by Paul Van Pul
The flood doors of the Spanish Lock before the First World War. In the background the Yser Channel.
Kunstmatige Inundaties in Maritiem Vlaanderen 1316–1945, J.Leper, 1957.
The West Vaart with, in the background, the Spanish Lock. Before the opening of the Furnes Lock on the north-east side of Nieuport in 1876, barges on their way from Dunkirk to Bruges passed here. By 1914 the vaart was only used for draining the polders west of the city. Through a culvert under the ‘new’ Furnes Canal the vaart was still connected to the polder south of Nieuport.
Nieuport 1914–1918, R. Thys, 1922.
On the west side of Nieuport, in the open fields a few hundred metres from the railway station lay the lone and abandoned Spanish Lock. This structure had been built in 1820 to replace the original ‘Old’ Spanish Lock that had been threatened with destruction by French troops in 1794. In spite of the thunder of the guns and the presence of the soldiers a lone lockkeeper daily showed up and went about doing his job until one day an inquisitive officer asked: ‘What do you do here every day, locks man?’ Since the Spanish Lock was not maintained for navigational purposes it seemed illogical that a lockkeeper showed up each day at such a deserted structure. The locks man told the officer that, although the doors were closed and locked the gate paddles in the doors, which are underwater shutters, had to be lowered or raised according to the drainage requirements in the adjacent canal and the polder west of the city. The man was ordered not to come back. Nobody could have guessed then that soon, during a few nerve-racking nights, this disused lock would become the gateway to the survival of the nation.
Despite the investigation by Le Clément and Thys to facilitate the retreat from the bridgehead, Le Clément sent the following written order to Lieutenant François:
In anticipation of an important offensive movement in the near future the lieutenant-general [Dossin] commanding the division repeats his order to preserve all the bridges until the very last minute and not to blow them up until no other course of action is available. October 20, 1914.
With the enemy advancing along the south side of the Bruges Canal into the Nieuwendamme Polder, the right flank of the Nieuport bridgehead and the Five-Bridges Road were now under deadly fire. This situation made the bridgehead tactically untenable.
As a result the engineers of the Second Army Division revived Captain Thys’s idea to inundate the creek. If they could only flood the polder up to the Old Fort Nieuwendamme and the abandoned former river bed, then the right flank of the bridgehead and the locks would be protected. It would have the added advantage that the defence along the Bruges Road could be relaxed in favour of the forward defence – to the east – of the hamlet of St Georges and the Union Bridge. To this end Major Le Clément put in a new request to General Dossin the same day, this time for a smaller, tactical flood rather than the large project that had been proposed three days earlier.
Early in the afternoon heavy German shelling broke out on all the advance posts and the Dixmude bridgehead. The bombardment was so severe that Belgian High Command decided at 16:00 to recall all its troops still on the right bank towards the river crossings except for the strongpoint of Dixmude and the Nieuport bridgehead.
At the junction of the First and Fourth Army Divisions, at km 10 in the exposed Tervaete Loop of the river, the enemy shelling was so severe that both divisional commanders agreed to pull back from the river levee and reorganize the defence along the chord of the loop. Shells of 210-mm created a bloodbath among the exhausted and badly equipped Belgian defenders.
The geography of the loop was indeed a weak point in the overall defence along the river. Perhaps this was an inevitable move, but at this point in the fighting it was still a very risky decision. Releasing one foot of dyke meant that the enemy would jump at the chance to cross the Yser. When High Command heard about the local decision it swiftly repeated its order to hold on to the entire riverbank at any cost. Was this the weak spot in the defence the enemy was looking for?
By the time the king returned to La Panne the British warships had halted their fire. They had expended all their ammunition and Admiral Hood had to send his destroyers to Dover to replenish, and his monitors to Dunkirk to await the arrival of their ammunition stocks. He himself kept up the patrol in the damaged destroyer Amazon.
