Dixmude Part 4

"'Oh, very well, sir.'

"And smiling to encourage his men," added the eye-witness who reported this dialogue, "he went off to a post as exposed as a glacis."

With such officers, Dixmude was better defended than if it had had a triple line of blockhouses. The men, who were worthy of their leaders, had soon grown used to the racket of the sh.e.l.ls. The damage they do is not in proportion to the noise they make, "for one can see them coming, and they are heralded by a creaking sound, as of ungreased pulleys,"[37]

wrote a Marine to his family, adding ingenuously: "All the same, anyone who wants to hear guns has only to come here." Indeed, the noise was stupendous: 420, 305, and 77 were thundering in unison. As we had no heavy artillery to reply, we had to wait patiently for the inevitable attack which follows after the ground is cleared. Then the 72-m. guns of our six groups would be able to have their say. Unfortunately on our right the ravages caused in the Belgian trenches by the storm of German artillery had made it impossible for our allies to hold their position; this being duly notified in time, the Admiral sent four of our companies to replace them. Scarcely were they installed, when the German attack began. Sure of themselves and of victory, they had adopted the close formation of their first onslaught, with machine-guns in the rear, the veterans on the two wings, the conscripts in the centre and in front, the latter with rapt, ecstatic faces, the former swelling with the pride of former victories, all united by the same patriotic ideal, marching rhythmically, and singing hymns to the national G.o.d. The majority were young men, hardly more than boys. Later, in the trenches, when the Marines fell upon them, they knelt down, clasping their hands, weeping, and begging for quarter. But here, in the excitement of the _melee_, elbow to elbow and sixteen ranks deep, they had but one colossal and ferocious soul. They were swinging along with a slightly undulating movement when the fire of our machine-guns struck them, true sons of those other barbarians who linked themselves together with chains, that they might form a solid block in death or in victory. An aroma of alcohol, ether, and murder preceded them, as it had been the breath of the blood-stained machine. Our men allowed them to approach within a hundred yards. To the shouts of _Vorwarts!_ ("Forward!") from the enemy's ranks we answered abruptly by the orders "Independent fire!

Continuous fire!" given by officers and petty officers. Behind their parapets, amidst the buzz of bullets and the bursting of shrapnel, the Marines did not miss a single shot. "We'll do for you!" yelled the gunners, catching the contagious fever of battle. The Germans came on steadily, but the ma.s.s was no longer solid. The dislocated machine was working with difficulty. It uttered its death-rattle at the foot of the trenches in the network of barbed wire where the survivors had rolled over. At 8 o'clock in the evening three blasts on a whistle, strident as a factory hooter, put an end to the work of the monstrous organism.

The battle had been raging for six hours in the night. Once more we were the victors, but at what a price! Dixmude, which the enemy's heavy artillery had battered incessantly during the attack, was not yet the "heap of pebbles and ashes," the line of blackened stones, it was presently to become, but its death agony had begun. Innumerable houses had been gutted. The entire quarter round the church was on fire. The rain, heavy as it was, could not extinguish the flames kindled by incendiary bombs. A projectile struck the belfry of Saint Nicolas at the hour of the Angelus; the great bell, mortally wounded, uttered a kind of dying groan, the vibrations of which quivered long in s.p.a.ce. "Poor Dixmude!" cried a sailor; "your pa.s.sing bell is tolling." Happily, the population was no longer on the spot. The Burgomaster had given the signal of exodus, and all had obeyed it, stricken to the heart, with the exception of the Carmelites and some dozen laggards and stubborn spirits, such as the old beadle described by M. T'Serstevens, who lived in a little gabled house with barred windows on the Grand' Place, and who, pipe in mouth, used to bring the keys of the church to visitors. He mumbled the rude Flemish dialect of the coast, and was tanned by the sea-wind. "The church, the house, the Place, the old man, were all in harmony: all embodied the unique soul of Mother Flanders," and all were destroyed at the same time; the old man was unable to disengage himself from his house, of which he seemed but a more animated stone than the rest.

