YPRES, 1914-1915-1917.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 12084, 13 August 1917, Page 8

YPRES, 1914-1915-1917.

GRAVEYARD OF THOUSANDS

INFERIORITY THAT BECAME PREPONDERANCE.

Twice before have great battles been fought in this war over nearly the same ground that saw th e Allied triumph at Ypres and Messines early in June, but nothing could be more impreserve than the difference between the Allies' prospects now and then. An extract from the account written by Mr Will Irwin, the American correspondent, of the first battle of Ypres, in tho late Autumn of 1914, will show tho e.normous difficulties which bad then to bo faced. Ho wrote : "Then eam G October 31 st—the crucial clay for England. Before tho sun was high a British aviator volplaned down to his own linos with a wine damaged by shrapnel. He dropped from his seat pale and shaken. A close call? ' they asked him. 'lt isn't that!' he said ,'it's what I've seen—three corps, I tell you—against our first!' So he jerked out his story. " 'And we're so thin up there,' he said, ' and they're so many.' Hard on this came hurried news to headquarters, from the front. The Gorman artillery and a massed attack of German infantry had broken the first division of the first army corps near Ypres; the division was going back; the French support was going back. DISASTER ON DISASTER. " Disaster after disaster followed. Tho Royal Scots Fusiliers, remaining too long in a hot place, were for their very valour cut off. Tho Germans had found new artillery positions, and shelled General Douglas Haig's headquarters. A shell had burst in the house. Haig was outside at the time; hut nearly every staff officer of the First Corps was killed or wounded. " French jumped into his motor-ear and rushed to the line of the First Division. He had not so far to go as ho thought. The lino had retired four miles. Through his glasses he could soo the close-locked quadruple ranks of Gorman infantrymen attacking everywhere. An everywhere the English were fighting valiantly but without method.

" They were in it to the last manoven the regimental cooks. The officers of injfiiHtry and^ cavalry were, firing with the jnen. soldiers loading spare rifles behind them.

"French,, assisted by Haig. became a Headquarter? Staff himself. They say ho risked bis life twenty times that afternoon, as his motor-car took him from focus of'trouble to focus of more trouble. He gave an order here, ho encouraged an officer there. In the thickest of that day's fighting he left his motor-car and ran on foot to a wood, where a bridge was giving ground. "He gathered up h part of tho broken First Division and threw it at tho flank of a German attack, which was proceeding on tho reckless theory that the English were totally beaten. The Germans broke; the British retook Gholnvelt on the original line. "Tho English had merely held—technically—really, they had won the climacteric action in that long battle, which must determine the future course of tho war." ANOTHER MIRACLE.

The second battle of Ypres, lasting from the last week in April to the middle of May, 1910, found tho British line again facing heavy odds and holding its position by sheer grit against the- masses of men and metal hurled against them by the Germans. This battle is noteworthy in the. chronicle, of tho great war as being the first occasion on which poison gas was used. These, wero anxious days for Britain, when tho German hopes seemed likely to he verified. Time and again our fate hung in the balance. The line was broken, and a soldiers' battle developed, in which rules and text-books were forgotten, and our troops proved themselves worthy descendants of the men of Malplaquet and Albuera. The breach in the line occurred in a four-mile front as the result of the sudden poison gas attack, in which Canadian and French Colonial troops suffered agonies. A Canadian coun-ter-attack partially restored the situation, and from this point the battle, became a long, chaotic struggle, which finally slackened owing to the British thrust from Foetubert in the middle of May. From that point, the. tide of big fighting swept past Ypres to the south. The Ypres salient, the graveyard of thousands of valiant soldiers and dreaded by the Gorman infantry as a bourne from which few ever returned, entered into a period of comparative quietude. There were severe local actions, but nothing approaching tho tremendous struggles of'the first nine months of the war. But the Messines Ridge, strongly fortified by the enemy, always cist its threatening shadow over the salient. Things arc changing now.