The French General Grossetti, commander of the 42nd Infantry Division. The reinforcement by his division in the ‘Tervaete Loop’ struggle prevented a German breakthrough near Pervyse.
Onze Helden, R. Lyr, 1922.
Undeterred by the darkness, the Germans continued their bombardment along the whole Yser front, but less violently than during the daytime. King Albert now saw the situation in a more positive light. The troops had held magnificently under the enemy fire. Galet, this time also more optimistic, wrote: Tomorrow we will still hold, the day after the French will get into the action.’
In order to launch his long announced offensive along the coast, General Ferdinand Foch needed to organize the various French contingents engaged in Belgium under a single command. These units were of a very different nature and value but would soon be reinforced by excellent elements. For the moment the new command would be called détachement d’armée de Belgique (DAB) and would be headed by General d’Urbal.
The Marine Fusiliers Brigade under Rear Admiral Ronarc’h was undoubtedly the best unit in this new detachment. They had already been under British General Rawlinson’s command in Ghent and had later been transferred to Belgian Command while withdrawing to Dixmude.
Courageous Frenchmen, with their characteristic blue berets topped by a red pompom, they had proved to be an invaluable reinforcement of the Belgian Army. Their heroic resistance on the Yser front would be remembered by the French Marine nationale in 1946 by renaming the former British escort carrier HMS Biter as Dixmude.
The Second Cavalry Corps operating east of Houthulst Wood, and the 87th and 89th Territorials along the Ypres Canal made up the remainder of the French DAB. However, on the same day, from 11:00 onwards, the 42nd Infantry Division under General Grossetti, started to detrain in Furnes. But let us return to the flooding of Flanders’ Fields.
Another view of the Furnes lock-and-gate structure, this time shortly before the war.
City archive Nieuwpoort
Apparently on the same day two French officers had spoken to the mayor in Furnes concerning possible floods but he had given them an evasive response. When the good man later informed Belgian General Headquarters of the incident the burgomaster got a rather cool reception. Obviously these French officers were preparing the floods around the Dunkirk Fortified Place, a project that would interfere with the drainage on Belgian territory. But, for the moment, this problem was not yet of concern to the Belgian engineers.
At the French Mission the reports to the Generalissimo concerning the Belgian front sounded reassuring in spite of the heavy fighting. By noon a cable went out about the German attack on the Nieuport bridgehead and Dixmude. But it ended: ‘Everything goes well.’
Close to midnight Colonel Brécard’s men did send an overview on the day’s events. In it they complimented the Belgian troops on their behaviour and closed with a phrase, well reflecting the spirit of the time: ‘A good day, stimulating for morale.’
At the British Mission the report was equally flattering. Colonel Bridges wrote: The Belgians fought very well today; they made a number of counter-attacks and lost 2,000 men.’
NOTES
1. We would like to indicate to the reader that our concise overview of the water managment of the region reflects the situation as it was at the beginning of the twentieth century. Major reconstruction afterwards – some of it even immediately after the Great War – has sometimes changed the hydrology. Our exposé will also enable the dedicated reader to distinguish between old and new.
2. vaart, ’vart: a Flemish word, originally used for a serpentine, tidal channel in mud flats. After the flats had been reclaimed from the North Sea, the channel, b
y then a shallow canal, was maintained for drainage and local navigation. We will use this word for the larger waterways in the polder to distinguish them from the navigation canals mentioned earlier. Locally the canals are also called vaarts.
3. North-African (Algerian) cavalry. Gaum is the Arab word for tribe or troop.
4. This was the German 22nd Reserve Corps (43th and 44th Reserve Div), arriving somewhat later than the 3rd Reserve Corps to the north.
Chapter VIII
Flooding the Creek
On the north bank of the Yser River, strategically located in front of the Ypres Lock and along the Five-Bridges Road stood the Café de l’Yser. It was one of several haunts for boatmen waiting for their barges to be locked through and for townsfolk who gathered and spread the latest gossip from Nieuport, Ostend or Dunkirk. Another tavern stood between the Count Lock and the Spring Sluice. Then there was the watering hole ‘A la nouvelle écluse, chez Lobbestal’ [In the New Lock, owned by Lobbestal] in front of the Furnes Lock and walking from the Furnes Lock towards the town one encountered six more pubs.
