By Eric Niderost
News that the Germans had been halted at the Marne River, a scant 30 miles from Paris, filled France and Britain with a sense of joy and relief. Since August 1914, a tidal wave of gray-clad soldiers had swept through Belgium and northern France like a juggernaut. Coming as it did on the brink of total defeat, the Allied victory was dubbed the “miracle of the Marne.”
But the euphoria soon faded as grim reality set in—the Germans had been checked, not decisively defeated, and they still occupied nearly 90 per cent of Belgium and a large portion of northern France. The one bright spot was that the Germans had been pushed back 45 miles, proving they were not invincible. But it would take more than one victory, however significant, to expel them from Gallic soil.
Stung by their unexpected defeat, the invaders pulled back and dug in on the eastern bank of the Aisne River. Though the belligerents did not know it, this stalemate was a foreshadowing of the brutal war of attrition that was to characterize the next four years.
Near the end of September Field Marshal Sir John French, commander of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), notified his French counterpart, Gen. Joseph Joffre, that he wanted to move the British army northward, from the Aisne to the Flanders coast. Though the maneuver was complex, French argued that it was a vital necessity for the overall war effort.
Concentrated on the coast, the BEF would have a shorter communications link with England and fresh troops could be processed into their units upon arrival across the channel. A skeptical Joffre was concerned that, if things went badly, the BEF would simply scurry home across the channel.
But Joffre agreed and the British army moved north without a hitch. Under the cover of night, French soldiers seamlessly replaced British units on the front, leaving the Germans completely unaware of the switch. The BEF arrived at its Flanders positions between October 16 and 18.
This movement north was part of what has become misleadlingly known as “The race to the sea.” Entrenched at the Aisne, both sides sought to outflank the other, and the only direction in which it was possible to move was north. Soldiers had forced marches, and to speed things along both sides utilized trucks and the railroad system when feasible. Between September 18 and October 6 there were no less than 10 violent attempts to maneuver around Allied or German armies—all failed with heavy casualties.
The situation was particularly galling for the Allies as each attempt to outflank the Kaiser’s forces seemed to be a day or a battalion short. But these movements began to gain their own momentum, drawing the combatants ever northward as they tried again and again to flank each other. The “race to the sea” ended in Flanders, on the North Sea coase because there was no more room to maneuver. From then on, the only route to victory would be a breakthrough of some kind.
The rapid movements and shifting positions bred confusion on an unprecedented scale. BEF Capt. Ian Hay later recalled that “Belgium and the north of France were one huge jumbled battlefield. Friend and foe were inextricably mingled and the direction of the goal was uncertain. There was no front, no rear, so direction counted for nothing.”
Some of this confusion seems to have percolated upwards, clouding the minds of the Allied high commands. Sir John French, certain that the Germans had only a single Corps in the area, was convinced that a mid-October push in Flanders would end the war with an Allied triumph.
Joffre was also offensively minded, though perhaps less sanguine than his British colleague. Fortress Antwerp had fallen to the Germans on October 10, but King Albert and 80,000 men of the Royal Belgian army had escaped the city to fight another day. They were now entrenched along the Yser River, with the waterway forming a kind of moat to help protect the last corner of precious Belgian territory
Joffre envisioned a grand swinging envelopment on the French left that would encircle the German right. To put his plan into effect, Joffre wanted to extend his left, and asked King Albert to abandon the coast and move inland to support the French moves.
Many monarchs are figureheads, but in Belgium the King was commander in chief with real power and responsibility. Albert was no Napoleon, but he was a competent soldier blessed with a prescient strategic sense. The king refused Joffre’s request, recognizing that any move inland would make the channel ports vulnerable to German seizure. The Belgian army would stay where it was, holding on to national soil and blocking any Teutonic incursion.
The defeat on the Marne caused changes in the German high command. Chief of Staff Gen. Helmut von Molke had been picked to carry out the invasion of Belgium and France, his guide a revised version of the Schlieffen Plan of 1905. The hapless Molke, completely over his head, actually had a nervous breakdown on the job.
