After a quiet morning the Dorsets witnessed French troops retiring from the direction of the Institute Royale, which was a large collection of monastical buildings in Messines. There’s an interesting blog on excavations in Messines here along with some interesting photographs of the Intitute before and during the war.
Knowing the French tactics for offensive the Dorsets assumed that a counter attack was imminent and so they informed a certain Colonel Butler. This was Lieutenant Colonel Richard Harte Keatinge Butler. He had been CO of the 2nd Bn Lancashire Fusiliers but had now assumed responsibility for the entire Ploegsteert Wood area. This entailed much of the 11th and 12th Brigades. We’ll hear more about Butler later on.
The French never counter attacked, presumably because of the heavy mist that day. The Dorsets sent out patrols out to find out what the French were up to on their immediate left. Other than that the rest of the day was fairly quiet.
Interestingly, as German snipers began to worm their way into the eastern edges of the wood, requests came into 11th Brigade HQ for rifle and hand grenades and steel loopholes. The British didn’t have an answer to the German’s sniping at this period in the war as we’ve seen before. This evidence shows that the British troops on the ground were crying out for the equipment to respond effectively but they weren’t to get it for a very long time.
The Dorsets spent the day being shelled in the woods, but at 4pm were gathered together and ordered to relieve the 2nd Battalion Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, who had scratched out some very basic trenches in the recent fighting. The History of the Dorsetshire Regiment 1914-1919 lists them as the 1st Battalion Royal Irish Fusiliers. I’ve just looked at the 11th Brigade war diary and it uses the abbreviation of “innis fus” so it looks like the War Diary is correct. Whoever they were, the relief was completed by 6pm. The rest of the night was quiet.
The Dorsets found themselves at the junction between what became known as two separate battles; the Battle of Armentières was dying away to the south and the Battle of Messines was now raging away just to the north. Ploegsteert Wood was a natural barrier between the two battles but the Germans were still pushing very hard to take it.
The map today is a bit of a leap of faith and I would be most grateful for more information if anyone has any. Since the 15th Brigade has been practically broken up after leaving La Bassée, there’s a paucity of information available. Gleichen’s memoirs have been very useful so far. I’ve located the Dorsets along a north westerly line running from the Messines-Ploegsteert road (Mesen on the Google map) to the River Douve, with Frank halfway along that line entrenched somewhere in a field. The line at this point is clearly marked on the Michelin illustrated guide to the battlefields (1914-1918) Ypres and the Battles of Ypres as bending around the north of Ploegsteert Wood (on the map just left of St Yvon).
Ploegsteert Wood. later anglicised to Plugstreet, is a large wood between Armentières in the south and Messines in the north. It held some strategic value in enclosing Hill 63, a rare high point which offered the British a toehold in targeting the Messines ridge to the north which had just fallen to the enemy.
On the morning of the 2nd November 1914, the British 4th Division held a thin twelve miles of front including a line of three villages along the eastern edge of the woods: La Gheer, Le Péverin and St Yves. The Germans were attacking all along the line from here to Ypres in the north. Their overwhelming superiority of both numbers and firepower was destroying the cream of the British Army. There were only so many last gasp charges the BEF could make.
At 2pm the Dorsets moved into position on a road junction along from the Petit Pont. They then withdrew westwards 2 hours later to cook a meal. At 6pm A Company moved into prepared trenches, further east into the wood. B and D Companies, meanwhile, began to dig trenches along the line of the Ploegsteert – Messines Road, south of a château, which I think was probably Chateau du Mont de la Hutte. It’s now ruins. Without the 1914 map referenced by the Dorsets’ war diary, it’s impossible to know exactly where they were but I’ve marked the rough locations for now.
There’s a 1915 sketch of the château available on the Imperial War Museum reproduced below.
The Dorsets awoke on a fine Sunday morning, perhaps expecting a nice leisurely breakfast and a stroll around Strazeele. However, at 7.50am they were greeted by a II Corps Staff Officer, Colonel Shoubridge, who announced that they were to be taken away by buses to the front. How dismayed they must have been. Their promised seven days rest vanished in an instant.
I think that II Corps knew it would be a tough ask so they decided to apply a bit of motivational management. Colonel Shoubridge himself was an ex-1st Dorsets man. As the men climbed wearily into the buses Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, II Corps’ commander, arrived and spoke to them, praising their fine fighting at Pont Fixe. The phrase forms the title of a self-published book I’m still trying to track down by Captain A.L. Ransome, “The fine fighting of the Dorsets”, portions of which embellish the official History of The Dorsetshire Regiment 1914-1919.
I have reasons to doubt his sincerity. Smith-Dorrien had actually been very critical of the 15th and 13th Brigades’ performance at Pont Fixe as I’ve explored in a previous post. He also claimed that the Dorsets and Cheshires “did not put up a resolute resistance” on the 22nd October at Violaines.
But these were desperate times and every spare unit was needed. The rumble of guns heard by the Dorsets the previous evening had been the sound of the Germans breaking the British line at Gheluvelt, east of Ypres in Belgium. Only a desperate charge by the 2nd Bn Worcestershire regiment on the 31st October had saved the situation. It remained critical time for the Allies and the British and French poured their tattered troops in to plug the gaps. The Dorsets were bound for Ploegsteert, where they were being attached to the 4th Division, who were having a very hard time of it.
And so the Dorsets grudgingly clambered aboard buses. Buses straight from the streets of London., manned by volunteers, painted red and white and still plastered with adverts for Evening News and Wright’s Soap.
London B-Type Buses
The London B-Type Motor Omnibus could hold 24 men, so between 30 and 40 buses would have trundled over the border into Belgium. It must have been a bizarre couple of hours for Frank, as if his old London life had suddenly emerged out of the past.
The journey would have been pleasant enough for the Dorsets as they enjoyed clear blue skies, very similar to today’s weather 100 years later. This wasn’t to last. As they approached Lindenhoek they could actually see heavy shelling to the north east at Wytschaete. Messines to the east had fallen and the Germans were pushing forward into Ploegsteert wood three miles east of Neuve Eglise.
At 3pm the Dorsets went into billets at Neuve Eglise. At 5pm B Company was sent out as an outpost on the Wulverghem-Neuve Eglise Road. C and D Companies entrenched nearby. Frank and the rest of A Company remained in billets in Neuve Eglise. An hour later they were joined by the rest of the Battalion, leaving just one platoon of B Company covering the road.
The Dorsets marched 13 miles to Strazeele in fine weather. Gleichen caught up with them on his way through to Pradelles a little further on. Here he was
met by a staff officer, Cameron of the 5th Divisional Staff, who gave us the welcome news that we were to rest and recuperate for at least a week—really and truly this time.
Earlier he comments on this promise with a little sarcasm:
I knew those rests.
For the Dorsets, the only semblance of Hallowe’en on this day in 1914 was the nightmare they had left behind. Some respite from the two months of almost continuous fighting would have been very welcome indeed.
Ominously, as the shellfire diminished behind them with every step, a new rumble of guns could be hear away to the north; away to Belgium.
