1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [141]
What I remember most is going up to the line, and Ypres was burning. I was crossing number 2 pontoon bridge across the Yser Canal, and just a bit half-right was Wipers on fire. I’ll never forget it. It was wonderful. For the moment everything was quite still, no war on so to speak. There was this town on fire with flames and smoke reflected in the waters of the canal, shimmering. It was a wonderful picture. Frightening too, but beautiful. The whole place seemed to be on fire.
Earlier that evening Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien drove from Poperinghe to Hazebrouck to confront the Commander-in-Chief at his Advanced Headquarters. He made a wide detour but for much of his journey the fires of Ypres were clearly visible, flickering in the distance, glowing red against the night sky. As Commander of the Second Army, Smith-Dorrien was deeply anxious about the situation round Ypres. He was concerned by abortive counter-attacks which, in Smith-Dorrien’s view, in the light of the failure of the French Army to fulfil bold promises, were not only costly but worthless. The catastrophe that morning had proved it, the virtual annihilation of the 10th Brigade was the last straw, the toll of casualties was frightful and they were men that could ill be spared. As his big staff car inched along congested country roads he brooded on the folly of throwing still more men into the maelstrom to no good purpose. The sight of soldiers on the march did nothing to relieve the mind of their Army Commander as he drove towards Hazebrouck. He was anxious above all to ascertain precisely how the Commander-in- Chief intended to make use of these reinforcements and to dissuade him if possible from dissipating their strength in more fruitless counter-attacks. Behind him, as he well knew, the Lahore Division, newly arrived, was already marching towards the line. The French had promised to launch another strong offensive, but Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien was not so sanguine as Sir John French that they would come up to scratch.
And the war was spreading. Early that morning a force of British, French and Australian troops had been landed on the shores of Gallipoli.
Chapter 17
Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien had not expected to receive a warm welcome and although the Commander-in-Chief received him with impeccable politeness the atmosphere cooled as their meeting progressed. The situation as seen by Sir John French from the eminence of headquarters differed greatly from the situation seen by the man on the spot, but the fact was that it was not possible from either point of view to get a clear idea of the position. Although the shrunken salient that contained them was only five miles deep and barely five miles wide hardly anyone knew where anyone else was. As one emergency succeeded the next and troops were detached from one brigade and hurried pell-mell to assist or reinforce another, or were bunched together piecemeal to make a counterattack, the very structure of command was in disarray. It was meaningless in the circumstances to refer to corps or even Brigades, and the makeshift formations could only be described by the name of the senior officer in command: Geddes’s force, Hull’s force, O’Gowan’s force. Even the Canadians now had so many ‘foreign’ troops attached that they could only be called ‘Alderson’s force’.
But it was easy for GHQ to inform a senior officer prior to an attack that a certain number of Battalions would be ‘put at his disposal’. The troops were there – somewhere – in the chaos of the salient, but they could not be marched from barracks to parade-ground as in peacetime, nor brought together as a body at some assembly point behind the lines. All telephone lines ran through Ypres and since most of them were out of action it was difficult to contact a Divisional Headquarters, let alone a Battalion Commander. The troops might be anywhere, and in the turmoil of events even a mounted man sent off to scour the ravaged salient would have little hope of finding them.