He was replaced by General Erich von Falkenhayn on September 14, 1914, hard on the heels of the Marne debacle. Introverted, taciturn, and something of an enigma, Falkenhayn plainly saw that the Schlieffen Plan had ignored the importance of the channel ports.
The French coastal ports of Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkirk, together with the Belgian cities of Nieuport, Zeebrugge, and Ostend were Britain’s gateways to the continent, places where troops, equipment and supplies could be funneled to the BEF. The coastal towns also were important links for the British to maintain an all-important line of communication with home.
If the Germans controlled the seacoast British logistical problems would increase tenfold as they struggled to maintain the BEF in the field. And if the campaign turned against the Allies, the BEF would be deprived of any avenue of escape. Submarine warfare was in its infancy in 1914, but there was also a possibility that the cities along the English Channel and North Sea could be developed into U-boat bases to harass British commerce and bring the island nation to its knees.
Falkenhayn selected the Flemish town of Ypres as the place where the Germans would mount a major offensive. It was a major communications hub, with roads and rail lines radiating in all directions. Its capture would facilitate the taking of the coastal ports, as well as driving a steel wedge between allied armies. The city had flourished in the Middle Ages, and its many imposing buildings, especially the 13th century Cloth Hall, bore testimony to its past greatness.
An eight-mile series of ridges formed a natural “bowl” with Ypres in the center. None of the ridges were higher than 160 feet, but Flanders was so flat these modest peaks afforded a spectacular sight of Ypres and the surrounding countryside. On a clear day even the vast blue-gray expanse of the North Sea could be glimpsed in the distance. There was a scattering of prosperous farms and villages nestled between the ridges, names that outsiders often found hard to pronounce. These villages, along with the names of some geographical features in the surrounding area, would become infamous as the places of unparalleled slaughter in the coming four years. For villages there was Messines, Zandvoordt, and St Eloi; for terrain there was Pilckem Ridge, Polygon Wood, Nun’s Wood, and perhaps the most notorious of all, Passchendaele.
Falkenhayn began to make arrangements for the Ypres offensive. It was decided a new formation, dubbed the Fourth Army, would be organized to take part in the attack. Grand Duke Albert of Wurttemberg was chosen as its commander. Fourth Army would be composed of four corps of reservists, many of them raw recruits with little more than six weeks of basic training for military experience. The 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment was part of the Fourth Army, but it would be remembered more for the one soldier in its ranks than any battlefield honors—25-year-old Private Adolf Hitler.
The Fourth and Sixth German armies, some 500,00 men, would take part in the Ypres operation. The BEF had about 250,000 men on the continent, with about 100,000 of them in Flanders. The Belgian army was now down to about 70,000-80,000 effectives, and the French Army had about 100,000, with two divisions from colonial French North Africa. The Moroccans were a colorful lot, wearing their native dress of baggy pantaloons and fezzes.
Hard numbers are not easy to come by, because of all the confusion, daily casualties, and rapid movements of the armies involved. But in Flanders the Allies could muster about 270,000 and the Germans roughly double that number. A gray-clad tsunami of infantry, cavalry, and powerful artillery was about to descend on Ypres.
Unaware of what was going on with the Germans, French was preparing his own offensive. He met with First Corps commander Lt.-Gen. Douglas Haig at the BEF headquarters at St Omer, France on October 19, mainly to tell his subordinate the part they would play in the coming Allied “push.”
An ebullient and optimistic French told Haig that the enemy was on the run, and that he’d face one depleted German corps at best. Haig, who became commander in chief of the BEF later in the war, was skeptical of French’s assessment, knowing that intelligence might well get garbled or even exaggerated in transit 50 miles from the front. He was operating closer to the action and was disturbed by reports that there might be three German Corps in the vicinity. In fact, the Germans were assembling more than five corps for the offensive.
In an interesting historical footnote, the Germans had been in physical possession of Ypres less than two weeks earlier. Looking formidable in their grey tunics and pickelhaube helmets, some 8,000 troops had marched into the city on October 7. Soldiers were billeted for the night in the Cloth Hall, in schools, or whatever building that might serve as a temporary shelter.
