The men who did that were the King's Royal Rifles and Northamptons of the 1st Division, and this last stand of theirs beyond the Yser Canal will not be forgotten as long as human valour is remembered by us. It is wonderful to think that after three years of war the spirit of our men should still be so high and proud that they will stand to certain death like this. Those men who came back from the other side of the canal came back wounded, and had to swim back. They were a remnant of those who have stayed, lying out there now in the churned-up sand, or have been carried back to German hospitals. They were soldiers of the Northamptons and the Sixtieth. Among the King's Royal Rifles there were many London lads, from the old city which we used to think overcivilized and soft. Well, it was men like that who have shed their blood upon the sand-dunes, so that this tract by the sea is consecrated by one of the most tragic episodes in the history of this war.
It was on the seashore, when a high wind ruffled the waters on the morning of July 10, that the enemy began his attack with a deadly fire. His position was in a network of trenches, tunnels, concrete emplacements, and breastworks of thick sand-bag walls built down from the coast to the south of Lombartzyde. Facing him were other trenches and breastworks which we had recently taken over from the French. Behind our men was the Yser Canal, with pontoon bridges crossing to Nieuport and Nieuport-les-Bains. Without these bridges there was no way back or round for the men holding the lines in the dunes. The enemy began early in the morning by putting a barrage down on our front-line system of defences from a large number of batteries of heavy howitzers. Most of his shells were at least as large as 5·9's, and for one long hour they swept up and down our front, smashing breastworks and emplacements and flinging up storms of sand. After that hour the enemy altered his line of fire. There was a five minutes' pause, five minutes of breathing-space for men still left alive among many dead, and then the wall of shells crossed the canal and stayed there for another hour, churning up the sand with a tornado of steel. The guns then lifted to the front line again, and for another hour continued their work of destruction, pausing for one of those short silences which gave men hope that the bombardment had ceased. It had not ceased. It travelled again to the support line and stayed smashing there for sixty minutes--then across the canal again, then back all over again.