Dixmude Part 6

[50] Here there seems to have been some confusion in the eye-witness's account. He leads us to suppose that Dr. Duguet's ambulance was in the town, and that the Germans who killed him and wounded the Abbe Le h.e.l.loco went on afterwards to the bridge with their prisoners. "As a fact," we are now told, "the affair took place between the bridge--which the head of a column had crossed by surprise, driving before them a number of Belgians, sailors, and perhaps some marauders--and the level crossing near the station of Caeskerke where the column was finally stopped. It was in this part of the street that Dr. Duguet had his dressing-station; and it was there, too, that Commander Jeanniot, whose reserve post was at Caeskerke, came out to meet the a.s.sailants. And it was the fields near the south bank of the Yser to which the column betook itself, dragging its prisoners with it, when it found the road barred." (See M. Thomas Couture's narrative at the end of this chapter.)

X. IN THE TRENCHES

Thus ended this dramatic episode, of which neither the genesis nor the results have been fully elucidated so far. Did the German troop which overran the town during the night, and of which only a portion got away to the meadows with the prisoners, consist of a battalion or a half-battalion? The fire of Captain Marcotte de Sainte-Marie's guns had laid a good many of the enemy low. "We were walking over their corpses in the street," wrote Marine H. G.[51] The next day we turned a fair number of the a.s.sailants out of the cellars where they had hidden. But the majority, aided by mysterious accomplices, certainly managed to escape.

In any case, the surprise had been a sharp lesson, showing us how necessary it was that our positions should be immediately reinforced.

The Admiral represented this to Headquarters, and two battalions of Senegalese were despatched from Loo. Meanwhile the bombardment had been resumed. It became very intense between eleven and three o'clock, and was directed mainly to the bridges of Dixmude and the trenches in the cemetery. We had some heavy casualties there, notably Lieutenant Eno[52]

and part of the seventh company of the second battalion. But the _moral_ of the men was perfectly maintained. We may cite the case of Quartermaster Leborgne, wounded in the head and taken to the dressing-station during a lull in the fighting, who escaped when he heard the cannonade resumed and came back to die at his post, or the bugler Chaupin, who, seeing the recruits arching their backs under the hail of bullets, cried, "Look at me, little ones," and drawing himself up to his full height with magnificent bravery, crossed the danger zone, carrying his comrades along in the wake of his heroism.[53] Thanks to the reconnaissances of his airmen and the spies he had in the town, the enemy's fire was surprisingly accurate. "In the s.p.a.ce of two hours, from half-past ten to half-past twelve in the morning," wrote one of the officers who commanded a much-exposed section, Second-Lieutenant T. S., "some fifty shrapnel sh.e.l.ls fell round us. At one o'clock a quarter of my men were out of action. I asked for reinforcements and provisions; we had been in the firing line for sixty hours. The Commander gave me a verbal order to fall back. I consulted my petty officers and my men.

'Shall we fall back without being relieved?' 'We can't do it, Lieutenant.' An hour later I received a written order to abandon the trench. I had to obey, after we had buried our dead and carried off our wounded. You see, dear parents, what our sailors will do: they will hold out to the last gasp. That same evening the trench was occupied by another section of the brigade."

And that same evening of October 26 this trench--or another--was again attacked, and was only saved for us by a prodigy of heroism. The enemy had advanced to within a few yards, and charged, shouting "Hurrah!" Our machine-guns were very dirty and would not work.[54] But Lieutenant Martin des Pallieres was in command of the section. It was holding the road to Woumen, between the wall of the cemetery and a trench dug on the other side in a beetroot field. Des Pallieres sprang upon the parapet.

"Boys," he cried, "we must receive these gentry with cold steel. Fix bayonets!"

And when one of the Marines, a Parisian, who had charged too vigorously, lamented the loss of his "hat-pin" (his bayonet), which he had left in a German hide, Des Pallieres replied: "Do as I do; charge with your head."[55] The next day he was killed by a sh.e.l.l.