But the Teutons quickly wore out their welcome as soldiers looted everything in sight and the officers demanded 8,000 loaves of bread be made for their ravenous troops. Civilian horses and wagons were “requisitioned,” their owners paid in worthless coupons. Much to the relief of a stressed and ransacked city, the Germans left after one night, ironically abandoning a strategic goal they would later spend so much time, treasure and blood to unsuccessfully retake.
A week later, on October 14, the French and British marched through the streets of Ypres to take positions outside the town. The British were the 7th Division and the 3rd Cavalry Division of General Rawlinson’s Fourth Corps. They made contact with French troops of the 87th Territorial Division who had arrived earlier. In British history, the city would forever be known as “Wipers” due to the Tommies’ inability to master the Belgian French pronunciation,“eee-pruh.”
The British entered Ypres in a torrential downpour as its citizens went about their normal lives, their city still intact. The Gordon Highlanders, a Scottish regiment that prided itself on their wearing of the kilt, made a most colorful spectacle with their scissoring legs in step to the sound of skirling bagpipes.
One of their number was Lieutenant William “Willy” Fraser, 27, a graduate of the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. He had upper class roots, and had served in India. He noted in his diary that as yet undamaged, Ypres was a “pretty little city surrounded by a wall and moat.” His brother, Lt. Simon Fraser, also served in the regiment.
On October 19 Rawlinson’s Fourth Corps pushed forward towards Menen and Roeselare, seeking to consolidate the cavalry’s seizure of the ridges around Ypres. Once on the high ground, the British soldiers could see thick black columns of smoke rising from Belgian villages torched by the Germans. They also saw streams of refugees, pitiful columns of misery, many with horse or dog carts filled with what possessions they could save.
Also visible, even further back, were the swarms of German soldiers, advancing like an undulating gray carpet. They numbered in the tens of thousands, plainly more than “one weak corps.”
On October 20 the town of Langemarck was held by French troops, supported by the British Fourth Corps to the south. They were joined by Haig’s First Corps, which were scheduled to attack the Germans the next day. Haig moved his second division and a division of cavalry 2.5 miles east of Ypres, near the Passchendaele ridge. The rain continued, alternating with mist and bitter cold, and it must have been a very long night for troops of both sides shivering in the darkness.
The formal battle opened the morning of October 21, with heavy German attacks from Armentières to Messines and Langemarck. Historians generally label the first few days of Ypres the “battle of Langemarck” for convenience, but in truth Ypres was actually a series of “soldier’s battles,” where combatants brutally slug it out with little real direction or control from their superiors. It was a confusing, protracted, and very bloody fight conducted with grim determination over an almost 20-mile front.
The Germans did have an enormous advantage in artillery, outnumbering the British by five guns to one. In addition, they brought up monster Krupp guns, the same artillery pieces that had battered Antwerp into surrender some weeks earlier.
The Gordon Highlanders were posted near the village of Zandvoorde a couple of miles from Ypres. At first the Highlanders didn’t see much direct fighting. But the shelling, which William Fraser described in his diary as a “most unpleasant experience” grew more intense as time wore on. He described the Krupp siege artillery as “Big guns they are, and the shell has a most inspiring scream… the shells sound like an express train going through the air.” The regiment started taking casualties—a man killed here—a man wounded there—but the worst was yet to come.
At one point German Fourth Army reservists attacked the British line and were cut down by the thousands. This aspect of the fight has since been turned into the stuff of legend, and though parts of the tales are certainly true, other aspects are almost certainly myth. The reservists had in their ranks a substantial portion of youthful and very raw recruits, many no more than 17-19 years old. Some were university students, the best and the brightest of the German nation, and they approached the war with a youthful patriotic fervor.
They were going against some of the most famous and elite regiments of the British army, with battle honors stretching in some cases 200 years and more. The Black Watch, Grenadier Guards, Coldstream Guards, Green Howards, Gordon Highlanders—the list includes scores of regiments and is too long to mention them all. Their battle honors were a roll call of British history and a source of pride to both officers and men.
