Critical day at Ypres

31 October 1914 was the most critical day of the First Battle of Ypres. Around midday the Germans took the village of Gheluvelt (PL) on the road from Menin to Ypres and broke the line of the British 1st Division. German shells killed several staff officers of two British divisions and severely wounded the commander of one of them. For a few hours it seemed that the road to Ypres, and beyond it to the Channel ports, lay open. The gap was closed by the counter-attack of a single battalion, the 2nd Battalion, Worcestershire Regiment. The British chronology of the war describes the day in these words: British line broken and restored. According to British nomenclature, the Battle of Gheluvelt ends on this day.

The Kaiser at the front

Two days earlier the Germans had taken the crossroads in front of Gheluvelt, and on 30 October the new army group of General Max von Fabeck had captured Zandvoorde and Hollebeke. For 31 October the Germans planned a decisive blow against Gheluvelt and the Messines ridge. The soldiers were told that their attack would be watched by the Kaiser himself. Wilhelm II did indeed arrive around midday at the battle headquarters of the Sixth Army of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, to which Fabeck’s group was subordinated. According to French, in those days the British intercepted a wireless message showing that the Kaiser intended to go to Hollebeke, and they supposed that he was counting on a triumphal entry into Ypres.

The fall of Gheluvelt

At dawn, in fine weather, the German artillery opened fire on a front of about 17 kilometres. Gheluvelt was shelled particularly heavily, and German observers on the captured heights near Zandvoorde could see the British trenches laid out before them. The village was defended by the depleted battalions of the British 1st Division, by British estimates no more than 2,000 men. Before noon at least eight German battalions of the XV Corps and the 54th Reserve Division advanced against them from the east and south. The commander of the XV Corps, General Berthold von Deimling, went up to the front line and was soon wounded by a shell splinter.

The British repulsed the attacks with rifle fire for over an hour, but around 11.30 a.m. the Germans broke into Gheluvelt. Of the company of the Welch battalion that had remained in the village, 45 men were still alive at 10 a.m., and before noon 37 survivors were taken prisoner. South of the road almost the whole of the 1st Battalion of the Queen’s was killed or captured. By about 1 p.m. the Germans held the entire village. North of it, behind the park wall of Gheluvelt château, the remnants of the 1st Battalion South Wales Borderers and the 1st Battalion Scots Guards were still holding on, almost surrounded. Wounded men and stragglers appeared on the road to Ypres, and the British batteries began to pull back.

Hooge château

The commander of the 1st Division, General Samuel Lomax, learned of the loss of Gheluvelt from General Charles FitzClarence, commander of the 1st Guards Brigade. He told him to use the 2nd Division’s reserve, standing in Polygon Wood, and drove to that division’s headquarters at Hooge château, on the Menin road, a few kilometres from Ypres. He arrived there at 12.45 p.m. and said briefly to the commander of the 2nd Division, General Charles Monro: “My line is broken.” The two generals agreed that retreat in these conditions was impossible and that they had to fight it out.

Around 1.15 p.m., shortly after a German aircraft had flown low over the château, the first shell fell in the château garden, followed by others. The second exploded right by the room in which the staff officers of both divisions had gathered. Six officers were killed outright, among them the chief of staff of the 1st Division, Colonel F. W. Kerr. Lomax was severely wounded and died in London in April 1915. Monro, who was standing in the doorway of the adjoining room, was stunned but able to continue in command. Command of the 1st Division was given to General Edward Bulfin and, until his arrival, to General Herman Landon.

The Worcestershire counter-attack

At that very moment the counter-attack that Lomax and Monro had agreed two days earlier was already getting under way. In the 2nd Division’s reserve, at the south-western edge of Polygon Wood, stood the 2nd Battalion, Worcestershire Regiment, under Major Edward Hankey. It was the last reserve on that sector. Around 1 p.m. FitzClarence ordered Hankey “to make a counter-attack with the utmost vigour, without delay, against the enemy who had occupied Gheluvelt, and to re-establish our line there”. He pointed out to him the church tower, visible above the smoke, as a landmark.

Three companies, about 370 men, first moved several hundred metres under cover of the wood. At the edge of a copse near Polderhoek château Hankey deployed them in two lines. Ahead of them stretched about a kilometre of open ground, across which wounded men and stragglers were falling back, warning that certain death lay ahead. The Worcesters crossed it at the double under German artillery fire. More than a hundred of them fell, but the rest reached the château park. The Bavarians of the 16th Reserve Infantry Regiment, in which Adolf Hitler was serving, were resting after their victory, looking for water and searching the houses. They put up no organised resistance and fled through the village. The Worcesters joined up with the defenders of the park, and in the afternoon the battalion’s fourth company entered the village as far as the church. The commander of the Bavarian regiment, Colonel Julius List, was killed in the fighting.

