‘Reprinted from “ The ‘Doily Mail” of March 4, 1915.
THE SPLENDID STORY
OF THE
BATTLE OF YPRES.
By W ILL IRWIN.
“ The 31st of October was the decisive point of the action before Ypres; but no
one knew it then.........................The American Civil War has been called the most terrible
in modern history. In this one battle Europe lost as many men as the North lost in
the whole Civil W a r .....................Yet the real news—the news that the battle of Ypres
was decisive, on the Western front, that it may rank with Waterloo and Blenheim for
glory and for effect—that news is coming out only now, months after the event.”
A lth ou gh the battle o f Y p res has already been briefly sketched in
F ield'M arsh al Sir John F rench’s despatches, this is the first time
that the story o f the G erm an s’ vast and unsuccessful attem pt to
break through to C alais has been told in the form o f a graphic
narrative intelligible to others than m ilitary students. F rom the
pen o f M r. W ill Irwin, a w ell-k n ow n A m erican journalist w h o is
n o w in this coun try, w e are able to give to the public the first
com plete account o f a battle w hich w ill live as on e o f the greatest
in history. M r. Irwin is exceptionally w ell in form ed concerning
the events w h ich he describes b e lo w . H e is w ell k n o w n as a
contributor to “ C ollier’s W e e k ly ” and the “ Saturday E vening
P ost,” and w ill be rem em bered as the author o f the charm ing
article o n 4 4 British C a lm ” published in “ T h e D a ily M a il" o f
January 2 5 .
N a parliamentary debate held during February
the Opposition expressed a strong hope that
members of the Press might have access to the
British lines in order that the public might
know about the “ Battle of Ypres ” and the
glorious feats of British arms thereat per
formed. To many, to most, of the English this was the first news
that any part of the great, continuous battle along the French
border had been divided by anyone into battles or minor en
gagements. They knew, this British public, that there had
been great feats of arms in and about the old capital of
French Flanders; they knew that England had become dark
with mourning for the men lost in those trying days; they
knew that somehow since November Germany was a nation
besieged by land and water, a nation fighting a defensive
battle; they did not know, the cause. The confused im
mensity of this war; the^veil drawn by military censorship;
the very novelty of military science brought about by new
servants of death, such as the aeroplane, have so confused
the situation, so muddled the public mind, that even the
Copyright in U .S.A . by the “ New York Tribune.”
military experts at home have only begun to realise that a
great, decisive action, separate from the rest of the war in
its character and consequences, occurred on the line between
La Bassee and the sea in October and November of 1911.
A decisive action—perhaps the really decisive action of the
war. Indeed, when history runs a thread through the confusions and
obscurities of Armageddon, historians may call it the most vital battle
in the annals of the island people. Not Crecy nor Blenheim nor
Waterloo seems now more important. For it closed the last gap in
the combined defensive-offensive operations of the Western Allies.
It made impossible—short of an utter collapse of the Allied Armies
— any further German move on Paris or any move to take the
French in the rear. Most importantly to England, it sealed the
road to Calais, that vital, critical port within eyesight of the
English coast. Further, more English troops were engaged here
than in any previous battle of the Empire, more Germans than
in the whole Franco-Prussian War— a hundred and twenty thousand
English against six hundred thousand Germans. Yet one thinks
of the English force, and rightly, as a “ little ” army in this war
of unprecedented numbers; it seems, in its relation to the whole
picture, like one of those brigades which won immortal glory in
old wars by holding a crucial point on a battle-line.
TH E ONLY VETERAN ARM Y.
Up to that brief breathing-spell when the British Army shifted
from its position on the Aisne to its new fighting-ground on the
Western front, it had been engaged every day for seven weeks.
There had been the attack at Mons, when its force, equivalent in
numbers to two army corps, found themselves attacked by four
German corps and outflanked on the left by another. There
followed four days of a backward fight which every surviving
Tommy of the British Expeditionary Force remembers only as a
confused kind of Hell. By night they dropped on their faces to
wake to the sound of guns, to the bursting of shells, to more
marching, more action. By day the massed German lines poured