The men filling the ranks were tough and seasoned professionals, well trained and ever ready for—as one put it—“a fight or a frolic” in equal measure. When they heard the German Kaiser had called them a “contemptible little army,” they cheerfully adopted “Old Contemptibles” as a nickname. Earlier in the war, freely using the name of one of Germany’s generals, they marched along singing “we don’t give a f—k for old von Kluck, or his f—king German army.”
The professional British soldier took well-justified pride in his superior marksmanship, which had a deadly effect on the long lines of Fourth army Germans advancing in rapid order over the battlefields of Flanders. According to some stories, these young men, many still in their teens, linked arms and had their pickelhaube helmets festooned with flowers. As they advanced, another story claims they lustily sang “Deutschland uber Alles” with a patriotic zeal that even British bullets could not subdue. In recent years scholarship has debunked some of these tales as embellishments added after the war, especially the singing stories.
But the fact remains that these young soldiers, as well as their older comrades, were cut down by the hundreds by well-served British rifles. The standard British infantryman’s weapon was the British Short Magazine Lee-Enfield MkIII, with a magazine that held 10 rounds and a rapid action bolt. This enabled a trained infantryman to perform the “mad minute,” 15 aimed and accurate shots in 60 seconds—sometimes even more. European armies had rifles made for unaimed shots; that is, to be fired in mass on the hip as soldiers advanced together in great numbers.
There was a relative lull in the fighting after October 24, but the battle was not over; it was just entering a new phase. The Germans geared up for an all-out victory, spearheaded by five divisions commanded by General Max von Fabeck. Dubbed “Armeegruppe Fabeck,” it consisted of the Fifteenth Corps, the Second Bavarian Corps, the 26th Division, and the Sixth Bavarian Reserve Division.
The Germans had high hopes for this Fabeck offensive, and indeed they almost succeeded. Beginning on October 29, and continuing for several days thereafter, the British were very hard pressed. “Willie” Fraser and his Gordon Highlanders were posted near the village of Zandvoorde, and they were among the members of the Seventh Division that bore the full brunt of the German push.
Fraser had already experienced a personal loss when his brother Simon was killed, but he had little time to mourn. The Gordons had hastily dug trenches, but lack of time made them slapdash affairs that might protect a soldier from a bullet, but little else. It was foggy, and the highlanders could hear the Germans coming through the damp and clammy air, but not see them. Then, as the sun burned through the fog and the dense mass lifted like a curtain, the Gordons could see the enemy as they came into full view, “line after line saying ‘Houra Houra’ (hurrah) all the time and soon fire opened all down the line.”
The Gordons were in dire straits; the battalion had had no food or water all day and heavy German shells rained down on them, the blasts eviscerating soldiers with horrible ease. The highlanders had mustered 26 officers and 812 men; they were now down to just one officer and 205 men. The fighting was a seesaw one, with positions gained only to be lost in the next round of fighting minutes or hours later.
Fraser was wounded in the shoulder by shrapnel, and in the confused and bitter fighting at one point he found himself a prisoner of the Germans. Luckily he spoke German, because he heard a German sergeant order that he be shot. Fraser quickly spotted an officer, chatted a bit, and the officer ordered he be spared. Once again confusion reigned, and in the fighting Fraser managed to slip away and escaped captivity.
A crisis developed at the town of Gheluvelt where the Germans were attempting to seize one of the high ridges running from Passchendaele to beyond Menen. Gheluvelt was a village that sat astride the Ypres-Menen road at almost the highest point of that particular ridge line. It afforded a good view of the terrain for miles, and the road—if controlled—would be a literal pathway to Ypres and the easiest way to take the city. The renewed offensive thrust up the Menen Road near Gheluvelt to Ploegsteert Wood in the south. The heaviest blows fell on the British Seventh Division and General Sir Edmund Allenby’s dismounted cavalry.
General von Fabeck issued an order of the day. “We must and will conquer,” he declared, “and end forever the centuries-long struggle, end the war, and strike the decisive blow against our most detested enemy (Britain). We will finish with the British, Indians, Canadians, Moroccans and other trash, feeble adversaries who surrender in great numbers if they are attacked with vigor.”
