Battle of Frezenberg Ridge ends

On 13 May 1915, for the last time in the Battle of Frezenberg Ridge, the Germans tried to break the British defence east of Ypres. From 3.30 a.m. to 1 p.m. their artillery shelled the trenches and the rear, and the war diary of the British V Corps described the bombardment as the heaviest since the fighting began. It rained all day and the shallow trenches turned to mud. The Germans broke into the line at several points but got no further. In the evening the front settled, and the battle, which had begun on 8 May with the breach at Frezenberg, came to an end.

Cavalry in the trenches

After 8 May the Germans attacked mainly the 27th Division on both sides of the Menin road. There they took several forward trenches and the corner of Sanctuary Wood, and on 11 May the wind blew the gas they had released back onto their own troops. Meanwhile part of their ammunition and troops had to go south, where the French offensive in Artois had been under way since 9 May. The exhausted 28th Division, which had lost more than 15,000 men since 22 April, was relieved during the night of 12–13 May. Its place was taken by the 1st and 3rd Cavalry Divisions, combined under General Henry de Lisle into the so-called Cavalry Force. The cavalrymen fought on foot, with rifles, like infantry. Each brigade could put about 800–900 men into the trenches. But they took over trenches dug in haste after 8 May, without communication trenches and almost without wire.

At about 8 a.m. the Germans broke into the line of the 7th Cavalry Brigade, which was holding the exposed slope by the Zonnebeke railway. The troopers of the two Life Guards regiments and of the Leicestershire Yeomanry, volunteer cavalry (yeomanry) from the county of Leicester, had no grenades, and the Germans, throwing theirs, drove them out of their trenches. A third squadron of the Leicestershire Yeomanry, firing from the support trenches, nevertheless stopped the enemy’s further advance. At 2.30 p.m. the 8th Cavalry Brigade, with the Royal Horse Guards, the 10th Hussars and the Essex Yeomanry, counter-attacked. It drove the Germans out of part of the ground, but under shrapnel and machine-gun fire could not hold the old line and dug in about 900 metres behind it. That day the Leicestershire Yeomanry lost 187 killed and wounded out of 281 men, among them its commanding officer and his second in command. Across the cavalry as a whole seven regimental commanders and one brigade commander were killed or wounded.

Mouse Trap Farm

To the left of the cavalry the 4th Division held its ground. Mouse Trap Farm, surrounded by a moat and, by British reckoning, hit by more than a hundred shells a minute, was lost for a moment when two platoons of its garrison were killed, but in the evening the British occupied it again. German attacks on the neighbouring sectors collapsed under rifle fire, some at the very wire. Lance-Sergeant Douglas Belcher of the London Rifle Brigade, a territorial battalion, held a wrecked trench all day with a handful of men, and every time the Germans made ready to attack he opened rapid fire on them. For covering the division’s flank he received the Victoria Cross.

Outcome of the battle

The Germans did not even occupy the ground the cavalry had abandoned. According to a German account, the great attack planned for 13 May had in any case to be called off for lack of ammunition, although all British accounts describe that day’s bombardment as exceptionally heavy. In six days the Germans had pushed the British off Frezenberg Ridge and won, between Hooge and Mouse Trap Farm, a strip of ground a little over a kilometre deep in the centre. According to the British official history, V Corps lost 456 officers and 8,935 other ranks in that time, more than 9,300 killed, wounded and missing. German losses were not given separately. General Joseph Joffre and the commander of the Second Army, General Herbert Plumer, sent their congratulations to the cavalry and to the 4th and 27th Divisions. The British official historian concluded that the soldiers, with fewer than a dozen modern heavy guns, a lack of ammunition and waterlogged trenches under the dominating fire of the German artillery, had made even so small a success too costly for the Germans to pursue.