Meanwhile the brigade had pa.s.sed under the command of General Grossetti, who had undertaken the defence of the line of the Yser as far as, and inclusive of, Dixmude (detachment of the army of Belgium under General d'Urbal). The day of the 27th pa.s.sed without an attack in force; the enemy merely bombarded us. He gave us time to breathe the following night and morning till 9 a.m. Then the hurly-burly began again. An officer of the Naval Reserve who received his baptism of fire that day, Lieutenant Alfred de la Barre de Nanteuil, grandson of General Le Flo, wrote to his family that he had been specially favoured. "It was a fine christening, plenty of sweetmeats, the whole show, bullets, shrapnel, and, above all, the famous 'saucepans' (_marmites_). Chance treated me well." In his section alone there were four killed, twelve wounded, and eleven missing. This was the prelude to a sudden attack, directed against the trenches in the cemetery, to which the enemy paid particular attention. But we knew this, and had put our steadiest troops there. The attack was again repulsed, thanks mainly to the firmness of the first musketry instructor, Le Breton, who had already been wounded on the 24th, and who took command of the company when all the officers had been put out of action.[56]

Our allies were less fortunate on the line from Dixmude to Nieuport, where the 4th Belgian Division, overwhelmed by superior numbers, had to fall back beyond Ramscappelle and Pervyse. The strategic importance of these two villages made it imperative to retake them immediately. Every available man was sent from the brigade on the evening of the 29th. This did not prevent the enemy from continuing his bombardment of Dixmude, to which this time we were able to reply very efficaciously with our heavy artillery. This secured us a fairly quiet night. Such nights were few and far between in the brigade. "We don't know what it is to sleep,"

wrote a sailor. "We haven't closed our eyes for ten days." Perhaps the enemy was as weary as our men. His sole manifestation that night was to send a few shrapnel sh.e.l.ls upon Caeskerke and the cross-roads where the Admiral had taken up his position. Perhaps, too, he was less interested in Dixmude than in Ramscappelle and Pervyse at this stage of the operations. At dawn he rushed Ramscappelle, but he was repulsed at Pervyse, which the two companies of Rabot's battalion defended with their accustomed vigour. The night before, however, the railway bridge of Dixmude had been demolished by a big sh.e.l.l.

In the brief intervals of this exhausting struggle, the eyes of the defenders were turned inquiringly on the _schoore_ of the Yser. How slowly the inundation announced by the Belgian Headquarters Staff on the 25th seemed to be spreading! The progress it had made in five days was almost imperceptible. And yet surely it was advancing now on the great level plain; the _watergands_ were overflowing; the meshes of the watery net were drawing together and encircling villages and farms. Near Ramscappelle and Pervyse it had already formed a large continuous expanse.

That day the first tactical effects of the inundation made themselves felt on our north. Ramscappelle had been retaken by the 42nd Division in a brilliant bayonet charge; the enemy had been driven back behind the embankment of the Dixmude-Nieuport railway, whence he had almost immediately retired upon the Yser: he was falling back not only before our troops, but before the insidious rising of the waters. The plan of the German General Staff was foiled. In their attempt upon Dunkirk they had not reckoned upon the intervention of the Anglo-French fleet, which prevented them from making their way along the dunes of the seash.o.r.e, nor upon the advantages offered to the defence by the inundation of the basin of the Yser. The key of the position was neither at Dixmude, Pervyse, Ramscappelle, nor Ypres, as they had supposed, but in the pocket of the head _wateringue_ in charge of the locks at Nieuport.

