by Paul Van Pul
Geeraert, dressed in military uniform and wearing his medals. He certainly must have felt very uncomfortable at that moment!
Historical prints collection Callenaere-Dehouck.
Then came the critical moment: the five double lift doors beside the lock chamber were raised simultaneously and the ropes holding the two double flood doors were cut with axes. A dangerous manoeuvre indeed: the sudden release of tension on the severed ropes could easily have cut off someone’s feet. Brutally the heavy doors opened and the canal water began to rush seaward like a violent mountain river. This was not the time for anyone to fall in.
As Captain Commandant Borlon had asked, we suspect that this procedure was repeated a few times during the ensuing tidal cycles. Unfortunately there is no account left of the practical results of these hazardous manoeuvres. A month later in December, it seems several enemy footbridges and even larger pontoon bridges were carried off by the sucking action and ended up entangled in the gate structure or, for the ones that had passed through the lock chamber, in the downstream channel. We also do not know if the water level in the river was raised as abruptly as Captain Commandant Borlon had requested.
Perhaps the reader can imagine what could have gone wrong with such a reckless procedure:
1.
The flood doors, under enormous reverse pressure, could have separated from their hinges, opening up the river to tidal oscillations that would have weakened the levees and eventually would have flooded thousands of hectares of polder.
2.
The cables under traction and/or the impromptu tie-downs could have snapped prematurely thereby making a second attempt impossible.
3.
The unusual water pressure on the brick and hard stone structure could have forced the water to try to find an alternate route, for instance under the foundation floor, thereby making the structure unstable and perhaps blocking the free movement of doors.
4.
All these strange goings-on around the lock finally could have alerted German observers, which would have resulted in a devastating bombardment.
It was indeed a last-ditch attempt by the Belgians to stop the enemy steamroller.
After his day at General Grossetti’s side in Pervyse, Captain Commandant Prudent Nuyten returned to General Headquarters in Furnes. With the French not having surpassed the Belgians in the Tervaete Loop and having seen the situation firsthand Nuyten had only this advice for his superiors: ‘If tomorrow, twenty-fifth, all commanding officers and all staff officers do not get on the battlefield to help, by their example and their energy, to keep the troops in place we can expect the worst.’
Later that night, at General Headquarters Report, a verbal order was given in this sense to all representatives of the major units. Nuyten’s firm attitude later earned him the nickname gendarme du Grand Quartier Général. As Nuyten himself later wrote:
… given by one of these gentlemen, no doubt still ignorant about the essential importance of supervising on the spot, the execution of orders given in critical circumstances.
Simultaneously, in the Army Orders for the next day, issued at 20:00 was written:
The positions held [to the east of the railway from Nieuport to Dixmude] will be held as much as possible. One will hold, in any case and at any price, on the line of the railway Nieuport-Dixmude. [Our italics]
Earlier in the day Foch had suggested as an alternative, and in fact purely based on a line drawn on a map, to hold on to this little-known railway. It so happened that during the day Captain Commandant Nuyten had come up with a similar view but his personal knowledge of the terrain and his firsthand experience that day obviously led High Command to accept this proposal.
In the morning, and despite fierce opposition, the Germans had captured the village of St Georges, 2km east of Nieuport. Since the Belgian 14th de Ligne Regiment had suffered heavy casualties in the fighting, their commander ordered a retreat south-west, across the Great Beaverdyke Vaart. In the late afternoon the 6th de Ligne got the order to recapture the village. Lieutenant Marcel Corvilain recalls:
In the early evening two recce platoons (2nd Company/2nd Battalion/6th de Ligne) are sent to St Georges: one along the main road and one along the Yser levee. They are spotted by the enemy at the intersection (km 34) and have to retreat under heavy German rifle fire. After the reconnaissance the different platoons are sent forward for the attack. Again they are spotted but now they dig in.
The captain tells me that our artillery will bombard the western edge of the village and that afterwards we will advance. ‘If we can still do that at least’, I reply pessimistically. Bang! There goes the signal. Bang! Bang! Bang! In front of us St Georges is torn to pieces. Hendiau, with his platoon on the left side of the road gets angry and everyone starts to shoot. The captain and I have our soldiers dig in on the right side of the road.
