Apart from the effort to outflank, neither side could therefore have any definite plan, and neither was able to choose the scene of conflict. Two years later, when they withdrew to the Hindenburg lines, the Germans admitted freely enough that the earlier line had been none of their choice, and it was certainly none of ours. It was, in fact, imposed upon both the combatants by that same balance of forces which eventually also imposed upon them, against their will, the deadlock in the West. On 19 October Sir John French was still hoping that Haig could outflank the Germans at Ghent, and the presence of the Kaiser on the coast a few days later suggests that his generals still cherished the idea of an outmarch rather than a break-through. It was the British Navy that put the final check on that design, and accident played its part. Three Brazilian monitors of shallow draught but heavy armament had been purchased by the Admiralty in August: they could work inshore even along the shallow waters of the Belgian coast which precluded counter-attack by submarines, and from 18 to 28 October their guns swept the Belgian shore for six miles inland and repelled the onslaught of the German right on Nieuport. Haig's outflanking project had been rendered equally impossible by the strength of the German resistance to Rawlinson's move on Menin, and by the 21st both sides had been pinned down to a ding-dong soldiers' battle all along the front. Its chronology is as important as its localities, and it is hard to follow the course of the struggle if the narrative loses itself in the different threads of the various corps engaged. For all were fighting at the same time, and the only generalizations possible are that the struggle tended to concentrate from both wings towards the apex at Ypres and to culminate in the combat of the last day of the month.