Once more the point of view changes. We have seen the 49th Division nursed by its ministering Association into the semblance of a military force. We have noted its cheerful submission to the discipline of drill and camp, and its fine-strung spirit of renouncement when the vague thought of active service at a remote date broke on the urgent call of the country’s immediate need. Either aspect has been encouraging. Whether viewed individually or in the mass, this Territorial Division, one of many, which took the Imperial Service obligation and joined the Expeditionary Force in the spring of 1915, fills the spectator of so much courage and the narrator of so much effort with high hope for the Force as a whole.

Henceforth, we are to see the Division under a new aspect. Certain units from the West Riding were already in the field. We have visited a Casualty Clearing Station near Merville, and presently we shall come to the fine record of the 1st Field Company, West Riding Royal Engineers, which served in Gallipoli with the ‘incomparable’ 29th Division. But, except for these isolated units, the war so far had passed it by. In its organic, military capacity, it had merely guessed at the course of the war from signs and tokens vouchsafed by the Army Council, from the duplication and triplication of its units, from the extreme difficulties of equipment, and from a general sense of haste without method. From this time forward, for four years and more, it was to learn warfare at first hand. It was to forget its separate existence as the sheltered nursling of a County Association, and to become a part, however small a part, of the British Expeditionary Force.

The B.E.F., France, at this date (April, 1915), needed all the reinforcements it could muster, and Sir John French[27] had already borne witness in his Fifth Despatch (February 2nd, 1915), to his hopes from the Territorial Force:

And he had written again, as recently as April 5th:

Territorial soldiers had made good, and Major-General Baldock, Commanding the Division, as a complete unit from the West Riding, found his confident welcome assured.

He arrived at a critical time. It was the spring of 1915. At home, public opinion was to be convinced of the thoroughness of German methods by the sinking of the ‘Lusitania’ on May 7th. A reconstruction of the Cabinet by Coalition was announced on May 19th, and a Ministry of Munitions, with Mr. Lloyd George at its head, took shape on June 16th. This innovation was due to several causes, the ultimate origin of which is to be sought at a date a long way back from the outbreak of war. Accordingly, we may be absolved from any attempt to adjudicate between a Prime Minister, a Field Marshal, and a Secretary of State for War, as to the responsibility for the shortage of munitions which was revealed after war broke out. They did fall short of requirements, and high explosive shells had been postponed to shrapnel; and, as far as public opinion could judge, the decision to repair these deficiencies (the political decision, that is to say) was expedited to some extent by the immediate effect of one sentence in a speech by Mr. Asquith, at Newcastle-on-Tyne, on April 20th. He was speaking, as he has since stated, to British workmen, with the object of speeding-up their output, but not without a proper regard to the cocked ears of the German Military Command; and, partly in reliance on the expert information which he had sought, he said in the course of his speech:

The assurance seemed to contradict the experience of gunners at the front. In his Seventh Despatch of June 15th, 1915, Sir John French affirmed quite clearly that,

Indeed, on the very night when Mr. Asquith was speaking at Newcastle, a Territorial Force Officer (2/Lieutenant Geoffrey Woolley, of the 9th London Regiment) was earning his Victoria Cross for defending a position on Hill 60 against overwhelming enemy cannonade.

Hill 60, which was not a hill at all, but merely a hummock of railway earthwork, was in any case not visible from the Tyne, but the general disquietude at home at the time of the formation of the Coalition Cabinet reflected accurately enough the conditions which marked the place and time of General Baldock’s arrival in France, with which we are immediately concerned. One word more will complete this impression:

The first such gas attack was launched at Ypres, on Thursday, April 22nd. On the previous Thursday night (the 15th), we left a West Yorkshire Battalion spending its first night in France at a Rest Camp, near Boulogne.

So the 49th went to the war on the eve of the Second Battle of Ypres, at a time of an outrage of gas and a shortage of shells.