[Ill.u.s.tration: (Newspaper Ill.u.s.trations)

THE PARISH CHURCH AFTER THE FIRST DAYS OF THE BOMBARDMENT]

In spite of the retreat of the enemy, the four companies of Marines had been left at their posts as a precautionary measure. An intermittent fusillade to the north of the Yser during the night suggested a renewed offensive. The only attack of any moment took place at 3 o'clock in the morning, "but we repulsed it easily," notes the Marine R., "for in our covered trenches we are invulnerable." Disappointed, the enemy turned again towards the town, which he began to bombard once more at dawn. It chanced that the weather had cleared. The _schoore_ smiled; the larks were singing; weary of lowing for their sheds, or already resigned to their forsaken condition, the cattle were ruminating in the sun[38]: and the interminable line of ca.n.a.ls, the silvery surfaces of the _watergands_, shone softly on the brown velvet of the marsh. The sky, however, as says the Psalmist, armed itself with thunders and lightnings. The bombardment became particularly violent in the afternoon. "At given moments the whole town seemed about to crumble,"

writes an officer. "The Germans had first attacked it with 10-centimetre guns, then with 15, and then with 21-centimetre; but as this was no good, they determined to finish off these infernal sailors in grand style with their 305 and 420-mm."[39] Our reserves in Dixmude were of course sorely tried by this terrible fire, which it was difficult to locate and still more difficult to silence with defective guns. To add to the complexities of the situation, we learned suddenly that at 4 o'clock the enemy had taken one of the trenches on the outskirts to the south of the town. Surprised by an attack in force, the Belgian section which occupied it gave way after a spirited resistance, involving the supporting section of Marines in their rear in their retreat. Only Lieutenant Cayrol remained at his post, revolver in hand, to enable his men to carry off the machine-guns.[40] Three companies at once crept along towards the captured trenches after our guns had cleared the approaches a little.

"We tried our hands as marksmen," writes one of the actors in this scene, "and while the Boches were trying to re-form, before they had recovered from their surprise, we fired into them at 50 metres, and then charged them with the bayonet. You should have seen them run like hares, throwing away their arms and all their equipment. What a raid it was, five to six hundred dead and wounded and forty prisoners, among them three officers! We reoccupied the trenches, and I spent the night in the company of a dead Belgian and a wounded German, who, when he woke up, exclaimed: 'Long live France!' lest we should run him through. When day came, and we could behold our work ... (Here an interval. A sh.e.l.l burst just over my head, smashed a rifle, and threw a handful of earth in my face. It was slightly unpleasant. I continue.) It was a pretty sight.

All day long stretcher-bearers were picking up the dead and wounded, while we continued to fire from time to time. All the wounded we have picked up are young men, sixteen to twenty years old, of the last levy.

"The next night there was a repet.i.tion of these experiences, only this time it was the northern trenches that failed. As always, it was the sailors who had to recapture them. For lack of available forces, we were obliged to send two companies of the 2nd Regiment, which had been set aside to act as reliefs; they put matters right by a little bayonet play."

"You might have supposed that after this dance we had claims to a turn at the buffet," writes a second quartermaster. "Not a bit of it! My company had been set aside for relief, and it carried out the relief. It would be untrue to say that we are not all a bit blown; but we are holding out all the same. We called the roll; there were some who did not answer to their names, and who will not see their mammies again....

If only we could move about a bit to stretch our legs! But we are packed together in the mud like sardines in their oil. In the morning the hurly-burly began again, first a few shrapnel, then from 12 to 1 a perfect whirlwind of sh.e.l.ls of every imaginable calibre. How they lavish their munitions, the brutes!"

