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Updated: June 7, 2025
Before we came, Givenchy had been a little forgettable village upon a hill, Violaines a pleasant afternoon's walk for the working men in La Bassée, Festubert a gathering-place for the people who lived in the filthy farms around. We left Givenchy a jumble of shuttered houses and barricaded cellars. A few Germans were encamped upon the site of Violaines.
The battles of Festubert, Neuve Chapelle, Loos, and all minor attacks which led to little salients, were but experimental adventures in the science of slaughter, badly bungled in our laboratories. They had no meaning apart from providing those mistakes by which men learn; ghastly mistakes, burning more than the fingers of life's children.
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.
Coming into Festubert I felt that something was wrong. The village had been damnably shelled that I had expected and there was not a soul to be seen. I thought of the father and mother and daughter who, returning to their home while we were there in October, had wept because a fuse had gone through the door and the fireplace and all their glass had been broken.
It is true the British needed more men in the ranks, but what was needed more was large additions to the supply of machine guns, artillery, and ammunition. For those reasons the British generals avoided clashes with the Germans after the battle of Festubert, except when it was necessary to hold as many of the Germans as possible to the British part of the western front.
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.
All but the worst happened. In my despatches, reprinted in book form with explanatory prefaces, I have told in full detail the meaning and measure of the British retreat, when forty-eight of our divisions were attacked by one hundred and fourteen German divisions and fell back fighting stubborn rear-guard actions which at last brought the enemy to a dead halt outside Amiens and along the River Ancre northward from Albert, where afterward in a northern attack the enemy under Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria broke through the Portuguese between Givenchy and Festubert, where our wings held, drove up to Bailleul, which was burned to the ground, and caused us to abandon all the ridges of Flanders which had been gained at such great cost, and fall back to the edge of Ypres.
It has been bombarded often but not utterly destroyed, and from there they ran out four miles to Festubert, because the little that the Germans have left of the thirteenth-century church and village, burns with an eternal flame of interest.
But, everywhere, the ruins with which northern, central, and eastern France are covered, whether they were caused by the ordinary processes of war or not, are equally part of the guilt of Germany. In the country which I saw last year on the Belgian border, from the great phantom of Ypres down to Festubert, the ravage is mainly the ravage of war.
Ypres, the Marne, Neuve Chapelle, Festubert names well-nigh forgotten in the greater battles of to-day in each and all of them the seed of "a contemptible little Army" has been sown. But at the moment there were just two men, sick of heart, watching the sun, in a blaze of golden glory, setting over Gozo. . . . Draycott's deliverance from the Half Way House came in three or four weeks.
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