Much of it is already history.  The surprise and fury of the Germans on discovering that what they had considered a contemptible military force was successfully holding them back until the English and French Armies could get into the field; the policy of systematic terrorism that followed this discovery; the unpreparedness of Belgium’s allies, which left this heroic little army practically unsupported for so long against the German tidal wave.

The great battle of the Yser is also history.  I shall not repeat the dramatic recital of the Belgian retreat to this point, fighting a rear-guard engagement as they fell back before three times their number; of the fury of the German onslaught, which engaged the entire Belgian front, so that there was no rest, not a moment’s cessation.  In one night at Dixmude the Germans made fifteen attacks.  Is it any wonder that two-thirds of Belgium’s Army is gone?

They had fought since the third of August.  It was on the twenty-first of October that they at last retired across the Yser and two days later took up their present position at the railway embankment.  On that day, the twenty-third of October, the first French troops arrived to assist them, some eighty-five hundred reaching Nieuport.

It was the hope of the Belgians that, the French taking their places on the line, they could retire for a time as reserves and get a little rest.  But the German attack continuing fiercely against the combined armies of the Allies, the Belgians were forced to go into action again, weary as they were, at the historic curve of the Yser, where was fought the great battle of the war.  At British Headquarters later on I was given the casualties of that battle, when the invading German Army flung itself again and again, for nineteen days, against the forces of the Allies:  The English casualties for that period were forty-five thousand; the French, seventy thousand; the German, by figures given out at Berlin, two hundred and fifty thousand.  The Belgian I do not know.

“It was after that battle,” said Captain F——­, “that the German dead were taken back and burned, to avoid pestilence.”

The Belgians had by this time reached the limit of their resources.  It was then that the sluices were opened and their fertile lowlands flooded.

On the thirty-first of October the water stopped the German advance along the Belgian lines.  As soon as they discovered what had been done the Germans made terrific and furious efforts to get forward ahead of it.  They got into the towns of Ramscappelle and Pervyse, where furious street fighting occurred.

Pervyse was taken five times and lost five times.  But all their efforts failed.  The remnant of the Belgian Army had retired to the railroad embankment.  The English and French lines held firm.

For the time, at least, the German advance was checked.

That was Captain F——­’s story of the battle of the Yser.