BELGIUM—On October 28 a solemn ceremony in the Belgium town of Ypres marked the 100th anniversary of the First Battle of Ypres. It was to be the last battle of maneuver of World War I on the arena of human carnage known as the Western Front until the breakouts of 1918. By the time the first of the five battles to bear the name of the small Belgian town had ended on November 22, 1914, the trench systems that have come to define our images of the War to End All Wars were completed.
Between those two lines over 60,000 Canadian soldiers lost their lives and more than 172,000 were wounded, some 6,000 so badly that they succumbed to their wounds after returning home from the front.
It is the Second Battle of Ypres that is most often recalled in Canadian annals of military history, for it was in that second clash that the Canadian 1st Division withstood one of the first mass uses of poison gas on the Western Front and marked the first time that a former colonial force defeated a European power on European soil. But the first Battle of Ypres, sometimes called the First Battle of Flanders, stymied the German push to the sea and set the stage for a titanic struggle over the next four years that saw the squandering of the accumulated treasure of the preceding century.
Only a couple of Islanders were in uniform at this early stage of the war, according to Little Current historian and author Alexander (Sandy) McGillivray. “They tried to get an Island company together and by November 300 had enlisted,” he said. “But due to the rigid medical tests at that stage, only 100 were accepted.” In fact, the medical tests had winnowed the Island hopefuls down to 120. “They tried to get the recruiting officer to take the other 20, but he said the rules were the rules. He was to take exactly 100, not 20 more, not 20 less.”
“The first fellows to leave Little Current to take military training were not army recruits,” he said, “but rather a group of 24 cadets who had been organized and drilled by E.B. Titus during 1913-1914.”
It was Mr. Titus and a certain R. Hay, lawyers in Gore Bay and Little Current respectively, who were behind the efforts to recruit for king and country.
The first casualty was actually a British reservist who had worked at the Red Mill in Little Current that became the Island’s first casualty in the war, falling in November. There were also four Russian reservists who left for their units on the Eastern Front.
Contemporary accounts in The Expositor posited that the Russians were making such advances on the Central Powers that they would be in Berlin before Christmas.
The Expositor at the time was urging farmers not to enlist, saying that Europe had plenty of men, but what the Allies really needed from Canada was food.
A soldier’s life was not a route to wealth. Recruits received $1.10 a day as privates and, if married, the wife received $20 month and an allowance for each child of between $4 and $7.50, depending on age.
We are all too familiar of the grim toll of casualties from that first conflict, where Canada was to see industrial warfare at its most horrific, even as our direct memories of the aftermath of the First World War have faded into dust, but the readers of The Expositor, like all of the public at that time, were completely ignorant of the casualties already piling up.
The pages of The Expositor, like all British media, were devoid of any references to Allied losses. However, there is to be found in a November 1914 edition of this paper a small article reporting that the German people would not be able to bear the incredible losses already piling up in the battles taking place in Belgium.
This was no accident. Journalists were not allowed to report from the front. Lord Kitchener’s experience during the Boer War had left him convinced that reports from the front were an aid to the enemy and more than one journalist had been threatened with being shot if found wandering near the front lines.
To a generation that has followed the downward progress of missiles on the 6 o’clock news from the comfort of our living room couches courtesy of embedded cameras, it is almost impossible to imagine the dearth of news available to families in 1914. The lack of any information in the local newspaper is little short of eerie to the modern eye.
Not that there wasn’t plenty of worrying going on. An advertisement in a November 1914 edition of The Expositor was flogging nerve pills ostensibly to help calm women’s delicate nerves frayed by worry over the war in Europe.
Britain had entered the war largely to maintain the balance of power, as was her wont. She could not abide the German Empire capturing the Belgian ports and threatening Britain’s imperial hegemony over the English Channel, North Sea and the Atlantic. Germany already had the most powerful army in Europe, should he defeat Russia and France the Kaiser would inevitably eclipse the British Empire. As part of that empire, Canada was de facto in the conflict as soon as Britain declared war.
At Ypres, the Germans had two armies, the Fourth and the Sixth and they had what should have been a decisive advantage in men and material. It was the German’s one chance to win the war with a quick knockout blow and it failed. By November 20 the Germans were withdrawing from their attack.
Sadly, this battle which should have led to diplomatic overtures to find a peaceful solution to the conflict, failed to awaken the German Chancellor Bethmann-Holweg and general staff Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff to the impending disaster facing their nation and the world. The First Battle of Ypres provided plenty of foreshadowing with 54,000 British casualties, around 80,000 German casualties and as many as 85,000 French losses. The carnage was absolutely unthinkable, literally destroying the core of the highly trained British professional army and the British prime minister of the day, when informed of the butcher’s bill, declared that the news must be kept from the public at all costs.
The Third battle of Ypres is better known by its other name, Passchendaele (July 31 to November 6 1917). The fourth (also called the Battle of Lys) took place in April or 1918 and the final Battle of Ypres took place between September 28 and October 2, 1918.
