Learning that the division headquarters and even the army group command had devoted such care to the fighting on the Nieuwpoort front—
And that despite being separated by floodwaters, they were all doing their utmost to support the battle from afar in their own ways—
The morale of the entire 16th Regiment was finally raised to its peak. The frenzied artillery bombardment of the Belgians’ dying struggle across from them no longer seemed so terrifying.
However, there was a difference between having a plan and executing it; much detailed work remained to be done.
After finishing his final pre-battle rally, Colonel Li Site immediately began deploying tasks with lightning speed and thunderous resolve.
First, he made minor readjustments to the line-filling deployments of each battalion’s combat troops.
The battalions were currently lying dormant; during the enemy’s fire preparation, they had withdrawn from the first- and second-line positions. They would only re-enter the positions to block the enemy after the bombardment stopped—this was a classic World War I tactic, the same on all sides.
After arranging the combat units, the colonel assigned key tasks to the reconnaissance company and the communications platoon:
“Balake, your reconnaissance company has fairly complete observation equipment. Assign men to the church bell tower to observe the enemy’s assembly positions and the impact points of our artillery. We have no firing positions deployed inside the church; if we don’t open fire on the enemy proactively, they won’t likely prioritize bombing it either.
Lu Luxiu, you take the communications platoon and send telegrams to division headquarters at the fastest possible speed when the time comes, communicating ballistic calibration information. Whatever data Balake feeds back, transmit it immediately.”
The colonel was obviously planning to use radio remote feedback for fire correction—a fairly standard procedure.
However, in 1914 radio sets were still extremely rare, and frontline troops generally lacked this kind of real-time communications capability.
In this era, on the Western Front only regimental-level units could call in precision artillery support. On the Eastern Front, the Russian Empire’s forces—or even the more backward Ottoman Empire—only had radios down to the division level, making artillery response even more sluggish.
Lieutenant Balake and Lu Luxiu immediately accepted their orders and went to handle their respective tasks.
…
A quarter of an hour later, the Belgian artillery fire finally ceased.
At Lieutenant General Bei Gehanmu’s order, the commander of the Belgian 1st Division, thousands of Belgians began to assemble, preparing to launch their charge.
But very quickly, they realized something was off.
Scattered shells began falling one after another into the sea north of the coastal highway, or into the flooded zone south of the coastal highway, raising plumes of water several meters or even a dozen-odd meters high.
Because they landed in water, most of the explosive kinetic energy was absorbed; to the soldiers on the shore, the noise was not actually all that tremendous, and not too many were frightened at first.
But within just a few short minutes, the shelling grew increasingly accurate.
Finally, not long after the Belgian troops began their charge, two 150mm heavy artillery shells and five or six 105mm shells slammed straight into the massed troops.
Severed limbs flew in all directions, brains and blood sprayed wildly, and cries of agony filled the air without pause. Panic began to spread instantly.
“What’s going on? Where is this shelling coming from? Could those few 77s in the town really pack that much punch?”
Lieutenant General Bei Gehanmu saw his soldiers blown to bits through his binoculars, and suddenly felt a surge of blood rush to his head; even his eyeballs began to redden.
“No! This is absolutely not the power of 77mm light guns!” The commander of the divisional artillery regiment immediately noticed the anomaly and hurriedly warned the division commander.
“Whatever it is! Immediately concentrate the few guns we have left and execute counter-battery operations as soon as possible!”
Bei Gehanmu knew full well that his counter-battery strength was pitifully weak. His own division’s artillery had long since been lost during their retreat, and now he only had the few remaining light guns of the Belgian 6th Division to work with.
But regardless, they absolutely could not endure one-sided bombardment without fighting back at this juncture! That kind of despair was the surest path to a total collapse of morale.
Counter-battery operations had to be carried out. Even if they couldn’t win, they had to fight! It would at least bolster their momentum and give the infantrymen some confidence.
The artillery regiment commander had no choice but to carry out the order with a hardened scalp. At the same time, Bei Gehanmu urgently telegraphed the French forces five kilometers to the west, hoping that the French 75 batteries would also coordinate in conducting counter-battery operations.
Time ticked away second by second. Radio communications and waiting for replies both took time. So for at least twenty minutes, the Belgians could only suffer the bombardment for nothing.
Many assault units were driven straight back and began fleeing and scattering in panic, unwilling to remain on the coastal highway any longer.
Those Belgian vanguard soldiers who had already been pushed into engagement range, caught in a dilemma with no way forward or back, fell into an utterly tragic predicament.
The battalion charging at the very front suddenly found that the friendly forces behind had lost contact and dared not advance. They were alone on the coastal highway with no cover on either flank, and the German forces opposite were also defending with unusual determination this time; as soon as the Belgian artillery stopped, they quickly sent blocking troops to the first line outside the town.
From the rubble of buildings at the town’s edge, more than a dozen MG08 heavy machine gun positions that had just maneuvered into place and deployed emerged one after another.
Machine gun crossfire swept wildly. The distant long-range heavy artillery didn’t even need to spot targets; after finding the correct range, they simply pounded the coastal highway, bombarding those coordinates regardless of whether anyone was there at that precise moment—blast after blast without fail.
Although the absolute number of German guns committed was not large, their rate of fire had been pushed to maximum—firing with mad rapidity, the entire barrage rolling on continuously, ceaseless and unending.
In order to achieve longer range—to pursue the goal of “savaging the enemy’s artillery one-sidedly at distances beyond their guns’ reach”—cannon shells necessarily had to sacrifice a certain amount of explosive charge.
A 150mm howitzer shell could hold more than ten kilograms of explosive, sometimes twelve or thirteen kilograms at most. The weight of the explosive could account for twenty to thirty percent of the shell’s total weight (the total shell weight being 50–60 kilograms; in later generations, the most extreme high-explosive shells could dedicate 40% of their weight to explosive, but during World War II it was generally less than 30%, and in World War I only 20%).