They went in eighty-four trains and on five days between April 12th and 16th, embarking at Southampton Docks, Avonmouth and Folkestone for Havre, Rouen and Boulogne respectively, and they joined the 4th Corps of the 1st Army, commanded by Lieut.-General Sir Henry Rawlinson. Corps Headquarters were posted at Merville, and there the Divisional Commander reported with five of his Staff Officers, and established, as we saw[28], Divisional Headquarters in the mayor’s house, 40 rue des Capucines. On April 18th, the following message was received from His Majesty the King:

A loyal reply was dispatched by General Baldock, and on the same day parties of Officers and N.C.O.’s, followed on the 19th by complete platoons, from the Battalions of the 2nd and 3rd West Riding (147th and 148th) Infantry Brigades were attached to units of the 23rd and 25th Brigades, 8th Division, for instructional duty in the trenches. On the 22nd, the 1st (146th) Brigade moved from Merville to Estaires, and was attached to the 7th Division, and placed under their orders. Sir Douglas Haig visited units of the Division on the following day. Divisional Headquarters were moved on the 27th to two houses and a farm in Bac St. Maur, and at 6 a.m. on the 28th, the Division took over a front of its own at Fleurbaix, covering sections 3, 4, 5 and 6 of the IV Corps sector.

We may fill in a few details in this outline. After all, it was a wonderful fortnight in the experience of the men from the West Riding. A war on the Western front had been waged for more than eight months, but it was all strange to new arrivals. Take, for instance, the 1/6th Battalion of the West Riding (Duke of Wellington’s) Regiment, which slept at S. Martin’s Rest Camp, about three miles out of Boulogne, on the night of April 14th. The next day, which was fine and warm, they marched nine miles to Hesdigneul, and waited two hours at the railway station before entraining for Merville. The entraining of a thousand and fifteen men presented no difficulty to troops which had long since become expert in such drill. It was carried out in batches of eight-and-forty, with a frontage of six men, eight deep. At a given signal three men entered the truck; the centre man took the rifles of the rest, whom the two flank men helped in. Merville was reached at 10-45 p.m. and the Battalion, preceded by its Billeting party in a motor-car, marched four miles to their billets at Neuf Berquin, turning in after 3 a.m.: a long and tiring day’s work. The 16th and 17th were spent quietly. On the 18th there was Church Parade, and in the afternoon motor-’buses were provided for a party of fifty officers and N.C.O.’s to proceed to Fleurbaix, where they were attached to the 13th Kensingtons for twenty-four hours’ instruction in the trenches. Even instruction had its perils, and this trench-party returned one casualty; Sgt. T. Richardson, ‘slightly wounded.’ On the 20th, the motor-’bus came again for a party of twenty-six in all, and next day a platoon from each Company in the Battalion studied trench-warfare as pupils of the 25th Brigade. This instruction, which included bomb-throwing, was continued till April 26th, when the Battalion paraded at 4-45 p.m. and marched to new billets at Fleurbaix, reaching Rue de Quesne at 8 o’clock. The next night at 11 p.m. Pte. J. Walsh was killed by rifle fire, and on Thursday, April 29th, Fleurbaix was shelled by heavy guns, which found the billets occupied by this Battalion. A single shell killed two privates and wounded a third: ‘the dead were buried where the shell fell, owing to Pte. Pickles being so mutilated. No service: Chaplain not available.’

This unhouselled grave may be taken as the initiation of the Division into war, rumours of which, set flying in the Second Battle of Ypres, reached units of the Division in their billets.[29] Their turn was to come a little later, but the fighting throughout April and May was so much of one piece and with one object that we may start, as the battle started, on April 17th.

