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Updated: May 25, 2025
Beyond the stately cemeteries of France, across Italy, through Eastern Europe in well-nigh unbroken chain they stretch, passing over the holy Mount of Olives itself to the furthest shores of the Indian and Pacific Oceans from Zeebrugge to Coronel, from Dunkirk to the hidden wildernesses of East Africa.
During the winter he had been injured and taken prisoner. The father, in Calais, got word that his boy was badly injured and lying in a German hospital in Belgium. He was an only son. I do not know how the frenzied father got into Belgium. Perhaps he crept through the German lines. He may have gone to sea and landed on the sand dunes near Zeebrugge. It does not matter how, for he found his boy.
The work in progress at Ostend and Zeebrugge, the active construction of basins, locks, and quays, the progress of the great mole building at the latter port, the activities of submarines and destroyers within the harbour, the locations of guns and the positions of barracks were all indelibly set down.
The Belgian coast is but forty-two miles long, extending from Zeebrugge at the northern extremity to Ostend -the Atlantic City of Belgium -at the south, but there are a number of tiny harbors along the strip of coastline, and these were infested by the light draft German warships, particularly the destroyers.
The bombing forays were harassing but little more, because the craft engaged were of too small capacity to carry enough bombs to work really serious damage, while the ever increasing range of the "Archies" compels the airmen to deliver their fire from so great a height as to make accurate aim impossible. But Kiel, Wilhelmshaven and Zeebrugge are likely to change all this.
On the 18th British and French airplanes again bombarded Ostend, dropping 180 bombs, and once more raided Zeebrugge. In an ensuing battle six German planes were brought down. Infantry fighting in the Dixmude sector between Belgian and German troops occurred on four consecutive days, from November 17 to 20, with hand-grenade battles but no definite result.
On the occasion of one of Hoover's crossings two German destroyers lying outside of Flushing harbor ordered the little Dutch boat to accompany them to Zeebrugge for examination.
He was credited with having brought down forty aeroplanes. Not until almost the middle of November, 1916, did aeroplane warfare develop its usual activity. On the night of November 9-10, 1916, British aeroplanes dropped bombs without success on Ostend and Zeebrugge. One British machine was forced down and captured and the aviator, a British officer, made prisoner.
As a submarine base, Zeebrugge was extinct. So, for that matter, was Ostend. That the success of the British expedition had been a severe blow to the Germans goes without saying. No other single feat since the beginning of the war had done so much to dishearten them; and there is little doubt that the sealing of their submarine bases did much toward hastening the end of the war.
For a considerable period thereafter, all the larger German torpedo craft remained cooped up at Bruges, and the Zeebrugge blockships still obstructed the channel at the end of the war. The Convoy System
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