Dixmude Part 1

Dixmude.

by Charles Le Goffic.

INTRODUCTION

Praise, they say, is stricken dumb by the greatest names, and also, we may add, by the greatest deeds. It is only by the bare simplicity of faithful narrative that we can hope not to belittle these.

But yesterday the public had no knowledge of the great, heroic things accomplished by the Brigade of Marines (_Fusiliers Marins_). They were hidden under a confused ma.s.s of notes, _communiques_, instructions and plans of operations, private letters, and newspaper articles. It has been no easy task to bring them to light--the discreet light permitted by the censors.h.i.+p. Everything seems simple and obvious to those who can look at facts in their logical order and regular sequence. The historian who has to handle new matter knows what a labour it is to introduce, or rather to re-establish, such order and sequence. History has to be written before the philosophy of history can be evolved.[1]

Our readers must not be surprised, therefore, to find here only such considerations as are in direct relation to events. We have been concerned with facts rather than with ideas. And in the result nothing will be lost hereby, for we provide materials ready for use in the establishment of that war mysticism which the sombre genius of Joseph de Maistre presaged, which Vigny showed at work in certain souls, and which is marked out as our national religion of to-morrow. It is obvious that such an immense effort, such prolonged tension, such whole-hearted sacrifice, as were demanded from the handful of men with whom we are concerned, could not have been obtained by ordinary methods. A special compact was required, a peculiar state of grace; the miracle was only possible as the outcome of a close communion, and, to use the proper word, of a true spiritual fraternity between men and officers.

True, this fraternity has been manifested in every branch of the service and on every battlefield during the course of the present struggle; but nowhere perhaps has it been so absolute as among the Marines. They had, no doubt, been well prepared. The sea is a perpetual battlefield, and a trench is hardly more of a prison than a s.h.i.+p. Community of danger soon creates community of hearts; how otherwise can we account for the fact that the most turbulent and individualist of men become the most perfectly disciplined on board s.h.i.+p? This is the case with the Bretons.

At Dixmude under the command of their own officers, retaining not only the costume, but the soul and the language of their profession, they were still sailors. Grouped with them were seamen from all our naval stations, Bayonne, Toulon, Dunkirk, etc., and the battalion of Commander de Sainte-Marie, formed at Cherbourg, even contained a fair sprinkling of natives of Les Batignolles. I had opportunities of talking to several of these "Parigots," and I should not advise anyone to speak slightingly of their officers before them, though, indeed, so few of these have survived that nine times out of ten the quip could be aimed only at a ghost. The deepest and tenderest words I heard uttered concerning Naval Lieutenant Martin des Pallieres were spoken by a Marine of the Rue des Martyrs, Georges Delaballe, who was one of his gunners in front of the cemetery the night when his machine-guns were jammed, and five hundred Germans, led by a major wearing the Red Cross armlet, threw themselves suddenly into our trenches.

"But why did you love him so?" I asked.

"I don't know.... We loved him because he was brave, and was always saying things that made us laugh, ... but above all because he loved us."

Here we have the secret of this extraordinary empire of the officers over their men, the explanation of that miracle of a four weeks'

resistance, one against six, under the most formidable tempest of sh.e.l.ls of every calibre that ever fell upon a position, in a shattered town where all the buildings were ablaze, and where, to quote the words of a _Daily Telegraph_ correspondent, it was no longer light or dark, "but only red." When the Boches murdered Commander Jeanniot, his men were half crazy. They would not have felt the death of a father more deeply. I have recently had a letter sent me written by a Breton lad, Jules Cavan, who was wounded at Dixmude. While he was in hospital at Bordeaux he was visited by relatives of Second-Lieutenant Gautier, who was killed on October 27 in the cemetery trenches.

"Dear Sir," he wrote to M. Dalche de Desplanels the following day, "you cannot imagine how your visit went to my heart.... On October 19, when my battalion took the offensive at Lannes, three kilometres from Dixmude, I was wounded by a bullet in the thigh. I dragged myself along as best I could on the battlefield, bullets falling thickly all around me. I got over about five hundred metres on the battlefield and reached the road. Just at that moment Lieutenant Gautier, who was coming towards me with a section, seeing me in the ditch, asked: 'Well, my lad, what is the matter with you?' 'Oh, Lieutenant, I am wounded in the leg, and I cannot drag myself further.' 'Here then, get on my back.' And he carried me to a house at Lannes, and said these words, which I shall never forget: 'Stay there, my lad, till they come and fetch you. I will let the motor ambulance men know.' Then he went off under the fire. Oh, the splendid fellow!"