A straight line, 260 miles long, drawn from a point on the Rhine midway between Cologne and Bonn, and terminating at the French coast about six miles north of Boulogne, will pass through Brussels and Ypres. That heroic town, in other words, the ‘great nerve-ganglion,’ as it has been called,[30] was not merely the symbol and shrine of Belgium’s resistance to the invader; it was also a necessary stage in the German attempt at the Channel ports. They battered the line up and down, in the hope of breaking a way through, but their worst and heaviest blows were levelled at Ypres itself, which they wrecked but they did not capture. The second of these desperate assaults opened as we saw, at Hill 60, two and a half miles to the south-east of Ypres, where it flared into the horror of poison-gas on April 22nd. A week of heroism and endurance brought this episode to a close by the withdrawal of the defence to a depth of about two miles on a semi-circular front of nearly eight. An intensified fierceness of attack marked the renewal of the battle in May. The hottest days were the 13th and 24th, between which there was a kind of lull; and thereafter the centre of fighting sagged away a few miles to the south, where the 49th Division was in waiting. The assault on Ypres had failed. Exhaustion-point had been reached on either side, but the defenders had paid an awful price. Their casualties numbered tens of thousands, and thousands had died in choking agony. The salient or semi-circle of troops, Belgian, French, Indian, Canadian and English, which had never stretched more than five miles out from its diameter on the Yser Canal, was flattened in even at the furthest to as little as two or three. Langemarck, the pivot of the first episode, which had lain on the rim of the salient, now lay more than two miles outside it; Bellewaarde Lake, the pivot of the second, which had lain two miles inside the rim, was now on the edge of it or without. If the last stronghold of Belgium was to be saved, and the gate to the Channel ports kept locked, at least an equal power of resistance was required from the defenders in the next phase.

Moreover, we must look at a bigger map. Behind the actual fighting line lay Lille and Douai, railway-junctions of cardinal importance for the communication and supplies of the German armies. To strike at these towns through Lens, at the south-west corner of the triangle of which Lille formed the apex and Douai the heel, was an object desirable on its own account and full of promise for the succour of Ypres. If these plans, concerted with high hopes between General Foch and Sir John French, succeeded in threatening the railway-system behind, they were bound to react unfavourably on the German occupation of Belgium. And even if these larger plans failed, partly in consequence of the indentation of the semi-circle of troops guarding Ypres, there might still be a sufficient gain of ground and a sufficient slaughter of the enemy to affect his distribution of forces between the Western and the Eastern fronts. For the situation in Russia was already causing anxiety to her Allies.

Hostilities were opened on May 9th by an intense attack of French artillery to the south-west of Lens on the road from Arras to Béthune, between La Targette and Carency. ‘That bombardment,’ says a graphic writer,[31] ‘was the most wonderful yet seen in Western Europe. It simply ate up the countryside for miles.’ Unfortunately, the mileage was not wide enough to open the way to Lens, and day by day the French advance was held up, pressed forward and held again, in a series of almost Homeric combats, which were measured by yards, even by feet, and in which the conspicuous names were White Works, Notre Dame de Lorette, Ablain, the Sugar Refinery, Souchez, the cemetery at Neuville St. Vaast, and a terrible labyrinth of underground fortifications. The whole area, working up from the River Scarpe, was on a frontage of about seven miles, with Lens about six miles to the north-east. Each obstacle had to be surmounted not once only, but in many instances several times, and when, at the end of May, the German salient from the Lille-Douai road was flattened back at its southern extremity to the outskirts of Lens, which did not fall, the French success in the three weeks’ fighting seemed hardly commensurate with the cost. We shall be in a position to estimate it more precisely when we have taken into account the results which were attained further north.

The French advance towards Lens from the south-west was supported by a British attack on a front facing east-south-east and aimed through Festubert and Aubers towards La Bassée and Lille. We noted just now the triangle which is formed with Lille at the apex, Douai at the eastern and Lens at the western foot. On the Lille-Lens line of that triangle, another and smaller triangle will be found, of which La Bassée forms the westernmost angle. The French, we are aware, came up on a front converging on Lens from Arras and the valley of the Scarpe. The British advanced from the north-west with a view to investing La Bassée, and if Lens and La Bassée had both fallen, as the issue of these heroic endeavours, the double triangle, or kite, would have been rolled up to its apex at Lille.

