by Paul Van Pul
So at 17:00 the British naval squadron under Rear Admiral Hood arrived off La Panne. But according to an eyewitness, three days earlier on 12 October, three British warships had bombarded the coast north of Ostend from 11:30 until 15:00.
It was not so much an impressive as a heart-warming sight: eight torpedo boats, followed by two cruisers and two monitors. The dispatch had been fraught with delays. The three monitors, with a division of destroyers to protect them, had been supposed to sail the previous evening from Dover to Dunkirk. But that night the weather had been so bad that the monitors could not put to sea.
In the evening, in a small dwelling in Long Street in Nieuport three officers gathered and discussed the defence of the lower part of the Yser River.
Here the canalized river ran west for 3km in a straight line, after a winding course coming from the south. Due to this rather sharp change in direction the defenders of the lower river section would be taken by enfilading fire from the enemy approaching from the east along the Bruges Road. Major Holman of the First Regiment Chasseurs à Cheval, explained this inherent weakness of his position to two officers of the Second Engineer Battalion, Second Army Division: Major Georges Le Clément de Saint-Marcq and Captain Robert Thys.
The British Dover Patrol in action off the coast of La Panne. Left a monitor, to the right a destroyer. In the foreground a fishing vessel on the beach.
Nieuport 1914–1918,” R. Thys, 1922.
Immediately after firing a salvo the monitor changes course seaward to avoid counter-battery fire. Belgian soldiers, relaxing on the beach, watch the proceedings.
Nieuport 1914–1918, R. Thys, 1922.
In order to solve this problem Captain Thys, after studying the ordnance map suggested inundating the right bank of the river. By doing so the Bruges Road would be flooded around the village of Mannekensvere, thus barring an enemy approach from the east.
Unbeknownst to him this was the original idea discussed by the British officers – and later Captain Commandant Prudent Nuyten – with lockmaster Gerard Dingens almost a week earlier. Nevertheless the objective of Thys was totally different.
While the British initially wanted to isolate Ostend from the mainland by flooding the land south of the Bruges Canal, Thys proposed to set a flood east of the Yser river, this time between the Belgian and the German armies. Coincidentally both projects involved the same area since ‘south of the Bruges Canal’ also meant ‘east of the Yser River’ (see map p.179). Flooding this road would prevent the Germans from moving field guns past the village of Saint-Pierre-Cappelle and it would protect Major Holman’s entrenched position along the river from accurate shellfire.
Since both engineers agreed that this plan looked quite feasible Major Le Clement put in a request with their commanding officer, Lieutenant General Dossin, head of the Second Army Division. According to one source, someone other than Captain Thys subsequently still sought the advice of the lockmaster. But Dingens again refused to cooperate. Obviously Dingens, for the second time, did not want to get involved in an action that would ruin the livelihood of the population in the polder. As Robert Thys later described it: ‘… for fear of the responsiblities’.
That the land in this region could be inundated was common knowledge amongst the local population, especially the schoolteachers who kept that knowledge alive and passed it on to their pupils. The following incident confirms that the military too did not ignore that valuable source of information.
On 15 October, Lieutenant General Dossin had established his divisional headquarters in Wulpen, a village halfway between Nieuport and Furnes. Two of his artillery officers were billeted with Germain Van Marcke, the local schoolmaster. One morning the good man was having breakfast with the two officers and he put the question to them why the army did not inundate the land. After all Nieuport had done so in 1793 against the invading French Army. The officers were quite interested in the teacher’s story and as a result General Dossin invited Van Marcke over to his headquarters the next day. There the schoolmaster gave some information about flooding the region. However, a few days later when another staff officer asked him to accompany him to Nieuport, Van Marcke declined and referred the man to the locks men, since he himself was unfamiliar with lock operations.
