Current Information:

Age-23

6, Pall Mall, Westminster

Royal Irish Rifles Graveyard, Laventie, France

The Race to the Sea - September-October 1914

By the middle of September 1914, the Aisne battlefield had stagnated into trench warfare and in order to break this impasse, both sides tried to outflank each other in a general movement northwards. Moving up through Picardy, Artois and Flanders, the race was over by 19th October when the North Sea was reached. The Western Front, a line of trenches stretching from Belgium to Switzerland, was now a reality. Initially it was the French army that conducted this movement whilst the British Expeditionary Force remained on the Aisne but by 6 October British reinforcements were needed to help beat off German attacks around Lille. They moved north and along with reinforcements from Britain, they took up new positions in Flanders, on the left of the Allied line and much closer to the Channel ports.

The Battle of La Bassée

This was fought by II Corps between 10th October and 2nd November 1914 and as the name suggests it focused on an area around the town of La Bassée in northern France. It was part of the Race to the Sea and it determined the line of the Western Front in that sector. There were some initial British successes but La Bassée remained firmly in German hands. German reinforcements arrived and the village of Neuve Chapelle was captured by them. Towards the end of October, the fighting on this front died down as the attention of both armies switched to Ypres.

At the beginning of the war in August 1914, the 1st Connaught Rangers battalion were in India as part of the Ferozepore Brigade, Lahore Division of the Indian Army which almost immediately set sail for Europe, landing at Marseilles on 26th September. From here they moved north in time to add their weight to the fighting at La Bassée. On 1st November the battalion moved into support trenches at Rue du Bacquerot, near Laventie and on the following day, 2nd November, moved forward to support the 2nd Gurkhas who were retiring in the face of a strong enemy attack. Other units were called upon as well but their combined efforts were not enough to recover the lost positions and by the end of the day the British line had fallen back to new positions. At some stage during the fighting Geoffrey Abbott was killed as he crossed back to the British line for the third time to bring up reinforcements.