that his troops "had just been fighting under very difficult
conditions," and he added: "It is our business now not to let the
struggle with our most detested enemy drag on longer * * * The decisive
blow is still to be struck." On October 30, General von Deimling,
commanding the Fifteenth Army Corps (belonging to General von Fabeck's
command), issued an order declaring that "the thrust against Ypres will
be of decisive importance." It should be noted also that the Emperor
proceeded in person to Thielt and Courtrai to exalt by his presence the
ardor of his troops. Finally, at the close of October, the entire German
press incessantly proclaimed the importance of the "Battle of Calais."
It is superfluous to add that events in Poland explain in a large
measure the passionate resolve of the German General Staff to obtain a
decision in the Western theatre of operations at all costs. This
decision would be obtained if our left were pierced or driven in. To
reach Calais, that is, to break our left; to carry Ypres, that is, to
cut it in half; through both points to menace the communications and
supplies of the British expeditionary corps, perhaps even to threaten
Britain in her island--such was the German plan in the Battle of
Flanders. It was a plan that could not be executed.
[Sidenote: Dunkirk the first objective.]
The enemy, who had at his disposal a considerable quantity of heavy
artillery, directed his efforts at first upon the coast and the country
to the north of Dixmude. His objective was manifestly the capture of
Dunkirk, then of Calais and Boulogne, and this objective he pursued
until November 1.
[Sidenote: Ramscapelle retaken.]
[Sidenote: Allies win the Battle of Calais.]
On October 23 the Belgians along the railway line from Nieuport to
Dixmude were strengthened by a French division. Dixmude was occupied by
our marines (fusiliers marins). During the subsequent day our forces
along the railway developed a significant resistance against an enemy
superior in number and backed by heavy artillery. On the 29th the
inundations effected between the canal and the railway line spread along
our front. On the 30th we recaptured Ramscapelle, the only point on the
railway which Belgians had lost. On the 1st and 2d of November the enemy
bombarded Furnes, but began to show signs of weariness. On the 2d he
evacuated the ground between the Yser and the railway, abandoning
cannon, dead and wounded. On the 3d our troops were able to re-enter the
Dixmude district. The success achieved by the enemy at Dixmude at this
juncture was without fruit. They succeeded in taking the town. They
could not debouch from it. The coastal attack had thus proved a total
failure. Since then it has never been renewed. The Battle of Calais, so
noisily announced by the German press, amounted to a decided reverse for
the Germans.
The enemy had now begun an attack more important than its predecessor,
in view of the numbers engaged in it. This attack was intended as a
renewal to the south of the effort which had just been shattered in the
north. Instead of turning our flank on the coast, it was now sought to
drive in the right of our northern army under the shock of powerful
masses. This was the Battle of Ypres.
[Sidenote: Importance of the Ypres position.]
[Sidenote: British cavalry a connecting link.]
In order to understand this long, desperate, and furious battle we must
hark back a few days in point of time. At the moment when our cavalry
reached Roulers and Cortemark (October 28) our territorial divisions
from Dunkirk, under General Biden, had occupied and organized a
defensive position at Ypres. It was a point d'appui, enabling us to
prepare and maintain our connections with the Belgian Army. From October
23 two British and French army corps were in occupation of this
position, which was to be the base of their forward march in the
direction of Roulers-Menin. The delays already explained and the
strength of the forces brought up by the enemy soon brought to a
standstill our progress along the line Poelcapelle, Paschendaele,
Zandvorde, and Gheluvelt. But in spite of the stoppage here, Ypres was
solidly covered, and the connections of all the allied forces were
established. Against the line thus formed the German attack was hurled
from October 25 to November 13, to the north, the east, and the south of
Ypres. From October 26 on the attacks were renewed daily with
extraordinary violence, obliging us to employ our reinforcements at the
most threatened points as soon as they came up. Thus, on October 31, we
were obliged to send supports to the British cavalry, then to the two
British corps between which the cavalry formed the connecting link, and
finally to intercalate between these two corps a force equivalent to two
army corps. Between October 30 and November 6 Ypres was several times in
danger. The British lost Zandvorde, Gheluvelt, Messines, and Wytschaete.
