Douglas Haig spent the night of 31 October-1 November reforming his line. The 2nd Worcesters were pulled out of Gheluvelt and became part of the 2nd Division reserve around the village of Veldhoek. The rest of the 2nd Division dug in around Polygon Wood, east of Zonnebeke, while the 1st Division dug in across the Menin road west of Gheluvelt with the 3rd Cavalry Division in reserve. These actions indicate that Douglas Haig was preparing for a renewal of the battle. The Battle of First Ypres was not over and would begin again at dawn.
Nonne Böschen 1-22 November 1914
The line that stood between the British Empire and ruin was composed of tired, haggard and unshaven men, many in uniforms that were little more than rags. But they had their guns, rifles and bayonets and plenty of ammunition.
British Official History, 1914, Vol. II, p. 304
The trench line east of Ypres had become a bastion, an Allied rock against which successive waves of German troops dashed themselves to pieces. German guns resumed their pounding of the Allied line soon after dusk on 31 October, concentrating most of their fire on the trenches along the ridge line between Wytschaete and Messines. At midnight the barrage intensified, a battery of 8-inch howitzers concentrating exclusively on Wytschaete, and an attack on that village by nine battalions of the 6th Bavarian Reserve Division came in one hour later, at 0100 hours on 1 November. The first battle for Ypres was now entering its second month with no sign of a conclusion.
Wytschaete was then held by a detachment known as the 'Composite Household Cavalry', made up of 'odds and sods' from the 4th Cavalry Brigade, just 415 in number - giving the enemy a numerical advantage of twelve to one. By 0300 hours the Germans had driven the 'Composite Cavalry' back to the edge of the village; there the troopers rallied and drove the enemy back again, counter-attacking through the streets, among the burning houses. This ding-dong struggle continued until the increasing German pressure drove the cavalry troopers to the western edge of the village- from where yet another counter-attack was mounted, again pushing the enemy back.
This attack was the last the cavalry troopers could make; by dawn the enemy were in full possession of Wytschaete and consolidating their positions among the smouldering ruins. Two battalions from II Corps, the 1st Lincolns and the 1st Northumberland Fusiliers, were then sent up in support of the cavalry and duly attacked the village, but were swiftly pounded by that dreadful combination - rifle fire, artillery and enfilading machine guns. Before they broke off their bid to retake the village, the Lincolns had lost 301 men and the Northumberland Fusiliers ninety-eight in each battalion about 30 per cent of the men committed.
This German attack on Wytschaete was part of a general attack along the Messines ridge, a position held by 294 men of the 6th Dragoon Guards (The Carabiniers) and 300 men of the London Scottish. These units were also driven back, and by dawn on 1 November the Germans held the centre of the Messines ridge, the defenders falling back to the Spanbroekmolen position on the far side of the shallow Steenbeek valley.
French reinforcements then arrived and their 32nd Division retook Wytschaete, aided in the task by German heavy artillery, which, unaware that their infantry had recently captured the vil lage, continued shelling the defenders even as the French infantry moved in. Here again, though, recapturing Wytschaete was as much as the French could do, and the battle for Messines contin ued. By 0730 hours on 1 November it became apparent that the enemy had total control of the ridge and the valley to the west of it, leaving General de Lisle of the 1st Cavalry Division no option but to withdraw, covered by the remnants of the London Scottish.
The 4th Division of III Corps, on the right of the cavalry, were also preparing to withdraw to a prepared defensive line - known as 'Torres Vedras' - but were then attacked by the German Ist Cavalry Corps and the 40th Division. In fact, the enemy would have been well advised to let the 4th Division pull back unmolested, for the 4th Division turned on the advancing enemy and drove them back with rifle, machine-gun and artillery fire, somewhat balancing the setback at Messines.
By the evening of 1 November the situation around Ypres was as follows. The northern flank from the Belgians to Broodseinde was held by the French. Then came I Corps, straddling the Menin road, then the French again, from the Ypres-Comines railway line to east of Messines, where the Cavalry Corps took over again, linking up with III Corps as far as Armentières, where the Indian division held the line to the south.