The battalion lost that day, according to various figures, between 187 and 192 killed and wounded, nearly 40 per cent of its strength. FitzClarence, who had watched the attack, galloped to Polygon Wood and reported: “It’s all right, my line is holding north of the village.” South of the road the front was re-established along the edge of the woods west of Gheluvelt, and the left wing of the 7th Division was able to return almost to its old positions. Its Royal Scots Fusiliers battalion, which had not left its trenches, was, however, surrounded.

At Haig’s headquarters

The commander of I Corps, General Douglas Haig, had his headquarters in the so-called White Château on the Menin road, just outside Ypres, next to the level crossing later called Hellfire Corner. Around 12.30 p.m. he received a report that the 1st Division’s line at Gheluvelt was broken. According to the British official history, he then rode out on horseback along the Menin road towards Hooge. He went at a slow trot, with part of his staff behind him, as if at a review, which greatly raised the soldiers’ spirits. Accounts differ, however, as to the time of this ride, and in some studies Haig sets out only after the good news had arrived. At 1.30 p.m. he ordered that a line closer to the town be held at all costs, and at 1.50 p.m. the news of the disaster at Hooge reached him. Later he laid down yet another line of defence, less than two kilometres from the walls of Ypres.

Around 2 p.m. Field Marshal John French arrived at the White Château on foot, having left his car on the crowded road. He found Haig and his chief of staff at a table covered with fragments of a chandelier brought down by an explosion. The news was bad, and French had no reserves to offer. He later recalled that it was the worst half-hour of his life. He walked back to his car to seek help from the French. He had barely left when Brigadier-General S. R. Rice, the corps’ chief engineer, galloped up to the château from the front with the news that the Worcesters had retaken Gheluvelt and the Germans were falling back in disorder. Haig’s aide-de-camp ran after the field marshal and caught up with him at the car.

French with Foch

French drove to General Ferdinand Foch, who was co-ordinating the operations of the Allied forces in the north. He found him at the headquarters of General Victor d’Urbal in Poperinge. Foch, as always, wanted to answer with an attack. He promised that at dawn the next day six battalions of the French 32nd Division and eight batteries would attack from Saint-Éloi and Wytschaete on Haig’s right, and the French IX Corps on his left. He also wrote a note for Haig: “It is absolutely essential not to retreat; therefore the men must dig in wherever they find themselves.” Any withdrawal by larger units, he added, meant progress for the enemy and inevitable confusion among the retreating troops. At 3.35 p.m. French added his own note to it: “It is of the utmost importance to hold the ground you are on. It is superfluous to write this, as I know you will do it if it is humanly possible.”

Night

Around 4 p.m. Haig rode to the commanders at the front. Taking into account the situation further south, he decided that the exposed, burning village, shelled by the artillery of both sides, was not worth holding, and ordered it to be abandoned. After dark the British took away the wounded and moved to a new line a few hundred metres west of the village. The Germans did not notice, and their scouts appeared in Gheluvelt only at 5 a.m. South of the Menin road, the cavalry brigades of General Julian Byng helped Bulfin’s battalions in the evening to clear the woods of Germans and close the last gap in the 7th Division’s sector.

In the south, on the Messines ridge, cavalry, Indian soldiers and the London Scottish volunteer battalion held out all day against the Württemberg 26th Division, which had broken into the little town. During the night the Germans attacked Wytschaete. In the evening the Kaiser sent Fabeck’s group warm thanks, but the German official history admitted that the objective of the attack had not been achieved.

Significance

On 31 October the Germans came closer than at any other time in 1914 to breaking through the front at Ypres. Fabeck’s group took Gheluvelt but had no fresh forces at hand to go further, and the British closed the gap with the last battalion they had left. French later wrote that on that day and the next the vital interests of the British Empire were in great danger and the whole coast from Le Havre to Ostend very nearly fell into enemy hands. The counter-attack at Gheluvelt passed into the legend of the British Army. The anniversary of 31 October is still commemorated by the successors of the Worcestershire and South Wales Borderers regiments, and in 1922 a park named after Gheluvelt was opened in Worcester.

The battle for Ypres was not yet over. In the following days the Germans took the Messines ridge and continued to attack east and south of the town, while the French took over ever longer sectors of the front. The last great assault, involving the elite regiments of the Prussian Guard, was to come on 11 November. For the British 1st and 7th Divisions, which on 31 October lost many of their last regular officers and men, it was nonetheless the moment when the old regular army began to come to an end.