The British assault, like the French, opened on Sunday, May 9th. The task of the IV Corps in the battle was assigned to the 7th and 8th Divisions, while the 49th Division took over the greater part of the trench-line held by the Corps. Their first object was to gain Fromelles, but their main and ultimate objective was the Aubers Ridge. The general scope of the attack was disclosed confidentially to the troops about to be engaged. It was ‘not a local effort for the capture merely of Fromelles and Aubers villages,’ but was ‘part of a much larger operation designed to break the enemy’s line on a wide front.’ The importance of the forces employed was also emphasized. ‘Not only is the offensive being undertaken by the First Army’, we read, but a force of ‘the best French troops, amounting to 300,000 or 400,000 men, is likewise advancing to the attack north of Arras.’ The disposition of the British troops made their objective quite clear. They faced the Lille-La Bassée road, curving round La Bassée at the extreme right. Their line was extended on the left to cover about half the road to Lille. The furthest point of that line from Le Bridoux to Cordonnerie Farm was held by the 49th (West Riding[32]) Division, and two of its Infantry Brigades, the 147th and 148th, were detailed to occupy the German trenches which the 8th Division, followed by the 7th, and thus supported by the 49th, was to compel the enemy to vacate[33]. Unfortunately, the whole plan miscarried. The first artillery attack could not be sustained in sufficient strength to wipe out the barbed-wire entanglements and free the way for the Infantry. It followed that the 8th Division could not press its heroic advance home, and the West Riding Infantry Brigades were never called upon to discharge their allotted task. The first day’s programme was thrown out from the start. Its features on the British front bore a tragic and curious resemblance to those of the later days further south, when the advantage won by the French bombardment had been neutralized by German local fire. The advance was broken, that is to say, into little pockets and blood-spots of fighting, which sank into the soil where they occurred. If the courage displayed in these encounters had been combined for the united effort which was intended, no troops born of woman could have withstood it. The record of every fighting unit tells the same tale of desperate valour; of a few exhausted and staggering survivors hardly able to remember their own exploits, of endurance strained to the limit of capacity, and of unwilling admiration extorted even from a grudging foe. But the net result on May 9th was failure; it was necessary to retire and to repair, and the part of the West Riding units, to their own deep disappointment, was confined to occasional supporting fire, to relief-duty in the trenches, marked by little more than its normal dangers, and, on the whole, to a comparatively quiet day.

This battle of Fromelles, or of Aubers Ridge, which had the indirect success of engaging sufficient German forces to assist the French advance to Carency, was renewed a week later at Festubert, and was not broken off till May 26th. ‘I had now reason,’ wrote Sir John French in his Seventh Dispatch, ‘to consider that the battle, which was commenced by the First Army on the 9th May and renewed on the 16th, having attained for the moment the immediate object I had in view, should not be further actively proceeded with; and I gave orders to Sir Douglas Haig to curtail his artillery attack and to strengthen and consolidate the ground he had won ... on a front of four miles to an average depth of 600 yards.’ We may add that, if Lille was not taken, Ypres, too, with its narrower front, still stood with its back to the wall; and behind that wall lay the Channel ports. Moreover, the southern approach had been partially blocked by the reduction of the German salient from Lens, and the fighting quality of our troops was such as to deter the enemy from attempting a break-through on one line without adequate resources on the rest. In other words, a see-saw movement was the chief obvious conclusion from the six weeks’ spurts of battle-fury to the east and south-east of Ypres. A new direct frontal attack would mean a new risk to Lens and on to Lille; a new attempt to throw out the Lens salient would mean a protrusion of the British salient from the Yser Canal. The third or middle course was to accept stalemate; and to the limited but useful extent of forcing this decision on the enemy, the heroes of the Second Battle of Ypres, of the French pocket-battles in the Artois, and of the British struggles round Aubers and Festubert are entitled to the full measure of their renown. Moreover, taking a wider survey, the stalemate suited the combatants on other accounts besides exhaustion. Germany was waging war on two fronts. Having pushed her western pieces into positions, in which, save for minor attacks, they might be left undisturbed for a time, she was anxious to concentrate on the east. England, too, had another foe, whom it might be too late to overtake unless she set about the work at once. It became known as shortage of shells, and Mr. Lloyd George, as we saw, was appointed in June to devise rapid measures for its defeat.