This defence of the Yser was, to quote the words of Dr. L., "an eternal Penelope's web." Scarcely had it been mended, when the fabric gave way at another point. Thanks to the reinforcements the enemy had received, his pressure became more violent every day. Reduced to impotence on the flank of the defence, where the vigorous att.i.tude of our sailors deluded him into the belief that he had to deal with superior numbers, the foe pushed forward his centre. He succeeded in driving in a wedge on October 22,[41] occupying Tervaete and gaining a footing "for the first time on the left bank of the Yser."[42] The 1st Belgian Division, thrown back, but not broken, sent us word that it would attack next day, supported by our artillery. We were further to send them one or two of our reserve battalions. But the next day Dixmude and our outer trenches were so furiously bombarded that we required our total strength to resist. The Germans were evidently using their biggest calibres, 21 and perhaps 28-cm. In spite of all this, their infantry could not get into our trenches. We had a few casualties, both killed and wounded, among the latter Commander Delage, "Colonel" of the 2nd Regiment, who, when his wound was dressed, would not stay in the ambulance, but resumed his command before he was cured. But things had not been going so well with our allies at Tervaete. Checked in a first attempt, a second and more vigorous counter-attack succeeded in driving the Germans into the river or upon the other bank; but this, as the _Courrier de l'Armee Belge_ admitted, "was a transitory success, for the same evening German reinforcements renewed the attack, and carried Tervaete." Our artillery had done its best under the circ.u.mstances; but, shouted down by the clamour of the big German guns, it was not able to keep up the conversation. "We still have nothing but the little Belgian guns," wrote Second-Lieutenant M. on the morning of the 22nd. "However, we are promised two batteries of short 155-mm. and two of long 120-mm. They arrived in the course of the evening. That's all right! Now perhaps we shall be able to have a little talk with the Boches!"

But was it not already too late? Dixmude was impregnable only so long as it was not taken in the rear; and the enemy, having finally occupied the whole of the Tervaete loop, was gradually penetrating into the valley of the Yser. The last news was that he had arrived at Stuyvekenskerke. The 42nd French Infantry Division, under General Grossetti, which was to replace the 2nd Belgian Division, now reduced to a fourth of its original strength, on the Yser, had not yet had time to come up into line. At Dixmude itself the pressure was formidable; sh.e.l.ls were falling on us from every side, from Vladsloo, from Eessen, and from Clercken, whither the Germans had removed their heavy artillery. And at the same time the enemy's infantry attacked our trenches regularly at intervals of an hour, with the stubbornness of a ram b.u.t.ting at an obstacle, preceding every attack by a few big sh.e.l.ls. It looked as if they were trying to divert our attention, to prevent us from noticing what was going on down below in the hollow of the Yser, where a grey surge seemed to be seething, and where the _schoore_ appeared to be moving towards Oud Stuyvekenskerke. But the movement had not escaped the Admiral, who was watching it from Caeskerke. Whence had these troops come--from Tervaete, from Stuyvekenskerke, or elsewhere? We could not say, and it mattered little. At whatever point a breach had been made in the defences of the Middle Yser, the German tide had crept up to us: Dixmude was turned.

In this, the most critical situation in which the brigade had yet been placed, the Admiral had only his reserves and a few Belgian contingents at his disposal. To bar the way to the bridges of Dixmude, Commander Rabot, with a battalion, hurried to the support of the left wing of the front. Commander Jeanniot, with another battalion, crept up towards Oud Stuyvekenskerke, to support the Belgians, having received orders to occupy the outskirts at least. The manoeuvre was a peculiarly difficult one to carry out, under a raking fire, and with men already dropping with fatigue and peris.h.i.+ng with cold and drowsiness. But these men were sailors.

"On October 24," writes the Marine F., of the island of Sein, "we had spent a day and a night in the first line. That night we had two men killed in our trench and four wounded by a sh.e.l.l, and we were going to the rear for a little well-earned rest. Scarcely had we swallowed our coffee, when the order came to clear the decks, as we say on board s.h.i.+p, and shoulder our knapsacks. When we got nearer, the bullets began to whistle. We crawled on all fours over the exposed ground, without a shred of cover. Those who ventured to raise their heads were at once wounded, though we could see nothing of the Germans. We got so accustomed to the bullets whizzing past our ears that we lost all fear and advanced steadily."

That day, however, our worthy Marine got no further. In the thick of the firing, a bullet broke his leg, and sent him rolling over into a pool.

