THE YPRES TIMES "3 I SUPPOSE that for all of us who fought in the last war the two most exciting days in our life were the day we first landed in France and the day we first went into action. And I think that for those of us who had the luck to be early in the field the excitement was even more intense. There was an indescribable glamour and novelty about everything then that made each succeeding day full with the promise of fresh adventure. Anyhow, that is how I felt during my first two months at the front, and I am by no means specially adventurous by nature. My regiment, the Oxfordshire Hussars (Yeomanry), landed at Dunkirk on September 22nd, 1914, and was attached to the Marine Brigade, forerunner of the Royal Naval Division. It so happened that, having a good knowledge of French, I was almost immediately detailed as A.D.C., and so came in for the Antwerp expedition. Life was full of surprises in those days. It had been a tremendous surprise when at two in the morning on the Berkshire downs we had received orders to entrain for Southampton and service overseas, having been told only the day before by a very senior officer that we should certainly spend the winter training in England. We actually sailed from England with some of our men in bowler hats and civilian clothes. It was an almost equally big surprise to me when at 6 a.m. on Saturday, October 3rd, I was woken with the news that we (i.e., the Marines; the Yeomanry were left at Hazebrouck, as mentioned later in this article) were packing up and going to Antwerp, already almost at its last gasp. A few days earlier we had moved inland from Dunkirk to Cassel, where Headquarters was established at the Lion Sauvage," well known by officers of the Second Army in later years. The main British army was miles away to the south on the Aisne. The Race to the Sea was in full swing, and the general idea of our presence in Cassel seems to have been to co-operate with the French in a threat to the German communications. Anyhow, there we were, full of fight, and daily expecting to move out and meet the enemy. The Marines actually had a battalion in Lille, and the late Commodore Samson's aeroplanes and armoured cars went far out into the blue every day, the latter having many scraps with German patrols. So it was rather a disappointment when these hopes of a dashing raid on the enemy communications were knocked on the head by orders to go to Antwerp. I envisaged being shut up m a beleaguered city for months on end, living on starvation rations and generally enduring the discomforts and anxieties one had read of in accounts of sieges in other wars. General Paris, of the Royal Marine Artillery, was in command of the relief force. (He continued to command the Royal Naval Division until dangerously wounded in the battle of the Somme in October, 1916, when he lost a leg.) It took us all day to get to Antwerp, though the distance is not much over 100 miles. We detrained at a suburb about midnight, and early next morning the brigade marched off to the defence line, about seven miles south-east of the city. There were no real trenches, and the men set about improving the position. During the morning, while the staff were going round the line, I was left in charge of the office, where I was soon assailed with all sorts of telephone inquiries, many of which I was hard put to to answer. I remember one in particular from the harassed com mander of a Belgian battery who said his guns were being shelled by observation from an aeroplane, and would I please immediately take steps to have it driven off. Another from a Belgian officer who had heard we had an armoured train, and would we please direct it to reinforce his position. Then there was a lot of to-do about some 9.2 inch naval guns which were said to be on their way to us from England, and which were

HISTORISCHE KRANTEN

The Ypres Times (1921-1936) | 1932 | | pagina 19