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 shells 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 shell. 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 seashore, 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.