But as he was a Breton, with a great respect for Madame Saint Anne of Le Porzic, he made a vow that if he got off without further damage, he would give her on the day of her "pardon" a fine white marble ex-voto, with "Thanks to Saint Anne for having preserved me" engraved upon it.

All his comrades were not so fortunate, and at the close of the day the majority of the officers engaged, notably those of the second and third battalions of the 1st Regiment, were _hors de combat_. But we held the outskirts of Oud Stuyvekenskerke; Commander Jeanniot and the Belgian troops, with Commander Rabot, had succeeded, according to the Admiral's instructions, in forming a line of defence facing north, which bid defiance to the enemy's attacks. Moreover, heavy as our losses were, they were nothing as compared with those of the Germans. The following dispirited comments were found in the note-book of a German officer of the 202nd Regiment of Infantry killed at Oud Stuyvekenskerke the following day:--

"We are losing men on every hand, and our losses are out of all proportion to the results obtained. Our guns do not succeed in silencing the enemy's batteries; our infantry attacks are ineffectual: they only lead to useless butchery. Our losses must be enormous. My colonel, my major, and many other officers are dead or wounded. All our regiments are mixed up together; the enemy's merciless fire enfilades us. They have a great many _francs-tireurs_ with them."

_Francs-tireurs!_ We know what the Germans understand by this term, which merely means skilled marksmen.[43] If our sailors had not been so hitherto, the night attack which crowned this tragic day showed that they had become so. The attack was unprecedented and of unparalleled fury. Between 5 p.m. and midnight we and the Belgians had to repulse no less than fifteen attacks on the south sector of the defence, and eleven on the north and east sectors. The enemy charged with the cries of wild beasts, and for the first time our men saw the brutish face of War. The next day, as soon as the mists lifted, the battle began again along the whole line. The town was bombarded, the outer trenches, the trenches of the Yser, and, above all, the railway station at Caeskerke, where the Admiral was. He had to resign himself to a change of quarters without gaining much in the way of safety. The enemy had spies in Dixmude itself. "The houses of the Staff were spotted one after the other as soon as any change was made," writes an officer; "and every day at noon, when we were at our midday meal, we were greeted by four big sh.e.l.ls.

Scarcely had a heavy battery been in position for five minutes, when the position became untenable: a man in a tree a hundred yards off was quietly making signals."

In the north alone a certain relaxation of the enemy's pressure was noted. Abandoning the attempt to turn Dixmude by way of Oud Stuyvekenskerke, the Germans seemed anxious to push on to Pervyse and Ramscappelle, from which they were only separated by the embankment of the Nieuport railway. The Grossetti Division endeavoured to stop the way with the remnant of the Belgian divisions, and sent a battalion of the 19th Cha.s.seurs to relieve us at Oud Stuyvekenskerke. Commander Jeanniot at once went into the reserve trenches of the sector. His men were utterly worn out. The companies which had occupied the outer trenches of the defence, and which had not been relieved for four days, were not less exhausted. The enemy's fire on the Dixmude front never ceased, the town heaved and shuddered at every blast, the paving stones were dislodged, every window was shattered, houses were perpetually crumbling into heaps of rubble, and after each explosion immense spirals of black smoke rose as high as 100 metres above the craters made by the sh.e.l.ls.

"During the night of Sunday, the 25th," notes the Marine R., on duty with Commander Mauros, of the third battalion, "we were thrice obliged to evacuate the houses in which we were, as they fell in upon us."

"Dixmude is gradually crumbling away," wrote Lieutenant S. on the following day. The Carmelites had left on October 21; their monastery, where the chaplains of the brigade[44] continued to officiate imperturbably, had received three big sh.e.l.ls during the day. The belfry still held, but it had lost three of its turrets, and the charming Gothic facade of the town-hall had a great hole in the first storey. It looked like a piece of lace through which a clumsy fist had been thrust.

