1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [138]
Father Delaere had a smaller congregation in Ypres that morning when he celebrated mass in front of twelve of the Sisters at the convent, and there was no congregation at all in the church of St Jacques, for the church was a blazing inferno. As soon as seven o’clock mass was over and he had blessed and dismissed the Sisters, the priest ran through the tumbling shells to try to help.
Father Delaere.
We got into the burning houses nearby and carried out the most important pieces of furniture. With huge efforts we managed to contain the fire and saved a few houses. But many others were demolished or fell victim to the flames in the Rue de Dixmude, Rue Jansenius and in other parts of the town. The Palais de Justice went on fire too. The Grand Place, the Leete, the surroundings of the Cloth Hall and the Rue de Dixmude were like an abandoned battlefield.
Five horses, an overturned ammunition wagon, a shattered motor ambulance, clothes scattered around, a big bundle of blankets, three bodies – a soldier and two women lying spread out miserably on the stones covered with dirt beside the pavements shattered and shell-holed.
At my request my devoted assistants Cottinie and Kerrinck, accompanied by Mademoiselle, went to lift the three bodies and carried them to a back entrance of the Cloth Hall, where I went to say prayers over them under a rain of shrapnel and had them buried.
Ypres crumbled and blazed, but for every shell that fell on the town a score were falling in the salient beyond it and long before Father Delaere had finished celebrating mass two thousand men of the 10th Brigade had been wiped out as they advanced to recapture St Julien. Most of the battalions that should have advanced with them had never received the order – and those which did had such difficulty in reaching the line that, of the fifteen battalions which were meant to be in position, only five had reached the rendezvous and even those who had were slow in advancing from the startpoint in the GHQ line through two narrow gaps in the wire. Long before they were able to spread out and deploy across the fields, machine-guns and trench mortars firing from Kitchener’s Wood, from isolated farms, and from houses in St Julien, began to mow them down. The German field-guns finished the job. Their own guns stayed silent. It was full daylight. The attack had been postponed from half past three in the morning but, yet again, no news of the postponement had reached the guns. Yet again the gunners had fired the preliminary bombardment two hours before the troops began to move. All it achieved was to put the Germans on the alert and when the 10th Brigade started out the Germans were waiting. Few of the leading waves returned to tell the tale. The assault had been carried out on the direct order of the Commander-in-Chief. It was brought to Smith-Dorrien by a Staff Officer and it admitted of no discussion: ‘Every effort must be made at once to restore the situation about St Julien, or the situation of the 28th Division will be jeopardised.’
The effort had been made and most of the men who made it now lay dead or dying among the long rye grass and the newly planted crops in the fields in front of St Julien. At 9.45 a.m. General Hull wired GHQ with the news that the attack had failed. He added a strong recommendation that there should be no thought of renewing it.
The Germans did not try to press home their advantage by pushing forward. It was fortunate that they did not for there was little or nothing to stop them and it was to their credit that they ceased fire as soon as the British ground to a halt and did not interfere with stretcher-bearers moving across the open to carry in the wounded. But the