"The splendid fellow!" Jules Cavan echoes Georges Delaballe, the Breton, the "Parigot." There is the same heartfelt ring in the words of each.

And sometimes, as I muse over these heroic shades, I ask myself which were the more admirable, officers or men. When Second-Lieutenant Gautier received orders to take the place of Lieutenant de Pallieres, buried by a sh.e.l.l in the trench of the cemetery where Lieutenant Eno had already fallen, he read his fate plainly; he said: "It's my turn." And he smiled at Death, who beckoned him. But I know of one case when, as Death seemed about to pa.s.s them by, the Marines provoked it; when, after they had used up all their cartridges and were surrounded in a barn, twelve survivors only remaining with their captain, the latter, filled with pity for them, and recognising the futility of further resistance, said to his men: "My poor fellows, you have done your duty. There is nothing for it but to surrender." Then, disobedient to their captain for the first time, they answered: "No!" To my mind nothing could show more clearly the degree of sublime exaltation and complete self-forgetfulness to which our officers had raised the _moral_ of their men. Such were the pupils these masters in heroism had formed, that often their own pupils surpa.s.sed them. There was at the Trouville Hospital a young Breton sailor called Michel Folgoas. His wound was one of the most frightful imaginable: the whole of his side was shaved off by a sh.e.l.l which killed one of his comrades in the trenches, who was standing next to him, on November 2. "I," he remarks in a letter, "was completely stunned at first. When I came to myself I walked three hundred metres before I noticed that I was wounded, and this was only when my comrades called out: 'Mon Dieu, they have carried away half your side.'" It was true.

But does he groan and lament over it? He makes a joke of it: "The Boches were so hungry that they took a beef-steak out of my side, but this won't matter, as they have left me a little."

Multiply this Michel Folgoas by 6,000, and you will have the brigade.

This inferno of Dixmude was an inferno where everyone made the best of things. And the _battues_ of rabbits, the coursing of the red German hares which were running in front of the army of invasion, the bull-fights in which our Mokos impaled some pacific Flemish bull abandoned by its owners; more dubious escapades, sternly repressed, in the underground premises of the Dixmude drink-shops; a story of two Bretons who went off on a foraging expedition and were seen coming back along the ca.n.a.l in broad daylight towing a great cask of strong beer which they had unearthed Heaven knows where at a time when the whole brigade, officers as well as men, had nothing to drink but the brackish water of the Yser--these, and a hundred other tales of the same kind, which will some day delight village audiences gathered round festal evening fires, bear witness that Jean Gouin (or Le Gwenn, John the White, as the sailors call themselves familiarly[2]), did not lose his bearings even in his worst vicissitudes.

Dixmude was an epic then, or, as M. Victor Giraud proposes, a French _geste_, but a _geste_ in which the heroism is entirely without solemnity or deliberation, where the nature of the seaman a.s.serts itself at every turn, where there are thunder, lightning, rain, mud, cold, bullets, shrapnel, high explosive sh.e.l.ls, and all the youthful gaiety of the French race.

And this epic did not come to an end at Dixmude. The brigade did not ground arms after November 10. The gaps in its ranks being filled from the depots, it was kept up to the strength of two regiments, and reaped fresh laurels. At Ypres and Saint Georges it charged the troops of Prince Ruprecht of Bavaria and the Duke of Wurtemberg in succession.

Dixmude was but one panel of the triptych: on the broken apex of the black capital of the Communiers, on the livid backgrounds of the flat country about Nieuport, twice again did the brigade inscribe its stormy silhouette.