Bullets whistle over our heads and the reinforcements that arrive dig in. When the artillery barrage stops we send patrols forward. But the Germans keep firing. At least twenty times we try to advance through the maze of smoke but twenty times we have to retreat under the hail of bullets fired at us. Then a message arrives that tells us that to our right troops are advancing along the North Vaart. When we get shot at our backs, we regroup. At 20:00h we get the order to return to the intersection with the road to Ramscappelle under cover of the 3rd and 4th battalions. At 23:00h the assault is cancelled.
With the capture of St Georges the Germans had gained a second strong foothold on the left bank. The village could now only be approached via the Bruges Road or the Yser levee. But every move on the levee could be seen for miles and a few well-positioned sharpshooters could defend the almost straight Bruges Road. Only an infantry attack behind an advancing artillery barrage could possibly dislodge the enemy from the village. But that was something the Belgian gunners could not deliver anymore.
On the Belgian right too, soon after nightfall, the Germans attacked the bridgehead of Dixmude. Four Belgian battalions and four Marine Fusiliers companies were entrenched at the town perimeter while the remainder of the French Marines held the trenches on the west bank of the river. Between Oostkerke and Caeskerke the Belgians kept two battalions of the 11th and three of the 2nd Chasseurs à pied in reserve.
That night the German 43rd Reserve Division of the 22nd Reserve Corps made twenty-six charges against the 12th de Ligne Regiment and one battalion of the 11th de Ligne. Several times the attackers reached the parapet of the trench, turning the fight into a man-to-man struggle with bayonet and rifle butt. Miraculously each time the assault could be repelled. Although three of the Belgian battalions involved had been in the trenches for over sixty-seven consecutive hours, they would only be relieved, totally worn out, two days later.
To reinforce the southern flank, Belgian High Command at 22:45 ordered the horse-drawn artillery to be at the disposal of the Fifth Army Division next morning in Oostkerke and the battalion of cyclists to prepare an alternate position for the Marine Fusiliers in the rear near Caeskerke.
Apparently on his journey back to Cassel, General Foch had taken the time to evaluate the overall situation in the north since during the night some good news arrived at Belgian General Headquarters. Foch informed the Belgians that the DAB would be reinforced, within four days, with two Senegalese battalions, sixteen cavalry regiments and two divisions.
Eventually though these French reinforcements were not all to go towards the Belgian Nieuport – Dixmude front. The Senegalese for instance were transported by car to Ypres and the cavalry regiments were being detrained in Hazebrouck. The 31st Infantry Division was also on its way to Ypres. To relieve the pressure on the Belgian front Foch had suggested to d’Urbal attacking north from Ypres in the direction of Dixmude.
To halt the Germans in the north Foch obviously only counted on his Dunkirk Fortified Place, his marines in Dixmude and the Anglo-French forces concentrated around Ypres.
NOTE
1. We assume that it was the sam
e team that worked the Spring Sluice three days earlier. Since Henry Geeraert had stayed with the detachment we suspect he was also one of them.
Chapter XI
Nieuport, a Nautical Knot
Allow us return for a while to the joys of water management in the Yser River basin. Earlier we briefly recounted the workings of the drainage system on the right bank of the river, including the narrow strip of land squeezed between the Bruges Road and the straight stretch of canalized river. As the reader will remember, originally the latter had been part of the Old Yser – renamed Nieuwendamme Creek – drainage area. South of the road/dyke known as Bruges Road lay a much larger polder with a more intricate waterway system.
For a better understanding of the next pages we should first of all emphasize that the whole region has two separate, superimposed waterway grids. The higher one is the navigation layer while below are ditches and vaarts that constitute the actual drainage basin. Over time the navigation canals per se have been embanked and their water level has been raised vis-à-vis the vaart water level.
Inland shipping along the Flanders coast connects Bruges and Ostend with Dunkirk and Ypres via Nieuport and Furnes. In both the latter several canals link up. As mentioned earlier, from the north-east comes the Bruges Canal to Nieuport. Its water level, being fed by the Scheldt river in Ghent, is independent of the other local canals. South of it is the canalized Yser with a water level of +3.25m. 1 This level can be rather unsteady since a few days of heavy rain in the catchment area can quickly overwhelm the discharge capacity of the five sluice gates adjacent the Ypres Lock at the Goose Foot.
