End of the First Battle of Ypres

On 22 November 1914, according to the British nomenclature fixed after the war, the First Battle of Ypres came to an end. The date is largely conventional. The Germans had launched their last great attack eleven days earlier, and in the days that followed the fighting gradually died down. On this day the relief of the exhausted British divisions by the French was being completed, and German artillery set fire to the medieval Cloth Hall in the centre of the town. After five weeks of fighting, which had begun on 19 October, Ypres remained in Allied hands.

The last fighting

After the attack of the Prussian Guard at Nonne Bosschen on 11 November both sides were at the end of their strength. The Germans went on attacking for a few more days, but with smaller forces. On 12 November they surprised the French IX Corps, and in the following days they attacked sectors of the British II Corps south-east of Ypres. The last major attack, on Herenthage Wood by the Menin road, was repulsed on 17 November. On the same day Albrecht, Duke of Württemberg, halted the attacks of the Fourth Army.

The weather broke. From 12 November there was torrential rain, the first snow fell on 15 November, and frost followed. The soldiers of both sides were stuck in shallow, flooded trenches, often with no chance of relief or a hot meal. The German command concluded that it would not achieve a breakthrough in Flanders. Some of the troops, among them III Reserve Corps and XIII Corps, began to be transferred to the Eastern Front, where heavy fighting was going on in Poland. The Allies noticed these movements around 20 November. All that remained on the front at Ypres was artillery fire and local skirmishes.

The French relieve the British

From mid-November French corps took over the sectors of the most exhausted British units. On 16 November General Ferdinand Foch agreed that his troops would take over the whole front from Zonnebeke to the Comines–Ypres canal. Between 15 and 22 November General Douglas Haig’s British I Corps was relieved by the French IX and XVI Corps. The battalions of I Corps, many of which now numbered only a few hundred men and some only a few dozen, went back to rest in the rear. From then on, for several months, the defence of the salient around Ypres itself was taken over by the French Eighth Army of General Victor d’Urbal.

The British moved south. After the reorganisation the British Expeditionary Force held a front some 34 kilometres long, from Wytschaete (PL) to the La Bassée Canal at Givenchy. A shorter sector offered a chance for rest, reinforcement and training of the reservists arriving from home. North of the French, on the flooded plain of the Yser, the Belgians held their ground.

Losses

The First Battle of Ypres was the bloodiest battle the British army had so far fought in this war. According to the British official history, from 14 October to 30 November the British Expeditionary Force lost, including the simultaneous fighting at La Bassée, Armentières and Messines, 58,155 killed, wounded and missing. French losses in Flanders are estimated at 50,000–85,000, and Belgian losses, suffered mainly on the Yser, at more than 21,000.

The Germans lost the most. According to incomplete figures from the Reichsarchiv, from 15 October to 24 November 134,315 soldiers were killed, wounded or missing in Belgium and northern France. The heaviest losses were suffered by the new reserve corps, thrown into battle after a few weeks of training. The Germans, incidentally, end their battle of Ypern only on 24 November, while the French close this fighting earlier, in mid-November.

Significance

For the British it was the end of the old regular army that had set out for France in August. At Ypres its best battalions, their experienced officers and NCOs, were finally bled white. According to frequently cited estimates, of the thousand men of a battalion that had landed in France in August, at the end of the year an average of one officer and about 30 men remained in the ranks. The gap was filled by reservists, volunteers from Territorial Force battalions and soldiers of the Indian Corps, and in the following years by Kitchener’s New Armies and troops from the dominions.

The battle closed the Race to the Sea. A continuous line of trenches now ran from Switzerland to the North Sea, and trench warfare began on the Western Front. General Erich von Falkenhayn became convinced that a quick decision in the west was impossible.

What remained on the map after the battle was the Ypres Salient, a projecting bulge of the front around the town, surrounded on three sides by the Germans, who held the surrounding ridges and hills. From them their artillery could shell almost any point inside the salient. The Allies defended it until the end of the war, regarding the holding of the last sizeable town of free Belgium as a matter of honour. They paid for this decision in the following years with hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915 and in the Third, at Passchendaele, in 1917. The town itself was reduced to ruins. The burning of the Cloth Hall on 22 November was only the beginning of its destruction.