German postcard map of the Western Front in Flanders, looking south and including Lille, Arras, Calais, and Ostend. In the Battle of the Yser in October, 1914, the Belgian Army held the territory south of the Yser Canal, visible between Nieuport, Dixmude, and Ypres (Ypern). Further north is Passchendaele, which British forces took at great cost in 1917.
Der KanalStraße von CalaisThe English Channel and the Strait of CalaisReverse:Panorama des westlichen Kriegsschauplatzes 1914/15 Von Arras bis Ostende.Die Panorama-Postkartenreihe umfaßt mit ihren 9 Abschnitten Nr. 400 bis 408 den gesamten westlichen Kriegsschauplatz von der Schweizer Grenze bis zur Nordseeküste.Panorama of the western theater of operations 1914/15 from Arras to Ostend. The panoramic postcard series includes nine sections, with their No. 400-408 the entire western battlefield from the Swiss border to the North Sea coast.Nr. 408Wenau-Postkarte Patentamtl. gesch.
"The area conquered by the Germans on the 23rd [October], lying within the bend of the Yser between Schoorbakke and Tervaete, was violently bombarded and recaptured. Here it was that a notebook was found on a German corpse in which an officer of the 22nd Reserve Corps recorded the dreadful moral and physical sufferings endured in that hell of bullets and fire and blood; companies reduced to half their strength, units mixed together, the officers nearly all killed, famine and thirst and a sense of the uselessness of all efforts against our redoubtable little army: such was the balance-sheet on the German side."
Excerpt from an address by Carton de Wiart, Belgian Minister of Justice, in London, June, 1915. From October 16 to 30, 1914, the primary German offensive was against the Belgian Army on the left wing of the Allied Army, between Dixmude and the North Sea, the Yser Canal before them, France twelve miles behind. The Belgian Army was approximately 60,000 soldiers, and suffered 25% casualties. Estimates of German casualties in the Battle of the Yser (part of the Battle of Flanders) are over 60,000, the size of the Belgian Army facing them.
The Great Events of the Great War in Seven Volumes by Charles F. Horne, Vol. II, 1914, p. 320, copyright © 1920 by The National Alumnia, publisher: The National Alumni, publication date: 1920
Battle of the Yser, Battle of Flanders, 1914-10-23, October, 1914, German prisoners, POW, prisoner
