In Flanders Flooded Fields

by Paul Van Pul

  Around 16:00 Jamotte and a Captain Grégoire went by car to pick up Cogge at his home. Together they drove to Wulpen, a village between Furnes and Nieuport where General Dossin, commander of the Second Army Division, had his headquarters. Here Cogge explained the work that had to be carried out in order to strengthen the banks of the shallow West Vaart. If this were not done properly the floodwater would invade the polder west of the town.

  From there they continued to Nieuport, stopping first at the railway bridge across the Koolhof Vaart. When the water had travelled along the West Vaart and under the Furnes Canal it would have to pass for some 150m on the west side of the railway levee before it would turn to pass underneath the railway track. Here the army engineers were to build a 175m long emergency dyke, two metres high, to prevent the water from again flowing westward. In this levee would be included the existing weir on the Koolhof Vaart which in turn would have to be heightened by 1.30m. But this could be accomplished by simply inserting more stop planks in the grooves. The appropriate timbers were always kept in storage in the nearby brick shed of the waterboard.

  The plan was to continue north along the West Vaart to inspect the various ditches that drained into the old canal and that would have to be blocked. But the bombardment on Nieuport intensified and it was considered too dangerous to proceed. They agreed to return to Furnes and carry on with their investigation the next morning. By 19:30 they arrived in Furnes.

  Off the coast Admiral Hood had a nerve-racking day. There was little he could do due to the autumn storm which prevented any air reconnaissance to locate enemy targets. The enemy heavy batteries that threatened the Belgian positions along the Great Beaverdyke Vaart were too far inland for accurate targeting. Furthermore, the only objective that could be found brought the French positions at Westende and Bamburgh Farm in the line of fire. Every effort Hood made to close in to get in a better position was met by fierce fire from newly installed and well-concealed enemy artillery in the dunes. So in the end he decided to stand off. In the evening, to make matters worse, the gale forced the smaller vessels to take shelter and the monitors, who had steamed to Dunkirk to replenish ammunition, were unable to sail.

  A view, taken from the railway levee in 1991. On the extreme right in the background - see the arrow - the existing culvert under the Furnes Canal, leading to the Spanish Lock via the West Vaart. From this culvert an emergency dyke was built to the weir in the foreground to prevent the seawater from reaching the Belgian lines (to the left).

  Author’s photo archive.

  With the early morning announcement by Brécard about the impending flood around Dunkirk, one of the first tasks at General Headquarters had been to warn Baron de Broqueville who was in the city at the time. He in turn immediately sent a strong worded protest to General Foch. In it de Broqueville declared to Foch that, in such case, the Belgian Army would have to lay down its weapons and evacuate the last shred of country left, ‘… which means opening the door to Dunkirk for the enemy’.

  Foch was quick to inform Joffre of his intentions and the Belgian reaction. At 09:00 he cabled the following lengthy report:

  I ordered the flood with seawater of Dunkirk. The operation will take a maximum of two days. My decision has raised an energetic protest from the Belgian Government.

  1/The flood will extend into Belgian territory. We can, it is true, avoid this inconvenience by building a dirt levee, 4km long; but this remedy will not be solid and it will not be lasting.

  2/The inundation, even limited in height, will flood the road to Furnes, Hondschoote and les Moëres, the supply route for the Belgian Army.

  3/In case of a withdrawal, there will only be one road for the French to retreat as the Belgians are operating on the Yser (Furnes-Dunkirk road).

  In view of these serious objections and other minor ones (forced evacuation of the population, infection of the drinking-water wells), I decided to postpone the operation.

  As we are master over the exits at the coast of the canals by which we set the flood, it is perhaps not necessary to set it at present. In three days, when the Belgians will have abandoned the Yser line, we can set the flood without the enemy being able to oppose it.