At a site called Fintele, 31km upstream of the river, the Loo Canal branches off to the north. This canal can take any excess surface water from upstream Fintele and divert it towards Furnes. Here the Loo Canal turns north-east, changes its name to the Furnes Canal, ending in Nieuport at the Yser Mouth through the Furnes Lock. This lock has been built as a mirror view of the Ypres Lock except that it has only four sluice gates. In Furnes itself a navigation lock branches off the above canals giving access westward to Dunkirk via the Dunkirk Canal.
Since it played a role in the French floods around Dunkirk we finally mention the smaller and winding Bergen Vaart that comes from France and ends in the Dunkirk Canal near Furnes. The French used this canal, called Colme Canal in France, to flood the eastern side of the Dunkirk perimeter, along the border with Belgium. At the border crossing a small lock separated the French canal section from the Belgian side. So initially these French flooding manoeuvres did not influence the Belgian polders. But, as we will soon see, Captain Commandant Nuyten thought otherwise.
In fact these canals are part of a 200 kilometre long inter-coastal waterway connecting Calais in the west to Antwerp in the north-east. It was only in Nieuport that barges still had to transit through the tidal tail bay in order continue their journey inland. This unusual procedure at the Goose Foot was inevitable because of the need to evacuate the large amount of surface water from the different underlying drainage vaarts ending in Nieuport 2.
Major waterways
The responsibility for the maintenance of the drainage in the Furnes-Ambacht was entrusted to the Furnes North Watering 3. Today this work is still accomplished through an elaborate network of ditches, brooks and vaarts. The western part of the water drains through the Steengracht (Stone Brook) into the Koolhof Vaart. The southern part, including the eastern polders between the winding river and the railway embankment, drain into the Great Beaverdyke Vaart. There is almost no gradient and on top of it both vaarts are interconnected. Both the Koolhof and the Great Beaverdyke end up in the North Vaart at 1,000 metres from a set of eight lifting gates with the same name at the Goose Foot complex.
The lock on the Bergen Vaart near Houthem at the French border. In October 1914 this lock prevented the French inundation water from flooding the Belgian Army’s encampments behind the railway embankment.
Nieuport 1914–1918, R. Thys, 1922.
In front left, the Koolhof Viaduct under the railway and, in the back, the Koolhof Weir, at the beginning of the war. Seawater, coming from the front right was held back by the closed and heightened weir and thus pushed underneath the railway viaduct.
Nieuport 1914–1918, R. Thys, 1922.
The weir on the Great Beaverdyke Vaart was heightened during the war, not only to contain the inundation (right), but also to act as a back up in case the German artillery destroyed the North Vaart Gates and the tidal water invaded the polder. In the background Nieuport. In the foreground left Lord Athlone, colonel Macdonald and Tom Bridges. On the right the typical brick shed where, in peacetime, the stop planks would be stored.
Nieuport 1914–1918 R. Thys, 1922.
Importantly, just upstream of their confluence with the North Vaart both vaarts had an identical weir in 1914 (see map p.188). Each weir consisted of three gates provided with a double set of grooves to allow the lowering of stop planks. These weirs allowed the Water staff to adjust the water level in the polder independent from the operations at the gate structures in Nieuport. For the vigorous growth of grass, sugar beet and other agricultural commodities the water level in the polder was kept at +2.20m in summertime. In winter, with the cold and wet maritime climate, the level was lowered to +1.90m. In practice this meant that in summer, in most spots, the water in the vaarts and ditches was barely a foot or so below soil level.
It is interesting to note that the seasonal lowering of the water level normally occurred mid-October but, due to the chaotic situation, this manoeuvre had not taken place in the autumn of 1914 when the Germans crossed the Yser. This not only hampered the movements of the adversaries in the water-soaked clay soil but it would ultimately have unexpected repercussions on the flood attempt.
