highlanders at ypres

 

The Second Battle Of Ypres - The Highland Spear-head

( Originally Published 1919 )

On Thursday, April 22nd, the 15th Battalion, as we have seen, were holding the line to the left of the 8th. On their own left the 13th continued the line to where it joined the Algerian division of the French. To the 13th was entrusted the responsibility for the main road which runs through Poelcapelle and St. Julien to Ypres. Of all the Canadian battalions in the Ypres salient these two, in the event of a breach any-where in the line, stood the least chance of escape. Probably no two battalions had less notion of escaping.
As a local reserve there lay in or close by St. Julien, Major Alexander's company of the 15th, two platoons of No. 3 Company of the 13th, and a company or half company of the 14th.
In the event of serious attack the two battalions had with these reserves to make good some twenty-five hundred yards of most awkward salient, with little hope of immediate relief. As trouble might be carried in through any of the entrances to Ypres from Langemarck to the Menin road, the remaining four battalions of the 2nd and 3rd Brigades had been echeloned to meet whatever case might arise: the 7th near Fortuin; the 14th, part near St. Jean and part near Wieltje between the Roulers and Broodseinde roads ; and the 10th and 16th close to Ypres. But it would not have been easy to make a workable distribution of these reserve battalions with a view to a quick reinforcement of the salient occupied by the 13th and 15th. They were so far up that if attacked they must rely on their supply of intrinsic Scotch stubbornness for some hours before help could arrive. As events proved they ran out of other things first — ammunition, food, and water.
The French on the left were not of the type that had turned the tide at the Marne and afterwards revised the world's idea of the typical Frenchman by their stolid holding of Verdun. Those in front of Langemarck were French Colonials, Turcos and Zouaves, men of all complexions except light ones, breezy, flamboyant, stagey fellows, flash-in-the-pan fire-eaters; good enough to storm a position; less reliable to keep one. The Germans selected wisely the theatre for the most atrocious of their criminal exploits. Nowhere in the Allied lines could they have found a group. more prone to a sudden depression or less fitted to resist an unheard of and mysterious form of military doom.