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Updated: June 7, 2025
The British Seventh Division at Festubert continued to work south along the German trenches. Its bayonets and bombs cleared the way before it. The plan was for them to continue toward Rue d'Ouvert, Chapelle St. Roch, and Canteleux. In the meantime the Second Division, on the left of the Seventh Division, was to fight its way to Rue du Marais and Violaines.
Dictated, too, by a pervading "worship of ancestors," of a preceding generation of plain evangelical men and women, whose books survived in the little house, and whose portraits hung upon its walls. Then, in the first year of the war, she had married a young soldier, the son of family friends, like-minded with her own people, a modest, inarticulate fellow, who had been killed at Festubert.
What was left of the Cheshires gradually rallied in Festubert. This German success, together with a later success against the 3rd Division, that resulted in our evacuation of Neuve Chapelle, compelled us to withdraw and readjust our line. This second line was not so defensible as the first. Until we were relieved the Germans battered at it with gunnery all day and attacks all night.
Early on the morning of October 29 we started, riding first along the canal by Béthune. As for Festubert, Givenchy, Violaines, Rue de Marais, Quinque Rue, and La Bassée, we never want to see them again. The censor was kind. Dorsets, I think. I do not say this paragraph is true. It is what I thought on 15th October 1914. The weather was depressing. Optimist!
While the 4th Army Corps were trying to gain a footing on the northern end of the Aubers Ridge near Fromelles the 1st Army was making an equally desperate attempt to the south in front of Festubert, a village already in our hands.
First the roads became greasy beyond belief. Starting was perilous, and the slightest injudicious swerve meant a bad skid. Between Gorre and Festubert the road was vile. It went on raining, and the roads were thickly covered with glutinous mud. The front mud-guard of George's Douglas choked up with a lamentable frequency.
On the 15th of June, at Festubert, he was killed in volunteering to bring what was left of a frightfully battered battalion out of action. "What seems to me my duty as an officer," he once wrote to a friend, "is to carry my sword across the barriers of death clean and bright." "This," says the friend who writes the notice, "he has done."
He had but one thought to go forward; and he went. They passed in silence through the little village of Festubert, where the wounded servant was, and then skirted the wood of Richebourg. At Herlier, Planchet, who led the column, turned to the left.
The Estaminet de l'Epinette was filthy and small. I slept in a stinking barn, half-full of dirty straw, and rose with the sun for the discomfort of it. Opposite the estaminet a road goes to Festubert. At the corner there is a cluster of dishevelled houses. I sat at the door and wrote letters, and looked for what might come to pass.
That formed a right angle, stretching north-east from Givenchy to Herlies and then north-west to Fauquissart; but on the 22nd his right was driven out of Violaines, and the salient had to be evacuated by withdrawal to a line in front of Givenchy, Festubert, and Neuve Chapelle. On the 27th Neuve Chapelle was taken by the Germans.
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