World war II

After the immortal stand of Joffre at the first battle of the Marne and the sudden savage thrust at the German center which sent von Kluck and his men reeling back in retreat to the prepared defenses along the line of the Aisne, the war in the western theater resolved itself into a play for position from deep intrenchments. Occasionally would come a sudden big push by one side or the other in which artillery was massed until hub touched hub and infantry swept to glory and death in waves of gray, or blue or khaki as the case might be.

But these tremendous efforts and consequent slaughters did not change the long battle line from the Alps to the North Sea materially. Here and there a bulge would be made by the terrific pressure of men and material in some great assault like that first push of the British at Neuve Chapelle, like the German attack at Verdun or like the tremendous efforts by both sides on that bloodiest of all battlefields, the Somme.

Neuve Chapelle deserves particular mention as the test in which the British soldiers demonstrated their might in equal contest against the enemy. There had been a disposition in England as elsewhere up to that time to rate the Germans as supermen, to exalt the potency of the scientific equipment with which the German army had taken the field. When the battle of Neuve Chapelle had been fought, although its losses were heavy, there was no longer any doubt in the British nation that victory was only a question of time.

The Battle Ground Of Neuve Chapelle

The action came as a pendant to the attack by General de Langle de Cary's French army during February, 1915, at Perthes, that had been a steady relentless pressure by artillery and infantry upon a strong German position. To meet it heavy reinforcements had been shifted by the Germans from the trenches between La Bassée and Lille. The earthworks at Neuve Chapelle had been particularly depleted and only a comparatively small body of Saxons and Bavarians defended them. Opposite this body was the first British army. The German intrenchments at Neuve Chapelle surrounded and defended the highlands upon which were placed the German batteries and in their turn defended the road towards Lille, Roubaix and Turcoing.

The task assigned to Sir John French was to make an assault with only forty-eight thousand men on a comparatively narrow front. There was only one practicable method for effective preparation, and this was chosen by the British general. An artillery concentration absolutely unprecedented up to that time was employed by him. Field pieces firing at point-blank range were used to cut the barbed wire entanglements defending the enemy intrenchments, while howitzers and bombing airplanes were used to drop high explosives into the defenseless earthworks.

Sir Douglas Haig, later to become the commander-in-chief of the British forces, was in command of the first army. Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien commanded the second army. It was the first army that bore the brunt of the attack.

No engagement during the years on the western front was more sudden and surprising in its onset than that drive of the British against Neuve Chapelle. At seven o'clock on the morning of Wednesday, March 10, 1915, the British artillery was lazily engaged in lobbing over a desultory shell fire upon the German trenches. It was the usual breakfast appetizer, and nobody on the German side took any unusual notice of it. Really, however, the shelling was scientific "bracketing" of the enemy's important position. The gunners were making sure of their ranges.

THE GLORIOUS CHARGE OF THE NINTH LANCERS

An incident of the retreat from Mons to Cambrai. A German battery of eleven guns posted in a wood, had caused havoc in the British ranks. The Ninth Lancers rode straight at them, across the open, through a hail of shell from the other German batteries, cut down all the gunners, and put every gun out of action.

At 7.30 range finding ended, and with a roar that shook the earth the most destructive and withering artillery action of the war up to that time was on. Field pieces sending their shells hurtling only a few feet above the earth tore the wire emplacements of the enemy to pieces and made kindling wood of the supports. Howitzers sent high explosive shells, containing lyddite, of 15-inch, 9.2-inch and 6-inch caliber into the doomed trenches and later into the ruined village. It was eight o'clock in the morning, one-half hour after the beginning of the artillery action, that the village was bombarded. During this time British soldiers were enabled to walk about in No Man's Land behind the curtain of fire with absolute immunity. No German rifleman or machine gunner left cover. The scene on the German side of the line was like that upon the blasted surface of the moon, pock-marked with shell holes, and with no trace of human life to be seen above ground.

An eye witness describing the scene said:

"The dawn, which broke reluctantly through a veil of clouds on the morning of Wednesday, March 10, 1915, seemed as any other to the Germans behind the white and blue sandbags in their long line of trenches curving in a hemi-cycle about the battered village of Neuve Chapelle. For five months they had remained undisputed masters of the positions they had here wrested from the British in October. Ensconced in their comfortably-arranged trenches with but a thin outpost in their fire trenches, they had watched day succeed day and night succeed night without the least variation from the monotony of trench warfare, the intermittent bark of the machine guns-rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-and the perpetual rattle of rifle fire, with here and there a bomb, and now and then an exploded mine.

Illustrated London News.

CHARGING THROUGH BARBED WIRE ENTANGLEMENTS

In one sector at Givenchy, the wire had not been sufficiently smashed by the artillery preparation and the infantry attack was held up in the face of a murderous German fire.

"For weeks past the German airmen had grown strangely shy. On this Wednesday morning none were aloft to spy out the strange doings which, as dawn broke, might have been descried on the desolate roads behind the British lines.

"From ten o'clock of the preceding evening endless files of men marched silently down the roads leading towards the German positions through Laventie and Richebourg St. Vaast, poor shattered villages of the dead where months of incessant bombardment have driven away the last inhabitants and left roofless houses and rent roadways....

