Talk:First Battle of Ypres
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All you need are some pictures of the battle
[edit] Kinder-Mord (Child murder)?
Hello, it should be noted that this term is quite misleading. The Germans brought 4 new built "reserve corps" to Northern France and Belgium, fall 1914. Some of its regiments had a large number of (most young) volunteers (e.g.: Reserve Infantry Regiment 215, from Hanover region, as can be seen in prussian 1914-15-casualty rolls, consisted to more than a half of "Kriegsfreiwillige" = "volunteers for wartime duration", men without any peacetime service experience).
But: The youngest volunteers were around 17, 18 years of age. And so far as "students" are concerned: the german grammar school leaver qualified for attending university ("Abiturient") was 19 years old - hardly younger than the average "active" soldier of 20,21 years. In other words, the university STUDENT was of the same age as the active soldier. But as soon as such a student had served his "One Year" in peacetime (the privilege of one year service for men from higher education which built the reserve officer pool) he couldn't have been a "Kriegsfreiwilliger" at all. So can be spoken of "Kindermord?"
The point is that the bulk of german volunteers came from an urban background (grammar schoolboys not finished "abitur", or secondary schoolboys: 17-19 years of age), but not to forget apprentice boys, trainees, and unskilled workers from the cities and so on.
And as far as higher educated youth is concerned: it's obvious that most of them came from well-to-do families and used to live under more comfortable conditions than the average and predominating draftees: farm hands, craftsmen and rural people like that. This better-off youth was obviously more irritated and stressed by the hardships of basic training and barrack life, maltreatment by sergeants or comrades as the ordinary recruit. On the other hand it's a fact that the german student was taller and heavier than his contemporaries from other classes.
So "Kinder" ? --- one sees, the term "child" is quite doubtful, and even more in conjunction with "student". Moreover, the number of university students in germany around 1910/20 was not very great - some 40-50,000, virtually all male. Germanys population was 60-65 mill. Compare this with present times: 1,000,000 male students alone at 80 mill. population. - for a more detailed examination see Karl Unruh "Langemarck - Legende und Wirklichkeit" (german), 1986.
Pure kitsch is 'unschuldig' / innocent. What should that mean ? One might say, some of the Kriegsfreiwillige were 'misled', but innocent is the wrong word for people rushing voluntarily to the colours, ready to fight, shoot, kill, and, not to forget - eventually being wounded, mutilated or killed.
In the end, that term might be a sign for german tending to emotional extravagance, not to say hysteria - besides of ill military leadership in that particular case. German over-emotion can be noticed here but also in other historical circumstances, past and present.
WernerE (german wiki), 07.12.2005
[edit] The lead-up to the battle
Battles are not fought just because the enemy is there in front of you: that's the squaddie's viewpoint, the generals have other views, right or wrong. The Race to the Sea was a German effort to outflank the relatively static French lines to the West, and it nearly succeeded: if it had, then the French would have surrendered and the UK would have lost the BEF.
In its bias towards the British troops who eventually had the victory, this Article ignores the Belgian line between Ieper(Ypres) and Nieupoort, who took the first step in the eventual victory by stopping the German forces virtually single-handed: had it not been for the Belgians, the Germans, who had won the Race to the Sea, would have outflanked the British and French forces to the West, with a clear run to Paris and the French heartland, cutting the entire BEF supply route off into the bargain. The German forces, initally attacking along an axis southwards from Brugge(Bruges), ran into the final Belgian last-ditch suicide defence: my own great-grandfather's citation, for instance, states he was the only survivor of what can only be termed a suicide squad of five men who destroyed a German machine-gun nest of a dozen machine-guns, approximately fifty troops.
This defensive line was principally along the railway embankment over the marshland between the two towns, which was the only consistently high ground in the area. The Belgian command of this was split, Nieupoort to Vuurne (Furnes) and Vuurne to Ieper. The Belgian forces had fought a running retreat from Namur in the East of Belgium, across the plain north of Brussels, past Ghent and Brugge and finally made a last-ditch stand on the railway: there was barely a couple of miles of land back to the French border.
When it finally became clear that the remaining Belgian forces were in the process of finally being wiped out, and that even this would fall, the Belgian King ordered the demolition of the sea-sluices at Nieupoort, thereby destroying the drainage of the entire area between there and the Ardennes, which then turned into the sea of mud so closely associated with the Battlefields of Flanders. This bought enough time for the British and French forces to catch up, threatening the German flank to the North of Ypres, and in an attempt to circumvent the flood to the East, the Germans ran into the BEF and French. The rest is as described.
It was, therefore, probably an even more closely-run thing than Waterloo: had the advancing British forces been any slower to come up, or the Germans quicker to disengage around Ramskapelle, then they would have probably broken through around Kortrijk(Courtrai) and the war would have been lost, at least as far as the French were concerned. This lesson did not get missed: the error was not repeated in WWII, leaving the Brits evacuating at Dunkerk.
Jelmain 13:34, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
