too." And he
grinned.
If the men who made the shells could have known how much heart every
9·2 projectile put into the brave boys that faced the Hun trenches,
weary to distraction of everlasting German shelling, and little
return thereto, they would have been justly proud of their handiwork.
A "Mother" shell was a fine tonic for those who were behind it, "when
it popped."
On the night of the 11th the 1st and 9th Brigades "took over" the
parts of the line held by the 27th Division and most of that held by
the 28th. Up to that time the troopers had been only in reserve or
support, yet so heavy was the Hun gun-fire in the Salient that our
Division had lost one officer killed and seventeen wounded, and the
casualty list among the men was but few short of one hundred.
De Lisle was given command of a stretch of line reaching from near
the Bellewaarde Lake to the Wieltje-St. Julien road, and 2,500 28th
Division men and all the guns east of the Yser-Ypres Canal were
placed under him. He at once planned to throw several additional
batteries into the Salient, and gave orders which would result in a
shell-surprise for the Huns. Every time the German gunners started
to shell our trenches, the German trenches were to be deluged with a
half an hour of concentrated shell-fire from all de Lisle's field
batteries, his 6-inch howitzer battery, and the single 60-pounder gun
that had been allotted to him.
The day closed with the repulse of the last of three sanguine enemy
attacks that had been launched since morning, two of which had gained
a foothold in the British line, only to have it, in each case, torn
from their grasp by costly counter-attacks.
The Ypres-Poperinghe road was filled with troops marching westward.
"To what lot do these men belong?" I asked General Mullens, as we
stood watching the passing columns.
"They are of the Northumberland Brigade," said Mullens. "I am told
that but 900 of them are left out of more than 5,000. Another Brigade
went into the Salient 5,500 strong a fortnight ago, and has come out
to-day numbering but 950."
I went to bed by the bright light of burning Ypres, which made every
tree cast flickering shadows to try the nerves of the men who tramped
up in the cold darkness to share the morrow's battle, or trudged back
to billets to sink into the torpor of extreme exhaustion, until in
their turn they should again face the shattering shell blasts.
May 12th was comparatively a quiet day. The wind had changed, and Hun
gas attacks were impossible until it again swung round to the east.
I told Captain Francis Grenfell, of the 9th Lancers, about the
"Mother" gun not far away, and we strolled down where it was
quartered just in time to watch it fire a score of rounds at a German
battery which was in action at the bend of the Ypres-Comines Canal
near Hollebeke.
A second 9·2 gun had arrived in the night and taken up quarters in
an adjoining farm. It had been doing good work near Brielen, but was
"spotted" by a German air-scout and "found" by the enemy's guns. One
man killed and several wounded by a German shell decided the gunner
in command to "make a get-away" from the discovered position.
The 3rd Cavalry Division troops were put under de Lisle's command in
addition to those of his own Division and the odd brigades of the
28th Division.
[Illustration: Officers of the Cavalry Corps]
[Illustration: A typical farm in Flanders, in which British soldiers
were billeted]
A slice of trench taken by the Huns on the 11th, and retaken by
a British counter-attack that night, was rushed by the enemy on
the morning of the 12th and captured, only to have another British
counter-attack prepared for the evening. Thus the line of battle
surged forward and backward day after day, each section of trench
being fought over time and again with heavy losses to both sides.
Slowly the German circle was drawing closer to the stricken town. The
second battle of Ypres was in full swing.
At lunch time General Allenby and his Chief of Staff were guests of
our mess. It was a source of great satisfaction that the cavalry,
on the threshold of one of the hardest struggles it had been called
upon to face, should be under a Corps Commander who had so long been
at its head as the G.O.C. of the Cavalry Corps. No man that I saw in
the months I was with the British Expeditionary Force inspired more
confidence in his leadership than Allenby.
General Meakin arrived from England, but decided that the command
of the 1st Cavalry Brigade, to which he had been assigned, had best
be left in the hands of "Tommy" Pitman until its turn in the front
trenches was done. Pitman knew the ground and had a wonderful grasp
of the situation, and to no other one man was due more of the credit
for the holding of the line during the ensuing forty-eight hours.
On the night of the 12th, the tired infantry of the 28th Division
was given relief from the firing-line, and before dawn the two and a
half miles of front trenches, from the Canadian Farm, north of the
Ypres-St. Julien Road, south to the western shore of the Bellewaard
Lake, a few yards from the Ypres-Menin Road at Hooge, was manned by
the dismounted troopers of the 1st and 3rd Cavalry Divisions.
The 2nd Cavalry Brigade held the extreme left of this stretch of
cavalry line. The 18th Hussars were furthest north, the 4th Dragoon
Guards in the centre, and the 9th Lancers on right. South of them
were the three regiments of the 1st Cavalry Brigade--5th Dragoon
Guards, 2nd Dragoon Guards (Queen's Bays), and 11th Hussars. The 5th
Dragoon Guards were on the left of the Queen's Bays, whose right
rested on the Ypres-Zonnebeke Road near Verlorenhoek, a thousand
yards from Potijze, where de Lisle so often took me each day. The
11th Hussars were in some trenches near the grounds of the Potijze
Château, The 9th Cavalry Brigade was in dug-outs near Wieltje.
South of the Ypres-Zonnebeke Road came the 3rd Cavalry Division
front; the 7th Brigade first, then the 6th Brigade, the 8th Brigade
being in reserve.
Of the 7th Brigade, the 1st Life Guards formed the left, their
trenches leading south from the Zonnebeke Road. One of their
squadrons was in a reserve trench at the back of the line. Next on
the right came the 2nd Life Guards, then the Leicestershire Yeomanry,
whose right rested on the Ypres-Roulers Railway.
The 6th Brigade held the line from the railway to the Bellewarde
Lake, the 3rd Dragoons on the left, the North Somerset Yeomanry on
the right, and the 1st Royal Dragoons (Royals) in reserve a bit to
the rear, and but a few yards north of the Menin road.
The 8th Brigade, in reserve, was composed of the Royal Horse Guards
(Blues), the 10th Hussars, and the Essex Yeomanry.
Each cavalry regiment had a fighting strength of about 300 men.
The 1st Division numbered some 2,400 rifles, and the 3rd Division
roughly 2,700, say, just over 5,000 men for the two Divisions. An
extra number of machine-guns made up for their comparatively small
numerical strength.
The trench-line into which the troopers were thrown that night was
in poor condition for defence. A foot of mud was the average bottom,
and further attempts at digging only resulted in more water and mud.
Parapets of sandbags and wire entanglements were sadly needed all
along the line, and, at that, sandbag parapets were all too easily
demolished by Hun shell-fire, which made short work of them.
A careful reconnaissance of the 3rd Cavalry Division trenches failed
to reveal a stretch of 100 yards where more sandbags and more wire
were not urgently required.