But at Ypres and Saint Georges the sailors had the bulk of the Anglo-French forces behind them; at Dixmude up to November 4 they knew that their enterprise was a forlorn hope. And in their hands they held the fate of the two Flanders. One of the heroes of Dixmude, Naval Lieutenant Georges Hebert, said that the Fusiliers had gained more than a naval battle there. My only objection to this statement is its modesty. Dixmude was our Thermopylae in the north, as the Grand-Couronne, near Nancy, was our Thermopylae in the east; the Fusiliers were the first and the most solid element of the long triumphant defensive which will one day be known as the victory of the Yser, a victory less decisive and perhaps less brilliant than that of the Marne, but not less momentous in its consequences.

The Generalissimo is credited with a dictum which he may himself have uttered with a certain astonishment:

"You are my best infantrymen," said he to the Fusiliers.

We will close with these simple, soldierly words, more eloquent than the most brilliant harangues. The brigade will reckon them among their proudest trophies to all time.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] We may perhaps be allowed to note that _Dixmude_ appeared in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, March 1 and 15, before any other study on the subject.

[2] "When we pa.s.sed through the streets of Ghent they were full of people shouting, 'Long live the French!' I heard one person in the crowd call out, 'Long live Jean Gouin!' He must have known them well." (Letter of Fusilier F., of the island of Sein.) Le Gwenn, which has been corrupted into Gouin, is a very common name in Brittany. [Compare the current English nickname "Jack Tar."--TR.]

NOTE

The sources drawn upon in the following narrative are of various kinds: official _communiques_, French and foreign reports, etc. But the majority of our information was derived from private letters, collected by M. de Thezac, the modest and zealous founder of the _Abris du Marin_ (Seamen's Shelters), from note-books kindly lent by their owners, and from oral inquiries addressed to the survivors of Melle and Dixmude.

Whenever possible, we have let our correspondents speak for themselves.

We regret that the strictest orders have compelled us to preserve their anonymity, which, however, we hope may be merely temporary.

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION i--xv I. TOWARDS GHENT 1 II. THE BATTLE OF MELLE 11 III. RETREAT 29 IV. ON THE YSER 35 V. DIXMUDE 42 VI. THE CAPTURE OF BEERST 52 VII. THE FIRST EFFECTS OF THE BOMBARDMENT 70 VIII. THE INUNDATION 94 IX. THE MURDER OF COMMANDER JEANNIOT 99 X. IN THE TRENCHES 117 XI. THE ATTACK ON THE CHaTEAU DE WOUMEN 133 XII. THE DEATH OF DIXMUDE 142

LIST OF ILl.u.s.tRATIONS

FACING PAGE

FRENCH MARINES MARCHING OUT OF THEIR DePoT _Frontispiece_ THE FLAG OF THE BRIGADE 4 LA GRAND' PLACE, DIXMUDE 36 THE PAPEGAEI INN 42 THE BeGUINAGE AT DIXMUDE 48 THE BRIDGE AND FLOUR FACTORY 54 BELGIAN ARMOURED CAR RECONNOITRING 60 THE PARISH CHURCH AFTER THE FIRST DAYS OF THE BOMBARDMENT 76 THE TOWN-HALL AND BELFRY AFTER THE FIRST DAYS OF THE BOMBARDMENT 92 THE "KIEKENSTRAAT" (CHICKEN STREET) AFTER THE FIRST DAYS OF THE BOMBARDMENT 140 OLD HOUSES ON THE HANDZAEME Ca.n.a.l 150 THE INUNDATION. OLD MILL AND FARMS ON THE YSER 162 PLAN OF ATTACK ON DIXMUDE ON NOVEMBER 10, 1914 _page_ 165 MAP OF OPERATIONS ROUND DIXMUDE _At end of volume_

I. TOWARDS GHENT

On the morning of October 8 two troop trains pa.s.sed each other in the station of Thourout. One contained Belgian Carabiniers; the other, French Marines. They exchanged greetings from their respective lines.

The Carabiniers waved their little yellow-bound caps and cried: "Long live France!" The sailors replied by hurrahs in honour of Belgium.

"Where are you going?" asked a Belgian officer.

"To Antwerp. And you?"

"To France."

He explained that the Carabiniers were recruits from La Campine, who were being sent to our lines to finish their training.

"You'll soon get them into shape, won't you?" said a sailor to the officer. And shaking his fist at the horizon, he added: