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