The Dorsets spent another day in reserve. In the morning A Company occupied a small rise near the Rue D’Ouvert and began to dig trenches. They swapped with the Composite Company at 7pm and at 11pm the Battalion was withdrawn and went into billets in Rue de Marais about half a mile to the east.
All this sounds perfectly routine but this was definitely not the case. The front was incredibly volatile and unpredictable. The Dorsets dug these defences under constant fire from the south east and the east, according to the 13th Brigade’s diary. All units were in danger of being over extended or outflanked. The Cheshires had been told to hold Violaines but they were being attacked all the time. The 5th Division had been in combat for several days under extreme pressure. They were short of men, especially experienced officers, were fighting across open flat ground, and had very little artillery support. The strain on everyone was beginning to tell.
The Dorsets repeated the same routine as yesterday. On this day, or possibly the day before (it’s not clear which day in the History of the Dorsetshire Regiment 1914-1919) Major Saunders sent Lieutenant Woodhouse, the machine gun officer, with a party of men to recover the bodies from the battlefield on the 13th. Under fire from the Germans, they recovered 130 bodies and brought back twenty wounded men who had been trapped out on the field.
Gleichen met General Morland, the new CO of the 5th Division, and explained to him the difficulty of the situation facing the 15th Brigade.
Generals Morland and Franklin turned up in the afternoon. We were perpetually being urged to advance and attack, but how could we? There was nothing to attack in front of us except La Bassée, a couple of miles off, and we could not advance a yard in that direction without exposing our right flank to a deadly enfilade fire from across the Canal, for the Germans were still strongly holding that infernal railway triangle, and nothing availed to get them out of it. General Morland wisely, therefore, ordered me not to advance in force.
As ever, the Dorsets were not left to rest. At 6am they rendezvoused along the Rue de Béthune and were put under orders of the 13th Brigade as Divisional Reserve with the West Riding Regiment. They marched into Festubert and went into billets.
I’m not sure being attached to the 13th Brigade would have been a popular decision among the tattered ranks of the Dorsets. After all, it was the failure of the 13th Brigade to get along the south side of the canal that had ultimately led to them getting cut up so badly in the beet fields.
I have been researching on the day I write a post. I want this blog to feel like a voyage of discovery rather than an authority on the subject, which I will never be. The learning experience for me is what’s keeping me going. Some days I get more time than others and mistakes have and will continue to be made. But it’s only when you turn thoughts and ideas over and over in your mind that patterns begin to emerge.
I didn’t want to spoil the narrative, but we’ve now reached a short gap in the action, and so I thought I would share my thoughts on the last few days of Frank’s war.
When I was writing the post for the 13th it was pretty depressing. I knew vaguely what had happened beforehand, but it’s hard to visualise these battles until you actually pull the facts apart and piece them back together again. Not all so-called facts are accurate. I keep going back to the strange reasons given for their failure of the attack on the 13th October. In the back of my mind is the idea that tremendous errors were made by the Dorset officers and they didn’t go unnoticed.
It’s easy to be an armchair general and I can’t for a second imagine what these men went through a hundred years ago. But I don’t think the truth is in the war diaries or the stories that came back with the men who survived the Battle of La Bassée.
Tomorrow I am going to try to see what really happened by looking at a higher operational level.
A Company once again held the factory. They were shelled all day but their experience in Missy had made them expert troglodytes and no casualties were reported.
At 7:20pm the Dorsets were relieved by the Devon Regiment. The bedraggled battalion marched via the canal to a location marked as Loisne. There’s a river Loisne but no indication of a village on modern maps. I’ve seen it marked on a later trench map and have marked its rough vicinity on the map.
The Dorsets went into billets for a period of rest and reorganisation.
The Dorsets left behind a killing zone. The 15th Brigade was to continue to try to occupy La Bassée over the coming days. The British were to remain in this spot for the next four years. Oceans of blood were spilled. The industrial landscape had insurmountable obstacles: the factories along the canal, the canal itself and the infamous brickstacks; a series of seemingly indestructible brickworks in which the two sides fought over with grenades, with mortars and hand-to-hand. The living eked out their miserable existence in trenches layered with the dead.
Cuinchy bred rats. They came up from the canal, fed on the plentiful corpses, and multiplied exceedingly. While I stayed here with the Welsh, a new officer joined the company… When he turned in that night, he heard a scuffling, shone his torch on the bed, and found two rats on his blanket tussling for the possession of a severed hand.
The only good news anyone had experienced for a couple of days crawled back through the battlefield during the night. Lieutenant Colonel Bols had dragged himself back to the Dorsets at Pont Fixe. His escape is a story straight out of the pages of Boys’ Own. The Germans had let a great prize slip through their hands.
Bols lay injured on the ground as the Germans surged over their position. Any immobile British wounded were taken prisoner. The German stretcher bearers soon arrived to pick among the wounded and Bols was told to wait for an ambulance. So he waited. And waited. Dusk came and so he began what much have been an agonising crawl back to the British line. Agonising because of his wounds, but also mentally as he crawled through the fallen heaps of his once proud Battalion.
Sadly there’s no first person account of his adventure, nor is there any more information about this other than the story above. We’ll catch up with Bols in the future but for now the Dorsets were in the capable hands of Major Cyril Saunders.
One more officer crawled back to the lines. Captain Francis Hans Bunbury Rathborne had been assisting the 18-pounders by the spoil heap when he was severely wounded. I’m happy to say that he survived the war and lived a long life, dying in 1976 aged 87.
First thing in the morning the sad remnants of the three Companies, B, C and D were merged into, what the war diary calls, a Composite Company. They were led by Captain Henry Beveridge who must have been an officer from the previous reinforcements as he’s not on the original list sent out from Belfast. They were sent away along the canal to the west out of the action.
Meanwhile the battle continued for a third day. The British continued to try to push through to La Bassée. The 15th Brigade was trying to move on, so that the 3rd Division to their north could swing round into the gap. Again the 13th Brigade was held up and the Dorsets couldn’t get forward without experiencing the dreadful enfilade fire from the Germans hidden behind the raised bank on the south side of the canal.
Gleichen’s hand drawn map shows the situation in more detail. Some of the positions aren’t the same as they stand today; Cuinchy is now more to the left directly south from the Pont Fixe.
Gleichen’s map showing the situation on the 14th October 1914
Frank and the rest of A Company hunkered down in the factory at Pont Fixe and soon came under withering shellfire. A message came fro Gleichen. “Pont Fixe must not be given up. I know I can rely on you to stick to it with the help of the Devons”. Two more companies from the Devons arrived to support the skeleton 1st Battalion Dorsets.
At 2pm the French attacked at Vermelles to the south. At 5pm A Company got the orders they must have been dreading. They were to support an attack by the Devons along the same line north of the canal they had tried for the last two days. But they weren’t to move until the 13th Brigade advanced on the south bank of the canal.
Luckily for A Company, the Germans attacked the 13th Brigade and pushed them back. By 8:30pm the Germans were now attacking the north side of the canal. A Company and the Devons held on and only three men were wounded, although three deaths are listed on CWGC, presumably they died from wounds sustained over the last couple of days.