The tail end (sea side) of the Ypres Lock. In the front left the lock doors, on the right the iron gantry with (on top) the manoeuvering platform with ten gearboxes to lift the doors. The layout of the Furnes Lock was identical, save for having only four openings instead of five and the lock being on the opposite side of the gates. After the war the gantry structures were not rebuilt and the lift mechanisms were installed at ground level. In the background on the right the so-called ‘Greek Temple’.
Historical prints collection Callenaere-Dehouck.
Germain Van Marcke himself wrote down the account of this particular incident nine years later. Hesitant though, he put the date of the discussion as 16 October. For various reasons this is quite likely to be a bit too early. We suspect that the events as described happened a week later as we will see in Chapter IX. The gunnery officers in question were Colonel Le Roy and Captain Commandant Leopold Geerinckx.
At General Headquarters in Furnes a note was handed to the French Mission outlining the following request:
The enemy seems to have concentrated his forces in front of Nieuport-Dixmude. If these forces attack this front it would be quite advantageous if the French Cavalry Corps [positioned in the Houthulst Wood area to the south] would make a flanking manoeuvre or even take them in the back. If this happens at least the Belgian Cavalry Division will support this action.
NOTES
1. Ferdinand Foch was born in Tarbes in 1851, the county town of the ancient French county of Bigorre at the foot of the Pyrenees.
2. We found one other English translation in Émile Cammaerts, Albert of Belgium, Defender of Right (1935), but in our opinion this one does not exactly reflect the mood of the times: ‘The nations which wish to continue their existence as such must defend themselves. At the moment when we set out to reconquer Belgium, it would seem extraordinary if the Belgian Army were not at our side. I, a soldier of the Republic, assure Your Majesty that our cause is a just and righteous one, and that Providence will give us Victory.’ We let the reader judge.
3. Crown Prince Rupprecht was also Queen Elisabeth’s uncle.
Chapter VII
The Battle for the Right Bank
The area known as ‘the coastal plain of Flanders’ is a fertile, narrow stretch of land that runs from Calais in France, north-east through Belgium, to the mouth of the Westerscheldt in the Netherlands. This flat land is protected from flooding at high tide by a ridge of sand dunes, varying in width from 1,000 metres in the south-west to a mere 100 metres in the north-east.
Although the plain is below high water level it is, unlike most polders in Holland for example, above low water. As such there is no need for mechanical devices like windmills or pumping stations to evacuate the surface water. Instead it runs off from the inland canals by gravity as long as the tidal cycle is below the polder water level1. Final drainage of the land is achieved through a few breaks in the line of dunes. The three main outlets in Belgium are at Zeebrugge in the east, Ostend in the centre and Nieuport in the west.
The Furnes Lock, seen from the Furnes Canal (downstream view), soon after inauguration in 1876. To the left, the gantry with four gates, to the right, the doors to the lock entrance. People lifting or lowering the gate doors could be seen from afar. That was one of the reasons why the gantries on both locks were not rebuilt after the war. The Five-Bridges Road was also moved upstream – closer to the camera – so the new bridges would clear the lock chambers. The lock houses were never rebuilt.
City archive Nieuwpoort.
Of these three the drainage facility in Nieuport is unique in the sense that there is also a river, the Yser, which empties into the North Sea through the Ypres lock-and-gate structure.
Besides the cana
lized river, two other navigation canals end up in the bay at Nieuport. First there is the Bruges Canal, connecting Nieuport with Ostend and Bruges. It ends in the Yser Channel through the Count Lock. This is the canal the two British officers talked about with lockmaster Dingens during their meeting on 10 October.
The second canal is the Furnes Canal, ending in the Furnes lock-and-gate structure, which comes from Furnes in the south-west.
No surface water from the adjacent polders is drained into these three canals since the canal water level is higher than the water level in the surrounding waterways.
To complete our round up of hydraulic structures in the Nieuport tail bay we have to mention the three drainage sluices that are wedged in between the three navigation locks.