"Two days before, a quiet room, where Nelson's Prayer stands on the mantel-shelf, saw the ripening of the plans that sent these sturdy sons of Britain's four kingdoms marching all through the night. Sir John French met the army corps commanders and unfolded to them his plans for the offensive of the British army against the German line at Neuve Chapelle.

"The onslaught was to be a surprise. That was its essence. The Germans were to be battered with artillery, then rushed before they recovered their wits. We had thirty-six clear hours before us. Thus long, it was reckoned (with complete accuracy as afterwards appeared), must elapse before the Germans, whose line before us had been weakened, could rush up reinforcements. To ensure the enemy's being pinned down right and left of the 'great push,' an attack was to be delivered north and south of the main thrust simultaneously with the assault on Neuve Chapelle."

After describing the impatience of the British soldiers as they awaited the signal to open the attack, and the actual beginning of the engagement, the narrator continues:

"Then hell broke loose. With a mighty, hideous, screeching burst of noise, hundreds of guns spoke. The men in the front trenches were deafened by the sharp reports of the field-guns spitting out their shells at close range to cut through the Germans' barbed wire entanglements. In some cases the trajectory of these vicious missiles was so flat that they passed only a few feet above the British trenches.

"The din was continuous. An officer who had the curious idea of putting his ear to the ground said it was as though the earth were being smitten great blows with a Titan's hammer. After the first few shells had plunged screaming amid clouds of earth and dust into the German trenches, a dense pall of smoke hung over the German lines. The sickening fumes of lyddite blew back into the British trenches. In some places the troops were smothered in earth and dust or even spattered with blood from the hideous fragments of human bodies that went hurtling through the air. At one point the upper half of a German officer, his cap crammed on his head, was blown into one of our trenches.

"Words will never convey any adequate idea of the horror of those five and thirty minutes. When the hands of officers' watches pointed to five minutes past eight, whistles resounded along the British lines. At the same moment the shells began to burst farther ahead, for, by previous arrangement, the gunners, lengthening their fuses, were 'lifting' on to the village of Neuve Chapelle so as to leave the road open for our infantry to rush in and finish what the guns had begun.

"The shells were now falling thick among the houses of Neuve Chapelle, a confused mass of buildings seen reddish through the pillars of smoke and flying earth and dust. At the sound of the whistle-alas for the bugle, once the herald of victory, now banished from the fray!-our men scrambled out of the trenches and hurried higgledy-piggledy into the open. Their officers were in front. Many, wearing overcoats and carrying rifles with fixed bayonets, closely resembled their men.

BRITISH INDIAN TROOPS CHARGING THE GERMAN TRENCHES AT NEUVE CHAPELLE

Germany counted on a revolution in India, but the Indian troops proved to be among the most loyal and brilliant fighters in the Imperial forces.

"It was from the center of our attacking line that the assault was pressed home soonest. The guns had done their work well. The trenches were blown to irrecognizable pits dotted with dead. The barbed wire had been cut like so much twine. Starting from the Rue Tilleloy the Lincolns and the Berkshires were off the mark first, with orders to swerve to right and left respectively as soon as they had captured the first line of trenches, in order to let the Royal Irish Rifles and the Rifle Brigade through to the village. The Germans left alive in the trenches, half demented with fright, surrounded by a welter of dead and dying men, mostly surrendered. The Berkshires were opposed with the utmost gallantry by two German officers who had remained alone in a trench serving a machine gun. But the lads from Berkshire made their way into that trench and bayoneted the Germans where they stood, fighting to the last. The Lincolns, against desperate resistance, eventually occupied their section of the trench and then waited for the Irishmen and the Rifle Brigade to come and take the village ahead of them. Meanwhile the second Thirty-ninth Garhwalis on the right had taken their trenches with a rush and were away towards the village and the Biez Wood.

"Things had moved so fast that by the time the troops were ready to advance against the village the artillery had not finished its work. So, while the Lincolns and the Berks assembled the prisoners who were trooping out of the trenches in all directions, the infantry on whom devolved the honor of capturing the village, waited. One saw them standing out in the open, laughing and cracking jokes amid the terrific din made by the huge howitzer shells screeching overhead and bursting in the village, the rattle of machine guns all along the line, and the popping of rifles. Over to the right where the Garhwalis had been working with the bayonet, men were shouting hoarsely and wounded were groaning as the stretcher-bearers, all heedless of bullets, moved swiftly to and fro over the shell-torn ground.

"There was bloody work in the village of Neuve Chapelle. The capture of a place at the Bayonet point is generally a grim business, in which instant, unconditional surrender is the only means by which bloodshed, a deal of bloodshed, can be prevented. If there is individual resistance here and there the attacking troops cannot discriminate. They must go through, slaying as they go such as oppose them (the Germans have a monopoly of the finishing-off of wounded men), otherwise the enemy's resistance would not be broken, and the assailants would be sniped and enfiladed from hastily prepared strongholds at half a dozen different points.

CHARGING ON GERMAN TRENCHES IN GAS MASKS