  In view of these considerations, let me know if you deem this measure necessary at this moment or, on the contrary, if I am allowed to wait until the Belgian Army in retreat will have lost the Yser line, then the one on the Loo Canal on which it seems to me it can maintain itself and on which we have to try to hold it by relieving it from all concerns of its communications and supplies. (EMA: #3341)

  While Foch was still rather diplomatic about the Belgian ability to resist any further, General d’Urbal wrote a more blunt assessment. In fact, half an hour after Foch had cabled Joffre, d’Urbal wired Foch that, from now on, the DAB would be calling the shots between Nieuport and Dixmude: ‘I hope, with or without the cooperation of the Belgian Army (on which I don’t count anymore) that the reinforced Grossetti Division …, today will hold the line Nieuport-Dixmude.’ (EMA: #3350)

  In the rear of the army, along the Loo Canal, the pontoneers had been working the whole day to fortify the field works in front of the canal crossings. The Second Cavalry Division in particularly had been organizing the village of Loo and the brigade commanders of the First Cavalry had been reconnoitring the bridgeheads at Oeren and Steenkerke.

  Another view of the (new) Koolhof Vaart Weir and shed in 1991 with the weir to the right and the rebuilt railway viaduct to the left. In 1914 the emergency dyke ran from the weir to the culvert (left out of view). This forced the seawater under the railway towards the inundation. The new weir and shed have since disappeared again to make way for a holding pond.

  Author’s photo archive.

  A peaceful view of the road from Caeskerke to Dixmude during the war. Notice the Decauville (narrow-gauge) railway on the left of the cobblestone road.

  Ons Land, Magazine, 1919.

  While deliberations went on in the town hall, the queen was visiting the wounded in Furnes. With the Germans being firmly established on the left bank of the Yser it was decided by the medical staff to evacuate the wounded by train to the next village, Adinkerke, four kilometres west. In all, there were over 9,000 casualties. The operation was a nightmare for the victims and the stretcher-bearers. That night the queen wrote in her diary that many wounded died during transport.

  Closer to the front line the situation was even more harrowing: it was estimated that 1,000 men were being treated in pitiful conditions in poorly improvised dressing stations, or had died between Furnes and the battlefield. And nobody could even guess the number of dead and wounded still on the battlefield and the men missing-in-action.

  It was a terrifying and emotional sight: thousands of poor souls were now within three kilometres of the border of their country. What was to come next?

  At night Colonel Brécard sent in his daily report to the Generalissimo. He acknowledged that along the whole Yser front the various troops had held their positions but that the Belgians were exhausted. Nevertheless he wired, they would try to set a flood between the Yser and the railway.

  Although during the day a south-westerly storm had been battering the men in the muddy foxholes, the German infantry had relaxed its pressure. By 20:00 the enemy made a surprise assault on the outskirts of Dixmude. The vigilance of the defenders made sure that the attackers were repulsed. Shortly after midnight the Germans tried again. Taking advantage of the moonless night caused by the heavy overcast skies, the thunder of the shelling and the raging fires, a few hundred Germans succeeded in penetrating the town. First they reached the Town Square, then the riverbank. But here an alert machine gunner got them in his sights. While one enemy column fled back in town, the other pushed on across the river and further along the main road, getting as far as the railway crossing in front of Caeskerke. By daybreak it was all over: they were all killed or apprehended in the fields south of the road.

  NOTES

  1. For experts only: All wate
r levels in this book are measured against ‘zero Z’, the Public Works Levelling made between 1840 and 1848. To compare them with the modern ‘zero D’ (Second General Levelling) one must subtract 0.1065m (roughly 10 cm). One should also be cautioned that all the water levels mentioned are as used in the early twentieth century and are not necessarily the same as today.

  2. In the 1980s a lock was built in the Nieuwendamme Polder connecting the canalized Yser with the Bruges Canal, thus bypassing the Goose Foot complex.

  3. Maintenance of dykes, waterways and related structures in the Flemish polders was entrusted to local polder-boards, called watering (-boards).

