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Updated: July 23, 2025
It was the girl whom I had seen on the lawn of an old English house in the days before the war. She was very worried about the fate of de Broqueville, and anxious beyond words as to what would befall the three friends who were now missing. We drove back along the road towards Dixmude, and rescued another wounded man left in a wayside cottage.
The Belgians were forced partly to evacuate their advanced positions over the river Yser, near Hernisse, south of Dixmude. In the Argonne the Germans, by a strong infantry charge, penetrated the first line of the French trenches, but were unable to hold their ground.
"Which gate did you come in at?" was a very common question which one officer would ask another on their return from work in the trenches. "I came in by the Dixmude Gate," or "I came in by the Menin Gate," would be the reply. And some would say that they had avoided "gates" altogether and threaded their way across the open. These gates were places of evil omen.
With the world making every Belgian man a hero and the unknowing convinced that a citizen soldiery at Liege defended by the Belgian standing army had rushed from their homes with rifles and beaten German infantry, it is right to repeat that the schipperke spirit was not universal, that at no time had Belgium more than a hundred thousand men under arms, and that on the Dixmude line she maintained never more than eighty thousand men out of a population of seven millions, which should yield from seven hundred thousand to a million; while they lost a good deal of sympathy both in England and in France, from all I heard, through the number of able-bodied refugees who were disinclined to serve.
The Germans made a violent attack on the edge of the Belgian front at Nieuport in order to prevent the Belgians from aiding in the defense of Ypres, but the Belgians defended Nieuport with one army corps and made an advance on Dixmude with another corps, with the result that they assisted the Zouaves in taking the German bridgeheads on the western bank of the canal above Ypres.
The great battle of the Yser is also history. I shall not repeat the dramatic recital of the Belgian retreat to this point, fighting a rear-guard engagement as they fell back before three times their number; of the fury of the German onslaught, which engaged the entire Belgian front, so that there was no rest, not a moment's cessation. In one night at Dixmude the Germans made fifteen attacks.
From this position they have never since been shaken, but they have never had to withstand more desperate attacks than those which took place in the end of October. The centre of these was Dixmude, and here the Germans threw against the little remnant of the Belgian Army forces which might have been expected to shatter it at a blow.
Those threatened beauties, our only cities yet intact, the treasures and sanctuaries of our whole past and of all our race, are still reeling on the brink of the same abyss and, failing a miracle which we dare not hope for, they will suffer the fate of Ypres, Louvain, Malines, Termonde, Dixmude and so many other less illustrious victims.
South of Dixmude a strong German raiding party attempted to attack a Belgian outpost. They were received by such a hurricane of infantry and machine-gun fire that the field was strewn with dead, and few of the raiders succeeded in making their escape.
At Nimy, the martyrdom of little Irma G. lasted six hours till death delivered her from her sufferings. When her father tried to rescue her he was shot, and her mother was seriously wounded. Indeed, it was certain destruction to any frenzied parent who tried to defend his child. A clergyman of Dixmude says, "The burgomaster of Handzaeme was shot for trying to protect his daughter."
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