The labyrinthine trenches of the Western Front are part of the lore of the First World War, but what of the ends of the line? What happened when the trenches reached the North Sea? Peter Barton answers the latter question in his book of First World War panoramas. The panoramas, which cover the length of the British line, were photographed for military intelligence and artillery purposes. Each section of the line has a battlefield map with numbered observation points that correspond to the photos. (“G” precedes German panorama numbers.)

Note the inundations on the map. During the race to the sea in 1914, before the Western Front became static, it was the Belgian Army who protected this part of Flanders. The Belgians had fought the Germans ever since the German attack on Liège on 4 August 1914, which was the first battle of World War 1. Now the Belgian Army had retreated, exhausted, to the Yser River. By October 1914, the Germans were approaching the fortified town of Nieuport, which sits a kilometer from the North Sea in an area of complex locks and sluices that control the water flow of five canals and the drainage of the Polder Plain. This was the last defensible position on Belgian soil. The Belgians decided to flood the plain to halt the German advance. Barton writes:

At 4 p.m. on 25 October Belgian engineers began the task of damming and sealing. Before the final few culverts had been blocked the situation had become desperate: the Germans were only about 350 m (382 yards) away and the Belgian artillery had exhausted their ammunition. It was decided that the locks must be opened before the blocking work was complete. Having been closed for 35 years the gates stubbornly refused to budge; only the integral sluices could be freed—and they released only a little water. On the night of 27–28 October the gates at last creaked apart and water gushed through. The result was not at all as successful as had been hoped: dry ground soaked up the flood, and bridges and other bottlenecks arrested its flow. By now the Belgians had been fighting non-stop for four days and four nights, hoping all the time that the waters might be their salvation… [An old lock-keeper suggested] that if the sluices in the great weir of Noordvaart Canal could be opened with the rising tide and closed as it fell, the results might be satisfactory. However, there was one major problem: the weir was now behind German lines… On the night of 29 October at 7:30 p.m. a small party crept out into the darkness. Reaching the weir they found to their astonishment and relief that the positions were unoccupied by the enemy. The handles of the system, which had been hidden in a bush, were found, and the sluices opened. During high tide the waters surged through, and at midnight as the flow was ebbing, the sluices were closed. The next day the Germans launched a huge general attack on the northern front, advancing along the entire line between Nieuport and Lille, taking parts of the railway and threatening to overrun the whole of the coastal sector. Sixteen hours after opening the sluices however, the water had already advanced almost 5 km (3 miles) across the Polder Plain. On 30 October, tides were not only higher, but augmented by onshore winds. The sluices were opened and closed again… The Polder Plain sank beneath the flood; the next day the lost positions on the railway line were recovered and the Germans forced to pull back behind the advancing flood. For the next four years the great man-made sea, 13 km long and 6 wide (8 miles long and 3 wide), was kept in place, and never again were the Germans to set foot west of the railway.

The British used duckboards across inundations to connect the lines and to reach forward observation positions. (Click photos to enlarge.)

Barton’s book comes with a DVD (PC and Mac compatible) of 350 zoomable panoramas, 90 of them German. I find the DVD essential for examining the panoramas. The photographs in the book are excellent, but using the DVD to explore the pictures in detail is much more satisfying. Nevertheless, Barton provides context for the panoramas in his book, in which he gives an overview and history for each section of the British line with additional photos and diagrams.

After looking at these terrain photos I understand why so many new recruits to the trenches were sniped taking a peek over the parapet and why many soldiers who had been in the trenches for months might write home that they had never seen the enemy. Really it’s incredibly difficult to see a hole in the ground a few hundred yards away across a terrain cluttered with detritus, even a hole miles long.

See what you can recognize of the seaside trenches at Nieuport-Bains from this portion of a British panorama:

Here’s a German view of the line from observation point G1. Can you spot the Germans? The structure that juts into the sea appears to be the remains of a pier.

Here’s a close-up.

A closer view of the German trenches at the sea’s edge. The defenses may look flimsy, but they would have included camouflaged machine-gun emplacements.

And finally, here’s what the German entanglements looked like farther back from the beach amongst the dunes.

I highly recommend Barton’s book and the accompanying DVD. The flash-player for the DVD is a little finicky. It takes some finagling to get a full-screen, zoomed view [View>show all>zoom in>full screen—worked for me], but once you get the hang of it, hours can be lost exploring these panoramas. And do note that all the photos here are just portions of panoramas: the originals are extensive.

Source:

Barton, Peter, Jeremy Banning, and Peter Doyle. 2008. “The Race to the Sea,” The Battlefields of the First World War: The Unseen Panoramas of the Western Front. London: Constable