United States or Burundi ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But Guynemer and Bozon-Verduraz had started at twenty-five minutes past eight. They had left the sea behind them, flying south-east. They had reached the lines, following them over Bixchoote and the Korteker Tavern which the French troops had taken on July 31, over the Bixchoote-Langemarck road, and finally over Langemarck itself, captured by the British on August 16.
Behind headquarters the hill sloped back to Haenebeek brook, northwest and southeast. Five hundred yards behind the Gravenstafel ridge ran the road from Zonnebeke to Langemarck. On this road immediately in our rear there was a ruined blacksmith shop and several old farm engines.
The attack was, on the whole, a complete failure, though on the left the French made progress through the swamps towards Houthulst Forest, and the 23rd Division took Langemarck. In the centre, where our Division was engaged, progress was infinitesimal. The enemy troops, hidden in their deep and inconspicuous labyrinth of defence, were fresh and fought stoutly.
I'll never write the poems I once dreamed of writing but I've helped to make Canada safe for the poets of the future for the workers of the future ay, and the dreamers, too for if no man dreams, there will be nothing for the workers to fulfil the future, not of Canada only but of the world when the 'red rain' of Langemarck and Verdun shall have brought forth a golden harvest not in a year or two, as some foolishly think, but a generation later, when the seed sown now shall have had time to germinate and grow.
On February 1, 1915, a portion of the French troops which had held the salient were withdrawn and their places taken by General Bulfin's Twenty-eighth Division. Thus, by April 20, 1915, that part of the Allies' front was held as follows: From the canal to east of Langemarck was the Forty-fifth Division of the French army, consisting of colonial infantry.
About November 5 the Brigade returned to the line for a few days before the Division was taken out. On that day I returned with the Staff-Captain and Capt. On the following day I walked nearly as far as the Steenbeke at Martin's Mill, and the ground around Langemarck was about as dreary and shattered as any that I have ever seen.
It made little appreciable progress on the right or in the centre, but on the left the French advanced from the Yser canal towards the Martjevaart, and our men took Wijdendrift and Langemarck. For the rest of the month it rained, and it was not till 20 September that the conditions were considered good enough for an attempt on the limited objectives to which our ambition was now reduced.
Foot by foot, yard by yard, the Hun was fighting to hold the line which should make good his insolent claim to the hegemony of the world. Step by step, yard by yard, that line was being torn from his bloody fingers. Into that sea of fire and blood, the Canadians were to plunge. They remembered Langemarck and Sanctuary Wood and St. Eloi, and were not unwilling to make the plunge.
It was well described to me once as 'utter squalor. Next day I went to the camp of the 4th N.F. south of Langemarck and to Marsouine camp, to arrange certain details of the relief. The same night the Brigade was relieved, but I was left in charge at Huddersfield Dugouts till the evening of November 8 when I returned to the camp at Ondank.
There it was told that the Division was about to take part in an attack on Passchendaele, but the weather conditions were so bad that, after an attack by one of the other brigades in the Division, the offensive was finally abandoned. The Battalion then held the shell crater line in front of Langemarck for a few days at the beginning of November, sustaining a considerable number of casualties.
Word Of The Day