The fighting at Gheluvelt was brutal and often hand to hand. One German historian said the action “almost had the savagery of the Middle Ages” in it. The fight was an endless succession of advances and retreats, advances and retreats, and positions often changed hands many times in the course of the day.
It was Sunday, October 31, when the Germans seemed on the cusp of victory. By sheer weight of numbers the British began to give way, and the Tommies were either slaughtered where they stood or reluctantly fell back in a kind of fighting retreat. Gheluvelt fell to the Germans, the imposing 18th century Gheluvelt Chateau, a prize that was a symbol of their triumph.
With the fall of Gheluvelt the road to Ypres was literally open, and a huge gap had been torn in the Allied line. Some 600 British prisoners had been taken, and the advance German elements on the Menen road were only about 1.9 miles from Ypres.
In the rear area Kaiser Wilhelm himself personally watched the progress of the advance through powerful binoculars. It was said that he planned to ride into Ypres in triumph once the great prize was taken Yet the German Emperor’s dreams of a victory parade was to prove premature.
Elements of the Scots Guards and the South Wales Borderers were still holding on against the odds in the Gheluvelt Chateau stables, perhaps 1,000 men against 10,000 Germans. Tpres was a battle where units were decimated regularly; earlier the Royal Welsh Fusiliers had been whittled down from 1,100 men to just eighty survivors. Yet the South Wales Borderers had a tradition of holding out against fearful odds. The South Wales Borderers (24th Foot) gained a kind of immortality when a detachment successfully withstood an attack of thousands of Zulu warriors at Rorke’s Drift in 1879.
Brigadier General Charles FitzClarence, a descendant of Britain’s King William IV and commander of the Guards Brigade, rode over to Gheluveldt and saw that it was now in German hands. Wheeling his horse around, he galloped to Major General Samuel Lomax to hurriedly explain the deteriorating situation and requested use of any reserves that might be on hand. The only soldiers that were available belonged to a half-strength formation, the Second Battalion, Worcestershire Regiment. FitzClarence didn’t hesitate, but ordered battalion commander Edward B Hankey to rush over to Gheluvelt, expel the Germans, and repair the Allied line.
Hankey had only 27 officers and less than 500 men, but he accepted the order without any qualms and began preparations at once. He ordered a meal of strew and rum for his men, told them to take only rifles, bayonets, and ammunition with, and marched off in the direction of Gheluvelt.
Once they arrived on the outskirts of the village, Hankey could see that woods and a streambed partly protected them from German fire—but after that, there was 1,000 yards of open ground to be covered. The bad news was that open ground was covered by German artillery. There was no getting around it—that open space had to be crossed. “Forward, at the double!” Hankey ordered in a loud voice, then led them across the stubble field as fast as they could run. The charge recalled battles of the historic past, with soldiers running with fixed bayonets and officers leading with drawn swords.
Artillery shells tore bloody gaps into the Worcestershires, killing and wounding about 100, but the rest made it past the gauntlet of fire. The Scots Guards and South Wales Borderers still clung to the stables, and some Germans were amusing themselves by taking pot shots at the surrounded Tommies.
Most of the rest of the Germans at Gheluvelt were casually walking around the chateau, eating rations, gawking like tourists at the imposing buildings, looting whatever they could lay their hands on, or simply taking their ease after days of strenuous fighting/ The Worchestershires burst into the chateau grounds like avenging furies, taking the Germans by complete surprise. Many just stopped whatever they were doing at that moment and fled.
Others were made of sterner stuff, and some hand to hand fighting developed, but the shock was too great, the Germans too unprepared to mount an adequate defense It wasn’t long before they were forced to rapidly fall back. Company C, 2nd Worcestershires swept the field near the chateau, while Company A cleared the village of remaining gray-clad soldiers. A good portion of the Germans at Gheluvelt were men from the Bavarian 16th Reserve Regiment, Adolf Hitler’s outfit. It is not known if he took part in the village and chateau fight and subsequent withdrawal.