Certainly in those days impoverished Flanders was littered with drinking-houses. It is said that in the mid-nineteenth century in Belgium, for breweries alone, the count was 2,900.
Since the war had started, most of the talk had been of the approaching danger and, throughout the preceding months, as more and more people left Nieuport for what they hoped would be safer grounds, patronage had dropped accordingly. Now, in mid-October, only a handful of curious or perhaps reckless customers had stayed. They were the ones who wanted to know firsthand what was really going on.
One of them was a bargeman in his early fifties named Henry Geeraert. His weather-beaten face, accentuated by a strong nose and heavy moustache, was always topped by his worn out skippers kepi. Although a jolly good fellow, his talk gave the impression that it was he who would halt the Teutonic masses here, right in front of the Café de l’Yser. Since September he had seen British and French servicemen coming and going but more and more Belgian uniforms had been coming into the region. It was a pitiful clutter at first, people demoralized by the perpetual retreat and desperately trying to hang on to the basic needs of life. The gradual disintegration of command had turned them into a bunch of poor peasants and tired labourers, disguised in some sort of uniform. Henry felt sorry for these disheartened young lads carried off from their homes and kicked around the land by a merciless Prussian tidal wave. His good nature and his father-like approach quickly made him popular with the young pack. But the war went on and so did most of the soldiers.
The Café de l’Yser early in the war. Since it had a strategic location and was used throughout the war as a reinforced observation post, by 1918 the Germans had bombarded the place into a pile of rubble.
Hotel Restaurant l’Yser.
Picture of Henry Geeraert used as the basis for the design of the 1,000 francs bank note.
Nieuport 1914–1918, R. Thys, 1922.
On 14 October Henry had been ordered by the marine superintendent to take some barges in tow with his small tugboat and pull them to the safety of the downstream harbour dock. But his curiosity had driven him back to the locks to follow events from close by.
A sapper platoon was on guard at the locks and he had seen a sergeant putting explosives under the swing bridge across the Furnes Lock. To re-establish some order the soldiers had expelled everyone non essential to the workings of the drainage structures. In all the confusion Henry Geeraert, eager to hang around, had managed to recover the cap of an assistant lockkeeper and now, wearing this official head gear, he could circulate on the Five Bridges Road undisturbed.
Unlike lockmaster Dingens, he had an uncomplicated philosophy; he did not care what language someone spoke or what kind of clothes a man wore. He seemed to be able to get along with everyone. And that an officer was a college man who knew a lot more than he did, he would gladly admit. It was no wonder army personnel didn’t bother him on his harmless strolls across the bridges and soon the sappers were on friendly terms with him.
Although the German guns had started shelling Nieuport and the lockmaster had taken off for safer quarters, Geeraert was undeterred and stayed with his newfound friends. They provided the action and excitement he had been looking for all his life.
During the night of Tuesday and early Wednesday morning the German artillery kept the pressure up. At 01:00 it launched a bombardment along the whole Yser front followed, one hour later, by an infantry attack on Dixmude from all three exposed sides, by the 44th Reserve Division on the north-east and the 43rd on the south-east side of the town. The French Marine Fusiliers and the Belgians were well entrenched and managed to repulse the assault but the Germans came back at 12:00 and again at 15:00. Each time they were driven back.
Joseph-Jacques-Césaire Joffre, Maréchal de France. From 1914 until 1916 he was the Generalissimo of the French Army.
Ons Land, 1919.
The defenders of the Nieuport bridgehead were more fortunate: there the German activity was weaker and the Second Army Division, with reinforcements from the Third, was able to enlarge the perimeter somewhat.