At this moment of the crisis a certain vacillation seemed to prevail in the councils of the enemy. The German Staff, though they had not forgotten Dixmude, were apparently casting their eyes in other directions. On the 30th and 31st they barely sent their daily ration of shrapnel and big sh.e.l.ls to our trenches in the cemetery and the houses near the bridge. It had been raining incessantly for three days; our men were standing half-way up their legs in water in the trenches. What had become of the spruce "young ladies with the red pompons" of the early days? "You should see us walk," wrote a sailor, one L., of Audierne. "We are like old fellows of seventy. I have no feeling in my poor knees and elbows." But the most severe suffering was caused by want of socks; the men could hardly stand on their naked feet, purple with cold, in their hard boots. "This is the campaign of frozen toes," says one of the sufferers. Inured to discipline and naturally fatalistic, they did not complain, and looked to their families to help them in their trouble.

"Do send me some socks. I have to go barefoot, and it is very cold,"

wrote one sailor, J. F., of Le Pa.s.sage Lauriec; and in his next letter he repeats: "I can tell you, my dear parents, that the weather is very bad here, rain and wind every day, and the cold! Sleeping in the trenches is not very easy. I have not closed my eyes for a fortnight, what with the cold and the sh.e.l.ls and bullets. Still I keep a good heart. My feet are bare in my shoes, and they are always icy cold. If you send me some socks, will you put some tobacco in with them?" Another letter is in the same strain: "Dear mother, you say my brother is still drinking, and this is very wrong of him, but that he took the socks off his own feet to send them to me. I thank him very much, for I did want them badly." The Breton drunkard can be generous!

There were lucky ones here as elsewhere. Such was H. L., who made himself some mittens with a pair of old socks found in a German trench.

Men are not very squeamish in war-time, when they have been wearing the same ragged filthy garments for a month. "You could not touch my vest with a pair of tongs, it is so dirty," wrote the same H. L. to his sister. The officers were no better off, except that they had socks.

"We never change; we never wash; we never brush our hair," wrote Alfred de Nanteuil. "I have been living in the same grime ever since I left Brest. The only things I have changed are my socks. All my ideas of hygiene are upset, for, on the whole, I have never felt so well." Some few complain of the food. "I have been three days in the trenches without enough to eat," grumbles one sailor J. L. R. But the majority declare that the tinned meat was not bad, especially when it was warmed, and that, on the whole, they got enough.[57] As for drink, with the exception of the coffee, p.r.o.nounced "famous," the unanimous verdict was that it was execrable, neither wine nor beer, only stagnant water; "and they say, besides, that the Boches have poisoned it." The men were recommended only to drink it in their coffee, well boiled. "I lived for days on bread and sugar, with a cup of coffee for an occasional treat,"

wrote Alfred de Nanteuil. "All the water in the district is polluted. So I go very well for a week without drinking anything but coffee."

Francois Alain, for one, was four days without food or drink, lying among the straw in a barn where twenty-seven of his comrades had been bayoneted. How did this nineteen-year-old conscript escape the Boches who had remained in the neighbourhood? Through a little hole he had made with his knife in one of the tiles of the roof he observed all their movements, and took note of their trenches and the emplacements of their cannon and their machine-guns; and one fine night, when there was not too much moonlight, he crawled out, killing a German officer who was reconnoitring the French positions, and got back into our lines with a cargo of precious information, a thick coating of mud, and teeth sharpened by a fast of ninety-six hours.[58] And these men, dripping with wet, with empty stomachs and burning heads, never lost heart for a moment. The same note recurs in all their letters: "In spite of this, all goes well, and we are not downhearted, especially when we can have a go at the Boches." The one thing consoles them for the other. They know the perils of the trenches, and they prefer them to the inactivity of being kept in reserve. "We have had twelve days of fighting now," wrote the Marine C., of Audierne, "and this evening, I am glad to say, we are to be in the first line, for it is better to be under fire than resting." Was this paradox or braggadocio? Not at all. They spoke as they thought. They courted danger as other men shun it.

FOOTNOTES:

[51] "Blood ran in the streets like water," said Jean Claudius still more emphatically, according to a witness. This was probably the origin of the fantastic accounts which appeared in the press at this period, most of them purely imaginary.