Turning back to the 49th Division, we note that on May 16th it occupied, again with the 8th Division, the extreme left of the British line. On the 22nd, orders were received for the 148th Brigade (the 4th and 5th King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry and the 4th and 5th York and Lancasters) to throw forward the line to two ruined houses on the Bois Grenier-Le Bridoux road. (A panorama sketch of the site is given opposite). This meant the laying-out and preparation of a new front-line trench astride the road, and the necessary tools, sandbags, stakes, barbed-wire, and other paraphernalia were collected during the day of the 22nd and the early part of that night. Work was started about 11 p.m., when two Companies of the K.O.Y.L.I. under Major P. T. Chadwick and Captain Critchley, traced out and began digging the new trench. The two ruined houses, situated about half way between the British and the German lines, were found to be occupied by the enemy, who brought heavy rifle fire into play and considerably worried the working parties. In this encounter, Lieut. R. T. S. Gwynne was wounded, and died the next day. On the 23rd the same Companies went out again in order to strengthen the work commenced on the previous night. Heavy fire was drawn from the ruined buildings, but the enemy was forced to retire. Work was continued till daylight with satisfactory results, the cover being much improved and the communication-trench up to the new line being practically completed. By this means, certain operations which had been ordered by the Corps Commander on May 20th were enabled to be carried out. On the 24th these were opened by a bombardment from the ninety-six guns in the line at short intervals between 8 and 9 p.m. At 8-50 two Companies of the same 4th K.O.Y.L.I., under Captain A. C. Chadwick and Captain L. M. Taylor crossed the parapet of No. 6 trench and advanced up to the new trench prepared on the preceding nights: a journey of about seventy yards. The German machine-gun and rifle fire was exactly one second too late to find this party. The Companies quickly took position, and dug themselves in, and the ruined houses were put in a state of defence by a section working under Captain Creswick. Next morning, two Companies from the 5th K.O.Y.L.I. relieved their comrades of the 4th, and continued operations. From the 26th of May onwards for some days the Germans left them no peace, and a number of casualties ensued. But the operation had been carried out, and Sir Henry Rawlinson, Commanding the IVth Army Corps, desired that his high appreciation should be conveyed to the officers and other ranks of the 4th King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry for the ‘gallantry and precision’ which had been displayed.

Further compliments followed. On June 12th, a message was received from the Adjutant-General at General Headquarters:

And Major-General Baldock, commanding the Division, was informed by the General Officer Commanding the First Army, to which the Division had been transferred at the end of May:

A month later, the Division was re-transferred from the First Army, Indian Corps, to the Second Army, VIth Corps, commanded by Major-General Sir John Keir, when it moved to Proven, north-west of Poperinghe, and the surrounding villages in Belgium. The weather after May 23rd had become very hot, and there was one case of sun-stroke in the trenches.

We shall return to the fortunes of the Division in the alternating periods of trench-life and billets which succeeded the intenser fighting of May. The whole Western front settled down to what seems like a phase of inactivity, but what was really a broken succession of diverse minor experiences, the monotony of which, like the sea’s, was always movement, more apparent at close quarters than afar. Meanwhile, it will be appropriate to pick up the record of that isolated unit of West Riding Divisional Engineers, which, as we mentioned above, preceded the Division overseas. They, too, reached the scene of war in April, 1915. They fought in a different field, and were even more heavily engaged, but they earned by conspicuous gallantry not less honour than their comrades in France.

This unit, the 1/1st Field Company of West Riding Royal Engineers, under the command of Major Dodworth, formed one of three Companies which served under Lt.-Col. G. B. Hingston, C.R.E., in the 29th Division. Their original destination was France, but in February, 1915, it was decided to ship the Division with all possible speed to the Dardanelles, and, had this decision been carried out, the fate of British arms in the Peninsula might have been brought to a different conclusion. As a fact, owing to causes which have been made public, its departure was postponed till March, and, after a troublesome delay at Alexandria, the Field Company, with a strength of 6 officers, 201 other ranks, 62 horses and mules, and 12 vehicles, reached Tenedos on April 24th. At midnight on the same day they were selected, much to their delight, to sail with the covering force on the ‘River Clyde’ to the South Point of the Peninsula, and there, below Sedd-el-Bahr, the modern model of the Trojan wooden horse was beached at 7 a.m. on April 25th.

