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"Don't you know?" was the reply as he glanced at the broad-tyred wheels; "why, they use them for rolling down the water in the canal after a storm!" It was in this mood we returned to billets. After Givenchy the Canadian Division rested for another week around the outskirts of Bethune before starting its long tramp back to the northern end of the line again.
German soldiers were slain and others wounded when a mine was exploded at Le Touquet, on the north bank of the Lys. One of the kaiser's ammunition depots was blown up near Quinchy on April 9, 1915, and his men were driven from their trenches in front of Givenchy by mortar fire.
We can then follow it along and turn off inland towards Ypres. I should very much like to film that place from above, then follow down the lines, passing over St. Eloi, Ploegsteert, Armentières, Neuve Chapelle, Richebourg, Festubert, Givenchy, Loos, Hohenzollern Redoubt, and on to Arras. I am of course entirely in your hands.
The Germans delivered an equally severe attack upon the allied position in the village of Givenchy, about a mile north of the canal, which bounded the scene of the attack just described.
I took up the Times and looked, as one always looks nowadays, at the obituary column. I looked again. In the same column, one succeeding the other, I read the following: Killed in action on 8th inst., near Givenchy, Arthur Hamilton C of the Guards, 3rd Battalion, only child of the late Arthur C. and of Mrs. C. of the Red House, Little Twickenham, aged 19. Behold!
The Germans had evacuated the west bank of the Yser and were obliged to return to the point from which they had started. While the engagement on the Yser was in progress in October, 1914, fierce fighting was kept up in the second section of the battle front, pivoting on Givenchy to the south and running east to the north of the La Bassée-Lille road.
He had been one of the first officers to receive the Military Cross, for brilliant work by the canal at Givenchy; he had laughed and joked as he lay all day in the open and listened to the bullets that went "pht" against the few clods of earth he had erected with his entrenching tool, and which went by the high-sounding name of "head cover."
Souchez, most of the Givenchy Wood, La Folie farm, and Thelus were captured, and on the 28th they made some progress up the Vimy slopes.
This was followed by an infantry charge along the entire line between Givenchy and La Quinque Rue to the north. The defense of Givenchy was in the hands of the India Sirhind Brigade, under General Brunker. At ten o'clock the Sirhinds became confused and fled, enabling the Germans to capture Givenchy.
As I studied the countenance of General Stockwell on that country road at Boisdinghem that afternoon I realized that he was no ordinary twopenny-halfpenny brigadier; but I did not then know that this was the man who, less than twelve months later, was destined to stand between Ludendorff and decisive victory in his last dramatic throw at Givenchy on the glorious ninth of April, and seven months later still to be chosen to command the flying column known by his name which captured Ath on Armistice Day and fired the last shots of the Great War.
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