While the monitors were awaiting their ammunition in Dunkirk, the scout cruiser Foresight arrived off the coast with the destroyers Lizard, Lapwing, Crusader and Cossack, accompanied by the torpedo gunboat Hazard. Admiral Hood transferred his flag to the cruiser and ordered his crippled Amazon home for repairs. By 07:00 his flotilla opened fire on Lombartzyde. An hour later, upon Belgian request, he extended his fire inland along the German trenches as far as the Great Bamburgh Farm where apparently bridging material was being collected. Later came a signal to turn attention to an area south of Westende where one of the naval balloons had located a heavy battery. But, even at a distance of 3,600m, the German fire upon the aerial observer was so accurate that he had to descend within five minutes. The balloon was hence transported to Coxy de-Bains and sent up there, at 8 km from the enemy. There it was out of range and from this point it was able to direct the ships’ fire on a battery at Rode Poort Farm, which was soon in flames and the guns silenced.
In the evening Admiral Hood reported that the squadron had fired for eleven consecutive hours, his cruiser alone expending 1,100 shells.
The sector St-Georges/Schoorbakke along the river suffered a heavy-calibre artillery attack but the infantry assault was headed off by Belgian 75-mm field guns. The lack of heavy guns was a major impediment for the Belgian Army throughout the battle. The Belgians had only fourteen 150-mm howitzers while the Germans were pounding the defenders with 210,150 and 100-mm artillery. This was the second day in which the Germans were testing the Belgian defence to find the weak spot that would allow them to establish a bridgehead on the left bank of the river.
At 13:00 the French Military Attaché with the BEF, Colonel Huguet, wired to the Generalissimo:
British High Command informs you that the Russian Attaché in Belgium has learned, from a bona fide source, that the Germans have decided to take Calais at any price.
Behind the Belgian lines, despite the grave situation, the mood improved when the first units of the French 42nd Division promised by Foch arrived in Coxyde. Consequently, as the French Generalissimo himself paid his first visit to King Albert at 16:00, both men had no further propositions concerning the role of the Belgian Army: Joffre didn’t insist on taking the offensive; the king did not ask for any more reinforcements. Afterwards both Commanders-in-Chief reviewed, from the steps of the Furnes Town Hall, a battalion of French Chasseurs. At last the Belgians did not feel alone anymore in this clash of arms.
At General Headquarters the composition of the opposing German forces was by now well known: the new German Fourth Army, between the coast and Courtrai, was fielding eleven full-strength divisions. Of these, five or six divisions were suspected of being deployed in front of the Belgian Army between the coast and Dixmude. The German order-of-battle was as follows: The 4th Ersatz Division in front of Nieuport and the 5th and 6th Reser
ve Division between Nieuport and Keyem. The 43rd and 44th Reserve Division north of Dixmude and the 45th and 46th Reserve Division in front and south of the town. Somewhat in the rear, towards Houthulst Wood, the 52nd and 53rd Reserve Division.
With Belgian manpower reduced to the equivalent of perhaps four under-equipped and battle-weary divisions, the arrival of the French 42nd Division was a blessing and would turn the scale closer to a tactical balance.
King Albert and his advisors had always assumed that the French division would strengthen the defensive position of the Yser. Thanks to the support of British naval artillery along the coast, the Nieuport bridgehead was relatively safe from being breached. Past the village of St Georges, nevertheless, the situation was totally different: here the river followed a sinuous course exposing the troops to dangerous flanking fire in several locations. But the Belgians hoped that with the French 42nd Division any German attempt at crossing the river here would be countered. In good spirits the king returned to La Panne around 19:00: his troops had withstood all German attacks and would soon be reinforced by first-class French troops.
Half an hour after the king’s departure General Paul-François Grossetti, commander of the 42nd Infantry Division turned up unannounced at Belgian General Headquarters in Furnes. To everyone’s dismay the Frenchman informed the Belgian staff that he was under immediate French command and that his mission was to mount a coastal offensive from Nieuport towards Ostend. For the Belgians it was déjà vu once more!