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We lost five hundred men in holding it. The trench and all in it were thrown up by mines. Among those killed was the Hon. Lyndhurst Bruce, the husband of Camille Clifford, with other husbands of women unknown. Our guest told the story of the massacre in Neuve Chapelle. "This is a death sentence," said the officers who were ordered to attack.
The battles of Neuve Chapelle, Fertubert, and Loos, in 1915, cost us thousands of dead and gave us no gain of any account; and both generalship and staff-work were, in the opinion of most officers who know anything of those battles, ghastly.
It was just what happened at Neuve Chapelle so long ago when we first saw this kind of fighting exemplified completely. In the new attacks the Germans still gained ground, but they gained ground because the French withdrew from positions made untenable through the original German advance at other points. They consolidated their line, organized their new front.
That family consisted of my father a half-pay English officer my mother and three sisters, then living au troisième in the Rue Neuve de Berri, not far from the newly-erected Russian church, and the windows of the appartement commanded a side view down the Champs Élysées. I only needed rest and recreation, both of which my adoring family eagerly provided me.
He discovers bloody clothes, imperfectly calcinated ashes which Prelati has not had time to throw into the latrines. Amid universal maledictions and cries of horror Gilles and his servitors are conducted to Nîmes and incarcerated in the château de la Tour Neuve. "Now this part is not very clear," said Durtal to himself.
The daring of the British aviators even took them over Lille, where they dropped bombs on one of the German headquarters. To summarize the fighting about Neuve Chapelle, it may be said that the British had advanced something more than a mile on a three-mile front, replacing the sag which had existed in their line by a sag in that of the Germans.
At first I opened on it with my heavies in sermon after sermon. Then I saw proportion, and decided on a tariff, allowing an officer a 'damn' and a man a 'bloody. Winter and Neuve Chapelle taught me the rock-bottom level on which we are fighting this war, and I spiked my guns. No one has a right to condemn them, who hasn't floundered in mud under shell-fire."
Annoying, but I suppose one can't expect Generals to tell you where they are going to stand. We reached Neuve Eglise in time, and went into our old billets. We all thought our fate was "back into those old Plugstreet trenches again," but mirabile dictu it was not to be so. The second day in billets I received a message from the Colonel to proceed to his headquarter farm.
During the afternoon of April twenty-second the Germans, for the first time in the history of warfare, used poisonous gas. And they used it against us as we lay there ready to protect the Ypres salient. Less than three months before this we were raw recruits. We were considered greenhorns and absolutely undisciplined. We had had little of trench experience. At Neuve Chapelle we had "stood by."
The hotel which Madame de Sabran inhabits has an entrance from the Rue des Bons Enfants; after a certain hour they shut the passage from the Palais Royal, which opens on the Rue des Bons Enfants: and he will be obliged, on his return, to follow either the Cour des Fontaines, or the Rue Neuve des Bons Enfants, and then we shall have him.
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