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Updated: May 6, 2025
The day was calm on both sides of the Meuse, but farther south, in the right center of the French attack, after gaining Hooge village and Sanctuary Wood, their first objectives, they fought their way forward and carried the village of Westhoek, against very obstinate resistance from the enemy. In this neighborhood there was stiff fighting throughout the day, and still continued.
We are too far off to see what is actually happening between the opposing trenches, but one of the chief fields of past and present battle, scenes which our children and our children's children will go to visit, lie spread out before us. Half the famous sites of the earlier war can be dimly made out between us and Ypres. In front of us is the gleam of the Zillebeke Lake, beyond it Hooge.
On the 28th May the Battalion returned to the trenches it had left a month before, and on the 2nd June the men were able to watch the German attack between Hill 60 and Hooge and the Canadian counter-attacks on the following day. Lieut. Ebsworth, M.C., D.C.M., East Lancashire Regt., joined as Adjutant on the 7th June.
Another at Hooge in front of Ypres on 30 July was marked by the first employment in battle of one of our new divisions recruited since the war began, and on the German side by the use of liquid fire. It was successful in making an awkward dent in our line, but again a counterattack on 9 August restored the situation.
The British also made another attack on Hooge on either side of the Menin road. The assault north of the road yielded the Bellewaarde Farm and ridge, but the Germans subsequently recaptured this part. South of the road the attack gained about 600 yards of German trench. The British took 2,600 prisoners, eighteen guns and thirty machine guns in the first day.
Nobody realised how serious the situation must have been until the accounts were published. Huggie has a perfect mania for getting frightened; so one day, instead of leaving the routine matter that he carried at a place whence it might be forwarded at leisure, he rode along the Menin road to the Chateau at Hooge, the headquarters of the 15th Brigade.
Along the harvest-fields there were many barren territories like that, and up by Hooge, along the edge of the fatal crater, and behind the stripped trees of Zouave Wood there was no other gleaning to be had but that of broken shells and shrapnel bullets and a litter of limbs.
It was no good some of those old gentlemen saying, "We've got 'em beat!" when from Hooge to the Hohenzollern redoubt our men sat in wet trenches under ceaseless bombardment of heavy guns, and when any small attack they made by the orders of a High Command which believed in small attacks, without much plan or purpose, was only "asking for trouble" from German counterattacks by mines, trench-mortars, bombing sorties, poison-gas, flame-throwers, and other forms of frightfulness which made a dirty mess of flesh and blood, without definite result on either side beyond piling up the lists of death.
But they attacked, and died, with great gallantry, as usual. "In the slums," said our guest, "we are expected to die if G. H. Q. tells us so, or if the corps arranges our funeral. And generally we do." That night, when the snow lay on the ground, I listened to the rumbling of the gunning away in the salient, and seemed to hear the groans of men at Hooge, at St.-Eloi, in other awful places.
Probably the Germans imagined that this extension had weakened our lines at Ypres; and on 8 February they began a bombardment which developed into a fierce struggle for Hooge and The Bluff on the Ypres-Commines Canal. The ground lost was mostly recovered by counter-attacks on 2 and 27 March and 3 April, but it could not all be held against further German attacks later in the month.
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