As an alternative and in case of emergency the surface water could also be drained through the West Vaart. This disused canal ran around the west side of Nieuport and ended in the Yser Channel through the Spanish Lock. The vaart connected to the North Water via an old culvert under the Furnes Canal. To allow for navigation by small barges in the polder itself the vaarts and brooks were accessible from the canal system through three narrow locks. Two of them were situated along the Loo Canal, one giving access to the Slopgat Vaart in the south, the second more north on the Steengracht. The third lock, identical to the other two, was located just outside Nieuport and south-east, in the levee separating the North Vaart from the Furnes Canal, almost in front of the mouth of the Great Beaverdyke Vaart. This lock was called the East Vaart Lock.
The weir on the Great Beaverdyke Vaart, this time seen from the North Vaart (opposite from the previous view). The diamond shaped designs on the shed were ventilation openings to allow the (wet) stop planks to dry. From 1915 on Belgian soldiers were issued steel ‘Adrian’ helmets as seen on the right.
Nieuport 1914–1918, R. Tkys, 1922.
To sum up one can see the Yser river and Loo and Furnes canals as a belt canal around the polder of the Furnes North Water. Since the smaller vaarts in the polder could also be used for local navigation three narrow locks connected the lower polder with the higher canal water level.
Amazingly enough in 1914 everyone in the region seemed to have forgotten – or perhaps did not want to think about it – that these three small locks could not only be used to transfer barges but also to inundate the polder. In any case, although everyone knew the polder could be inundated, no local informed the military that this could be achieved by opening these three locks. It took an engineer officer on a reconnaissance mission to discover this possibility. But to a large extent the tide had already turned by then.
In spite of the enduring artillery duels, Sunday 25 October started off rather quiet along the front line although the same could not be said about the rear. In the morning Colonel Brécard called on Belgian General Headquarters and announced to the chief of operations, Major Maglinse that the Military Governor of Dunkirk was preparing to flood the perimeter of his fortified place. The Gover
nor was taking this action upon orders from General Foch and the Governor warned that, ‘… these floods could spread onto Belgian territory and extend on a scale we are unable to determine’.
This flood with inland water had been planned for some days, as the drainage of the countryside through Dunkirk had been halted and the canals had been brought up to their maximum water level. Major Maglinse and Captain Commandant Nuyten, who happened to be present, were flabbergasted. Nuyten spontaneously retorted: ‘So, under those conditions we will have the enemy in front of us and water in our rear!’
It did not take long for Maglinse and Nuyten to grasp the seriousness of this unexpected development. It called for prompt action. Maglinse immediately ordered Nuyten to collect all available information on the drainage system of the region in order to avoid a disaster on the Belgian side of the border. By then it was around 10:00 on Sunday morning and Nuyten decided to go into the town and try to find someone with technical know-how on the Furnes North Water. Besides, Nuyten was the right man for the job: not only was he was born and raised in nearby Ypres, so he spoke the local Flemish dialect, he was also billeted with his brother-in-law, local attorney Auguste Lesaffre.
While leaving the town hall, Nuyten bumped into the acting mayor of Furnes, Mr Despot and asked him if he knew the name of some engineer from the local waterworks or the Roads & Bridges Department who could advise him about the workings of the drainage system of the polders. Mr Despot said that unfortunately, due to the hostilities, all these men had left town. Asked if there was no other person in town who would be able to provide information on this issue, the mayor named Charles Cogge, a fifty-nine year old supervisor of the Furnes North Water authority. He lived on the north side of town so Nuyten had sent for him by one of the messengers at the town hall, Désiré ‘Dies’ Vandamme, who found that he was not home. Being a Sunday, he had gone to high mass, and as usual, would only return home after having had a beer in the nearby tavern Petit-Paris. Accustom to this ritual, his wife Marie ‘Mietje’ Libbrecht, went over to the bar and had her husband called outside. When Charles showed up at the door she told him that a messenger from the town hall was waiting for him at home. Back at the house Dies told him that General Headquarters wanted him. Cogge, being a conscientious employee accompanied Dies into town. On their way there they halted at the house of water engineer Degraer, for he was supposed to come too, but he was out. Neither was he at the café Français where they dropped in next. So they both continued their walk and arrived at the town hall around 11:30.