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Updated: June 24, 2025
The effort began with an intense bombardment on the 25th, and a few hours later the Germans had captured the village and hill of Kemmel; our forces were driven back to a line running in front of Dickebusch lake, La Clytte, the Scherpenberg, and Locre. Mt. Kemmel had been regarded as the key to the position, and it looked as though the range would fall.
Beyond Dickebusch French artillery were in action on the road. The houses just outside Ypres had been pelted with shrapnel but not destroyed. Just by the station, which had not then been badly knocked about, I learnt where to go. Ypres was the first half-evacuated town I had entered. It was like motor-cycling into a village from Oxford very early on a Sunday morning.
Half a mile south from Dickebusch are cross-roads, and the sign-post tells you that the road to the left is the road to Wytschaete but Wytschaete faces Kemmel and Messines faces Wulverghem.
In the evening the Lincolnshires took our place, and, having lost 11 killed and 39 wounded in 6 days, we marched back to rest at Dickebusch huts. For some considerable time there had been many rumours about a coming autumn offensive on our part, and on the 22nd September, having returned to trenches two days previously, we received our first orders about it.
We soon struck the pavé road that runs through Dickebusch, a long straggling village, still fairly intact and occupied by Belgian civilians. It was shelled now and again but not severely. When we reached this place, the battalion opened out considerably, platoons keeping 200 yards apart; a precaution necessary on roads that were periodically shelled at night.
They will only answer something about "Cheering up," or and this is the strangest thing to hear "to forget it." I don't want to forget it. So if in a book I see names like Château Thierry, Crépy-en-Valois, Dickebusch, Hooge, Vermelles, Hulluch, Festubert, Notre Dame de Lorette, Ligny-Tilloy, Sailly-Saillisel, Croiselles, Thiepval, Contalmaison, Dompierre, then I am caught. I do not try to escape.
Then we trudged down the road, kilometer after kilometer, every one gloomy and grouchy, looking for our several units. Ours had moved and we spent the whole day before we located it. We found the battalion in camp near the town of Dickebusch and soon settled down to the same old routine.
Following the main road south from Dickebusch you cross the frontier and come to Bailleul, a town of which we were heartily sick before the winter was far gone. In peace it would be once seen and never remembered. It has no character, though I suppose the "Faucon" is as well known to Englishmen now as any hotel in Europe. There are better shops in Béthune and better cafés in Poperinghe.
They looked straight into Kemmel village and turned their guns on to it when our men crouched among its ruins and opened the graves in the cemetery and lay old bones bare. Clear and vivid to them were the red roofs of Dickebusch village and the gaunt ribs of its broken houses. Southward they saw Neuve Eglise, with its rag of a tower, and Plug Street wood.
Early in December it was known that the next tour was to be once more in the "Salient." On the 17th December the Battalion entrained at Steenwercke for Poperinghe, from where it marched to Dickebusch huts, which are always remembered as being built on islands in a sea of mud. The trenches were found to consist of holes and ditches which were worked on till they were quite good and dry.
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