Battle of Neuve Chapelle

“ The Hindu warrior believes that to die in battle is to win at once a coveted eternity in Erewohne. He does not wish to be merely wounded, he desires death in fight rather than immunity from injury. He does not evade danger; rather he seeks it.
Shortly after this, at the great battle of Neuve Chapelle, where the British took over five miles of trenches and four miles of front from the enemy, the Hindu troops distinguished themselves in magnificent charges. ”

“ Still, it would be wrong to class Neuve Chapelle among British defeats. The troops were undoubtedly encouraged by seeing that German positions could be stormed and the captured ground held against powerful counter-attacks. Nearly 1,700 prisoners had been taken and the German losses had exceeded the British. Rifles, artillery and machine-guns had found splendid targets, and the German battalions who had shown themselves in the open had been shot down in masses. It was felt that another attack in which the lessons of the battle could be turned to good effect might lead to far-reaching results. ”

“ The moral of the battle, brought home to every man that took part in it, was that the ultimate victory in this war will lie with the nation that best organizes itself to provide its armies with the sinews of war. If at Neuve Chapelle we bitterly felt our shortage of shells, at Ypres we realized even more intensely the enormous advantage which the enemy’s superiority in artillery and high-explosive ammunition gave him. ”

“ The two British offensives at Neuve Chapelle had included a small proportion of the battalions which were to fight on the Somme; and the third, incomparably more ambitious, faced heavier concentration of troops and guns than its predecessors.
What had not been gained in battle practice must be approximated in drill. Every battalion commander, every staff officer and every general who had had any experience, must be instructor as well as director. They must assemble their machine and tune it up before they put it on a stiffer road than had been tried before. ”

“ Neuve Chapelle began fairly early, and it is no exaggeration to say that when the immense number of guns began crashing it was hell let loose. The very earth shook, and no part of the country where we were seemed to escape from the shattering effects of the shells of every sort which were bursting all around us, a great many of them in the air. Some shells fell into the reserve trenches, and many of our fellows were hit. ”

“ That night further German reinforcements arrived. They were Saxons and Bavarians, mainly from Tourcoing. Before dawn on March 12 the German artillery opened upon Neuve Chapelle. Then in the dim light of breaking day two immense grey columns of German infantry were seen coming out of the woods towards Neuve Chapelle, one on the north-east, the other on the south-east. What is more they came on in mass formation. The British trenches, needless to say, had as usual been made as nearly as possible invisible. ”

“ For years we had been taught that an army that relinquishes the offensive acknowledges itself as beaten. It now began to look as though military science had undergone a complete revolution and that trench warfare and the policy of attrition were to be the normal methods of the future.
But Neuve Chapelle showed something else—it showed that the indomitable spirit of our men had not been quenched by the misery and suffering of the winter months and that the British bayonet was as much to be feared as ever. ”

“ It was safer to relieve by daylight rather than by night, as darkness brought bursts of sudden rifle and machine-gun fire, despatched at a venture from behind the five-deep line of German chevaux-de-frise not seventy yards away. Tempting openings, too, were left in the wire to invite attack, but the bait was not taken. Neuve Chapelle had been a failure except in so far as it had shown the enemy that winter had not dulled any of our arms, and it was recognized we must continue to sit still till men and material should accumulate behind us. ”

“ In the months that followed, Britain had to build up an army commensurate with the task she had assumed. For every soldier of the pre-war army she had to find about ten, and her generals had to teach the new armies their business. The action of Neuve Chapelle showed the British army making its début in one of those carefully-planned limited attacks against entrenched positions which have been developed, with growing experience, out of all recognition. Loos was a more ambitious venture. In it there appeared volunteer troops to astound seasoned veterans by their dash and discipline. ”

“ By twelve o'clock the whole position, trenches, village, and detached houses, had been carried, while the artillery had lengthened its range and rained shrapnel upon the ground over which reinforcements must advance. The Rifles of the 25th Brigade and the 3rd Gurkhas of the Indians were the first troops in Neuve Chapelle.
It is not to be imagined that the powerful guns of the enemy had acquiesced tamely in these rapid developments. ”

“ As has already been told, the Second Royal Berkshires and the Second Lincolns took the first line of trenches in front of them, and opened the middle of their line to permit the Second Rifle Brigade and the First Irish Rifles to dash on to the village. The British artillery range was lengthened, thereby preventing the German supports from interference with the well-defined plan of the British. Into the wrecked streets of Neuve Chapelle swung two battalions of the Twenty-fifth Brigade. The few of their enemy who (p. 085) offered resistance were soon overpowered—being captured or slain. ”

“ As soon as the wounded men from Neuve Chapelle arrived in Great Britain, budgets of personal experiences began to appear in the newspapers. All the men dwelt upon the terrible effects of our artillery and the splendid spirit shown by our troops, not only while under fire, but when stricken down. ”

“ General Sir John French's Own Story The Costly Victory of Neuve Chapelle
LONDON, April 14.—Field Marshal Sir John French, commander of the British expeditionary forces on the Continent, reports the British losses in the three days' fighting at Neuve Chapelle last month, as follows: Killed, 190 officers, 2,337 men; wounded, 359 officers, 8,174 other ranks; missing, 23 officers, 1,728 men; total casualties, 12,811. The report continues:
The enemy left several thousand dead on the field, and we have positive information that upward of 12,000 wounded were removed by trains. ”