The enemy did not even spare our ambulances. "A chapel in the middle of the town, protected by the Red Cross (Hospital of St. John), was sh.e.l.led from end to end," says Marine F. A., of Audierne; "not a single one of the surrounding churches and belfries has been left standing."[45] The worst of it was that our forces, greatly tried in the last encounters, no longer sufficed for the exigencies of the defence. We had to be making constant appeals to the depots. The winter rains had begun, flooding the trenches. If it had not been for the heavy cloth overcoats insisted on by a far-seeing administration, the men would have died of cold. Many who through carelessness, or in the hurry of departure, had left their bags at Saint-Denis, went s.h.i.+vering on guard in cotton vests, their bare feet in ragged slippers. All their letters are full of imprecations against the horrible water that was benumbing them, diluting the clay, and encasing them in a sh.e.l.l of mud.

[Ill.u.s.tration: (Newspaper Ill.u.s.trations)

THE TOWN-HALL AND BELFRY AFTER THE FIRST DAYS OF THE BOMBARDMENT]

But their salvation was to come from this hated water.

FOOTNOTES:

[36] Cf. Dr. Caradec, _op. cit._, also the note-book and letters of Second-Lieutenant Gautier: "11 o'clock, the church on fire.... Sailors are queer creatures. Yesterday, while the church was being bombarded they exclaimed: 'Oh, the brutes! I wish I could get hold of one of them and break his jaw!' This morning we took a wounded prisoner. There was not a word of hatred, not an insult, as he pa.s.sed. Two sailors were helping him along. He said: 'Good-day. War is a terrible thing.' And our men answered. They are more French than they think."

[37] "At first the big sh.e.l.ls give one a very unpleasant sensation, but one gets used to them, and learns to guess from the whistling noise they make where they are likely to fall." (Second-Lieutenant Gautier's note-book.)

[38] "The cattle are running about on all the roads and in all the fields. No one attends to them." (Letter of the Marine E. T.) See also below, De Nanteuil.

[39] Cf. Dr. Caradec, _op. cit._

[40] The note which furnishes this information as to the heroic conduct of Lieutenant Cayrol adds: "Received a bullet in the middle of his forehead. Brought into the dressing-station by his men, where he gave an account of the incident and of the bravery of his men. He would not consent to be removed until he had been a.s.sured that his machine-guns were saved. Has come back to the front."

[41] Second-Lieutenant Gautier's note-book has the following under date of October 22: "Cannonade still lively. One of our convoys blown to pieces." The incident took place the day before, and is evidently identical with that mentioned by Second-Lieutenant X. under date of October 21: "Intensive sh.e.l.ling, a good deal of damage. De Mons and Demarquay, naval lieutenants, wounded. The church on fire. In the afternoon a German airs.h.i.+p spotted an important convoy (provisions, ambulances, munitions, etc.) on the road from Caeskerke to Oudecappelle.

The convoy was sh.e.l.led."

[42] _Courrier de l'Armee Belge._ The pressure, says this official _communique_, was very strong, had been very strong ever since the 20th.

On that day "a furious bombardment by guns of every calibre had been kept up upon the Belgian lines. A farm situated in the front of the 2nd Division was taken by the Germans, retaken by the Belgians, and again lost." On the 21st a German attack upon Schoorbakke, combined with an attack upon Dixmude, failed signally. But the Belgians were becoming worn out.

[43] R. Kimley (_op. cit._), quoting Lieutenant Hebert, offers another and perhaps a more acceptable explanation. In their dark blue overcoats and their caps with red pompons, the sailors looked strange to the Germans, who took them for _francs-tireurs_. The terror they inspired was aggravated by this idea.

[44] The Abbes Le h.e.l.loco and Pouchard. We have spoken more than once of the former, a man of great intelligence and of a self-abnegation carried, in the words of Saint Augustine, _usque ad contemptum sui_. His _confrere_ was equally devoted.

[45] "There is not a single uninjured church in the deanery," declared the Abbe Vanryckeghem, Vicaire of Dixmude. "Nearly forty churches between Nieuport and Ypres have been destroyed."

VIII. THE INUNDATION

A new actor was about to appear on the scene, a new ally, slower, but infinitely more effectual, than the best reinforcements.

