The Battle of Messines, June 7th, 1917.
182
Thb Ypres Timbs.
Eight years ago in the month of June, British troops in Flanders fought and won a
battle which for complete success, perfect organisation, terrible concentration of destructive
force, and lightness of human loss on our side, was unique in our warfare on the Western
Front. It was the attack and capture of the Messines and Wytscliaete Ridge by thé
Second Army under General Plumer, with Major-General Charles Harington as his Chief
of Staff.
At the time we thought of it only as a stupendous victory achieved with few casualties.
Looking back on it now we may, I think, regard it as an episode in history such as will
never be seen again in the world if humanity is capable of learning from the lessons of
the past. There may be future wars I'm afraid there certainly will bebut I doubt
whether there will ever be such enormous powers of destruction, such an accumulation
of scientific forces, such a piling up of explosive material as preceded our assault on
Messines. It was due to the long period of trench warfarenot likely to happen in a
future war with new weaponswhich enabled the enemy to make a hillside like Messines
into one vast tunnelled fortress and necessitated on our side a long process of sapping
and mining, an immense assembly of artillery, and even,' available weapon underground,
above ground, and in the air, to blast, its defences and paralyse its defenders who had the
supreme advantage of position.
It is not an exaggeration to say that preparations for the battle began a year before
that morning of June 7th, when Canadian miners and our own began to tunnel under the
slopes and laid charges of ammonal which at a touch would alter the very geography of
Flanders. For a year the Second Army had been laying light railways, piling up
ammunition dumps, and arranging gun positions, under the ven' eyes of the enemy,
who for two years and a half had had perfect observation of our roads, billets and
transport from those high ridges which had been a curse to us. For all that time their
artiller}' observers had directed their guns upon our men in the swamps of the Douve,
in the woods of Plug Street, in the flat ground round Kemmel Hill, at sinister cross roads
and evil spots which still live in the memory as Shell Trap Farm and Suicide Corner.
But they could not see the work of our men below ground and they could not stop the
preparations which were gradually being piled up against them.
A week before the battle the Second Army had their plans ready with every kind of
weapon which modern science has devisèd for the killing of men in great masses, includ
ing tanks and heavy guns. Night and day for seven days our bombardment continued
with growing violence, working up to supreme heights of fury, which kept thousands of
Germans imprisoned in their tunnels and smashed regiments coming up to their relief.
Their own concentration of artillery was smothered by our gunfire, directed by young
airmen who seemed possessed by a fiery exaltation of spirit, and took supreme risks, and
fought innumerable duels with enemy 'planes, of which forty-four were sent crashing to
earth in five days before the battle. And meanwhile our miners were busy in the tunnels.
Our infantry divisions assembled for the attack at dawn. They were, from north to
south, the 23rd, 47th (London), 41st, 19th, 16th (Irish), 36th (Ulster), 25th (New Zealand)
and 3rd (Australian).
The night before the battle the sky was lighted by bursting shells and the air shook
with the heavy hammer strokes of guns. The Germans sent over bursts of gas shells to
choke our gunners. Over in their fines one could see fires lighted by our gunfire, big
rose-coloured smoke clouds with hearts of flame. There were moments of silence when one
heard the cocks of Flanders crow'ing for a dreadful dawn, and the tuff-tuff of our engines
behind the fines. A full moon had risen in a sky still faintly blue, with here and there a
star. It was a moon which through all the ages had never looked down 011 such fires of
man-made hell as those which burst out when the battle began. The signal for its begin-