“ These determined efforts were not spent in vain, for the Germans would not bide the other brunt. Early on the 29th the British patrols found that Neuve Chapelle had been evacuated by the enemy, who must have lost several thousand men in its capture and fine subsequent defence. In this village fighting the British were much handicapped at this time by the want of high explosive shells to destroy the houses. The enemy's artillery made it impossible for the British to occupy it, and some time later it reverted to the Germans once more, being occupied by the Seventh Westphalian Corps. ”

“ Captain Sir Edward Hulse, hero of a night raid at Fromelles, lies buried by the wayside, and he died at Neuve Chapelle. As for German dead, there is a strange absence of graves, but beyond Neuve Chapelle is a field of outrageous thistles and broad-bladed rotting crosses, some down, some standing, all with faded inscriptions, but the thistles are so thick and high one might easily pass by without observing an old graveyard of our dread enemy. ”

“ They had been fighting and fighting and fighting until their nerves were nothing but a jangling torture. And a counter-attack on Neuve Chapelle was being organised. Huggie told me afterwards that when the car had come along the road, all the men had jumped like startled animals and a few had turned to take cover. Why, if a child had met one of these men she would have taken him by the hand instinctively and told him not to be frightened, and defended him against anything that came.
First we talked about the counter-attack, and which battalion would lead ”

“ To-day, as I write this, General Foch's army in the North and the British are bearing the brunt of another great attack at Ypres. [E] The British have made a gain at Neuve Chapelle, and the Germans have retaliated by striking at their line, some miles farther north. If they break through it will be toward Calais and the sea. Every offensive movement in this new warfare of trench and artillery requires a concentration of reserves. To make their offensive movement the British have concentrated at Neuve Chapelle. ”

“ The advent of a fresh unit made confusion the worse confounded. The trenches which afforded little shelter were filled with men, and the enemy was using his artillery freely. Machine guns in profusion were disgorging their several streams of bullets. Communication trenches had been blotted out. Despite the lessons of Neuve Chapelle there was no effective liaison between artillery and infantry as the telephone wires were soon cut, and as a consequence the inferno was intensified by the short firing of the British artillery, a battery of 6-inch howitzers being the chief offender. ”

“ They all had to face the new and most infamous methods of fighting introduced by the Germans, clouds of asphyxiating gas and sheets of liquid fire, the opening, literally, of "the mouth of hell" in warfare. But these horrors were encountered and overcome by the Irish battalions with the same valour as had previously rendered vain the more legitimate weapons and methods of the enemy.
[48] Neuve Chapelle is a rural village, with many enclosed gardens and orchards, four miles to the north of La Bassée, and on the road between Bethune and Armentières. ”

“ Shortly after the arrival of the Canadian division the British, concentrating the largest number of guns that had hitherto been gathered together on the French front, made an attack on the Germans at Neuve Chapelle. This attack, only partially successful in gains of terrain, served to teach both belligerents several lessons. It showed the British the need for huge quantities of high explosives with which to blast away wire and trenches and, that in an attack, rifle fire, no matter how accurate, was no match for unlimited numbers of machine guns. ”

“ The entire moral effect was a gain for the British; but even that and the gain in advancing the front had been obtained at a too great sacrifice of the life of their men. The words of the Germans in characterizing the tremendous bombardment of the British were: "That is not war; it is murder."
The belief in the supposed superiority of the German artillery was so shaken in the minds of the General Staff as a result Page 1292 of the fighting on the Neuve Chapelle front that they shortly after issued an order to try a series of experiments on animals with asphyxiating gases. ”

“ Early in the spring the British forces gained a notable victory at Neuve Chapelle in the western theater of war. Then the German forces in Flanders were heavily reinforced until it was estimated that they numbered not less than half a million men, gathered for the purpose of smashing the line of the Allies at the strategic point where the British and the Belgian troops were in touch with one another. Here, for three days, the Germans succeeded in pushing forward, driving a wedge for several miles into the line of the allied armies of England, France and Belgium. ”

“ YPRES
I remained in this spot with the guns until March, when the costly victory of Neuve Chapelle was fought. My battery was playing on their northern flank. The objective of the British Tommies was the city, which they took, but at a terrible toll; 6,000 Indian troops, mostly Ghurkas, were slain. The fearful mortality exacted from these troops was due to their impetuosity; they do not know fear; it was impossible to hold them; they rushed out before their time and some of them suffered from the fire of our own guns. ”

“ In the great fighting around Loos at the end of September, when the French and the British between them fired 65,000,000 shells in seventy-two hours, there was no shortage of the wherewithal, the lack of which turned Neuve Chapelle into a "victory" which Britain had been better without. A prodigious amount of high explosive was necessary to wreck the Germans' first defensive lines in Artois, but still the supply was not exhausted. ”

“ North of Neuve Chapelle the Indian Corps, supported on the left by the 2oth Div., was to assault the German salient at Mauquissart, the legacy of the Neuve Chapelle fighting. Further N. again the 8th Div. was to attack at Bridoux, while the principal diversion was that to be undertaken against Hooge and the Bellewaarde ridge on the Ypres front by the 3rd and i4th Divisions. These attacks were more than mere raids; they all aimed at definite tactical improvements in the local situations, but their primary object was to
prevent the transfer of reserves to the main point of attack. ”

“ March 9—Floods hamper campaign in Alsace; it is reported that Germans are shelling factories in France which they cannot capture.
March 10—Germans declare that the French have failed in the Champagne district and have lost 45,000 men.
March 11—After several days of severe fighting the British capture Neuve Chapelle, the German loss being estimated by British at 18,000; the British also have lost heavily, particularly in officers; British believe they will now be able to threaten seriously the German position at La Bassée ”