The front of the Allies, thus contracted, was all the more difficult to
defend; but defended it was without a recoil.
[Sidenote: French reinforcements.]
The arrival of three French divisions in our line enabled us to resume
from the 4th to the 8th a vigorous offensive. On the 10th and 11th this
offensive, brought up against fresh and sharper German attacks, was
checked. Before it could be renewed the arrival of fresh reinforcements
had to be awaited, which were dispatched to the north on November 12. By
the 14th our troops had again begun to progress, barring the road to
Ypres against the German attacks, and inflicting on the enemy, who
advanced in massed formation, losses which were especially terrible in
consequence of the fact that the French artillery had crowded nearly 300
guns on to these few kilometers of front.
Thus the main mass of the Germans sustained the same defeat as the
detachments operating further to the north along the coast. The support
which, according to the idea of the German General Staff, the attack on
Ypres was to render to the coastal attack, was as futile as that attack
itself had been.
[Sidenote: Losses of the enemy.]
During the second half of November the enemy, exhausted and having lost
in the Battle of Ypres alone more than 150,000 men, did not attempt to
renew his effort, but confined himself to an intermittent cannonade. We,
on the contrary, achieved appreciable progress to the north and south
of Ypres, and insured definitely by a powerful defensive organization of
the position the inviolability of our front.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The war in Belgium.]
[Sidenote: Siege of Antwerp.]
[Sidenote: Belgian troops retreat to Ostend.]
[Sidenote: The territory left to the Belgians.]
We have seen that, with the fall of Liege the German armies swept
through Belgium on their way to Paris. Brussels was abandoned as the
capital, and the Government moved hastily to Antwerp, where a portion of
the Belgian army also gathered to defend the city. The remainder of the
Belgian forces, under the leadership of their gallant King, opposed as
stoutly as their numbers would permit the advance of the Germans.
Battles were fought at Alost and Termonde in which the Germans were, for
the time, repulsed, but their ever-increasing reinforcements enabled
them to advance despite the efforts of the Belgians to check them. Ghent
was captured on September 5 and the Belgians, in an effort to stay the
German advance on Antwerp, opened the dikes and let in the waters of the
North Sea. Termonde fell on September 13, and seven days later the
German armies began the siege of Antwerp. The military authorities in
command of the city had taken whatever measures were possible for
defense. A body of British marines was hurried to the beleaguered city
and preparations were made for a long siege. The Germans brought up guns
of heavy caliber, with which they bombarded the city at long range.
After a brave defense of two weeks, during which the inhabitants endured
many hardships, it was plain that further resistance was useless, and
the city was surrendered on October 10. The Belgian troops in the city,
and many of the noncombatants escaped. The Belgian troops retreated to
Ostend, which they reached on October 11 and 12, after having been
greatly harassed by the pursuing Germans. On the 13th, Ostend was
evacuated, and was occupied by the Germans, and Bruges on the following
day. The German forces now controlled the whole of Belgium, with the
exception of the northwest corner, north of Ypres, to the coast of the
Channel. This little slip of territory they held throughout the entire
war, and at what a cost! But the heroic defense of this territory by the
Belgians saved the French coast cities and prevented the Germans from
breaking through the line which extended now from the North Sea to
Belgium.
THE LAST DITCH IN BELGIUM
ARNO DOSCH
Copyright, World's Work, January, 1915.
[Sidenote: The Yser the Belgian's last ditch.]
A little piece of the Low Countries, so small I walked across it in two
hours, was all that remained of Belgium in the last days of October. A
tide-water stream, the Yser, ebbed and flowed through the sunken fields,
and there King Albert with his remnant of an army stopped the German
military machine in its advance on Calais. If he and his forty thousand
men had been crushed back ten miles farther they would have been
fighting on French soil. The Yser was the last ditch in Belgium.
The Belgians were able to hold that mere strip of land against more men
and better artillery because they had determined to die there. Some of
those who had not yet paid the price of death told me. They were not
tragic about it. There was no display of heroics. They said it
seriously, but they smiled a little, too, over their wine glasses, and
the next morning they were back in the firing-line.
