ECHOES OF ARMAGEDDON, 1914-1918

By the end of 1914, 90,000 officers and men of the British Expeditionary Force in France and Flanders had been listed as killed, missing and wounded...swept away at Mons, the stubborn retreat to the Marne, the advance to the Aisne and in the fury of First Ypres. Like all other British battalions, the 1st King’s had been reinforced, but even so, thirty-three officers and 814 other ranks had been listed as casualties by the latter date on that narrow bronze bar on the 1914 Star.

The remaining men of the 1st Battalion could be proud of themselves, and they were. On November 11^th, with little to sustain them beyond biscuits and rum, they and the men of other battalions in the Gheluvelt salient had helped bar the way to Ypres, less than five miles to their west. Facing them was the finest force their enemy could hurl at them, an entire division of the Prussian Guard, selected for the sole purpose of destroying them.

Rushing forward, this elite enemy formation almost reached the Royal Field Artillery’s gun line but was systematically decimated by a blizzard of shrapnel fired over open sights. Soaked to the skin, some of the King’s men would have been suffering from trench foot, and by the end of that winter, 20,000 British soldiers would be invalided because of it.

Late that night of the 11^th along the southern fringes of Polygon Wood, the 1st King’s remained exactly where they had stood at dawn. In a turnip field not more than seventy-five yards ahead of them lay a serpentine wall of dead and wounded from the shattered German 3rd Foot Guard Regiment. Exhausted, shivering and caked with mud when relieved in the rain and cold, the battalion’s survivors were still facing front, unvanquished. They had been in battle for three straight weeks.

Ypres would become not only a symbol of Britain’s stubbornness in denying this ancient city to the Germans. It would also be remembered as a shrine to the many thousands of her men and boys who had fought so gallantly to hold it at such high cost to themselves. Their misery in Flanders was intensified when King Albert of the Belgians ordered the flooding of his country from the sluice gates at Nieuport south to Dixmude even though he knew the salt water was certain to poison farmland soil for a long time. By spreading for about fifteen miles above Ypres, this vast swamp’s main benefits were to reduce the Allied front line by twenty miles while denying this saturated land to the Germans.

Elsewhere on the Western Front, General Sir Douglas Haig’s offensive at Neuve Chapelle on March 10^th, 1915, cost the BEF 13,000 casualties within just three days in return for occupying only 1,000 yards of putrid soil extending over a width of the same distance. The Germans lost no time in responding to this modest advance by launching the Second Battle of Ypres on April 22^nd and introducing to the Western Front a new tool of terror. This would have a serious effect on two members of the author’s family whose experiences highlight the devastation it could cause to those with no protection from it. 

On the morning of that warm and clear April day in Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) trenches slightly northeast of the Flemish town of St. Julien, members of four battalions reported seeing hundreds of pipes being pushed through enemy parapets. Not until 5 p.m. would their purpose be revealed when a high, pale greenish-yellow fog began to drift south to engulf a division of French Territorials and Algerians. This fog was asphyxiating chlorine gas, and the Germans had released it earlier in Poland with moderate success even though its use had been discouraged but not banned by Hague Conventions in 1899 and again in 1907. The effects of this caustic gas interfered with the bolt action on many rifles, especially the Canadians’ Ross, which had a disturbing habit of often dropping its bayonet after being fired a few times. But far worse, gas prevented lungs from absorbing oxygen, causing many seriously affected men to drown in their own sputum.

Retching, gasping and panicking, these French Colonials fled south, but none of the four Canadian battalions or the British 28^th Division to their southeast were seriously affected and held onto their positions. However, all present soon realized that hordes of Germans were pouring through a wide gap in the line vacated by the Algerian French ‘Turcos’ and were heading for St. Julien less than two miles to the south. If this enemy mass could not be stopped, the Allied front line would be separated from its supplies and allow the Germans to continue south, capture Ypres and then head for the Channel ports to cut off the British from their lifeline.