Belgians retake Bruges

On 19 October 1918 Belgian troops entered Bruges and occupied its seaport, Zeebrugge. The Germans, who had marched into the city without a fight on 14 October 1914, withdrew from it during the night, just as they had left Ostend two days earlier. That same day the British recovered Kortrijk on the Lys, and the next day the Belgian army reached the Dutch frontier. The whole Belgian coast, which the Germans had held since October 1914, was once again in Allied hands. The British chronology of the war ends the battle of Courtrai, that is, of Kortrijk, on 19 October.

For four years Bruges had been the capital of Germany’s naval war in Flanders. It housed the headquarters of Admiral Ludwig von Schröder’s Marine Corps, and its inner harbour, linked by canals to Zeebrugge and Ostend, served as a base for the submarines and torpedo boats that attacked shipping in the English Channel and the North Sea. In April 1918 the British had tried to block this exit in the Zeebrugge Raid. As the front drew nearer, the Germans hastily recalled the submarines home and on 5 October scuttled several that were unfit to sail, among them UB-59 at Zeebrugge and UB-40 at Ostend. On the evening of 15 October General Erich Ludendorff decided that there was no longer any point in defending the coast, and during the night of 18 to 19 October the German troops in the north withdrew to a new position on the Lys.

On the morning of 19 October the Belgians set off in pursuit. That afternoon at Burkel, between Oedelem and Maldegem, two squadrons of Major Victor Van Strydonck’s Belgian 1st Guides Regiment, preceded by two armoured cars, charged on horseback at the German rearguards in a wood and rode through their first line. The charge at Burkel is regarded as the last cavalry charge in Western Europe, and Van Strydonck was later given the title of Baron “de Burkel”. Further south the French corps, from that day on as General de Boissoudy’s Sixth Army, reached the Lys below Harelbeke.

At Kortrijk the Germans held out longer. On the evening of 18 October the 17th Battalion, Royal Scots, crossed the Lys on a single plank and during the night took the suburb of Marke, and by dawn a second brigade of the 35th Division had followed it across. In the afternoon its patrols entered Kortrijk, and the 11th Battalion of the Queen’s Regiment from the 41st Division crossed by boat at the north-eastern edge of the town. At 2.35 p.m. it turned out that the Germans had already left Kortrijk, although their artillery was still shelling it from a distance. During the night three divisions of II Corps crossed the Lys, and the Scottish 9th Division took Harelbeke, suffering only a few wounded in the crossing. By the morning of 20 October the whole front of the British Second Army was across the river. In six days of battle the Flanders Army Group had liberated most of West Flanders, and along the way, further south, the British had entered Lille and Douai as well as Roubaix and Tourcoing.

On 19 October Marshal Ferdinand Foch issued his last general directive: the Flanders Army Group was to advance towards Brussels. In the evening King Albert I ordered the crossing of the Lys and the Deinze–Eeklo canal before the Germans could dig in on them. He himself flew to the coast on 23 October, and on 25 October he rode into Bruges together with Queen Elisabeth and the British admiral Roger Keyes, commander of the Dover Patrol, who since the beginning of 1918 had been fighting the flotillas from Bruges and Zeebrugge.