The Battle of Neuve Chapelle begins

At 7.30 a.m. on 10 March 1915 the British artillery opened fire on the German trenches around the village of Neuve Chapelle in French Flanders. Half an hour later the infantry of General Douglas Haig’s First Army, British and Indian, went into the attack. It was the first offensive that the British Expeditionary Force had planned and carried out on its own since the Western Front had congealed into trenches. In the morning everything went to plan: before noon the village was in British hands and the German line was broken on a front of about two kilometres. In the afternoon, however, the attack began to bog down.

The objective

The Germans had taken Neuve Chapelle at the end of October 1914, and since then the village had sat in a small salient pushed into the British line. Behind it, beyond the Bois du Biez, rose the Aubers Ridge, barely a dozen or so metres higher than the flat, waterlogged plain, but screening the way on towards Lille. Haig wanted to eliminate the salient, take the village and then, if the defence cracked, push on to the ridge. Behind the infantry the cavalry waited, ready to move into the breach.

The attack was originally to have been part of a joint offensive with the French, but they withdrew when the British were unable to relieve their troops at Ypres. Field Marshal John French decided to attack alone. He wanted to support his allies and to prove that his army could attack and not merely hold on in the trenches.

Two corps were assigned to the attack. IV Corps under General Henry Rawlinson, with the 8th and 7th Divisions, was to strike from the north-west, and the Indian Corps under General James Willcocks, with the Meerut and Lahore Divisions, from the south. For the Indian Corps it was the first major offensive since December, when it had barely held the front at Givenchy. Facing them were thin detachments of the Westphalian VII Corps of the German Sixth Army, in shallow trenches and behind sandbag breastworks.

New methods

The preparations were more thorough than for any previous British attack. Airmen of the Royal Flying Corps photographed the German positions from the air, and on the basis of the aerial photographs accurate maps of the German trenches were drawn for the first time and then issued to officers. More than 340 guns and howitzers were brought up to their positions by night and concealed, and every battery received a list of targets and a fire timetable down to the minute. The troops moved into their assembly positions at night, and by 4.30 a.m. everyone was in place. The Germans expected nothing.

Bombardment and assault

The night was wet, with passing snow, and in the morning mist hung over the plain. At 7.30 the bombardment began. According to most sources, for 35 minutes the field guns cut the wire while the howitzers pounded the German breastworks. Soldiers in the British trenches later recalled a roar so tremendous that they could not hear their own voices. At 8.05 the artillery lifted its fire onto the village and the infantry left the trenches.

In the centre the British 25th Brigade and the Indian Garhwal Brigade crossed no man’s land almost without loss. The stunned German survivors of the bombardment mostly surrendered. The soldiers broke into the ruins of the village and cleared them house by house. On the right flank, however, one of the battalions of the 39th Garhwal Rifles lost its direction and ran into an unbombarded stretch of the German trenches, where it suffered heavy losses. Rifleman Gabbar Singh Negi of the regiment’s second battalion led the attack along a German trench, forcing the defenders to surrender. He was killed that day and was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.

On the left flank the 23rd Brigade came up against intact wire. The two batteries of heavy howitzers that were to have destroyed it had reached their positions only on the eve of the attack and had not had time to register. The 2nd Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment and the 2nd Battalion of the Scottish Rifles lost hundreds of men here in a short time, and the commanding officer of the Scots, Lieutenant-Colonel Wilfred Bliss, was killed. Only when a neighbouring brigade took this position in the flank from the direction of the village, and the artillery shelled it again, did the attack move on. According to French’s report, by 11 o’clock the whole village was in British hands.

A lost opportunity

Then the attack lost momentum. After the fighting in the trenches and ruins the units were intermingled and had to be sorted out. German fire cut the telephone lines, so reports from the front and orders from the staffs took hours to get through. IV Corps headquarters was unable to bring the reserve brigades forward quickly, and some commanders waited for orders instead of pressing on. Meanwhile the Germans secured the flanks of the breach, and isolated groups, among them men of the 11th Jäger Battalion, held out for many hours in trenches and houses on its edges.

The renewed advance began only at about 3.30 p.m. The brigades of the 7th and 8th Divisions were stopped by machine-gun fire around Moulin du Piètre, and the Dehra Dun Brigade, supported by the Jullundur Brigade of the Lahore Division, was held up on the way to the Bois du Biez at the Layes brook, under fire from a fortified bridge. At dusk the troops began to consolidate the ground they had won. That same day Lord Kitchener at last agreed to send to the Dardanelles the 29th Division, on which French had been counting in France.

What came next

On the evening of 10 March the British and Indians held Neuve Chapelle and a strip of captured ground up to a kilometre deep, and several hundred Germans had been taken prisoner. Behind these gains, however, stood a new German line, and during the night German reinforcements were coming up. For the next two days Haig tried to break through to the Aubers Ridge, and on 12 March the Germans launched a strong counter-attack. The battle ended on 13 March. The Aubers Ridge remained in German hands, and the first day of the attack went down in history as proof that a trench front could be broken, and at the same time as a warning of how hard it was to exploit such a breakthrough.