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Updated: May 23, 2025
The Wild Man rocked on its base, and every pane in my windows beat a tattoo. What was that incredible unimagined sound? Why, it could be nothing, of course, but the voice of the big siege-gun of Dixmude!
Rawlinson's 7th Division of infantry and 3rd of cavalry had not been landed at Zeebrugge and Ostend on 6 October to defend those ports or even the Yser, and the fresh German armies advancing through Belgium were not intended to waste their strength on the ridges in front of Ypres or floods around Dixmude.
The party aboard the Arabella quickly assembled on deck, where little Maurie was found leaning over the rail. "They're at it," he remarked, wagging his head. "The Germans are at Nieuport, now, and some of them are over against Pervyse. I hear sounds from Dixmude, too; the rattle of machine guns. It will be a grand battle, this! I wonder if our Albert is there." "Who is he?" asked Patsy.
Kelsey and a sailor for assistants, the Belgian would make a dash to Ypres or Dixmude or Furnes and return with a full load of wounded soldiers. These were the days of the severest fighting in Flanders, fighting so severe that it could not keep up for long. There would come a lull presently, when the overworked nurses and surgeons could get a bit of sleep and draw a long breath again.
The Belgian ruler had taken refuge in this bleak, sea-swept corner of Belgium and the only part of the country that had escaped the invader. He lived in a little châlet near the beach. Every day the King walked up and down on the sands while German aeroplanes flew overhead and the roar of the guns at Dixmude smote the ear.
An unseen enemy was killing unseen men, and other guns replied into this grim, grey mystery, not knowing what destruction was being done. It was like the war itself, which was utterly shrouded in these parts by a fog of mystery. A few days previously, it seemed that the enemy had abandoned his attack upon the coast-line and the country between Dixmude and Nieuport.
The whole surface of the square was literally paved with bits of glass from the hundreds of broken windows, and at the foot of David's statue of Jean Bart, just where our motor had stood while we had tea, the siege-gun of Dixmude had scooped out a hollow as big as the crater at Nieuport. Though not a house on the square was touched, the scene was one of unmitigated desolation.
Each answer about the absent one had an appeal that nothing can picture better than the simple words or the looks that accompanied the words. "The last I heard of my husband he was fighting at Dixmude two months ago." "Mine is wounded, somewhere in France." "Mine was with the army, too. I don't know whether he is alive or dead. I have not heard since Brussels was taken.
This was on the eastern border of the inundated section. After destroying the German front in the graveyard at Dixmude, the French artillerists battered a German convoy on its way between Dixmude and Essen on March 17, 1915. By March 23 the east bank of the Yser held a Belgian division. In fact, from Dixmude to the sea the Allied troops were advancing.
In particular, excursions may be pleasantly made from Furnes whose principal inn, the Noble Rose, is again a quaint relic of the sixteenth century to the two delightful little market-towns of Dixmude and Nieuport-Ville: I write, as always, of what was recently, and of what I have seen myself; to-day they are probably heaps of smoking ruin, and sanguinary altars to German "kultur."
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