Last November the _Moniteur Belge_ published a royal decree conferring the Order of Leopold upon M. Charles Louis Kogge, _garde wateringue_ of the north of Furnes, for his courageous and devoted services in the work of inundation in the Yser region.

It was, we have been told, this M. Kogge who first conceived the idea of calling the waters to our aid. A more romantic version has it that the notion was suggested to the Headquarters Staff by the singularly opportune discovery of a bundle of old revolutionary doc.u.ments bearing upon the action brought in 1795 by a Flemish farmer against his landlord "to recover damages for the loss he had suffered through the inundation of his land during the defence of Nieuport." Be this as it may, on the evening of October 25 the Belgian General Headquarters Staff informed the Admiral that it had just taken measures to inundate the left bank of the Yser between that river and the railway line from Dixmude to Nieuport.

The effects of this inundation could not, however, be felt for the first day or two, or even for those immediately following. The word inundation generally suggests to the mind the image of a torrential rush of water, a great charge of marine or fluvial cavalry which sweeps all before it.

There was nothing of the sort in this case. We were in Western Belgium, in an invertebrate country, without relief of any sort, where everything proceeds slowly and phlegmatically, even cataclysms. It is, perhaps, a pity that there is not another word in the language to describe the hydrographic operation we were about to witness; but in default of a substantive there is a verb, which surprised most readers of the _communiques_ as a neologism, but which, as a fact, has been used in Flanders from time immemorial, and has the advantage of expressing the nature of the operation most admirably. It is the verb _tendre_ (to spread or stretch). They _spread_ an inundation there as fishermen spread a net. No image could be more exact. The _spreader_, in this case, was at the locks of Nieuport. He is a head _wateringue_, commanding a dozen men armed with levers to manipulate the lifting-jacks. At high tide he had the flood-gates raised; the sea entered, forcing back the fresh water of the ca.n.a.l and its tributaries; and the sea did not run out again, for the flood-gates had been lowered.

Henceforth the fresh water which flowed on every side into the basin of the Yser will find no outlet; "without haste and without rest" it will add its contribution to that of the tide; it will gradually overflow the d.y.k.es of the collecting ca.n.a.ls, will reach the _watergands_, and cover the whole _schoore_ with its meshes. Slily, noiselessly, unceasingly, it will rise on a soil already saturated like a sponge and incapable of absorbing another drop of water. All that falls there, whether it come from the sky in the form of rain, or from the hills of Ca.s.sel in the form of torrents, will remain on the surface. There is no way of checking the inundation as long as the flood-gates are not raised. He who holds Nieuport holds the entire district by means of its locks. This explains the persistence of the Germans in their attempts to capture it.

Fortunately, these attempts were somewhat belated; they tried a surprise by the dunes of Lombaertzide and Middelkerke, which might perhaps have succeeded but for the timely co-operation of the Anglo-French fleet with the Belgian troops: the German attack was driven back by the fire of the monitors, and failed to carry the locks of Nieuport. The inundation continued. When its last meshes were woven and all its web complete, it was to spread in a semicircle on a zone of 30 kilometres, and this immense artificial lagoon, from four to five kilometres wide and from three to four feet deep, in which light squadrons and batteries might have engaged if hard pressed, but for the abrupt depressions of the _watergands_ and collecting ca.n.a.ls, forming invisible traps at every step, was to const.i.tute the most impregnable defensive front, a liquid barrier defying all attacks. Dixmude, at the extremity of this lagoon, in the blind alley here formed by the Yser, the Handzaeme Ca.n.a.l, and the railway embankment, might aptly be compared to Quiberon; like Quiberon, it would be, were its bridges destroyed, a sort of thin, low peninsula; but it is a Flemish Quiberon anch.o.r.ed upon a motionless sea, without waves and without tides, studded with tree-tops and telegraph poles, and bearing on its dead waters the drifting corpses of soldiers and animals, pointed helmets, empty cartridge-cases and food-tins.

IX. THE MURDER OF COMMANDER JEANNIOT