Along the Belgian line north of Dixmude - most of which was now behind spreading flood water - all was quiet. French attacks south of the Belgian line had been held by the enemy, but although the British had now lost Wytschaete and Messines, the BEF front was firm and in no acute danger of collapse. There were, however, several serious problems. Quite apart from a chronic shortage of men, those now in the line were exhausted; they had been fighting all day and digging all night for the past ten days - and now they were having to fight at night as well. The men were falling asleep as they stood to arms, unable to continue the endless labour of repairing their existing trenches and digging new ones.
Added to this was a serious shortage of artillery ammunition, vital to maintaining the defence. Some BEF batteries had already been taken out of the line, as there were no shells for their guns. Indeed, on 2 November French reported to Kitchener that he had only 180 shells per howitzer and 320 shells for every 18-pounder and no shells at all for the 6-inch howitzers.
The Allies were on the defensive but shells were urgently needed, not least to engage German guns and break up any attack formations gathering on the BEF front. Going on the defensive was sensible because the Germans had not yet decided to abandon their push past Ypres -far from it. While continuing to batter the BEF with artillery, the enemy mustered forces for one more stab at Ypres, building this final thrust on the strong foundation of the elite Prussian Guard.
Nor was this all; signs of strain were also starting to appear at GHQ. The BEF's chief of staff, Lieutenant General Sir Archibald Murray, was suffering from nervous strain, and Henry Wilson was anxious to replace him, pressing the advisability of this move on the Field Marshal. French relayed this suggestion to Kitchener, who informed French that the Cabinet had not forgotten Wilson's intervention in the Ulster affair and were anyway dubious about him and totally opposed to any change; for the moment, Murray stayed in his post.
However, as Wilson soon discovered, an even more radical change was also in the offing. During a meeting with the French commanders at Dunkirk on r November, Kitchener had proposed to the French President and General Joffre that Field Marshal French should be removed and General Sir Ian Hamilton take his place. According to Callwell, 'Joffre said at once that he could not agree as he and French got on very well and M. Poincare backed this up.' (1) Foch quickly passed this news on to Henry Wilson, and Wilson, ever keen on intrigue, passed the details to Field Marshal French.
The following day, according to Wilson's diary, 'Sir John and I went to Cassel at 3 pm when Sir John thanked Foch personally and in the warmest terms for his comradeship and loyalty.' (2)
One wonders why Kitchener felt it necessary to consult the French over this suggestion, rather than simply informing them that Field Marshal French must go. After all, the French did not consult the British before sacking Lanrezac, and there seems no pressing reason for the British to consult their allies over a decision that rested with the British Cabinet. French support for the Field Marshal is also interesting; Joffre can hardly have held the BEF commander in very high esteem after the events of recent weeks, so it would appear that the support came from Foch, who, with the aid of Henry Wilson, found the Field Marshal easy to manipulate. And so, with French also still in his post, the war continued.
One has to admire German tenacity at this time; whatever casualties the Allies were sustaining, far higher casualties were being inflicted on the enemy formations moving in the open as they swept into the attack. And yet, in spite of these casualties, in spite of the fact that vast losses were being sustain
ed for no perceptible territorial gain, the enemy kept on mustering men, forming new divisions and pressing home the attacks.
Assembling another force for yet another push took the German commanders a little time. Meanwhile, the day-to-day fighting around Ypres continued unabated and BEF losses continued to mount. In I Corps, the 7th Division, with a ration strength of 12,672 soldiers, could now muster just 2,434; the 1st Division had been reduced to just 3,583 men. Other units at every level- brigades, battalions, cavalry regiments - were in a similar situation. This shortage of men could not be remedied, certainly not with regular soldiers; the regulars called from far-off garrisons were still at sea and such small regular reinforcements as reached the BEF from the UK were the scrapings of an already empty barrel. In this extremity the only answer was to send out Territorial units, but all these were currently ill equipped and mostly half trained.