I counted on my American passport and my _permit de sejour_ in Paris
seeing me through the zone of the fighting, and they did. At the station
at Dunkirk, when I admitted I had no _laisser passer_, an obliging
gendarme led me to his commander, and he placed his visee on my passport
without question. He asked me whether I was a correspondent, and I
confessed to it, but it seemed only to facilitate the affair. Earlier
experiences had made me feel that the French gendarmes were my natural
enemies, but I have had a kindlier regard for them since.
[Sidenote: Troop trains.]
The train I was on had ten cars full of French and Belgian soldiers. The
Belgians had all been recently re-equipped. On other troop trains which
passed us going forward there were many more Belgian soldiers, some of
whom I had seen only a few hours earlier in the streets of Calais
without rifles. As their trains passed now I could see them studying the
mechanism and fondling their new firearms.
Coming in through the suburbs of Dunkirk we passed hundreds of children
perched on the fences singing the Marseillaise. Nor were their voices
flat and colorless like most school children's. They felt every word
they sang, and they put their little hearts into it. Looking back along
the side of the cars at the faces of soldiers leaning out, I could see
they were touched by the faith of the children.
[Sidenote: In Dunkirk.]
As I rattled along on the cobbles of Dunkirk half an hour later I heard
an explosion with a note unfamiliar to me. It sounded close, too, but it
did not seem to bother the people of the street. A few children ran
behind their mothers' skirts and a young girl hurried from the middle of
the street to the protection of an archway, but that was all.
Standing up in the fiacre I could see a thin smoke about three hundred
feet away in a garden in the direction from which the explosion came,
and high in the evening sky I could barely make out an aeroplane. "A
German bomb?" I asked the driver in some excitement.
"Oh, yes," he replied, cracking his whip, "we usually get three or four
every afternoon about this time, but they have not hurt any one."
Dunkirk that night answered the description of what a threatened town
which was not afraid should look like. It had none of the depressing
atmosphere of Calais. All the refugees and the wounded were passed on
to a safer place. It was full of French, English, and Belgian soldiers,
with a scattering of sailors and breezy officers from both the French
and English navies. They kept the waiters in the cafes on the run, and
there was only an occasional bandage showing from under a cap or around
a hand to indicate these men were engaged in any more serious business
than a man[oe]uvre.
[Sidenote: Armored motor-car.]
In the street, however, in front of the statue of Jean Bart, an armored
Belgian motor-car was standing. It was built with a turret where the
tonneau usually is and it was covered with thick sheet steel right down
to the ground. Just in front of the driver was a slit with a lip
extending over it, giving it somewhat the effect of the casque belonging
to an ancient suit of armor. That was the only opening except the one
for the barrel of the rapid-fire gun in the turret. The armor was dented
in a dozen places where bullets had glanced off, but it had only been
penetrated at one spot, about six inches from the muzzle of the gun.
From the soldier at the steering gear I learned that that bullet had
passed over the shoulder of the man in the turret.
[Sidenote: Bombardment of Nieuport.]
Twenty-four hours later, at Nieuport, when the German shells seemed to
be falling in every street and on every house, I saw this car again,
going forward at not less than forty miles an hour. The turret was being
swung to bring the gun-muzzle forward, as if the gunner were expecting
to go into action almost immediately. As the last of the Belgian
trenches were just the other side of the town, I have no doubt that he
did.
[Sidenote: A walk to the firing line.]
Getting out of Dunkirk was rather more of a problem than going in. To
obtain permission to ride toward the Belgian line in any kind of
conveyance was an elaborate performance, and quite properly so, as I
soon learned. There were preparations for defence going on there which
should not have been publicly known. The country was full of spies. Four
suspects had been picked up on the boat coming from Folkestone. If I had
realized what I was to see in the next few miles I would not have
attempted what I did. But, as I was anxious to get on and the
firing-line was only twenty miles away, I decided to walk.
A French hat and a French suit of clothes, I think, were alone
responsible for my success in passing through the city gate. Two
military automobiles were stopped and forced to show their credentials,
but I strolled through unmolested. Once outside, the reservists guarding
the various barricades let me pass as soon as I showed them my passport
vised in Dunkirk. I was stopped many times, too, trying each time not to
give an appearance of too great interest in the works of defence being
built all around me.
