The Ypres Times.
7
The success of the new weapon was immediate and complete. Some thousands of
half-suffocated prisoners were taken, with eight batteries of French seventy-fives and four
British naval guns a gap nearly five miles broad was cut in the Allied position, and the
city of Yprgs lay not only within sight, but within three miles easy march of the attacking
force. The fate, of the British Army and the Channel ports never hung more desperately
in the balance than on that day and the next.
One night was all that was left to General Smith-Dorrien for designing a counter-
move to save his command and the campaign. His alliesthe French Colonial troops
had vanished completely off the landscape. On-his own left, the 8th and 5th Canadians
were fighting brilliantly, but their flank was in the air, and beyond them as far as the
canal by Boesinghe lay the open gap with two roads through it, and not even the remnants
of a line to hold it. From the French trenches, on the Pilkem ridge, now in German hands,
the ruined towers of Ypres lay near and clear, almost, as it seemed, within a long rifle shot.
To meet the danger there was for a British army but one plan possible resistance
to the last. But here the resistance must take the almost fantastic form of an attack.
The audacity of attacking at a time when even a defence might seem a desperate business
is well described by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as a classical example of military bluff/'
Eight scattered battalions of different divisions were all the reserve Smith-Dorrien had.
By midnight they had been'placed under the command of Colonel Geddes of the Buffs,
and were moving, one by one, to the front, through the town now ruined and burning.
From daylight till mid-day they were making their way northwards through woods and
farms towards the north, foodless, almost waterless, and often under shell fire. They
marched separately and sighted each other, if at all, by accident, for in this new and
desperate crisis staff work was almost impossible. They had been marching, dodging,
digging and starving for fifteen hours, when one by one, without touch and without ex
planation, they received the order to attack.
To the men, and perhaps to the junior officers the plan of operations was a mystery.
Probably their commanders knew better what was meant. Each of them acted as if he
had received an order in some such words as these The regiment with others will
be used as they can be got to the front, to bluff the enemy. The leading half-battalions
will be thrown in twos and threes, or even singly, into the gap they will keep up the
appearance of an offensive, while the other half of each battalion digs in on a new line.
The attacking companies have only to get as far forward as they can and die there they
will be successful if they do not die before dark. The enemy must not move on Ypres."
They were not staked in vain, these eight battalions with the plain name of Geddes's
Detachment. They were the 2nd Buffs, half of the 3rd Middlesex, half of the 2nd Shrop-
shires, the 1st York and Lancaster, the 5th Royal Lancaster, the 4th Rifle Brigade,
the 9th Royal Scots and the 2nd Cornwalls. This poor and starvèd band should be
remembered, like the men of Agincourt, from this day to the ending of the world."
No one has ever put together a complete account of their extraordinary attack.
No finer proof of soldierly virtue could be given," says Sir Conan Doyle than the
behaviour of these isolated British regiments which were now pushed up out of their
rest camps, many of them wearied from recent fighting, and none of them heartened
by the presence of the comrades and superior officers who had formed their old brigades
these battalions, regardless of fire and gas, marched straight across country at
the Germans, got right up to their line, and though unable to break it, held them fast
in their positions deliberately sacrificing themselves for the sake of the army."
As long as daylight lasted, without guns and without supports, the attacking line
of some 2,000 men covered a gap 8,000 yards wide, and pinned down the advance of a
whole victorious army. Behind them the remaining 2,CC0 dug the new line which held
fast from that day to the end of the war. Of the half-battalions staked in this gigantic
bluff scarcely a battered remnant was left. One company of the Buffs was entirely