  4. Moer [moór]: Dutch word for marshy ground, peat bog.

  5. To set an inundation for defensive purposes the military in previous centuries had always preferred to use inland water over seawater as it was deemed less damaging to the soil and thus to agriculture.

  Chapter XII

  The Impending Collapse

  Monday morning the weather was still as bad as the previous day. The endless rain showers had let up but the wind had shifted to the west-north-west and was now blowing at a stiff, stormy pace.

  At 06:00 Charles Cogge was ready again. Together with Captain Commandant Jamotte, Cogge was driven towards Dixmude for an inspection of the various underpasses. Due to the heavy traffic on the narrow, wet, cobbled roads behind the front line their itinerary took them on a zigzag pattern throughout the polder (see map).

  At some point the German bombardment was becoming so intense they had to make a detour to reach the Bertegat Vaart between Caeskerke and Dixmude. This six metres wide canal had to be blocked, under the railway levee, together with some smaller culverts in the vicinity. From there they drove back north on the main road towards Pervyse. One kilometre before reaching Pervyse they took a side road and crossed the Reigersvliet Brook. Then it was walking again for a few hundred metres towards the railway and the Great Beaverdyke Vaart crossing. This underpass was even bigger, almost eight metres wide. But now they were very close to the German lines. Heavy shelling forced them to return hastily to the car. But Cogge was undeterred.

  Shortly after the war Charles himself recounted his story in his own vivid language:

  Monday morning we left early to check on the preparations. We drove to Schewege, not far from Dixmude, and then walked on foot through the fields towards the railway. Our soldiers were on guard in that spot and there were Frenchmen at the Old Proostdyke. We reviewed the work being done at the Great Beaverdyke Vaart and, since I got that far anyway, I wanted to check up on Mrs Allewaerts homestead nearby since she herself lived in Furnes. She was going to leave and I had agreed to watch her house. They had told us that her homestead had been set on fire already by the bombing and I wanted to see for myself if it was true. And indeed, I peeked over the levee and saw that the farm had gone.

  The French soldiers looked at me but the officers who accompanied me told me they had nothing to do with me. Shortly afterward the Germans started to bombard ferociously and like that we were in the middle of a hail of steel and lead. The officers retreated quickly but I was short of breath and could not move that quickly. So I inched back towards the Reigers Brook.

  Jamotte/Cogge recce

  Out there stood six guns apparently without ammo because they were not firing.

  ‘You are retreating slowly, old man’ the gunners said. ‘You’re lucky they didn’t mow you down.’

  ‘Bah, bah!’ I replied. ‘there’s more room around me than on me so it would be pure luck if one of those hummers struck my head.’

  But then all of a sudden I heard one of those loud whistling sounds so I quickly ducked down behind a small stable. There were all these manure heaps around us and see … zut, bourn, bang, all these heaps flew up in the air and the manure was spread out around the field in a flash, quicker than the farmer could have done it.

  ‘What do you say, old man?’ shouted the gunners. ‘Be happy you got here, eh?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but what can we do? We’re in the thick of it and we have to get through somehow.’

  The officers had run south and they winked at me.

  ‘Are you going there?’ the soldiers asked, ‘it’s dangerous you know.’

  ‘I have to.’ I replied.

  ‘But you’re too old to run like that.’

  ‘I won’t run for sure, I’ll take it easy. I won’t die before my time has come.’

  Lieutenant General Emile-Jean-Henri Dossin, commander of the Second Army Division. In 1914 his divisional headquarters was located in the village of Wulpen, 5km south-west of Nieuport.

  Guldenboek der Vuurkaart, 1937.

  Because the enemy was so near, they had to take another long way about to reach the Venepe Vaart underpass near the Boitshoucke railway stop. But they did not get that far. The First and Second Army Divisions in this spot were pulling back from the Great Beaverdyke Vaart and the fighting was too intense to come near. At the farmstead of the burgomaster of Boitshoucke, Cogge explained to Jamotte what had to be done at the underpass of the Venepe Vaart and further north at the Ramscappelle Brook and the other, smaller culverts.

