d their might in equal contest against the
enemy. There had been a disposition in England as elsewhere up to that
time to rate the Germans as supermen, to exalt the potency of the
scientific equipment with which the German army had taken the field.
When the battle of Neuve Chapelle had been fought, although its losses
were heavy, there was no longer any doubt in the British nation that
victory was only a question of time.

[Illustration: THE BATTLE GROUND OF NEUVE CHAPELLE]

The action came as a pendant to the attack by General de Langle de
Cary's French army during February, 1915, at Perthes, that had been a
steady relentless pressure by artillery and infantry upon a strong
German position. To meet it heavy reinforcements had been shifted by
the Germans from the trenches between La Bassee and Lille. The
earthworks at Neuve Chapelle had been particularly depleted and only a
comparatively small body of Saxons and Bavarians defended them. Opposite
this body was the first British army. The German intrenchments at Neuve
Chapelle surrounded and defended the highlands upon which were placed
the German batteries and in their turn defended the road towards Lille,
Roubaix and Turcoing.

The task assigned to Sir John French was to make an assault with only
forty-eight thousand men on a comparatively narrow front. There was only
one practicable method for effective preparation, and this was chosen by
the British general. An artillery concentration absolutely unprecedented
up to that time was employed by him. Field pieces firing at point-blank
range were used to cut the barbed wire entanglements defending the enemy
intrenchments, while howitzers and bombing airplanes were used to drop
high explosives into the defenseless earthworks.

Sir Douglas Haig, later to become the commander-in-chief of the British
forces, was in command of the first army. Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien
commanded the second army. It was the first army that bore the brunt of
the attack.

No engagement during the years on the western front was more sudden and
surprising in its onset than that drive of the British against Neuve
Chapelle. At seven o'clock on the morning of Wednesday, March 10, 1915,
the British artillery was lazily engaged in lobbing over a desultory
shell fire upon the German trenches. It was the usual breakfast
appetizer, and nobody on the German side took any unusual notice of it.
Really, however, the shelling was scientific "bracketing" of the