First Ypres, 1914: the trenches reach the sea

In the autumn of 1914 the old Flemish cloth town of Ypres stood in the last gap of the Western Front. For five weeks German armies tried to break through it to the coast, and a battered British army, the French and the Belgians held them off at a terrible price. The salient they kept around the town would be fought over for the rest of the war.²

Background: the race to the sea

After the German retreat from the Marne in September 1914, each side tried to work around the other's open northern flank, moving ever closer to the Channel in what became known as the race to the sea. The name misleads: neither side was racing for the coast, but each kept trying to turn the other's flank until the armies ran out of room.³ › The First Marne, 1914

Antwerp fell to the Germans on 10 October, and the Belgian army fell back to the coast and the line of the Yser. Meanwhile the British Expeditionary Force was moved north from the Aisne and took up a line in Flanders between La Bassée and Ypres.⁴ › Siege of Antwerp, 1914

Erich von Falkenhayn, the German chief of staff, saw a chance. He meant to hold the next Allied flanking move with one army while another, made up of troops freed by the fall of Antwerp and four newly raised reserve corps, swept down the coast, broke the Allied northern flank and took the Channel ports of Dunkirk, Calais and Boulogne.⁵

Armies and commanders

On the Allied side Field Marshal Sir John French commanded the British Expeditionary Force, with Sir Douglas Haig's I Corps and Sir Henry Rawlinson's IV Corps at Ypres, and Indian troops fighting alongside the British. General Ferdinand Foch coordinated the French armies in the north, and King Albert I led the Belgians on the Yser.⁶

The British force was small beside the French and German armies, but it was made up of well-trained regulars. It had already fought at Mons in August, where its rifle fire stopped the advancing Germans, retreated with the French and then helped drive the Germans back at the Marne. At Ypres its marksmanship and discipline would again be decisive.⁷

Against them stood the German Fourth Army under Albrecht, duke of Württemberg, and the Sixth Army, later reinforced by an improvised army group under General Max von Fabeck. Many of the new reserve corps were filled with young war volunteers, schoolboys and students among them, given only a short training.⁸

The battle in phases

The clash, 19 to 24 October. On 19 October Sir John French ordered his left to attack from Ypres toward Menin. The attack ran straight into the German offensive that opened the next day, and for a time French believed he was attacking while his troops were barely holding their ground. Britannica calls the result a soldiers' battle, decided more by the courage of the men in the line than by any plan from above. The German attacks at Langemarck were held, French reinforcements, the IX Corps sent by Joffre, came up north of the town, and by 24 October the French held the northern half of a semicircle east of Ypres and the British the southern half.⁹

The flooding of the Yser. To the north the exhausted Belgians held the Yser between Nieuport and Dixmude. At the end of October King Albert ordered the sluices at Nieuport opened, and the sea flooded the low ground in front of the German attackers, forcing them back and securing the Allied left flank.¹⁰

Gheluvelt, 31 October. The crisis came on the Menin road east of Ypres. German attacks drove the British back from Zandvoorde, and on 31 October the Germans took Gheluvelt and broke the British line. A counterattack by the 2nd Battalion, Worcestershire Regiment, retook the village and restored the front.¹¹

Messines. Farther south Fabeck's attacks took Messines, Wytschaete and the whole of the Messines Ridge in the first days of November, but French reinforcements stopped them, and the Allies held a line east of Kemmel and on the high ground of Mount Kemmel.¹²

Turning point: Langemarck and the Prussian Guard

First the Allies shifted their forces. The Indian Corps took over part of the line farther south, which freed British infantry to take over the trenches of the shattered 7th Division east of Ypres. Falkenhayn, meanwhile, tried once more. He gathered six more divisions for a final effort to break into Ypres, among them a division of the Prussian Guard. On 10 November inadequately trained reserve corps of young volunteers attacked near Langemarck, uphill against machine guns, and were cut down in their hundreds by fire from above. The same day the Germans drove the French out of the ruins of Dixmude.¹³

On 11 November, after a heavy bombardment, the Prussian Guard attacked astride the Menin road and broke through the left of the British 1st Division into the Nonne Bosschen wood. Two counterattacks, by the Royal Scots Fusiliers and by the 2nd Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry, threw them out again. Brigadier General Charles FitzClarence was killed by rifle fire as the second was being prepared.¹⁴

The failure of the Guard all but ended the battle. Further German attacks were checked, snow and frost set in, and the hastily dug trenches began to fill with water. On 22 November the battle came to an end.¹⁵

Aftermath

The losses were staggering for so short a campaign, and the sources count them differently. For the British the official historian James Edmonds gave 58,155 casualties from 14 October to 30 November; Jack Sheldon, writing in 2010, puts the figure at about 54,000, and Britannica at more than 54,000. French losses at Ypres are estimated at between 50,000 and 80,000, Belgian losses at the Yser and Ypres at more than 20,000. German casualties are given as between 80,000 and 130,000 by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and at more than 130,000 by Britannica.¹⁶

For Britain's small professional army, so much smaller than the French and German armies, the cost was crushing: by the end of the year, the National Army Museum writes, the original force that had crossed to France in August had almost been wiped out.¹⁷

Both sides dug in for the winter. A line of trenches now ran from the Channel coast to the Swiss frontier, and the war of movement in the west was over. Around Ypres the Allies held a salient, a bulge in the line overlooked by the Germans on the low ridges to the east.¹⁸ › The Christmas Truce of 1914

Legacy and memory

In Germany the battle produced a myth. On 11 November 1914 the army's official report claimed that west of Langemarck young regiments had advanced singing “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” and taken the enemy's first line. The Western Front Association notes that the claim was untrue and that the action it described took place at Bixschoote; the Deutsches Historisches Museum shows how the self-sacrifice of the young volunteers was glorified as the Langemarck myth and invoked well beyond the Weimar Republic. In Germany the battle is also remembered as the Kindermord, the massacre of the innocents.¹⁹

Ypres itself never left the front line. In April 1915 the Germans attacked the salient again in the Second Battle of Ypres, and on 22 April released chlorine gas against French and Algerian troops, the first use of gas on such a scale. In July 1917 the British and French launched the Third Battle of Ypres, remembered as Passchendaele, whose bitter struggle came to symbolize the horrors of trench warfare.²⁰ › The Battle of Passchendaele, 1917

Visiting Ypres today

The town, now Ieper, was rebuilt after the war. At its eastern gate stands the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing, which bears the names of more than 54,500 Commonwealth soldiers who died in the salient and have no known grave.²¹

Every evening at 8 o'clock the police stop the traffic under the gate, and buglers of the Last Post Association sound the Last Post. The ceremony has been held since 2 July 1928, and anyone may attend. In 2023 the Menin Gate became part of a UNESCO World Heritage property of 139 funerary and memorial sites of the Western Front, in France and Belgium.²² › The Greatest Battles of the First World War