With Cavalry in 1915: The British Trooper in the Trench Line, Through the Second Battle of YpresColeman, Frederic
History
With Cavalry in 1915: The British Trooper in the Trench Line, Through the Second Battle of Ypres
Coleman, Frederic
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
From that point the trenches led south, passing to the west of
Verlorenhoek, a town on the Ypres-Zonnebeke road. South again, and
a little east, they crossed the Ypres-Roulers railway, skirted the
western and the southern shores of the Bellewaarde Lake, took in the
grounds of the ruined Hooge château and the eastern fringe of the
woods that surrounded it, passed east of Hooge, and thus reached the
famous Ypres-Menin road.
On went the line, winding snakelike through the eastern edge of the
Sanctuary Wood, south of the Menin Road. Here the Salient reached its
furthermost eastern extremity.
Then began a south-westerly trend, less than a mile in front of
Zillebeke, reaching Zaartsteen before crossing the Ypres-Comines
railway and later the Ypres-Comines canal.
From the canal the trenches ran more west than south to St. Eloi,
then still on to the westward, until they circled south, away from
Ypres, in front of Vierstraat, Kemmel and Wolverghem successively.
There they faced, then passed Messines, reached the Ploegsteert
Wood, crossed the River Lys and bent round Armentières, on their way
through the Auber and Neuve Chapelle area, to the Festubert and La
Bassée fronts.
Early morning on that eventful Sunday found me driving General de
Lisle and Hardress Lloyd to Ypres, straight through the devastated
old city, out of the Menin gate, over the Menin bridge and on up the
Zonnebeke Road as far as Potijze.
From the railway crossing at the western edge of Ypres, past the
smashed cathedral of St. Martin, round the ruins of the Cloth Hall,
through the Grande Place, and down the Rue de Menin, dead horses and
men lined the way.
Ypres, which I had seen shelled so heavily time after time without
its semblance of a city being destroyed, was at last indescribably
in ruins. The slender pinnacles at the ends of the Cloth Hall still
stood, and the tower itself had not fallen, though it had been so
riddled it seemed in imminent danger of collapse. The tall torn tower
of St. Martin's, near by, was also standing.
I found great difficulty in picking my way through the square, past
shell-holes, piles of paving blocks, and heaps of dead horses. At
one end of the Grande Place a howitzer shell had burst directly on
an artillery limber, the horses and men being piled indiscriminately
together, every one instantly killed. They lay in a heap on the
broken stones of the square.
Our previous brewery headquarters was levelled to the ground, and the
house where we had slept when last in Ypres was smashed out of all
recognition.
Shells were falling in Ypres as we went through it. Across the Menin
bridge the road, once a broad highway, had been narrowed to a mere
path by pile on pile of shell-strewn bricks and stones. The houses
were one by one completely disappearing, as though the space they
occupied was required for other purposes, and the demolition of each
one of them was a preconceived part of a plan of extinction of all
signs of habitation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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