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Page 6
Because of the lack of telephone communication it was impossible to send
reinforcements to the troops that had been held up by barbed wire and
other emplacements and upon which German machine guns were pouring a
steady stream of death.
As the Twenty-third Brigade had been held up by unbroken barbed wire
northwest of Neuve Chapelle, so the Seventh Division of the Fourth Corps
was also checked in its action against the ridge of Aubers on the left
of Neuve Chapelle. Under the plan of Sir Douglas Haig the Seventh
Division was to have waited until the Eighth Division had reached Neuve
Chapelle, when it was to charge through Aubers. With the tragic mistake
that cost the Twenty-third Brigade so dearly, the plan affecting the
Seventh Division went awry. The German artillery, observing the
concentration of the Seventh Division opposite Aubers, opened a vigorous
fire upon that front. During the afternoon General Haig ordered a
charge upon the German positions. The advance was made in short rushes
in the face of a fire that seemed to blaze from an inferno. Inch by inch
the ground was drenched with British blood. At 5.30 in the afternoon the
men dug themselves in under the relentless German fire. Further advance
became impossible.
The night was one of horror. Every minute the men were under heavy
bombardment. At dawn on March 11th the dauntless British infantry rushed
from the trenches in an effort to carry Aubers, but the enemy artillery
now greatly reinforced made that task an impossible one. The trenches
occupied by the British forces were consolidated and the salient made by
the push was held by the British with bulldog tenacity.
The number of men employed in the action on the British side was
forty-eight thousand. During the early surprise of the action the loss
was slight. Had the wire in front of the Twenty-third Brigade been cut
by the artillery assigned to such action, and had the telephone system
not been destroyed the success of the thrust would have been complete.
The delay of four and a half hours between the first and second phases
of the attack caused virtually all the losses sustained by the attacking
force. The total casualties were 12,811 men of the British forces. Of
these 1,751 officers and privates were taken prisoners and 10,000
officers and men were killed and wounded.
The action continued throughout Thursday, March 11th, with little change
in the general situation. The British still held Neuve Chapelle and
their intrenchments threatened Aubers. On Friday morning, March 12th,
the Crown Prince of Bavaria made a desperate attempt under cover of a
heavy fog to recapture the village. The effort was made in
characteristic German dense formations. The Westphalian and Bavarian
troops came out of Biez Wood in waves of gray-green, only to be blown to
pieces by British guns already loaded and laid on the mark. Elsewhere
the British waited until the Germans were scarcely more than fifty paces
away when they opened with deadly rapid fire before which the German
waves melted like snow before steam. It was such slaughter as the
British had experienced when held up before Aubers. Slaughter that
staggered Germany.
So ended Neuve Chapelle, a battle in which the decision rested with the
British, a victory for which a fearful price had been paid but out of
which came a confidence that was to hearten the British nation and to
put sinews of steel into the British army for the dread days to come.
The story of Neuve Chapelle was repeated in large and in miniature many
times during the deadlock of trench warfare on the western front until
victory finally came to the Allies. During those years the western
battle front lay like a wounded snake across France and Belgium. It
writhed and twisted, now this way, now that, as one side or the other
gambled with men and shells and airplanes for some brief advantage. It
bent back in a great bulge when von Hindenburg made his famous retreat
in the winter of 1916 after the Allies had pressed heavily against the
Teutonic front upon the ghastly field of the Somme. The record is one of
great value to military strategists, to the layman it is only a
succession of artillery barrages, of gas attacks, of aerial
reconnaissances and combats.
One day grew to be very much like another in that deadlock of pythons. A
play for position here was met by a counter-thrust in another place.
German inventions were out-matched and outnumbered by those coming from
the Allied side.
Trench warfare became the daily life of the men. They learned to fight
and live in the open. The power of human adaptation to abnormal
conditions was never better exemplified than in those weary, dreary
years on the western front.
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