Where All Roads Led in October 1914

In the fall of 1914, the new German chief of staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, decided to make a major push to capture the Channel ports, since without them the British Army could neither be supplied nor evacuated, if that proved necessary. To accomplish, he directed two armies, his Fourth and Sixth, to Flanders. The Allies, still thinking on the scale of the Race to the Sea to date, were late in appreciating the size of this approaching German steamroller. They would find themselves outnumbered in the sector through the end of the year. The Allies, though, were able to improvise a mixed defending force of Belgian, French, British, and Indian Army troops. Their decisive action to foil the enemy's plan would be known at the "First Battle of Ypres," which, for our purposes here, excludes the fighting to the north along the Yser section, and to the south from around Armentiéres to the La Bassée Canal. The area would prove to be a unique and challenging battlefield.

Maj and Mrs. Holt's Battlefield Guide, Ypres Salient describes peculiar terrain around Ypres:

The area in which the British found themselves was known as "Flanders," a centuries-old word meaning "flooded land." The town itself sits on a wet plain astride a complex of waterways designed to drain the surrounding land. Beyond that, running in a broad sweep clockwise around Ypres from Passchendaele in the northeast via Messines in the south to beyond Kemmel in the southwest is a low ridge that puts the town at the centre of a natural amphitheatre.

After the desperate struggle of 1914, while the British Army held the town and some variable amount of the surrounding countryside, the Germans occupied the heights, which defined and constrained the "salient" surrounding Ypres and from which they would observe everything that moved in the Salient for much of the next four years.

In mid-October, it was the British cavalry that first saw the importance of the terrain around Ypres when they occupied the high ground to the south of the town. Shortly after, one of the newly arrived British divisions, the 7th, commanded by General Henry Rawlinson, was sent to join the British 3rd Infantry and 2nd Cavalry Divisions blocking the strategic Menin Road east of Ypres and found themselves looking at Passchendaele Ridge. Meanwhile, the Allies along the coast to the north fought off the German Fourth Army, commanded by the determined Duke of Württemberg. Suddenly, this most northern section of the Western Front was effectively shut down when the coastal area of Belgium was flooded. Deflected to the south, the Fourth Army would attack the British forces north of Ypres around a village called Langemark on 21 October. The Fourth Army, however, was made up of older reservists and a few battalions of youthful barely trained "student" battalions, who were ill prepared to go against entrenched British Regulars. In the latter part of the battle, the decisive moments would come farther south, in the center of the salient on either side of the Menin-Ypres Road.

The BEF Heading for Ypres

For this presentation, we will be focusing at the fighting in three key locations: Langemark in the north, Messines Ridge south of town, and east of Ypres, centering on the Menin Road. These dimensions of the battle overlap in both time and space, so our explanations here will necessarily be simplified to cover the big picture. The First Battle of Ypres seems maddeningly complex and chaotic to understand, filled with bad luck, missed opportunities, and startling heroics.

Source: St. Mihiel Trip-Wire, July 2021