Sir Douglas Haig, later to become the commander-in-chief of the British forces, was in command of the first army. Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien commanded the second army. It was the first army that bore the brunt of the attack. [Illustration: THE GLORIOUS CHARGE OF THE NINTH LANCERS An incident of the retreat from Mons to Cambrai. A German battery of eleven guns posted in a wood had caused havoc in the British ranks. The Ninth Lancers rode straight at them, across the open, through a hail of shell from the other German batteries, cut down all the gunners, and put every gun out of action.] No engagement during the years on the western front was more sudden and surprising in its onset than that drive of the British against Neuve Chapelle. At seven o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, March 10, 1915, the British artillery was lazily engaged in lobbing over a desultory shell fire upon the German trenches. It was the usual breakfast appetizer, and nobody on the German side took any unusual notice of it. Really, however, the shelling was scientific “bracketing” of the enemy’s important position. The gunners were making sure of their ranges. At 7.30 range finding ended, and with a roar that shook the earth the most destructive and withering artillery action of the war up to that time was on. Field pieces sending their shells hurtling only a few feet above the earth tore the wire emplacements of the enemy to pieces and made kindling wood of the supports. Howitzers sent high explosive shells, containing lyddite, of 15-inch, 9.2-inch and 6-inch caliber into the doomed trenches and later into the ruined village. It was eight o’clock in the morning, one-half hour after the beginning of the artillery action, that the village was bombarded. During this time British soldiers were enabled to walk about in No Man’s Land behind the curtain of fire with absolute immunity. No German rifleman or machine gunner left cover. The scene on the German side of the line was like that upon the blasted surface of the moon, pock-marked with shell holes, and with no trace of human life to be seen above ground. An eye-witness describing the scene said: “The dawn, which broke reluctantly through a veil of clouds on the morning of Wednesday, March 10, 1915, seemed as any other to the Germans behind the white and blue sandbags in their long line of trenches curving in a hemicycle about the battered village of Neuve Chapelle. For five months they had remained undisputed masters of the positions they had here wrested from the British in October. Ensconced in their comfortably-arranged trenches with but a thin outpost in their fire trenches, they had watched day succeed day and night succeed night without the least variation from the monotony of trench warfare, the intermittent bark of the machine guns--rat-tat-tat-tat-tat--and the perpetual rattle of rifle fire, with here and there a bomb, and now and then an exploded mine.