The events of that day of death and glory have been sung, and painted, and told, and require but brief reference here. ‘No army in history,’ says the poet who wrote a prose-epic called Gallipoli[34], ‘has been set such a task. No other troops in the world would have made good those beaches,’ and it is heartening to recall that troops from the West Riding of Yorkshire were included in this unique band.

For five months, from April till September, our Field Company of Royal Engineers remained on the Gallipoli Peninsula. The roads, the water-supply, the trenches, the night-wiring, the bridges, the jetties: every kind of engineering job came their way. They even manufactured hand-grenades, and gave practical lessons in the use of them, and they took their bellyful of fighting and of experience of Turkish shells. In June, for example, two of their sappers, A. Jennett and G. Packard, were awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for their gallant rescue of Captain Todd, of the Argyll Mountain Battery, who was lying with a leg blown off under heavy fire on the other side of a barbed-wire entanglement; and the same decoration was bestowed on Lance-Corporal W. B. Owen, who snatched another wounded Officer out of a trench in actual enemy occupation, and carried him to a dressing-station two miles off, for the most part under fire. On September 22nd came a welcome fortnight’s rest. They were back again early in October, and had a terrible spell of work after the great gale of November 26th, which helped to confirm the decision for evacuation. For the end of the adventure was approaching, and our Engineers remained till the end. After helping to clear Suvla and Anzac, they moved in January, 1916, to Helles, where they cut steps down the cliff to W. Beach. Thence they sailed at last in two parties reaching Suez, January 16th.

The rest of their story belongs to the Division in which they became absorbed. But the praise of their famous work in Gallipoli, to which they went straight from home, redounds to the credit of the West Riding, and may be added to the praises which we have quoted from Sir Henry Rawlinson, Sir Douglas Haig and Sir John French:

This passage occurs in a letter written by Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston on September 9th, 1915, and published with the next Quarterly Report of the West Riding County Association. In that Report, Lord Scarbrough included an account of a visit paid to Flanders by himself, as Chairman of the Association, and by Brig.-General Mends, the Secretary. Their ‘object was to ascertain in what ways the Association might best provide for the needs and comfort of the troops, and to study the conditions under which they have to work’; and it will not be out of place to examine Lord Scarbrough’s conclusions in those respects in anticipation of what we shall find in the ensuing chapter.

He recalled to the memory of local patriots that the 49th Division was composed of Field and Heavy Artillery raised from Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, Otley and York; of Engineers from Sheffield; of three Infantry Brigades from the West Yorkshire, West Riding, Yorkshire Light Infantry, and York and Lancaster Regimental Districts; of Army Service Corps from Leeds and York; and Field Ambulances from Leeds and Sheffield. They had left for France in April, and had been ‘continuously in the fighting line ever since.’ It would stimulate local patriotism to know that a Staff Officer wrote of the Division:

To the ‘amenities of war,’ as likewise to the ‘other side of the picture’, we shall presently come back: such facts may be recovered from written evidence; but what Lord Scarbrough and General Mends saw in the ‘smiling faces’, the ‘spirit of cheerfulness’ and the ‘sense of mastery over the enemy,’ is contained in no formal War Diary, and is the more valuable and vivid on that account. It brought comfort and encouragement to the West Riding in the dark days of the autumn of 1915; not merely to members of the Association, struggling, as we know, against the flood, but also to many wives and mothers, realizing that, ‘in a campaign like this,’ as the Report stated, ‘casualties come fast,’ and, lastly, to the various committees, Parliamentary Recruiting, Trades Union, and so on, which based their appeal for fresh efforts, in the last stages of voluntary enlistment, on the valorous record of the ‘boys’ who had already gone to the front. Alike in Flanders and in Gallipoli, that record was worthy of the West Riding.