[Sidenote: Sand-dune barricades.]
Even though this cannot be published for some time I do not feel free to
tell what these defences were. I have no doubt there are complete
descriptions of these works in the hands of the German army, their spy
system is so thorough, but I would not care to have any military secrets
escape through anything I write. I think I can go so far as to say,
though, that I received a liberal education in how to barricade
sand-dunes and low-lying fields.
Ten miles out of Dunkirk I was surprised to see a civilian on a bicycle,
as civilians were no longer permitted to go near the theatre of war on
bicycles, a precaution taken against spies. As he approached I
recognized Mr. J. Obels, the Belgian correspondent of the Chicago _Daily
News_, whom I had last seen under arrest near Brussels when the German
army first passed through Belgium. He told me he had been kept in prison
seventeen days by the German military governor of Brussels, but, once
released, was given every possible kind of pass. I was relieved to see
him alive and free.
As Obels left me to continue his journey to Dunkirk and on to London to
deliver his own "copy," he advised me to go directly to Furnes, the most
considerable town in what was left of Belgium, and have my passport
vised again. So I continued down the long, flat highway, bordered on
both sides by sunken fields, toward the cannonading I could now hear
ahead. The road had been fairly full of automobiles, motor-trucks,
motorcycles, and bicycles over its whole length, but it became crowded
now with the addition of a long string of Parisian motor-buses taking
several infantry regiments forward. A whole artillery division of yellow
French "Schneiders" also took up its share of the wide road, and at the
barricades there were traffic blockades lasting at times for ten
minutes.
[Sidenote: The road to Furnes.]
All the way from Dunkirk I had been struck by the character of the land.
As I approached Furnes, the dykes were being opened and half the fields
were already inundated. It seemed a poor country for military
operations. There were at most three highways, all defended. They could
only be taken at a price no army could afford, and any departure from
them meant being mired in the heavy fields, now being hastily harvested
of a bumper crop of sugar-beets: at one place a whole French regiment in
uniform was gathering the beets preparatory to inundation. With the
dykes open these fields would be covered with four feet of water half
the time. The only possible course for an army was over the sand-dunes,
which lay a mile to the north, looking like the imitation mountains you
see in the scenic-railways at every amusement resort in the United
States.
[Sidenote: Tommies' battles on the sand-dunes.]
A reservist with whom I walked a mile or so told me Dunkirk had never
been successfully attacked except over those sand-dunes, and the English
and French had fought some of the bloodiest battles of history there
against the Spanish, when they held Dunkirk. I doubt, though, that they
were as bloody as the battle I was to see within a few hours.
[Sidenote: Belgian soldiers.]
The old Flemish town of Furnes had much less military precision about it
than Dunkirk. It was on the very edge of the battle, and an occasional
shell was dropping in the town. One exploded as I crossed the bridge and
entered a narrow street, but it was on the far side of town, too far
away for the soldiers halted in the street to notice. These were tired
and dirty men, but not too tired to be courteous. They were also passing
jokes among themselves, and laughing. By that, even if I had not known
their uniforms, I could have told they were Belgians.
[Sidenote: The enemy held at the Yser.]
Every street and every courtyard in Furnes was full of Belgian soldiers.
They were resting for the day, waiting to go forward at night-fall to
relieve the men on the firing line only five miles away. Even above the
noises of the street I could hear the answer of their small field
artillery to the heavy assault of the German guns. Nothing I heard the
soldiers say, however, would have given the idea that the Belgians
considered themselves outclassed by their enemy. They seemed superbly
unconscious of the absurdity of their position. This was the tenth day
they had held the Germans at the Yser, and they had done it with rifles
and machine guns, taking punishment every minute from the big
fieldpieces the Germans had brought against them. So far they had lost
twelve thousand men at that ditch, but the thought of giving it up had
evidently not even occurred to them. They could not give it up, one of
them explained to me later, it was all they had left. There was a little
irritation in his tone, too, as he said it, such as one might feel
toward a child who was slow at grasping a simple fact.
