https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/register/the-fresh-advance-in-belgium-k6tn6gwkj
On the whole, it was a fine and satisfactory day’s fighting, and it brings us much nearer the completion of the task of clearing the last of the ridges. There is more in all this stubborn fighting than the relation of local successes may seem to imply. The best evidence of the stake involved is found in the determination with which the enemy are resisting our advance. They know very well the kind of winter they are likely to spend in the flat plains beyond the ridges, and we know it even better, for our troops stood for three trying winters in the low ground around Ypres.
The enemy will not yield lightly, and there is more desperate work ahead. The Germans are throwing in their reserves with a recklessness which suggests that they are drawing freely on their Russian front. Some of the public are, we gather, puzzled by the frequency and violence of the counter-attacks, in view of assertions that the German rank and file show signs of deterioration. The explanation is fairly simple. About a third of the German forces are probably as good material as any we have yet encountered. These are the stout men who hold most of the “pill-boxes”, and who are thrown in when a counter-attack is delivered. The rest of the enemy’s troops are of inferior quality, and they are the units who so often surrender or break before the impetuous onslaught of our regiments.
So long as the Germans, from whatever cause, can maintain such resolute opposition as they are showing this week, we must continue to take them seriously, and not jump to the conclusion that they are at the end of their resources.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2017-09-27/register/another-clean-cut-victory-htl2kd92z
The area covered was from a little north of an east and west line through Gravenstafel to below Tower Hamlets south of the Menin road. It has carried us into the village of Zonnebeke, through and out on the other side of Polygon Wood, and has given us possession of much of the disputed positions south-east of Tower Hamlets. At one narrow section of our line only the situation at the moment is doubtful, and the extent of our advance is uncertain. Everywhere else we have achieved, as in the last battle, precisely what we set out to achieve, though the Germans will doubtless tell the world that we intended to go much farther but were repulsed by their invincible infantry, and all the usual stuff. I wish you could have heard with me today the tales told by our wounded of how the invincible infantry ran.
For five days, or since our victory of the 20th, the Germans have been flinging counter attacks against our line, and have utterly failed in spite of enormous sacrifices of men to drive us back. Today, after due preparation, we replied to these counter-attacks, and once more in the course of an hour or two had brushed them aside.
The enemy knew the attack was coming. He tried to anticipate it and frustrate our plans by unusually heavy attacks delivered yesterday, beginning in the morning and going on persistently through the greater part of the day. During the preceding night the enemy had shelled our line heavily both with high explosives and gas shells. In the morning the first infantry attacks were launched, and two such attacks had been beaten off by noon. Others followed, the Germans being absolutely reckless of their waste of men. Through Polygon Wood itself and immediately below no impression was made on our positions, but south of here the enemy succeeded in penetrating our advanced positions and forcing us back, and it is probable that a party of nearly 100 of our men, refusing to retire, were taken prisoners.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2017-09-26/register/escape-of-23-war-prisoners-rnbm93gkp
Another prisoner who was recaptured proved to be Captain Müller, of the Emden. Some school children found him blackberrying in Tollerton Woods, six miles from the camp and four from Nottingham, and information was given to the police, who arrested him. Müller has made three attempts to escape. In his possession were a compass and some money, and he carried a quantity of food in a kitbag, which was slung over his shoulders.
Yesterday an East Leake farmer named Gunn and Inspector Keast found two prisoners playing at cards while crouching beneath a hedge, with a big pile of tinned provisions in a knapsack beside then. They volunteered a story of their escape, which, they said, was effected by tunnelling a distance of 50 yards, a work which occupied three months. They left Sutton Bonnington camp, they said, in parties of four, and took different routes for the coast, where they hoped to get away by tramp steamers.
Two of the absconding party were apprehended at Gotham and one at Plumtree. So closely has the net been drawn by police and military that it is believed they cannot long maintain their liberty. The guards at the camp have been doubled.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2017-09-25/register/turin-to-london-by-air-6bgf5wgn5
The journey a brilliant success, though the north-west wind was contrary, and rough and tricky over the mountains. The route followed corresponds to that of the railways over a great part of the journey, and refreshments were carried in a thermos bottle under the airman’s coat and absorbed through a rubber tube like that of a baby’s bottle. Although this is the greatest international peace flight yet, it cannot compare in the mileage with Captain Laureati’s recent non-stop trip in a similar machine from Turin to Naples and back, when he travelled 920 miles between 10.7am and 8.40pm, or with the French Lieutenant Marchal’s flight of 800 miles across Germany in July.
