The Battle of Ypres had at one and the same time brought the second German plan of a Western offensive to the ground, and ensured the accomplishment of General Joffre's envelopment scheme. There was nothing now before the German Staff, therefore, but to attack that envelopment scheme while it remained, as they thought, still in its inceptive stages. If we turn to the day-to-day record of the operations as disclosed in the official reports we shall at once see that there was on the part of the enemy a series of attempted wedging movements. They tried by wedging to break the Allied front simultaneously at Roye and at Arras. This, had it been successful, would have forced out the section of the Allied front lying between those points, and have broken up the Allied position. The movement was not successful. Another movement of this kind was tried between La Bassee on the one side and the Yser on the other. This time the Germans did get a foothold on the west side of the Yser. They were driven out of it, however, by the Belgians cutting the dykes and flooding the country all along the lower course of the river. When the flood burst upon them large numbers of the enemy caught in their entrenchment diggings were drowned.[14] Many of their guns could not be recovered. A third of these wedging attempts was made between La Bassee and Arras. Though they led to desperate fighting, these efforts proved barren of result. [14] A correspondent of the Paris _Gaulois_, describing the annihilation of a brigade (nearly 9,000) Wurtembergers by the floods on November 4, wrote: "At midday, the Wurtembergers, in formidable numbers, had succeeded, under the protection of their artillery, in crossing the Yser on planks. "After a week's fighting the river was choked with sunken boats, trunks of trees, bodies of men, and carcasses of horses. It was over a veritable bridge of corpses that the enemy passed.