Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 18, 2025
In passing through the outskirts, we stopped to call on two young women an Irish girl and a Canadian who, undismayed by the periodic shell-storms which visit it, have pluckily stayed in the town ever since the battle of the Yser, caring for the few hundred townspeople who remain, nursing the wounded, and even conducting a school for the children.
A Belgian, one of the boy soldiers, came forward to sing to the bearded men. And the song that he sang was "La valse des obus" "The Dance of the Shells." "Dear friends, I'm going to sing you some rhymes on the war at the Yser." The men to whom he was singing had been holding the Yser for ten months. "I want you to know that life in the trenches, night by night, isn't gay."
It was here decided to turn the entire command of the allied forces along the Yser over to the British to avoid confusion.
In the Château at Boesinghe, where the moss is growing round the broken doors and the rank weeds fill the garden, with the stagnant Yser hard by; in Ypres, where the rooks nest in the crumbling Cloth Hall and a man's footsteps ring loud and hollow on the silent square; in Vermelles, where the chalky plains stretch bare towards the east, and the bloody Hohenzollern redoubt, with the great squat slag heap beside it, lies silent and ominous; in Guillemont and Guinchy, where the sunken road was stiff with German dead and no two bricks remain on top of one another; on Vimy Ridge, in Bullecourt and Croisilles, in all these places, in all the hundred others, the seed has been sown.
Louis restored Tournai, and a portion of West Flanders beyond the Yser including Furnes and Ypres, but Artois, Walloon Flanders, the south of Hainault and of Luxemburg remained French. From the point of view of the Netherlands, the treaties of Rastadt and of Baden were merely the ratification, by the emperor and by the Holy Roman Empire, of the clauses of the treaty of Utrecht.
And on October 9 the gallant Belgian army withdrew from Antwerp and made its way to the Yser under cover of French and British troops. Foch soon saw that an allied offensive would not be possible then; that the most they could hope to do was to hold back the invading forces. Until October 24 he remained at Doullens, twenty miles north of Amiens.
For more than a week the Belgians gallantly held the banks of the Yser in spite of the utmost endeavors of the Germans to cross, and it was not until October 24 that the latter finally succeeded in getting south of the river, with the French seaport of Dunkirk as their next objective point. Bloody engagements were fought at Nieuport, Dixmude, Deynze and La Bassée.
When, as occasionally happened, there was a bit too much fervor when her hand was kissed, she laid it where it belonged to loneliness and the spring and became extremely maternal and very, very kind. Which both of them are death blows to young love. The winter floods were receding. Along the Yser Canal mud-caked flats began to appear, with here and there rusty tangles of barbed wire.
But in spite of these strong forces it became clearly evident by the middle of November that the attempt to break through to Calais had failed for the time being. The flooding of the Yser marks the end of the main struggle for Calais. The battle fronts had shifted. Between them there was a mile or two of mud and water. The Belgians had lost a quarter of their effectives.
From three sides he and the others with him were being shelled. He must have known what the inevitable end would be. But he said very little. And then he died. There were other journels taken from the bodies of other German officers at that terrible battle of the Yser. They speak of it as a "hell" a place of torment and agony impossible to describe. Some of them I have seen.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking