HISTORIC NEUVE CHAPELLE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVII, Issue 267, 21 April 1915, Page 6

HISTORIC NEUVE CHAPELLE.

THE EARLIER STRUGGLES. BRITISH FACE GREAT ODD Neuve Chapelle, which was recently recaptured by the British, has been the scene of some very severe lighting. The story of the ear.ier struggle for this village is told by Mr. W. Douglas Newton in " Great Deeds of the Great War." He is speaking of the sweeping movement of the Kaiser's troops aimed at driving the Hi itish headlong from their 'positions near the coast, and swinging 011 victorious to Calais. The date is October id.

" Against General Smith-Dorrien's 2nd corps the enemy rolled in force towards the village of Neuve Chapelle. They came 011 bravely, their rifles and their mitrailleuses flaming through the woods. The village took fire at once with a blaze of resistance. Our men had made of Neuve Chapelle not a village, but a fort, formed up of a string of forts, the houses. The Germans pushed oil,, went down in swathes, and came 011 again. The Maxims and the artillery of our men exterminated regiments, company by company. Death was discounted. Fresh men gathered over the corpses. The attack came on again. It pushed into the works about the village, driving the British Tommies out by sheer mass. It flowed over, and filled the trenches in a whirling wrestle of personal combat. Then the mass, having the trenches, was coming on into the village. " The fighting in the streets was infernal. Every cobble was a battlefield. From every window death was flung into the pack of the fight. Men jammed in the narrow space fought with their elbows 1 only, working the stabbing bayonet with violent dagger-thrusts. Still the momentum of the mass pushed the British back. The German glacier ground 011. From their barricades, from the houses melting to rubble over their heads, the British fought the enemy off. The place was choked with dead and clogged with wounded, was piving between, the high ditch of the walls with the appalling noise of fighting. Still the terrible and frantic battle went on between the gutters. The impetus of the mass oozed forward until half the village was German, half the houses were in the hands of the enemy. Then the attack stopped. The British, with their steady rifles, refused to be beaten back another foot.

LINE OF COLD STEEL. " In the centre of our line, where Sir Henry Rawlinson's splendid few of the 7th Division held with their thin front of steel the marches of Ypres, the bombardment and the battle worked itself up into a particular rage of fury. The pressure of three German army corps was brc ";ht incessantly to bear on this devoted line; through the day and many days attack followed attack with dazing determination. But the line remained staunch. The splendid Gordons, the Guards Brigade, the Wiltshires, the 2ml .Yorkshires, 2nd Borderers and the other indomitable regiments clung to their positions under the avalanches of men, swept their fronts clean with the deadly outpouring of their bullets. And, when J,he moment came, they rose up in their trenches, and' leapt in a line of cold steel into the shy faces of the attacking masses. The 2nd Border Regiment held a flowing string of attacks from nine in the morning until six at night. They had to fight odds of 20 to 1; but they fought them and defeated them. When the fighting had eased down, only 400 of the Borderers who went into the fighs, sod nearly every N.C.0., had been put out of action. Nig'ht fell with the battle still raging all along the line; and the darkness was made light with the fire of a veritable hell on earth. Through' the reek and the fire of it the guns were coughing, attacks were worming forward, anil men, up to their knees in slime, were (lopping down in a thousand angular attitudes of death. Tuesday dawned with the struggle still in bitter progress, and ever the Germans pressed on in their thousands and their tens of thousands to crush the inexhaustible little army. The fighting in ami about Xeuve Chapelle was hotter than ever if, indeed, it were possible to imagine such. Back and forward through the village streets the British and Germans attacked and counter-attacked in ceaseless fury until the victory was ours, we thought, the village was ours, when through that last light of the day, fresh German troops were hurled at and into the place. The rage of the battle spouted out again. Four great successive attacks were thrust into the place, and the harvest of death was ghastly. Still, iiumDers told, and that village was lost.

RETAKEN BV THE BRITISH. " Neuve Chapelle became a new Ilougomont. The fiercest blaze of war enfoldkl it. With the first hint of Wednesday, the 28th, in the air, the British were, out to recapture it again. The Indian troops, the superb 47th Sik's and the 20th and *2lst Companies of the admirable Sappers and Miners, were rushing with the regiments to the attack. Again the battle was ferocious to a degree. The Germans dung to the shottorn ruins desperately, their rifles and they many mitrailleuses worked frantically to hold the British off. Losing their dead over every foot of ground, the Indians and the British stormed the place. They were checked, but on they rushed again. They were at the village and into it, and the rush of their bayonets and the crackling of their rifles were clearing the rubble-filled streets inch by inch. Again the fight roared between the wall, and again the attack was an affair of inches. But the favors were on our side now. The British, progressed. By nightfall the greater part of the place was ours, and we were holding on to it grimly with bayonet and bullet and Maxim.

'' If tlie fighting was severe at N'euve Chapelle, no milder term could be applied to the struggle that involved the rest of the British line right up to the east, where the Belgians were also assisting. But on the Allies' extreme left the day was gained by a deadly ruse. So fast as the Hermans poured on to the attack, so fast did the Belgians and the British retire before them. The Wurtemburgers, in particular, simply rushed on to their apparent victory. At St, Georges they forced the passage of the Yser, and by midday the left bank was theirs. At one o'clock they were still advancing with the song of'joy on their lips. At three the Allies struck. The sluices were opened before Nieuport. and the tide of waters rushed to overwhelm the impetuous invader. With the floods came the Allies along the high roads, to batter and beat the living foe into a terror-stricken rout. ' All the ground that had been abandoned was recovered with ease, and the lines cleared of the enemy.

"So ended the 28th, w'th a vast front leaping with the lie* est fires of battle. It was but one (lav in a wild and awful series of days; it was, too, but the prelude of wilder and more, ferocious days. For the German effort, was accumulating, and the, allied line was on the threshold of some of the sternest, most terrible days of fighting that this war of unprecedented and terrible fighting had yet seen."