A War To End All Wars - Home Front Propaganda I THE GREAT WAR - Week 13

Europe had been at war for less than three

months, but already hundreds of thousands of young men had died horribly. In the interests

of morale and patriotism, the media in each warring nation had portrayed its side as good

and the enemy as evil, and what we begin to see is that there was a gap created between

what people believed about the war at home and what was actually happening on the front.

I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War. At the beginning of the week, the Russians

were crossing the Vistula to try and stop the Germans, who were intent on capturing

Warsaw. The Austrians had broken out of the siege at Przemsyl but were badly beaten by

the Russians on the River San, and the British had just arrived at a sleepy little Belgian

town called Ypres. German army chief of staff Falkenhayn had

assembled a new army under the Duke of Wurttemberg to take over the right flank of the German

forces in Flanders, which is this part of Belgium and Northern France. A lot of the

new units were reservists, though- middle-aged men past campaigning or young recruits that

hadn’t really been trained, and in their first few days of battle they would make catastrophic

mistakes.

Now, the only gap on the Western Front through which either side might possibly make some

sort of decisive maneuver was a narrow corridor right here, and that’s where the action

was happening. On Sunday October 18th, the British headed eastward from Ypres toward

Menin, nearly 20 km away and in German hands, and there were a few skirmishes, but nothing

major.

The next day, as the advance progressed, British pilots reported huge columns of advancing

Germans who would be upon them in hours so the British withdrew to a low ridge overlooking

Ypres. This area would be known as the Ypres salient. A salient, in battle, is a projection

of the line like a bulge, which means that the enemy can attack it on three sides. The

Ypres salient would be the scene over the next four years of some of the bloodiest and

harshest battles in all of human history.

On the 20th, the Germans attacked along the whole front, 24 divisions against 19, but

the main contest this day was around Ypres, where 14 German divisions attacked 7 British,

though most of the German forces were Wurttemberg’s reservists. The British were outnumbered in

men and artillery, but they were equal to the enemy in machine guns, and they managed

to hold their line because of their superiority in rapid rifle fire.

Here we find, as we did at the Battle of the Mons in August, the stories of the “mad

minute”. A mad minute was, according to the British soldiers of the Great War, the

art of hitting 15 targets in one minute with a bolt-action rifle, which the British professionals

were trained to, and legend has it that at both Mons and the first action at Ypres, German

soldiers thought they were facing machine gun fire when in fact it was intense rifle

fire.

The German forces made the novice’s mistake of advancing in large masses and presented

huge targets to the British rifles, suffering terrible casualties, and for the next three