Battle of La Bassée begins

On 10 October 1914, according to the official British chronology, the Battle of La Bassée began. That day the British II Corps of General Horace Smith-Dorrien, freshly moved from the Aisne, was approaching Béthune by a rapid march to take its place on the left wing of the French armies. In this way the British entered the last stage of the Race to the Sea, which over the following weeks was to be decided on the plains of French and Belgian Flanders.

The British in the north

From the beginning of October the British Expeditionary Force had been secretly leaving the Aisne front. II Corps, made up of the 3rd and 5th Divisions, arrived by train in the Abbeville area on 8 and 9 October. The commander of the British army, Field Marshal John French, did not wait for the whole army to assemble. On the evening of 8 October he ordered Smith-Dorrien to move east the next day and reach the left wing of the French Tenth Army near Béthune.

The situation in the north was uncertain. The French Tenth Army had just held Arras, but its left wing ended at Vermelles, south of the La Bassée Canal. Further north, as far as Dunkirk, there were only French cavalry and Territorial divisions, while German cavalry corps were ranging deep to the west. That same day Antwerp fell, freeing further forces for the Germans.

10 October

General Ferdinand Foch, who was coordinating the French armies in the north, handed over to the British buses that could carry almost 10,000 soldiers. Thanks to them, and by forced marching, the divisions of II Corps covered about 35 kilometres from their billets on 10 October and by evening stood around Diéval and Pernes, north-east of Saint-Pol. Their flanks were covered by the British cavalry divisions, which were to secure the line from Merville to Hazebrouck, from where the German cavalry had recently withdrawn. Around Saint-Omer another corps, III Corps, began to detrain.

That same day French met Foch at his headquarters in Doullens. They agreed that the French and British forces in the north would go over to a joint advance eastwards, with the British to outflank Lille from the north. The Allies hoped finally to get ahead of the Germans in the race and reach the rear of their right wing.

First clashes

II Corps went into action only two days later. On 11 October it reached Béthune and took over a sector along the canal from the French cavalry. On the morning of 12 October news came that the French XXI Corps had lost Vermelles. Smith-Dorrien, not wanting to lose contact with the French, directed his divisions straight east, towards La Bassée. In front of the British stretched a flat, marshy plain criss-crossed by ditches, hedges and canals, and German cavalry and Jäger defended every farm.

The very first days showed that there was no question of quickly outflanking the Germans. On 13 October the Germans retook the village of Givenchy, and II Corps lost almost a thousand men that day. Instead of a manoeuvre began weeks of bloody fighting for every village between Givenchy and Neuve-Chapelle. The Germans held La Bassée until the autumn of 1918.