[52] We must quote this short pa.s.sage from the eloquent speech made at the funeral of this brave officer at Lannion by Second-Lieutenant de Cuverville, representing Admiral Berryer: "The order to mobilise found Ernest Eno at Brest, engaged in training those very battalions he was later to lead against the enemy; and no one could have been better qualified than he to give our young recruits not only professional instruction, but those lessons of manliness and patriotism which go to the heart, and make men strong and courageous. For he was himself a hero. A self-made man, he had raised himself step by step on the steep ladder of his calling. He was a true sailor. He went off with the 1st Regiment of Marines on August 13.... He fell at the head of his men under intense fire round the cemetery of Dixmude, his thigh fractured by a fragment of sh.e.l.l. He was not fated to recover from his terrible wound. He died, uniting in his last prayers to G.o.d his dear ones and his beloved Brittany, which he was to see no more." An operation had been performed on Eno on the battlefield by his fellow-citizen and friend Dr.

Taburet, one of the doctors of the brigade, who showed the most supreme contempt of danger under fire in attendance on our wounded.

[53] Dr. Caradec, _op. cit._

[54] In less critical circ.u.mstances the same accident had happened to Second-Lieutenant Gautier, and was the occasion of an amusing little scene, which might have been taken from Leonec and Gerveze's sketches of Marines: "Yesterday I was going at the Germans with machine-guns at 1,200 metres on a road from which I finally cut them off. All of a sudden the guns jammed. I yelled from my blockhouse: 'What's the matter?' 'Guns jammed.' 'Tell the gunner from me that he's an a.s.s.' The communicator, a worthy Breton fisherman, repeated gravely: 'The Lieutenant says that the gunner is an a.s.s.' The gunner was one Primat. A few days later, on November 10, in submerged Dixmude, this same Primat (the orderly of the Second-Lieutenant), who had survived his officer, used his machine-guns with such skill and coolness against a German column that he stopped it dead, mowing down three sections."

[55] This story is told by the Marine Georges Delaballe. Such was the ardour communicated by Des Pallieres to his men, that the next day a Marine and a Boche were found "lying dead one upon the other, the Marine's fingers thrust through the German's cheek, and still clutching it." A stray bullet had killed them both. What had exasperated the Marines was that the major who led the attack wore a large Red Cross armlet. Their native honesty was revolted by this constant recourse to ign.o.ble ruses, by which our enemies have dishonoured even their own heroism. Martin des Pallieres was the nephew of the Admiral who commanded the Marines in 1870. "He was a brave man, whose courage was combined with great simplicity and gaiety. He was killed by a big sh.e.l.l in the middle of the group of machine-guns he was working under a furious fire," writes a correspondent. Dr. Caradec points out that this night of October 26 was particularly tragic; and in support of this statement he quotes an incident horrible enough, indeed, from the narrative of the naval mechanician Le L.:--

"The Germans had taken some French trenches, and sh.e.l.ls were raining thickly upon us. All of a sudden some of our men were engulfed in a ma.s.s of _debris_. As one of my friends was half buried in the earth, I and another went to help him; but a sh.e.l.l fell right upon him, and I in my turn was buried up to the neck. Night was coming on fast. I spent fourteen hours of anguish in this position. Furious fighting was going on. Two friends were moaning near me. The one nearest begged me to help him, but I was held fast as in a vice, and had to look on helpless as he died. My own strength began to fail. I became unconscious a few hours after I had been buried. What made me suffer most was to see the Germans a few yards from me. I could see all they were doing, all their death-dealing preparations. During the night the Senegalese riflemen retook our lost trenches; they set to work to clear away the rubbish and found my two dead friends near me. One of the Senegalese stepped on my head. Feeling something under his feet, he bent down and saw me. They got me out and took me to the first ambulance. In a few hours I was fully conscious again. You can imagine how I rejoiced to find myself among friends. I felt like one risen from the dead."

