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The First, or Royal Regiment of Foot, now known as The Royal Scots, when it climbed the steep streets of Boulogne, marched on a soil sacred to it by the memories of heroic campaigns. Names that were as yet unfamiliar to the world at large were dear to it as the last resting-places of its comrades of long ago names such as Dunkirk and Dixmude, Furnes and Ypres, Saberne and Bar-le-Duc.
He is a King who, without suspicion of guilt, has lost his country; who has seen since August of 1914 two-thirds of his army lost, his beautiful and ancient towns destroyed, his fertile lands thrown open to the sea. I went on. The guns were still at work. At Nieuport, Dixmude, Furnes, Pervyse all along that flat, flooded region the work of destruction was going on.
Dixmude, quiet in its ruins, trembled again, and crumbled a little more, under the vibration of the enemy's shells, firing at long range towards the Franco-Belgian troops. Here and there, near Pervyse and Ramscapelle, guns, not yet located, fired "pot shots" on the chance of killing something soldiers or civilians, or the wounded on their stretchers.
It was some minutes before the remaining soldiers could clear the road sufficiently for the cars to pass. Dixmude itself was a roaring furnace, and shells were pouring into it in all directions. Practically every house had been damaged, many were totally demolished, and many more were on fire. The wounded were in the Town Hall on the square, and shells were bursting all over it.
That shell was from one of two guns that were expressly manufactured for the purpose of destroying the city of Ypres, a couple of months being taken to build cement platforms in which to set the ordnance, and the death-dealing monsters started on their mission of destruction from Dixmude, about 22 miles distant.
Their efforts culminated in one of the fiercest and bloodiest engagements of the whole war, and at the height of the engagement word came that there were wounded in Dixmude, and that ambulances were urgently required to get them out. Getting wounded out of a town which is being shelled is not exactly a joke, and when the town is in rapid process of annihilation it almost becomes serious.
The enemy's artillery is too well sheltered, too strong; and as our own guns, fewer in number, have not been able to silence those of the enemy, our infantry is unable to make any advance. We are suffering heavy and useless losses. "The medical service on the field has been found very wanting. At Dixmude, in one place, no less than forty frightfully wounded men were left lying uncared, for.
Consequently, long-range artillery duels in the north had been all in favor of British arms. Terrific charges of the British troops, of whom there were now less than half a million Scotch, Irish, Canadians and Indians included on the continent, had driven the Germans from Dixmude, Ypres and Armentières, captured earlier in the war.
D'Urbal's 8th French army now, however, came up to support the exhausted Belgians and assist in holding the Yser from Dixmude to the sea, where British warships were assembled to harass the German flank along the dunes; and Sir John French thought the moment had come for an offensive wheel round Menin towards the Scheldt.
D'Urbal's 8th Army from Bixschoote north to Dixmude played a subsidiary part similar to that of Pulteney's 3rd Corps farther south; but had it not been for the supports he was able to send to Haig's assistance, the Germans would assuredly have broken through.
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