[Sidenote: Military automobiles and wagons.]
The town square was full of military automobiles and a few provision
wagons. I did not see any fieldpieces or machine guns. Every last one
was right up on the firing-line. My feet were tired from walking over
the Belgian blocks, and I held tenaciously to the sidewalk passing
around the square, though it was mostly taken up with cafe tables and
bay trees in boxes. At one point the tables were empty and a single
sentry was sauntering up and down. I stopped to ask him the way to the
_gendarmerie_, and, in the middle of giving me the directions, he came
to attention, as a door opened behind me, and saluted.
[Sidenote: Two Belgian generals.]
Two men came out of the door, one rather tall, with an easy manner, and
smartly dressed as a general in the Belgian army. The other was older,
also a general, wearing, if anything, the more gold braid of the two.
They entered a waiting automobile and drove off as casually as two men
at home might leave their office for their club.
Something about the first of the two men impressed me as familiar. I had
only seen his back, but that had arrested my attention. I thought
possibly I had seen him at the beginning of the war in Brussels, so I
asked the sentry his name.
[Sidenote: King Albert.]
"That is our king, Albert," he said quite simply.
During the next couple of days I saw the King of Belgium a number of
times. He spent his nights at a small villa on the seashore at La Panne,
a hundred yards possibly beyond the hotel where I spent mine. He passed
through the streets as unnoticed as any one of the other Belgians who
had retreated from Antwerp and Ghent ahead of the army, but preferred
the chilly nights in an unheated seaside hotel in Belgium to comfort
somewhere beyond. It seemed to be a point of courtesy on the part of the
Belgians not to bother their king with ceremony at this trying time. I
doubt if he cares much for ceremony, anyhow. Searching around for a
single adjective to describe him, I should call him off-handed. His
manner, even then, while alert, was casual. It is easy to see why the
Belgians love him. If kings had always been as simple and direct as
Albert, I am inclined to think democracy would have languished.
[Sidenote: Luncheon at La Panne.]
At La Panne, which I reached at noon on a little steam railway running
from Furnes, I had luncheon with several Belgian soldiers and a Belgian
in civilian clothes, who told me I would see all the fighting I was
looking for at Nieuport, just beyond. The civilian, a tall youth with a
blond beard, volunteered to show me the way to the beach, the shortest
route, and ended by going all the way. He told me he was recovering from
an "attack of Congo," which I take to be an intermittent fever. He had
just been mustered out of the civic guard and was waiting for a uniform
to join the army. He had the afternoon free and his Belgian sense of
hospitality impelled him to see that the stranger was properly looked
after.
For several miles along the wide, flat beach, which stretches
unobstructed as far as Ostend, except for the piers at Nieuport-les-Bains
and Westende, there were Belgian soldiers bathing in the shallow water.
Some of them, cavalrymen, were riding naked into the deeper water, and
this, mind you, was late October. They were even playing jokes on one
another, and did not seem to be paying any attention to the fifteen
English and French cruisers and gunboats which were standing off the
shore almost opposite them, keeping up a steady stream of fire obliquely
along the beach at the sand dunes just beyond the pier at
Nieuport-les-Bains. In these dunes, _five_ miles away, big German guns
were hidden.
[Sidenote: Fishermen unconcerned.]
Farther on, and even right up to the pier at Nieuport, we passed, along
the beach behind the shrimp fishermen, who seemed even less interested
in the novel fight on land and sea. The barelegged men and women were as
industriously taking advantage of the low-tide as if nothing at all were
happening. The French and English warships were directly opposite them,
and, by this time, they were drawing the German fire. German shells,
probably from siege guns, were plumping down into the water all around
them only a couple of miles off-shore, but, though the shrimpers looked
up occasionally when the explosion of a shell fairly shook the face of
the ocean, their attention would be directed again to their work before
the column of water raised by the shell had had time to fall again. The
shelling kept up about an hour, but none of the warships was struck.
They kept moving at full-speed in an uneven line, making it impossible
to get their range.
[Sidenote: A panorama of battle.]
[Sidenote: Germans try to cross the Yser.]