First there are the Nieuwbedelf Gates in the north that drain the polders west of the Bruges Canal. This is the structure the British were first interested in when they talked to the lockmaster on 10 October. Secondly, south of the Count Lock lays the Spring Sluice. This sluice drains the region between the Bruges Canal and more or less the Yser River itself. Finally we encounter the North Vaart 2 Gates situated between the Yser and the Furnes Canal. When we near the end of the story these gates will become the focus of our attention.
All together these six structures form a complex, build in a fan-shaped design around the bay at the end of the tidal Yser Channel. Due to this shape the people of Nieuport call the complex ‘The Goose Foot’ (Ganzepoot), or in French, ‘patte d’oie’.
To avoid swamping the reader with technical jargon, it will be easier to treat the main hydrology of this region in two separate chapters. Here we will give a quick overview of the northern drainage basin and later on in the book we will cover the southern area. The watershed between the two basins, also important to our story, is not exactly the straight stretch of the canalized Yser River but is in fact the more or less parallel winding road/dyke from Nieuport to St Georges and the Union Bridge: in other words, the Bruges Road. But first a bit of history.
In the early seventeenth century neither locks nor sluices existed at The Goose Foot location. The lower part of the Yser – between the Union Bridge and Nieuport - had a meandering riverbed following more or less the course of what is now called the Nieuwendamme Creek. The river, coming from Dixmude turned north near the Union Bridge towards the Old Fort Nieuwendamme. Here the riverbed turned south-west again to reach the spot where later the Spring Sluice would be built (see map p.108).
But over the years the still tidal Yser was silting up and hampering navigation on the lower river section. To solve this problem the city of Nieuport, in 1643, straightened out the river by digging a three-kilometre long bypass, almost due east – west. With the construction of the first hydraulic structure, a navigation lock called Ypres Lock at the tail end, the lower section of the river was now canalized while an excess of surface water automatically drained through the still open, old bed of the winding river. To provide for drainage of the strip of polder south of the new section that had now been cut off from its natural drainage basin, a culvert was built underneath the new canal some 400m upstream of the lock.
The North Vaart Gates, a few years after inauguration in 1875.
Kunstmatige Inundaties in Maritiem Vlaanderen 1316–1945, J.Leper, 1957.
The beginning of the nineteenth century saw the appearance of larger barges with deeper draughts that in turn required deeper waterways. Now it became a priority to find a way to deepen the river channel downstream from Ypres Lock. As mechanical dredging was almost non-existent in those days a more familiar technique, known as sluicing, was used.
Sluicing works on the same principle as a toilet. When flushing a toilet the water in the tank rushes into and scours the bowl. Sluicing does the same, but on a larger scale: water is held up in a reservoir at high tide and released sometime before low water. At that moment the outgoing water creates a strong seaward flow, flushing out the accumulated silt in the river channel. For this purpose a peculiar type of sluice was built in 1820 at the mouth of the Old Yser, now called Nieuwendamme Creek, just north of the Ypres Lock. This so-called Spring Sluice did in fact serve two purposes: a civilian one and a military one.
In those days Nieuport was still a fortified place with heavy brick walls and earthen ramparts combined in an intricate design. To augment the defence, the low laying surrounding lands could be inundated to prevent siege artillery from approaching and sappers from building a siege trench network. As such the Spring Sluice was designed not only to maintain depth in the Yser Channel but also to inundate the Nieuwendamme Polder with seawater in case of a military crisis. In fact the sluice had been designed first and foremost as a flood sluice.
Nieuwendamme Creek
In 1794 the French, who had come from Ostend, had besieged the city. They had placed three cannons on the north side of the Yser Channel opposite the Old Spanish Lock situated north-west of the city, in order to destroy the lock doors and thus create an uncontrolled flood to the west and south of the city.