The survivors of the Scots Guards and South Wales Borderers greeted their rescuers with a mixture of gratitude and relief. With the action over, Hankey sheathed his sword and went over to the South Wales Borderers commander, a man with the imposing name of Henry Edmund Burleigh Leach. Hankey said with a smile, “My God, fancy meeting you here.” They were old friends. Leach, exhausted and overcome with emotion, could only reply “Thank God you’ve come.”
The last major action of First Ypres occurred on November 11, 1914. Though the combatants didn’t know it, exactly four years later the fighting would end with an armistice in 1918. The German Fourth Division and the Prussian Guards. It was an offensive that played out along a nine mile front stretching from Messines to Reuel. The attack was preceded by a German artillery bombardment that was the heaviest of the war to that date.
The Germans achieved some initial successes, but their momentum soon wore down. The First Prussian Guards made some headway, but as always British rifle fire was deadly, and British artillery well served. Eventually even the Prussian Guards—elite soldiers said to be six feet tall and above—were decimated, and they took refuge in a thick patch of woods named Nonne Bosschen, usually translated as “Nun’s Wood.”
Somewhere between 700 and 900 Prussian guardsmen were in the woods, seemingly cut off from support by heavy British artillery fire. They dug in, still intending to be the spearhead of a renewed assault. In spite of the difficulties, progress had been made, and the fortunes of war can change in an instant. The Prussian guards still hoped that a breakthrough could be achieved, and ultimately the English Channel and North Sea coastal ports be taken.
Those hopes were rudely shattered by the Second Battalion of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. When their commander, H. R Davies, learned that the Prussian Foot Guards were at Nonne Bosschen, he wasted no time in forming up his men to lead a bayonet attack. The regiment could trace its roots to the 52nd Foot, who had helped defeat Napoleon’s Imperial Guard at Waterloo almost 100 years earlier. Now, they had a chance to best yet another enemy elite force, this time German.
The Oxs and Bucks attacked with vigor, and the vaunted Prussian Foot Guards withered under this determined assault. The woods were cleared of Germans, with virtually all of them killed or captured. Once again the Allied line held; Kaiser Wilhelm was cheated of his victory parade through Ypres.
After November 11 there still was some half-hearted fighting, but both sides were exhausted, and colder weather heralded the coming of winter. Both Allies and Germans dug in, this time with trench systems designed by engineers, and the Western Front was formed. It was a demarcation line between opposing forces that stretched some 300 miles from the border of Switzerland to the North Sea The Ypres area formed a bulge in that line, a salient in military terms. As fighting continued in the salient over the next four years, the bulge would vary in size. But to the Germans’ great frustration, Ypres was never taken.
The Battle of First Ypres marked both an end and a beginning. The war of maneuver ended, and in its place a static war of trenches, barbed wire, and stalemate would characterize the next four years. It also was the end of the prewar professional British army, which to all intents and purposes was destroyed in the first five months of the war. Some estimates place BEF losses at dead, wounded, missing or captured at about 90 per cent.
Ypres also marked the end of traditional horse-mounted cavalry. Modern artillery, rifles, and above all the machine gun made cavalry charges obsolete and almost suicidal. In early September there was a celebrated clash between the British 9th Lancers (Queen’s Own) and the German First Guards Dragoons, a horse to horse, lance to lance melee in which the British emerged the victors. But the skirmish was more a salute to the past rather than an indication of the future.
By mid-October the cavalry was operating for the most part as dismounted cavalry—Dragoons—or just plain infantry. One British cavalry officer, Captain Francis Grenfell of the 9th Lancers, recognized they were seeing the end of an era. “We have had five of the hardest days of the war in trenches repelling German attacks” he wrote. “I am afraid all the cavalry traditions are forever ended …”
Another sobering British statistic estimates that of the thousand men per battalion that landed in August there remained, on average, one officer and 30 men in December. The empty ranks would be filled by a whole mass of “for the duration” volunteers, which history labels “Kitchener’s Army.”
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