On 1 November, during the meeting with Foch and Joffre at Dunkirk, Field Marshal Kitchener told the Allied army commanders and the French politicians-and told them very distinctly- that Britain had no more men to send, adding that 'to send untrained men into the fighting line was little short of murder, and that no very important supply of British effectives could be looked for until the late Spring of 1915 and that the British Army would only reach full strength, its high water mark, during the Summer of 1917. (3)
Britain's Regular Army was now paying the price for the government's pre-war failure to introduce conscription and Kitchener's blunt declaration, however unwelcome to the French, was both honest and totally correct. So too was his comment that no significant numbers of trained troops could be expected in the line for another two years.
It takes time to raise and train troops from scratch and even longer to form and train armies. Even if the men could be found and hundreds of thousands of men were now answering Kitchener's famous call to arms - the weapons and kit needed to equip them were simply not available and would not be available for another two years. The small pre-war army had not needed a large armaments industry, so this too had to be created, again virtually from scratch.
Lord Kitchener, who had been appointed Secretary of State for War much against his personal wishes, was now discovering on a daily basis just how unprepared Britain had been for a European war- those extended 'conversations' and Henry Wilson's pre-war machinations notwithstanding. Britain had an army, and a very fine army, but it was not an army designed, manned or in any way equipped for the sort of war in which it was currently engaged. What made it formidable were the fighting qualities of its soldiers- and those soldiers were now being killed or wounded in large numbers. 'Did they remember,' he asked the Cabinet in September 1914, 'when they went headlong into a war like this, that they were without an Army, and without any preparation to equip one?' By 25 August 1914, just three weeks into his appointment, Kitchener had already envisioned a force of twenty-five divisions in the field, but recognized that a shortage of kit was the critical factor. (4)
The cabinet and the House of Commons seemed to have some difficulty grasping this point. As late as 1916, Kitchener was reminding Members of Parliament that:
The pre-war theory worked out by the General Staff on instructions from the 'Government of the day' had been that, in certain eventualities, we should despatch overseas an Expeditionary Force, six divisions in all, or in round numbers, 150,000 men; that the Territorial Force should take over the defence of these islands; and that the Special Reserve should feed the Expeditionary Force. On this basis, the business of the War Office in the event of war was to keep the Army in the field up to strength and to perfect the arrangements for Home defence. My immediate decision was that in the face of the magnitude of the war, this policy would not suffice.
Kitchener had clearly been reading the minutes of those Cabinet subcommittee meetings of 1909, and was pointing out that, right from the start, the demands and ferocity of this war - its sheer size -had exceeded all previous calculations and created an unprecedented situation. Looking at the equipment situation in the autumn of 1914, John Hussey gives the example of the 2nd West Riding Division of the Territorial force. This division quickly raised no fewer than twelve battalions between August and October 1914, but finding the men was the easy part. Clothing and webbing equipment came in over the autumn and winter but horses and rifles did not arrive until the spring of 1915- and even then these were only drill rifles, not suited to the field. The battalions received their .303 SMLE rifles only in May 1916- more than a year and a half into the war, just in time for the Battle of the Somme.
True as all this is, it still seems likely that much more use could have been made of the Territorial Force. Although originally raised by Haldane for home defence, the Territorial Force contained many units that were willing to volunteer for general service and, like the London Scottish, would have given a good account of themselves in battle if allowed to do so.
The snag was that Herbert Kitchener, the War Secretary, had no faith in the Territorial Force. Kitchener had spent most of his career in Egypt or India and had little knowledge of the British Army and little interest in the Territorial force. He had seen Territorial troops before - the aged, unfit, ill-trained and unwilling French Territorial troops of the Franco-Prussian War- and that dire experience had coloured his judgement. Kitchener did not appreciate the young volunteers of Britain's Territorial Force and made the fundamental mistake of rejecting the expansion of the Territorial Force to concentrate on creating new armies, the 'Kitchener's Armies' of civilian volunteers. Many of these civilians were already in the Territorial Force, so expanding this and equipping it properly would have been equally effective and a great deal quicker than starting from scratch.
