Thus ended this dramatic episode, of which neither the genesis nor the
results have been fully elucidated so far. Did the German troop which
overran the town during the night, and of which only a portion got away
to the meadows with the prisoners, consist of a battalion or a
half-battalion? The fire of Captain Marcotte de Sainte-Marie's guns had
laid a good many of the enemy low. "We were walking over their corpses
in the street," wrote Marine H. G.[51] The next day we turned a fair
number of the assailants out of the cellars where they had hidden. But
the majority, aided by mysterious accomplices, certainly managed to
escape.
In any case, the surprise had been a sharp lesson, showing us how
necessary it was that our positions should be immediately reinforced.
The Admiral represented this to Headquarters, and two battalions of
Senegalese were despatched from Loo. Meanwhile the bombardment had been
resumed. It became very intense between eleven and three o'clock, and
was directed mainly to the bridges of Dixmude and the trenches in the
cemetery. We had some heavy casualties there, notably Lieutenant Eno[52]
and part of the seventh company of the second battalion. But the _moral_
of the men was perfectly maintained. We may cite the case of
Quartermaster Leborgne, wounded in the head and taken to the
dressing-station during a lull in the fighting, who escaped when he
heard the cannonade resumed and came back to die at his post, or the
bugler Chaupin, who, seeing the recruits arching their backs under the
hail of bullets, cried, "Look at me, little ones," and drawing himself
up to his full height with magnificent bravery, crossed the danger zone,
carrying his comrades along in the wake of his heroism.[53] Thanks to
the reconnaissances of his airmen and the spies he had in the town, the
enemy's fire was surprisingly accurate. "In the space of two hours, from
half-past ten to half-past twelve in the morning," wrote one of the
officers who commanded a much-exposed section, Second-Lieutenant T. S.,
"some fifty shrapnel shells fell round us. At one o'clock a quarter of
my men were out of action. I asked for reinforcements and provisions; we
had been in the firing line for sixty hours. The Commander gave me a
verbal order to fall back. I consulted my petty officers and my men.
'Shall we fall back without being relieved?' 'We can't do it,
Lieutenant.' An hour later I received a written order to abandon the
trench. I had to obey, after we had buried our dead and carried off our
wounded. You see, dear parents, what our sailors will do: they will hold
out to the last gasp. That same evening the trench was occupied by
another section of the brigade."
And that same evening of October 26 this trench--or another--was again
attacked, and was only saved for us by a prodigy of heroism. The enemy
had advanced to within a few yards, and charged, shouting "Hurrah!" Our
machine-guns were very dirty and would not work.[54] But Lieutenant
Martin des Pallieres was in command of the section. It was holding the
road to Woumen, between the wall of the cemetery and a trench dug on the
other side in a beetroot field. Des Pallieres sprang upon the parapet.
"Boys," he cried, "we must receive these gentry with cold steel. Fix
bayonets!"
And when one of the Marines, a Parisian, who had charged too vigorously,
lamented the loss of his "hat-pin" (his bayonet), which he had left in a
German hide, Des Pallieres replied: "Do as I do; charge with your
head."[55] The next day he was killed by a shell.
Meanwhile the brigade had passed under the command of General Grossetti,
who had undertaken the defence of the line of the Yser as far as, and
inclusive of, Dixmude (detachment of the army of Belgium under General
d'Urbal). The day of the 27th passed without an attack in force; the
enemy merely bombarded us. He gave us time to breathe the following
night and morning till 9 a.m. Then the hurly-burly began again. An
officer of the Naval Reserve who received his baptism of fire that day,
Lieutenant Alfred de la Barre de Nanteuil, grandson of General Le Flo,
wrote to his family that he had been specially favoured. "It was a fine
christening, plenty of sweetmeats, the whole show, bullets, shrapnel,
and, above all, the famous 'saucepans' (_marmites_). Chance treated me
well." In his section alone there were four killed, twelve wounded, and
eleven missing. This was the prelude to a sudden attack, directed
against the trenches in the cemetery, to which the enemy paid particular
attention. But we knew this, and had put our steadiest troops there. The
attack was again repulsed, thanks mainly to the firmness of the first
musketry instructor, Le Breton, who had already been wounded on the
24th, and who took command of the company when all the officers had been
put out of action.[56]
Our allies were less fortunate on the line from Dixmude to Nieuport,
where the 4th Belgian Division, overwhelmed by superior numbers, had to
fall back beyond Ramscappelle and Pervyse. The strategic importance of
these two villages made it imperative to retake them immediately. Every
available man was sent from the brigade on the evening of the 29th. This
did not prevent the enemy from continuing his bombardment of Dixmude, to
which this time we were able to reply very efficaciously with our heavy
artillery. This secured us a fairly quiet night. Such nights were few
and far between in the brigade. "We don't know what it is to sleep,"
wrote a sailor. "We haven't closed our eyes for ten days." Perhaps the
enemy was as weary as our men. His sole manifestation that night was to
send a few shrapnel shells upon Caeskerke and the cross-roads where the
Admiral had taken up his position. Perhaps, too, he was less interested
in Dixmude than in Ramscappelle and Pervyse at this stage of the
operations. At dawn he rushed Ramscappelle, but he was repulsed at
Pervyse, which the two companies of Rabot's battalion defended with
their accustomed vigour. The night before, however, the railway bridge
of Dixmude had been demolished by a big shell.
