pected their enemy, on the ground and in the
air. On the 21st of November, at the close of the battle of Ypres, two
German second lieutenants of the air corps, called Fribenius and Hahn,
were taken prisoner near Neuve-Chapelle, and were examined. They said
that the performances of British aeroplanes had caused instructions to
be issued that a British aeroplane was to be attacked whenever
encountered. British aeroplanes, they said, were easily distinguishable
from others, for they always showed fight at once. What prisoners say
under examination is not evidence, but this early tribute to the
fighting quality of the Royal Flying Corps is repeated in many later
testimonies.

The crisis of the battle of Ypres came on the 31st of October, when the
line of the First Division was broken and the left flank of the Seventh
Division exposed, at Gheluvelt, some six miles east of Ypres. The
counter-attack by the First Guards Brigade and the famous bayonet charge
of the Second Worcestershire Regiment retook Gheluvelt, and
re-established the line. The last act of the long agony came on the 11th
of November, when a great attack was delivered all along the line. The
place of honour on the Ypres-Menin road was given to two brigades of the
Prussian Guard Corps, who had been brought up from Arras for the
purpose. The First Division of the British army met this attack at its
heaviest point of impact, and by the close of the day the Prussians had
gained five hundred yards of ground at the cost of enormous losses. The
story of the battle belongs to military history; the loss and profit
account can be summarized in two facts. The First Brigade, which met the
Prussian spearhead, was taken back into reserve on the following day. It
had gone into the battle four thousand five hundred strong; on the 12th
of November there remained, of the First Scots Guards, one officer and
sixty-nine men; of the Black Watch, one officer and a hundred and nine
men; of the Cameron Highlanders, three officers and a hundred and forty
men; of the First Coldstream Guards, no officers and a hundred and fifty
men. This is not a list of the surrendered remnant of an army: it is a
list of some of the victors of Ypres. The other fact is no less
significant; after a week of fighting the German attack fainted and
died, and when the next great assault upon the Ypres salient was
delivered, in April 1915, it was led not by the Prussian Guard but by
clouds of poison-gas.

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