[56] Among them was Second-Lieutenant Gautier. The following order, communicated to us by his family, was found with his papers: "Monsieur Gautier,--By superior orders, I am sending a section to relieve you, and to instruct you to go with your section near the cemetery, behind the wall or on the railway embankment, as may seem best to you and to the officer in the adjoining trenches. Des Pallieres' section, which was in the cemetery, has been annihilated, Des Pallieres himself killed and buried in the _debris_ of the trench." Second-Lieutenant Gautier was killed at 9 o'clock in the evening. "We were having our dinner in the trench," wrote Lieutenant Gamas a few days later, "when the order came for him to go to a dangerous position to replace Des Pallieres, who had just been killed there. The last words your son-in-law said to me were: 'Captain, it's my turn.' We shook hands warmly, looking affectionately at each other. The next day I heard that my poor friend was dead. He had been hit in the forehead by a German bullet at the moment when, attacked by very superior numbers with three machine-gun sections, he had put his head out in order to regulate his fire and do his duty thoroughly. He fell n.o.bly, leaving a glorious and honoured name to his wife and children."

[57] All the officers we have seen or who have written to us declare that the transport service was excellent throughout the defence, in spite of the greatest difficulties, and that the naval commissariat was irreproachable.

[58] He was decorated with the military medal by General Foch in person.

XI. THE ATTACK ON THE CHaTEAU DE WOUMEN

All Saints' Day was nearly as quiet as the preceding forty-eight hours.

We re-established our trenches, and the Admiral reorganised his regiments and transferred his headquarters to Oudecappelle. In his journal Alfred de Nanteuil, who had been with our second line from the day before, notices the truce from _marmites_, if not from shrapnel and bullets, "singing past a little like summer flies." But farms were blazing all round the vast horizon, lighting up the November night and accentuating the fact that, although the enemy's attentions had changed in form, they had put on no amenity. "One of my men," says De Nanteuil, "found the severed hand of a small child in a German's knapsack...." And at Eessen, where the _vicaire_ was a young priest of twenty-eight, the Abbe Deman, his murderers amused themselves by forcing him to dig his own grave before they shot him in the graveyard of his own church.[59]

A day later the temporary inertia of the enemy was explained. A few _marmites_ on our trenches and on the farms occupied by our supply services were not enough to deceive us. We had been aware for several days of a continuous growling in the south-west, on the Ypres road. The enemy had transferred a part of his forces towards Mercken, where he was seeking contact with our Territorials and with the British troops. It seemed a good opportunity to break the iron girdle which held us and to afford some relief to our positions. The _moral_ of our men had never been better. Rumours of a general offensive were current in the brigade, and nothing stimulates the French soldier more than the hope of an advance. On November 3 French aeroplanes pa.s.sed over Dixmude, towards the German lines, and a balloon was hanging in the sky towards the west.

"Happy omen!" wrote De Nanteuil. "We have been without such encouragements all through the long defence.... Now my spirits rise.

Everything points to an advance. The _marmites_ have disappeared, for which no one is sorry. I have been in the first line since last night.

The sun is shining; the lark is singing; the mud is drying. We are fearful to behold. Relieved by the Belgians in the night, I have to find and guide those who have to take the place of my company. On my way back, worn out, I stop a barrel of Belgian soup and have a delicious pull at it. My battalion is in reserve since last night. Pa.s.sed the night in a barn, men in the trench. To-day it has been a case of 'packs on' ever since the morning."

"Where are we off to?" said this intrepid officer to himself. "Perhaps,"

he thought, "nowhere! Anyway, the guns are raging, and this time it is our own beloved guns, which we have awaited so impatiently. I cannot hear the others; I think it is all right."

Alfred de Nanteuil was not mistaken. This time it was our 75's which led the dance. The General had decided that an attack should debouch from the town "supported by a powerful ma.s.s of artillery and having for main objective the Chateau on the road to Woumen, about a kilometre from Dixmude." The attack was to be made by four battalions of infantry of the 42nd Division, a Marine battalion under Commandant de Jonquieres acting as support, and the rest of the brigade as reserve. The whole was under the command of General Grossetti--Grossetti the invulnerable, as he had been called ever since his splendid defence of Pervyse, where he faced the sh.e.l.ls sitting on a camp-stool.

