End of the battle of Neuve Chapelle

On 13 March 1915 the battle of Neuve Chapelle came to an end. During the night of 12–13 March Field Marshal John French ordered the commander of the First Army, General Douglas Haig, to halt the attack and consolidate the ground won. Three days earlier British and Indian divisions had taken the village in a single, carefully prepared assault. They got no further, however. German reinforcements closed the breach, and Aubers Ridge, the objective of the whole operation, remained in German hands.

Two days of fruitless attacks

On 11 March both sides were preparing to attack. A thick mist hung over the flat plain, the airmen could not observe targets, and most of the telephone lines between the observers and the batteries were cut. The British guns could not find the new German line, hidden in houses, ditches and on the edge of the Bois du Biez, and the attacks of the 7th and 8th Divisions and of the Indian Corps broke down under machine-gun fire. The Germans meanwhile brought up reinforcements, above all the 6th Bavarian Reserve Division, but their own counter-attack had to be postponed because some units did not arrive in time.

At dawn on 12 March, in the mist, about 20 German battalions attacked along the whole front of the breach. The British and Indians, however, had had time to dig in, and the German infantry advanced across open ground. The counter-attack broke down with heavy losses. Haig concluded that the Germans were exhausted and ordered the attack on the Bois du Biez and Aubers Ridge to be renewed. Further attacks by the 7th and 8th Divisions, and in the afternoon by brigades of the Indian Lahore Division, brought only small gains, however. The fighting was mainly with grenades, for individual trenches and houses. On that one day British soldiers won several Victoria Crosses.

The decision to break off

By the evening it was clear that there would be no breakthrough. The cavalry waiting for the breach found no use. The artillery, meanwhile, had fired so many shells that its stocks were melting away before their eyes: on the first day alone the First Army had used almost a third of its field-gun ammunition. During the night French ordered Haig to go over to the defensive. On 13 March the troops consolidated the new line, running a few hundred metres east of the ruins of Neuve Chapelle, while opposite them the Germans dug trenches of their own. On 15 March French finally abandoned any further offensive, because there were shells enough only for defence.

Not all sources end the battle on 13 March. The British Battles Nomenclature Committee, and after it the chronology of the war on which our timeline is based, adopted the dates 10–13 March. French himself, however, wrote in his report that the battle had been fought on 10, 11 and 12 March, and some studies date it so.

The balance

The British and Indians took the village and eliminated a German salient about two kilometres wide, but they came no closer to Lille. According to the British official history, the four divisions that took part in the attack lost 11,652 killed, wounded and missing, the Indian Corps about 4,200 of them. German losses are estimated at 8,500–10,000 men, and more than 1,600 were taken prisoner.

The first independent British offensive showed that a short, violent bombardment and a precise plan made it possible to break the first line of trenches. But it also showed that when communications failed, the command lost control of the battle, and the defender closed the breach faster than the attacker could bring up reserves. The French learned that the British could be relied on in an attack, and the Germans hastily strengthened their trenches in this sector.

The shortage of shells had the longest echo. French explained the breaking off of the offensive by the exhaustion of his soldiers and the lack of ammunition. When in May 1915 the next attack at Aubers broke down for similar reasons, the matter reached the press and caused the shell crisis in Britain, which contributed to the formation of a coalition government and of a new Ministry of Munitions under David Lloyd George.