This achievement brings nearer the great future which is opening to aircraft for peace purposes. Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and others have foretold that before many years mails and passengers would travel regularly by air between London, the Cape, Egypt, India, and Australasia to the East, and London, Canada, and the United States to the West. Captain Laureati and his companion did in a little over seven hours a journey on which the fastest time by steam and train has hitherto been more than three times that. We doubt not that their performance will greatly stimulate the study of flight as applied to the arts of peace. The air raid on London, which followed not many hours later, keeps present to us its importance in those of war.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2017-09-23/register/the-londoners-fight-pfjvjplsm
A great part of yesterday I spent in the vile region of broken trench and shell-hole and shattered concrete defences beyond the old German front line. It is as hideous a country as all these battlefields are now, an endless vista of shell craters and heaped earth and twisted and dreadful wreckage. Hill 35 is no more than a gently rising low ridge of brown. Beyond it the ground dips down to the little valley of the Zonnebeke stream, then rises again to the main Passchendaele Ridge.
Passchendaele presents the outward appearance of a village, red roofs gleaming in the sun, with a truncated church tower thrusting clear of the housetops. But when you look more closely you see that no building is really whole. lt seemed as if in half an hour one could have strolled across to it over the sunlit, open ground, and almost incredible that in between the fronts of two mighty armies lay face to face.
It was here that the Londoners fought. They are not big men mostly, except in heart, but in them, big or little, are qualities of nerve and pluck which carry them through anything, and they come out at the end possessed of imperturbable good-humour that is irresistible.
He was quite a small man with a broken forearm in a bandage, and there was blood all over his face, and he had nothing on his head, and his clothes were torn and disreputable beyond description, and I asked him how he felt. “We’ve got ‘em biled,” he said. Oh yes, he was hit. Blinking bullet from nowhere did it, just when he was having the time of his life. But that was nothing; “We’d got ‘em biled.” That was the essential fact, and he stood a simply deplorable figure, in the middle of that indescribable road amid the howling waste and smiled as if he were lord of all the universe, as, in fact, he was.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2017-09-22/register/the-battle-for-the-ridges-2vjtn67g5
To the superficial it may seem that so deadly a struggle for possession of a few low ridges implies a great fight for very little, but upon these battered slopes the fate of the German armies in the West is being slowly but irrevocably determined. We should not forget that in battles such as that which began afresh on Thursday the real heroes are our cheerful and incomparable infantry. More than ever warfare of the kind we are witnessing before Ypres tends to be dominated by machine-guns. It is the machine-gun which enables the enemy to hold their front line so thinly, and without it they would soon be lost.
september 28, 1917
The fresh advance in Belgium
Although in the last two or three days the fighting in Belgium has probably been fiercer than at any period in that area since the first battle of Ypres, the renewal of the struggle has resulted in valuable progress. Our attack on Wednesday morning was made on a front of six miles, from Tower Hamlets to the ground east of St Julien, and it met with substantial success. Just north of the Ypres-Menin road English and Scottish battalions had some of the hardest fighting, for after they had attained their objective the Germans counter-attacked repeatedly until night fell. In last night’s bulletin Sir Douglas Haig says there were seven such counter-attacks.On the whole, it was a fine and satisfactory day’s fighting, and it brings us much nearer the completion of the task of clearing the last of the ridges. There is more in all this stubborn fighting than the relation of local successes may seem to imply. The best evidence of the stake involved is found in the determination with which the enemy are resisting our advance. They know very well the kind of winter they are likely to spend in the flat plains beyond the ridges, and we know it even better, for our troops stood for three trying winters in the low ground around Ypres.
The enemy will not yield lightly, and there is more desperate work ahead. The Germans are throwing in their reserves with a recklessness which suggests that they are drawing freely on their Russian front. Some of the public are, we gather, puzzled by the frequency and violence of the counter-attacks, in view of assertions that the German rank and file show signs of deterioration. The explanation is fairly simple. About a third of the German forces are probably as good material as any we have yet encountered. These are the stout men who hold most of the “pill-boxes”, and who are thrown in when a counter-attack is delivered. The rest of the enemy’s troops are of inferior quality, and they are the units who so often surrender or break before the impetuous onslaught of our regiments.
