Battle of Messines begins

On 12 October 1914 the British Cavalry Corps of General Edmund Allenby moved east through French Flanders towards the Belgian border. Towards evening, after fierce fighting, its regiments took the Mont des Cats, a hill held by German cavalry. British nomenclature dates the start of the Battle of Messines from this day. At stake was the low ridge between Messines and Wytschaete (PL), south of Ypres, for which the cavalrymen were to fight for the next three weeks.

Cavalry on the left flank

Since the beginning of October the British Expeditionary Force had been moving from the Aisne to Flanders. The first to arrive were two cavalry divisions, which on 9 October were combined into a corps under Allenby. Behind them came the infantry corps. II Corps was already in action near La Bassée, and III Corps of General William Pulteney was just detraining at Saint-Omer and moving towards Hazebrouck.

On 10 October Field Marshal John French agreed with General Ferdinand Foch, who was coordinating the French armies in the north, on a joint advance eastwards. The British were to pass north of Lille and strike the German flank. Allenby’s cavalry was to cover the left flank of III Corps, occupy the hills around Bailleul and push on towards Ypres.

Facing it stood the German IV Cavalry Corps of General von Hollen, made up of three cavalry divisions. A few days earlier its units had passed through Ypres and reached Hazebrouck, but they had fallen back to the hills around Bailleul, where the corps had its headquarters.

The assault on the Mont des Cats

West of Bailleul runs a chain of isolated hills: the Mont des Cats, the Mont Noir and, further on, already in Belgium, Mount Kemmel. They rise more than a hundred metres above the flat plain and dominate the whole area. As long as the Germans held them, the British could not safely advance further.

On 12 October Allenby’s cavalry ran into the enemy dug in on the Mont des Cats and in the village of Flêtre, on the road from Cassel to Bailleul. The summit of the hill was crowned by the buildings of a Trappist monastery, and its slopes were covered with hop gardens. The task of taking the hill went to the 3rd Cavalry Brigade. Its 4th Hussars and 5th Lancers attacked on foot from the west, and the 16th Lancers, supported by a battery of horse artillery, from the south. Towards evening, after hard fighting, the hill was in British hands.

Among the wounded whom the Germans had to leave behind was the nineteen-year-old Prince Maximilian of Hesse, a nephew of Emperor Wilhelm II. He died soon afterwards. Sources give the date of his death as 12 or 13 October.

What came next

On 13 October, while III Corps was fighting for Meteren, the cavalry occupied the Mont Noir. The next day the Germans withdrew behind the river Lys. The British occupied Kemmel and then the villages of Messines and Wytschaete on the ridge south of Ypres. There they joined up with the 3rd Cavalry Division, which had come from Ypres. For the first time an unbroken, if very thin, Allied line stretched from Switzerland to the North Sea.

It was, however, the last moment of Allied advantage. Attempts to cross the Lys in the following days failed, and from 20 October new German corps struck the front in Flanders. Allenby’s cavalry, fighting on foot in trenches, defended the Messines ridge until the turn of October and November, when it lost it in heavy fighting that was already part of the First Battle of Ypres.