As for a 150mm gun, the charge was generally less than ten kilograms. This Krupp prototype later to become the K16 gun, currently in German service, only held 6.8 kilograms of explosive, giving it a theoretical blast power of merely half that of a howitzer of the same caliber.
By comparison, the long-barreled 105mm gun held two kilograms of explosive at most, giving it a theoretical blast power roughly on par with a 75mm howitzer shell.
But at this moment, none of these details mattered.
The desperate situation of “taking a one-sided beating without being able to strike back” was the final straw that made the Belgians collapse completely.
The Belgian infantry battalion charging at the very front was actually wiped out just like that—caught under heavy artillery cover and machine gun crossfire, every last man killed on the open ground east of the town without ever touching the first street.
Some soldiers had not died outright at first; they merely lay on the ground with mortal wounds, wailing as they awaited death. The German machine gunners ceased fire once they saw that all the enemy had fallen.
But the problem was that the heavy artillery group more than ten kilometers away did not know everyone here had fallen, and continued pouring shells onto the predetermined coordinates, with a fresh salvo landing every dozen or so seconds.
The wounded were blown to death, and the dead were blown to pieces. The heavy artillery group had no intention of desecrating corpses; they simply could not judge in time whether to cease fire, so they just kept bombing even the dead.
The psychological impact of this scene was simply too violent.
The German troops might be able to endure a day of bombardment and still fight to the death without retreating, but that was because they were fighting an elastic defense from within the town’s ruins; the vast majority of shells could not cause substantive damage.
But the Belgian assault troops at this very moment were taking shelling on a road completely devoid of cover, where every round could solidly reap a cluster of lives.
Especially because of the flooding, the low-lying terrain south of the coastal highway was submerged as well, narrowing the passable section for Belgian infantry to just a few hundred meters at its tightest point.
This meant that after the German heavy artillery had calibrated their range, they only needed to keep mindlessly shelling this few-hundred-meter-wide zone—essentially the same as hurling shells directly into a crowd of men!
One could say that the Belgians’ earlier act of blowing the dikes to flood the area was, at this very moment, a case of them lifting a rock only to drop it on their own feet.
The boomerang would come back sooner or later.
Those twenty minutes were absolutely the most agonizing twenty minutes Lieutenant General Bei Gehanmu had ever experienced in his life.
“Haven’t the French been able to carry out counter-battery operations yet? Why?” Lieutenant General Bei Gehanmu repeatedly urged and cursed the allied commanders, as well as his own artillery regiment commander.
Finally, the desperate reply from his artillery regiment commander made Bei Gehanmu’s heart, which had been hanging in suspense, die completely and utterly:
“General! We have observed the enemy’s trajectories and can confirm that the enemy artillery positions are firing from at least fifteen kilometers to the south! We do not have a single gun that can reach that far! We can only endure one-sided bombardment!”
This “professional assessment” completely broke Bei Gehanmu, as well as the fighting will of the various regimental commanders under him.
“Retreat! Retreat at once! Abandon the attack! The entire army is to pull back and escape the coverage of the enemy’s heavy artillery! All units are to stop marching on the coastal highway! Spread out as much as possible and move along the beaches and muddy terrain on both flanks!”
The Belgian 1st Division, reputedly the most loyal to the King among all Belgian forces, chose to rout directly after its vanguard reinforced battalion was completely annihilated without a single survivor, and the remainder of its main force regiments were also heavily battered by artillery.
Even if the King personally distributed the royal hams and brandy to the soldiers, even if the King brought out all his gold and silver coins to increase their pay, it was impossible to make men seek death under one-sided, slaughtering artillery fire.
…
“It seems we’ve finally won. After their final desperate leap failed, the Belgians landed as high-level paraplegics.”
Colonel Li Site watched the chaotic Belgian retreat through his binoculars, and his own suspended heart finally settled back into place.
Lu Luxiu had already earned the colonel’s considerable trust, so at this moment he was standing nearby and was even permitted to take the colonel’s binoculars after him to observe for himself.
Watching the retreating Belgians, Lu Luxiu offered a well-intentioned reminder: “Sir, perhaps we still shouldn’t let our guard down completely? For the time being, it seems we have thoroughly shattered the Belgians’ will to fight and their morale, making them unwilling to attack any further and robbing them of the courage to attack again.
But ‘not attacking’ is not the same as ‘willing to surrender immediately.’ If the remnants of their three divisions all withdraw to the vicinity of Ostend, then dig in and wait for reinforcements, simply waiting for the French army to attack and rescue them, we would still be in danger.
They might think that we only have around two battalions left, but the French forces between Dunkirk and De Panne will only grow more numerous—today it is a little over a division, tomorrow it might be two divisions, and they may even bring heavy artillery.
The Belgians only need to outlast us in a contest of sitting tight and holding out to see who survives longer, and they might outlast us. To be truly safe, we must find another way to annihilate them as soon as possible, or at least persuade them to surrender.”
The colonel nodded. “You think I don’t want that? But the gap between routing them and forcing their surrender is easier said than closed.”
The Belgian army’s current state was actually quite similar to the French army later in 1917. After the Battle of the Ladies’ Lane, the French had been beaten so badly they’d lost all spirit; frontline soldiers mutinied and refused to launch further offensives, but that was all.
“Is there any way to make those Belgians who refuse to attack transform one step further into directly surrendering to us?”
After thinking hard for a long time, Lu Luxiu gradually calmed his mind.
Then he suddenly noticed a battlefield detail that had been overlooked just moments before, and a plan came to mind.
—
P.S. New book, seeking comments, follows, collections, and monthly tickets.