Desperate for men, Field Marshal French promptly queried Kitchener's Dunkirk statement of 1 November and was informed that there were no Regular units left in Britain. Indeed, Kitchener added, the total number of Regular Army reinforcements currently available in the UK amounted to just 150 officers and 9,500 other ranks, roughly sufficient for two infantry brigades, but these were mainly engaged in training the newly recruited volunteers; for the moment the BEF must soldier on as best it could.
During the first days of November, as the rains fell and the first signs of winter began to appear, the battered BEF continued to do just that. German artillery fire grew in volume and duration, but when German infantry attacks came in - and they came in constantly - they continued to dissolve under the fire of the British, French and Belgian soldiers, doggedly hanging on in their muddy dug outs and water-filled trenches.
The battles of Gheluvelt and Messines ended- at least officiallyon 31 October and 2 November respectively, but these terminations were not apparent to the troops on the ground. Their battle continued; to the men in the front-line trenches it seemed that the Germans had an endless supply of men and shells and would continue to attack until the Allied defences were finally breached and taken and their bodies added to the hundreds that now lay out between the trench lines, slowly consumed by the mud.
In an age when military service is rare, the plight of these soldiers is very hard to grasp. The hard fact was that if this war continued most of them were going to die. Many had died already; men not killed at Mons had died at Le Cateau or in the retreat to the Marne or on the Aisne. Now many of those who had survived those early encounters were locked in yet another struggle, or had already died defending Messines or attacking La Bassée or Armentières. Even if they had survived so far, there was no escape in this war. If they did not die or were not hideously maimed in this battle, they would simply be committed to the next one, and so on, until death, shrieking from the sky, brought an end to their condition. And yet they endured.
How men coped with this situation remains a mystery to later generations. Perhaps a certain lack of imagination helped, or it could be that, in spite of all the evidence, men were still convinced that being killed or wounded was something that happened only to the other fellow. Perhaps, most of all, they were kept goi
ng by that combination of comradeship, regimental pride, ingrained discipline and a simple determination not to give in that is the hallmark of the British soldier. They would hang on, develop their defences and give the enemy another pasting when he came on again. There was no glory in such a situation, no glory in this kind of life, but these men gained a kind of glory, simply by enduring it.
It is important to stress that the French played a major part in the Battle of First Ypres and the Belgian Army also played its part; First Ypres was never a purely BEF affair. French reinforcements were coming up steadily and taking over more of the line. The British had no more men to send and the French had no option but to fill the gap. It is equally important to stress that the arrival of the French did not stem the German advance on Ypres. The German line crept forward steadily during the first days of November, and on 5 November the Spanbroekmolen position (Hill 75) on the Messines ridge was lost by the French. German pressure was unrelenting, and another major thrust somewhere was clearly in the offing.
On 5 November, the Allied positions from the north were as follows. The Belgian Army held the line from the North Sea to Dixmude, from where the French 38th Division occupied the line south as far as Bixschoote. The line then swung east across the edge of the salient, de Mitry's cavalry holding the front as far as the Ypres-Roulers railway line north of Langemarck. Here General Dubois' IX Corps took over as far as Broodseinde, where Haig's battered I Corps- the 2nd, 1st and 7th Divisions and Lord Cavan's detachment - held the front astride the Menin road and as far as Zillebeke, where the French XVI Corps took over. French units then held the line south to the River Douve, where the Cavalry Corps and the 4th Division of III Corps took up the defence as far as the link with II Corps - though many II Corps battalions were now at Ypres, reinforcing other units in the salient. On 6 November these detached II Corps battalions were formed into a new division- a rather small one- under the command of Major-General F. D. V. Wing.
The Old Contemptibles Page 34