  The exhausted soldiers that laboured to close the various underpasses used the most diverse material they could find nearby: at the Venepe Vaart for example the soldiers had only wheat sheaves from a nearby field to dam the waterway. They had to wade – at times waist-deep – through the brown water and at every bridge they were always within a few hundred metres of the enemy. The sappers had one small consolation: there was no current in the waterways. The reason for this was simple: with the lock personnel in Nieuport gone all the gates were closed and no run-off water was evacuated to sea. The drawback of course was that, with the abundant rains of the previous days, the water level in the polder had risen sharply. But this in turn would be an advantage once the gates in Nieuport were opened to start the flood.

  After their exploration the two men drove back west to Wulpen to meet General Dossin and by 11:30 they were back in Furnes. Apparently Charles Cogge had enjoyed his excursion with Jamotte. This is what he recalled after the war about the time when he got out of the car on the Market Square in Furnes:

  At once some gentlemen were gathering around me, burgomaster Despot, Mr Pil and others and they asked how it was. I told them: ‘Gentlemen, I won’t deceive you, it’s bad, but there are people of good will that have launched another attack and we will have to wait how this turns out.’

  This news surely made the rounds in the well-to-do households in town since by the time evening rolled around quite a few of them had already left for France.

  The Venepe Vaart, two kilometres south of Ramscappelle, seen from the railway embankment towards the ‘own’ lines. Notice the bridge of the road Ramscappelle-Pervyse in the background.

  Nieuport 1914–1918, R. Thys, 1922.

  Afterwards Charles was introduced to Jamotte’s deputy, Captain Robert Thys. He was the officer who would be in charge of the actual opening of the Spanish Lock and the flood in front of the railway levee.

  Robert Thys was born in 1884 in Schaerbeek, a suburb of Brussels. From the first day on Robert was immersed in that special atmosphere that reigned in higher intellectual circles all over Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century: the drive for the exploration of the still uncharted territory of the ‘dark’ continent of Africa.

  His father, Albert Thys was a career officer who, after his outstanding studies at the Royal Military Academy in Brussels, had been among the few young men who had convinced King Leopold II to launch several expeditions from the mouth of the Congo River upstream into the interior to explore the possibilities and riches of this vast expanse of tropical forests. Albert Thys, not only a bright officer but also a man with a keen eye for business, soon headed a group of companies he had founded to deal in lumber, rubber, ivory and other tropical products. But in the humid heartland of Africa it was one thing to harvest a crop, it was a far greater problem to transport it
to the Atlantic for shipment to Europe. All would go rather well along the Congo River down to Leopoldville-Kinshasa but then, for some 350km, the mighty Congo rumbled and tumbled through the Crystal Mountains which effectively prohibited any shipping on the last stretch towards the wide mouth of the river. Realizing the strategic importance of this broken link, fascinated by the challenge and enticed by the major business opportunities it would generate, father Thys retained royal assent to build a railway from Matadi, the seaport on the Congo to Leopoldville, as such bypassing this unnavigable section of the river.

  By the time young Robert was in his teens his father’s business activities in the Congo had boomed and other railway projects were on the drawing board. Besides his civilian career Albert Thys had in the mean time become a colonel in the Belgian Army and an orderly officer of the king himself. It seemed more than logical that the son would follow in his father’s footsteps.

  For almost four years engineer Captain Robert Thys led the Sappers-Marines Company, a specialized unit dedicated to maintaining the inundation in the Belgian sector. Most officers of the company were already experienced civil engineers or young university professors before the war.

  Thys family archive.

  So at the age of seventeen Robert entered the Royal Military Academy and in 1905, barely twenty-one, he was assigned to the Engineers’ Regiment. Four years later though, he resigned from active duty and after studying electricity at the Montefiore College in Liège, he joined his father’s business conglomerate as an electrical engineer.