The attack began about eight o'clock by an energetic clearing of the whole position. There was, perhaps, some little hesitation in the movements which followed. The fact is that by not moving off until half-past eleven in the morning our infantry lost much of the advantage given by the artillery preparation. The enemy had had time to pull himself together. The eighth battalion of Cha.s.seurs could not debouch from the cemetery by the Woumen road until supported by the De Jonquieres battalion. Then it was checked at the end of 200 metres. At the same time the 151st Infantry had made good a similar advance on the Eessen road. That was the total gain of the day. We renewed the offensive at 3 next morning, but with no more success than the day before. The attack always lacked "go." We scarcely advanced at all, well supported as we were by our 75's, which once more showed their superiority over the German artillery. The General now determined to reinforce the attack with the whole 42nd Division and two fresh battalions of Marines. A day was taken up by preparations for the pa.s.sage of the Yser, a kilometre below Dixmude. For this purpose two flying bridges were brought down from the town. There was a thick fog, the best sort of weather for such an operation. One of the Marine battalions was directed to attack on a line parallel to the Yser. The remaining two, crossing higher up, were to make straight for the Chateau, while the 8th Cha.s.seurs were to prolong the attack to the north. Fifty guns concentrated their fire on the buildings and the ground immediately about them. But this enchanted castle, with its fouga.s.ses, its deep trenches, its lines of barbed wire, its loopholed walls, its machine-guns on every storey, and its flanking fire, gave out a sort of repelling electricity which had the effect, if not of destroying the _elan_ of our troops, at least of curiously blunting it.

The ground, seamed with watercourses, was unfavourable, and trouble brooded in the fog. In short, when night fell we were still a quarter of a mile from the Chateau; we had not even reached the park. On the Eessen side we had made no progress. Finally, the Belgians near Beerst, who were defending the north front of Dixmude, sent word that they were no longer enough to man the trenches, and the Admiral had to send to their help two companies of the De Kerros battalion from the first reserve.

This unwelcome necessity was made up for by the arrival of two long 120-mm. pieces, which were at once put in battery south of the level crossing at Caeskerke.

However, the night of November 5 was quiet all round Dixmude; but at dawn the attack was renewed. This time we had good reason to hope for success. Rising from the provisional trenches, our battalions moved simultaneously in echelon across the plain. The charge sounded, shouts of "Vive la France!" broke out, and, in spite of terrible machine-gun and rifle fire, the farm and the park were carried with a rush. Our men were at the foot of the Chateau. But there the rush was stopped.

Contrary to report, the Chateau was not taken. The internal defences had been organised in the most formidable way, perhaps even before the war began. The enemy left in our hands some hundred prisoners, who had been barricaded in the pavilion at the main gate.[60] At nightfall the order was given to retire. The De Jonquieres battalion returned to its billets. The 42nd Division went off in another direction,[61] and the brigade was again left alone at Dixmude with a handful of Senegalese and the Belgians.[62]

[Ill.u.s.tration: (Newspaper Ill.u.s.trations)

THE "KIEKENSTRAAT" (CHICKEN STREET) AFTER THE FIRST DAYS OF THE BOMBARDMENT]

"We don't budge," writes De Nanteuil on November 6. "Our reinforcements are being sent back. Visited the church and Hotel de Ville of Dixmude.

Frightful! They are nothing but shapeless ruins. There is not a whole house left. Certain quarters are destroyed down to their very foundations; they are nothing but heaps of stone and bricks.... Messina is in better case than this unhappy town."

FOOTNOTES:

[59] Declaration of the Abbe Vanryckeghem, who affirms that the _cures_ of Saint Georges, of Mannekensverke, and of Vladsloo were also executed.