In the brief intervals of this exhausting struggle, the eyes of the
defenders were turned inquiringly on the _schoore_ of the Yser. How
slowly the inundation announced by the Belgian Headquarters Staff on the
25th seemed to be spreading! The progress it had made in five days was
almost imperceptible. And yet surely it was advancing now on the great
level plain; the _watergands_ were overflowing; the meshes of the watery
net were drawing together and encircling villages and farms. Near
Ramscappelle and Pervyse it had already formed a large continuous
expanse.
That day the first tactical effects of the inundation made themselves
felt on our north. Ramscappelle had been retaken by the 42nd Division
in a brilliant bayonet charge; the enemy had been driven back behind the
embankment of the Dixmude-Nieuport railway, whence he had almost
immediately retired upon the Yser: he was falling back not only before
our troops, but before the insidious rising of the waters. The plan of
the German General Staff was foiled. In their attempt upon Dunkirk they
had not reckoned upon the intervention of the Anglo-French fleet, which
prevented them from making their way along the dunes of the seashore,
nor upon the advantages offered to the defence by the inundation of the
basin of the Yser. The key of the position was neither at Dixmude,
Pervyse, Ramscappelle, nor Ypres, as they had supposed, but in the
pocket of the head _wateringue_ in charge of the locks at Nieuport.
At this moment of the crisis a certain vacillation seemed to prevail in
the councils of the enemy. The German Staff, though they had not
forgotten Dixmude, were apparently casting their eyes in other
directions. On the 30th and 31st they barely sent their daily ration of
shrapnel and big shells to our trenches in the cemetery and the houses
near the bridge. It had been raining incessantly for three days; our men
were standing half-way up their legs in water in the trenches. What had
become of the spruce "young ladies with the red pompons" of the early
days? "You should see us walk," wrote a sailor, one L., of Audierne. "We
are like old fellows of seventy. I have no feeling in my poor knees and
elbows." But the most severe suffering was caused by want of socks; the
men could hardly stand on their naked feet, purple with cold, in their
hard boots. "This is the campaign of frozen toes," says one of the
sufferers. Inured to discipline and naturally fatalistic, they did not
complain, and looked to their families to help them in their trouble.
"Do send me some socks. I have to go barefoot, and it is very cold,"
wrote one sailor, J. F., of Le Passage Lauriec; and in his next letter
he repeats: "I can tell you, my dear parents, that the weather is very
bad here, rain and wind every day, and the cold! Sleeping in the
trenches is not very easy. I have not closed my eyes for a fortnight,
what with the cold and the shells and bullets. Still I keep a good
heart. My feet are bare in my shoes, and they are always icy cold. If
you send me some socks, will you put some tobacco in with them?" Another
letter is in the same strain: "Dear mother, you say my brother is still
drinking, and this is very wrong of him, but that he took the socks off
his own feet to send them to me. I thank him very much, for I did want
them badly." The Breton drunkard can be generous!
There were lucky ones here as elsewhere. Such was H. L., who made
himself some mittens with a pair of old socks found in a German trench.
Men are not very squeamish in war-time, when they have been wearing the
same ragged filthy garments for a month. "You could not touch my vest
with a pair of tongs, it is so dirty," wrote the same H. L. to his
sister. The officers were no better off, except that they had socks.
"We never change; we never wash; we never brush our hair," wrote Alfred
de Nanteuil. "I have been living in the same grime ever since I left
Brest. The only things I have changed are my socks. All my ideas of
hygiene are upset, for, on the whole, I have never felt so well." Some
few complain of the food. "I have been three days in the trenches
without enough to eat," grumbles one sailor J. L. R. But the majority
declare that the tinned meat was not bad, especially when it was warmed,
and that, on the whole, they got enough.[57] As for drink, with the
exception of the coffee, pronounced "famous," the unanimous verdict was
that it was execrable, neither wine nor beer, only stagnant water; "and
they say, besides, that the Boches have poisoned it." The men were
recommended only to drink it in their coffee, well boiled. "I lived for
days on bread and sugar, with a cup of coffee for an occasional treat,"
wrote Alfred de Nanteuil. "All the water in the district is polluted. So
I go very well for a week without drinking anything but coffee."
Francois Alain, for one, was four days without food or drink, lying
among the straw in a barn where twenty-seven of his comrades had been
bayoneted. How did this nineteen-year-old conscript escape the Boches
who had remained in the neighbourhood? Through a little hole he had made
with his knife in one of the tiles of the roof he observed all their
movements, and took note of their trenches and the emplacements of their
cannon and their machine-guns; and one fine night, when there was not
too much moonlight, he crawled out, killing a German officer who was
reconnoitring the French positions, and got back into our lines with a
cargo of precious information, a thick coating of mud, and teeth
sharpened by a fast of ninety-six hours.[58] And these men, dripping
with wet, with empty stomachs and burning heads, never lost heart for a
moment. The same note recurs in all their letters: "In spite of this,
all goes well, and we are not downhearted, especially when we can have a
go at the Boches." The one thing consoles them for the other. They know
the perils of the trenches, and they prefer them to the inactivity of
being kept in reserve. "We have had twelve days of fighting now," wrote
the Marine C., of Audierne, "and this evening, I am glad to say, we are
to be in the first line, for it is better to be under fire than
resting." Was this paradox or braggadocio? Not at all. They spoke as
they thought. They courted danger as other men shun it.