Twenty-six years later, when the Spring Sluice was being built, the city’s magistrates took this possibility into account. This time their new sluice was built in a ‘bombproof way. Not only were the vital lift mechanisms faulted but also the structure was built with two long and narrow parallel channels. Since the structure was now part of the defensive belt of the city, an enemy could only fire at the doors from the east. With the doors and stop planks located far to the west in the channels they made for a very small and well-protected target. Only by positioning a few guns at a well determined, high spot 1,000 metres from the sluice was there a slim chance for the aggressor to hit the doors. And even then it had to be a bull’s eye with a bomb in a low, straight trajectory since the slightest deviation would make the projectile ricochet from the heavy, rounded masonry on the upstream side.
A schematic aerial view of the Spring Sluice as it existed in 1914. Only from a distance of 1,000 metres could a besieger target the lift doors, set far back in the narrow sluice channels. Scoring a direct hit was still another matter at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Unfortunately by the end of the Great War this original sluice was totally destroyed. Although rebuilt and again operational in 1921 the structural changes have been so profound that its functioning in 1914 is unrecognizable today, yet for some unknown reason the outer recesses of the downstream flood doors were restored although no doors nor median wall to support two additional doors were ever installed! Nonetheless the bluestone used in the restoration is of a unique and detailed design worth admiring. But we should return to the tactical discussion of the three officers in the Long Street.
It looked quite simple to execute the proposal by Captain Thys. At ebb tide the doors of the Spring Sluice were to be opened to let seawater rush inland. At high tide the gates would then be closed and retain the water. The procedure was to be repeated at every tidal cycle to boost and enlarge the flooding. However, if Thys had been able to take a closer look he would have noticed that the floodwater would not have gone very far.
Indeed, between the Old Fort Nieuwendamme and Kets Bridge a structure called Nieuwendamme Sluice regulated the drainage of the whole region further east of the river, up to Dixmude. Until the construction of the Spring Sluice in 1822 this structure had been the first line of defence against the ravages of the sea.
Any attempt to flood this large polder depended on the control over this sluice. But within hours of the discussion in Long Street this sluice would be a mile in front of the Belgian lines.
On the morning of 18 October King Albert was on his way to inspect the bridgehead at Dixmude, occupied by the French fusiliers marins. In order to be able to hold on to the whole of the Yser the Belgians needed firm control over the Nieuport bridgehead on their left and Dixmude on their right. But as the guns of the British Fleet were now covering Nieuport, the king’s foremost concern for the moment was the defence of Dixmude.
Meanwhile the Germans were attack
ing the main guards left in the villages of Leke, St Pierre Cappelle and Westende. After several hours of heavy fighting the troops defending these locations had to fall back on their respective advance posts. Subsequently the German 6th Reserve Division captured Leke and Keyem, the 3rd Reserve Jäger Battalion took St Pierre Cappelle while the 4th Ersatz Division captured Westende.
The Nieuwendamme Sluice near the Napoleonic fort with the same name, provided drainage of the polder on the right (north) bank of the Yser River, as far south as the town of Dixmude. Further upstream the waterway is called Vladsloo Vaart, downstream it becomes the Nieuwendamme Creek. As this hydraulic structure was situated a mile in front of the Allied front line the Germans were more or less in control of the drainage of their side of the front.
Kunstmatige Inundaties in Maritiem Vlaanderen 1316–1945, J.Leper, 1957.
The Belgian advance posts, battalion-strength units dug in at Schoore, Mannekensvere and Lombartzyde were, in turn, bombarded but managed to hold on for the remainder of the day.
At 3:00 Admiral Hood, who had arrived on the Continent around midnight, was able to announce that the monitors would be in position at daylight. Their main goal would be to check with their fire the enemy advancing on Nieuport and prevent any landing of German troops between Nieuport and La Panne. From 9:30 they started bombarding German gun emplacements around Westende, and later on shifted their attention to two enemy positions, one in the hamlet of Lovie and the other near Blokhuis Farm, north of Rattevalle on the Bruges Canal. But owing to the height of the dunes, the effect of the fire was difficult to ascertain from the crow’s-nest and the forward fire control from the shore was not yet established.