So long as the Germans, from whatever cause, can maintain such resolute opposition as they are showing this week, we must continue to take them seriously, and not jump to the conclusion that they are at the end of their resources.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2017-09-27/register/another-clean-cut-victory-htl2kd92z
september 27, 1917
Another clean-cut victory
We have struck the enemy another very severe blow on the Ypres front, capturing his positions and thrusting forward our line to a depth of over a thousand yards, and taking several hundred prisoners. The attack was not on a wide front, nor intended to penetrate any further.The area covered was from a little north of an east and west line through Gravenstafel to below Tower Hamlets south of the Menin road. It has carried us into the village of Zonnebeke, through and out on the other side of Polygon Wood, and has given us possession of much of the disputed positions south-east of Tower Hamlets. At one narrow section of our line only the situation at the moment is doubtful, and the extent of our advance is uncertain. Everywhere else we have achieved, as in the last battle, precisely what we set out to achieve, though the Germans will doubtless tell the world that we intended to go much farther but were repulsed by their invincible infantry, and all the usual stuff. I wish you could have heard with me today the tales told by our wounded of how the invincible infantry ran.
For five days, or since our victory of the 20th, the Germans have been flinging counter attacks against our line, and have utterly failed in spite of enormous sacrifices of men to drive us back. Today, after due preparation, we replied to these counter-attacks, and once more in the course of an hour or two had brushed them aside.
The enemy knew the attack was coming. He tried to anticipate it and frustrate our plans by unusually heavy attacks delivered yesterday, beginning in the morning and going on persistently through the greater part of the day. During the preceding night the enemy had shelled our line heavily both with high explosives and gas shells. In the morning the first infantry attacks were launched, and two such attacks had been beaten off by noon. Others followed, the Germans being absolutely reckless of their waste of men. Through Polygon Wood itself and immediately below no impression was made on our positions, but south of here the enemy succeeded in penetrating our advanced positions and forcing us back, and it is probable that a party of nearly 100 of our men, refusing to retire, were taken prisoners.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2017-09-26/register/escape-of-23-war-prisoners-rnbm93gkp
september 26, 1917
Escape of 23 war prisoners
Although, after recent experiences, precautions at the German officers’ internment camp at Sutton Bonnington, near Nottingham, have been redoubled, 22 prisoners eluded suspicion on Monday night and got clear away. They had excavated an opening into the grounds, and had evidently been making preparations to escape for a considerable time, carefully covering all traces of their work until the hour arrived for the attempt. On leaving the park they appear to have scattered in various directions. The astuteness of some special constables led to the recapture of six of the prisoners near Nottingham — the chief instigator, Otto Thelen, Stephen Prondzynski, Herman Gemest, Gustav Lutz, Eric Landoverg, and Emil Lehmann. Two of them were found asleep in a wood, worn out by their walk. They were all well supplied with tinned food and biscuits, and most of them had maps. Three of them who were arrested just outside Nottingham aroused suspicion by asking the way to the nearest railway station. When arrested the prisoners admitted that they were escaped German officers.Another prisoner who was recaptured proved to be Captain Müller, of the Emden. Some school children found him blackberrying in Tollerton Woods, six miles from the camp and four from Nottingham, and information was given to the police, who arrested him. Müller has made three attempts to escape. In his possession were a compass and some money, and he carried a quantity of food in a kitbag, which was slung over his shoulders.
Yesterday an East Leake farmer named Gunn and Inspector Keast found two prisoners playing at cards while crouching beneath a hedge, with a big pile of tinned provisions in a knapsack beside then. They volunteered a story of their escape, which, they said, was effected by tunnelling a distance of 50 yards, a work which occupied three months. They left Sutton Bonnington camp, they said, in parties of four, and took different routes for the coast, where they hoped to get away by tramp steamers.
Two of the absconding party were apprehended at Gotham and one at Plumtree. So closely has the net been drawn by police and military that it is believed they cannot long maintain their liberty. The guards at the camp have been doubled.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2017-09-25/register/turin-to-london-by-air-6bgf5wgn5
september 25, 2017
Turin to London by air
Yesterday afternoon morning papers from Italy were safely landed at Hounslow. This very remarkable feat was achieved by Captain Laureati, accompanied by Private Michael Angelo Tonzo. Our Allies may well be proud of their gallant and skilful airmen. The actual time of the journey from point to point was 7 hours 22 minutes and a half. The travellers started from the old capital of Savoy at 8.28, Italian time, and arrived at 10 to 3. The distance in a beeline is about 560 miles, but that actually covered from earth to earth was a little over 656 miles. The speed, including the time spent in climbing and landing, was 89 miles an hour. The Alps were crossed at an approximate height of 12,000ft above sea level, and the Channel passage occupied no more than a quarter of an hour. The airplane was an “SIA”, as those built by the Societa Italiana Aeroplani are called, and the engine a “Fiat”.The journey a brilliant success, though the north-west wind was contrary, and rough and tricky over the mountains. The route followed corresponds to that of the railways over a great part of the journey, and refreshments were carried in a thermos bottle under the airman’s coat and absorbed through a rubber tube like that of a baby’s bottle. Although this is the greatest international peace flight yet, it cannot compare in the mileage with Captain Laureati’s recent non-stop trip in a similar machine from Turin to Naples and back, when he travelled 920 miles between 10.7am and 8.40pm, or with the French Lieutenant Marchal’s flight of 800 miles across Germany in July.
