upon to push the line forward more than a short distance, their task rather being to link up the ground won by the Canadians with the old line near Poelkapelle. Some hundreds of prisoners were taken. The operation further to the S., on the other hand, which only had a very limited objective, was unsuccessful. The purpose had been to capture the village of Gheluvelt and to improve the position somewhat a little further to the N.; the possession of Gheluvelt on its well-defined spur running south- eastward would create as it were a bastion to flank the forward slopes on either hand. But after very nearly gaining their objectives at the outset, both the 7th and the sth Divs. were driven back to their starting point, and they suffered heavily in casualties during a furious combat. With the ground in the condition that it was in, rifles were apt to become choked with mud, while percussion shell buried themselves in the swamp doing little harm by their explosion; these conditions however affected both sides equally.
Between the 26th and the 28th Belgian and French troops made an important gain of ground on the extreme left of the line, securing possession of the flats as far forward as the Blan- kaart lake. And on the 3oth a fresh attack was made between the Ypres-Roulers railway and Poelkapelle by the same troops as had fought on the 26th, but on a narrower front this day as most of the high ground in the direction of Passchendaele which Sir D. Haig was anxious to occupy had been captured in the previous combat. Some progress was made; but the Germans offered a very stout resistance at important points, although at others they showed some symptoms of losing heart and some of them even abandoned their posts at the outbreak of the fight. Owing to the front of attack now being restricted and to the object which the assailants had in mind being obvious, the enemy was concentrating a very heavy artillery fire upon the area that formed the battle-field, and in their efforts to get to Passchendaele the Canadians suffered heavy losses on this day. The 6$rd and 58th Divs., further to the left and attempting to get forward on lower ground, found this almost impassable and they only ad- vanced their line slightly here and there. But up on the main ridge what had been achieved paved the way for a brilliant success a week later. At dawn on Nov. 6 the Canadian 2nd and ist Divs. suddenly advanced and captured Passchendaele together with the somewhat higher ground immediately to the N. and N.W. of the village, also taking 400 prisoners. This fine achievement can fairly be set down as the closing incident in what has been called " The Third Battle of Ypres." One or two attempts were made within the next few days to improve the position in the sector where the Canadians had made such sub- stantial gains, and these were partially successful, but they did not appreciably modify the situation.
The prolonged succession of combats, many of them (such as the capture of the Messines-Wytschaete ridge by the II. Army and the very successful operations on July 31 and Oct. 4) reckoning as unqualified victories to the credit of the Allies, had transformed the situation in Flanders. The chain of heights from N. of Armentieres to Passchendaele had changed hands. The Ypres salient, vastly extended, so far from its constituting a weak and barely defensible sector of the Allies' front, had become a serious danger to the enemy. Sir D. Haig had secured an excellent defensive position between the Yser and the Lys. Great hostile forces had been kept fettered to the north-western extremity of the western front, striving to maintain possession of a tract that had been captured by the invaders some three years before. But the main object for which the offensive had been undertaken had been only very partially attained. The German hold upon the coast district remained unshaken. The line of high ground to the N. of Passchendaele and circling round beyond the further outskirts of the Houthulst forest, as also that forest itself, remained in the enemy's hands. The third battle of Ypres, chiefly perhaps because of unfortunate delays in start- ing the operations and of untoward weather conditions after they had been started, had not prepared the way as had been intended for subsequent advance upon Ostend and the great plains N. of the Lys. (C. E. C.)
IV. BATTLES or SEPTEMBER 1918
At the end of Aug. 1918, when the French counter-offensive, commenced on July 18, and the British counter-offensive, begun on Aug. Sth, had both been crowned with success, the initiative in strategy had been definitely taken out of the hands of the German command. The enemy had been driven from the salients of Chateau-Thierry and Montdidier, which were his conquests of March and May.
Thanks to British shipping, each month 250,000 American soldiers were being landed on French soil, and this increasing wave of troops, young and fresh, gave the Allies a superiority in numbers and materiel which grew day by day.
Desiring that the enemy should have no opportunity to re- cover from disorganization and fatigue, Marshal Foch proposed to continue the operations by a triple attack, to which end three actions were to commence about Sept. 25 at 24-hour intervals.
The American I. Army and the French IV. Army were to attack on both sides of the Argonne in the general direction of Mezieres. The British I., III. and IV. Armies and the French
I. Army were to push towards Cambrai and St. Quentin, and break through the famous Siegfried position or Hindenburg line. The Belgian army, the British II. Army and certain French divisions, who would presently join them, formed the group of the armies in Flanders under the supreme command of H.M. the King of the Belgians, and would undertake the opera- tions in Flanders. This force in the first place was to secure the Flanders ridge and having conquered this to push on the left wing toward Bruges-Ghent with the object of freeing the Belgian coast, while the right wing would push toward Courtrai- Renaix in such a manner as to cause the evacuation without fighting of that vast inhabited region Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing.
At the request of King Albert, General Degoutte of the French army took over the duties of chief-of-staff of the group of armies in Flanders.
The German Position. The Belgian army and the British
II. Army were ordered to seize the Flanders heights, the line which, starting from Hill 10 toward the S.E. of Dixmude, reaches Hill 43 at Clercken, passes round the forest of Houthulst by the Stadenberg, passes by Westroosebeke, Passchendaele, Zonne- beke, beyond Ypres to Gheluvelt, Hill 60, Wytschaete and Messines. The line continues to the right toward the W. by Mont Kemmel, Mont Rouge, Mont Noir and Mont des Cats, which form the watershed of the rivers Yser and Lys.
At this period nine German divisions held the sector Dixmude- Armentieres: three or four being at rest behind the front line. The first line of German trenches passed by Dixmude, Wbumen, the Chateau Blanckaert, Langemarck, St. Julien, Zillebeke, St. Eloi, Wytschaete, Messines, and the river Lys to the W. of Armentieres. This was a zone of cover behind which the Ger- mans had echeloned four successive positions, the product of four years of stability which had been strengthened with partic- ular care in 1917 to resist the British offensive that year.
These were characterized by the use of concrete groups, very numerous and strong, of the type of the famous "pill-boxes " of Stirling Castle, Inverness Copse and Poelkapelle. Some of these contained sections of artillery with gunners and ammuni- tion: generally they sheltered one or two sections of machine- guns, the fire of which covered the intervals and afforded flanking fire to each other. Everywhere were vast stretches of a network of barbed wire in front of dugouts and trenches affording an entire continuity of obstacles.
The terrain of the attacks had been entirely overturned by the bombardments in the British offensives of 1917: every vestige of cover had disappeared; only some mounds of walls marked the position of villages; the soil was riddled by the shell- holes adjoining each other; the land drainage system no longer functioned, every ditch was full of water and the field of battle everywhere was a vast and foetid bog (slough) in which progress was arduous. The network of roads was hidden under the mud and any advance would be as difficult for the lines of skirmishers as for the artillery horse-teams and the supply convoys.