This achievement brings nearer the great future which is opening to aircraft for peace purposes. Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and others have foretold that before many years mails and passengers would travel regularly by air between London, the Cape, Egypt, India, and Australasia to the East, and London, Canada, and the United States to the West. Captain Laureati and his companion did in a little over seven hours a journey on which the fastest time by steam and train has hitherto been more than three times that. We doubt not that their performance will greatly stimulate the study of flight as applied to the arts of peace. The air raid on London, which followed not many hours later, keeps present to us its importance in those of war.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2017-09-23/register/the-londoners-fight-pfjvjplsm
september 23, 1917
The Londoners’ fight
In casually going over the battlefield after an attack, it has often seemed that our dead were even more numerous than the Germans, owing to the fact that our men are killed in the open as they go forward, probably as they top some rise or go over high ground, and each man lies conspicuously. On the other hand, the Germans are killed in their trenches and shell-holes, and many are buried by shells as they lie. Only when you walk along the trench lines and peer into the dug-outs and craters do you learn the truth.A great part of yesterday I spent in the vile region of broken trench and shell-hole and shattered concrete defences beyond the old German front line. It is as hideous a country as all these battlefields are now, an endless vista of shell craters and heaped earth and twisted and dreadful wreckage. Hill 35 is no more than a gently rising low ridge of brown. Beyond it the ground dips down to the little valley of the Zonnebeke stream, then rises again to the main Passchendaele Ridge.
Passchendaele presents the outward appearance of a village, red roofs gleaming in the sun, with a truncated church tower thrusting clear of the housetops. But when you look more closely you see that no building is really whole. lt seemed as if in half an hour one could have strolled across to it over the sunlit, open ground, and almost incredible that in between the fronts of two mighty armies lay face to face.
It was here that the Londoners fought. They are not big men mostly, except in heart, but in them, big or little, are qualities of nerve and pluck which carry them through anything, and they come out at the end possessed of imperturbable good-humour that is irresistible.
He was quite a small man with a broken forearm in a bandage, and there was blood all over his face, and he had nothing on his head, and his clothes were torn and disreputable beyond description, and I asked him how he felt. “We’ve got ‘em biled,” he said. Oh yes, he was hit. Blinking bullet from nowhere did it, just when he was having the time of his life. But that was nothing; “We’d got ‘em biled.” That was the essential fact, and he stood a simply deplorable figure, in the middle of that indescribable road amid the howling waste and smiled as if he were lord of all the universe, as, in fact, he was.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2017-09-22/register/the-battle-for-the-ridges-2vjtn67g5
september 22, 2017
The battle for the ridges
The essential point about the advance of the British Army beyond Ypres on Thursday is that it wrested from the enemy much ground which they were determined never to relinquish. For the Germans there is no question of strategic withdrawals in this portion of Belgium. From the sea to Lille they regard their present front as vital, and their troops are ordered to hold all points to the last gasp. The object of our own Higher Command is clear enough. We are fighting to compel the Germans to loosen their grip upon the strip of Belgian coast which has become the key to their whole scheme of defence in the Western theatre. The heart of their resistance lies in the series of low ridges which run north and south beyond Ypres. We greatly impaired their prospects when in a single day we blew them off the Messines ridge. Thereafter they clung desperately to the Gheluvelt and Passchendaele ridges further north. These are the last heights left to them in this area, and once they have lost them they will be down in the flat and swampy plains. They have stuck tenaciously to the shattered woods and endless shell-holes, and have fought with a grim courage which shows the high importance attached by their leaders to all these bloodstained places. They have even invented a new system of defence, the small but powerful strongholds which our men call “pill-boxes”. These formidable retreats can be held by a few stout-hearted men, of whom the Germans still have a surprising supply. The heaviest artillery fire affects the “pill-boxes” very little, for they offer the smallest of targets and can only be wrecked by a direct hit from a shell of considerable calibre.To the superficial it may seem that so deadly a struggle for possession of a few low ridges implies a great fight for very little, but upon these battered slopes the fate of the German armies in the West is being slowly but irrevocably determined. We should not forget that in battles such as that which began afresh on Thursday the real heroes are our cheerful and incomparable infantry. More than ever warfare of the kind we are witnessing before Ypres tends to be dominated by machine-guns. It is the machine-gun which enables the enemy to hold their front line so thinly, and without it they would soon be lost.
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