Word spread that the division headquarters and even the army command were deeply invested in the battle on the Nieuwpoort front. Even though they were cut off by the floodwaters, command was doing everything in its power to support the fight from afar.
Morale up and down the 16th Regiment finally soared to its absolute peak, and the frantic, desperate artillery bombardment from the Belgin forces across from them no longer seemed so terrifying.
However, plans were just plans. To put them into action, there were still many specific details to work out.
After completing his final round of pre-battle mobilization, Colonel List decisively began assigning tasks.
First, he fine-tuned the deployment plans for each battalion's combat troops along the front lines.
Every battalion was currently lying low, having withdrawn from the first and second line trenches during the enemy's artillery preparation. They would only move back into position to intercept the enemy once the bombardment stopped. This was a classic tactical doctrine during the First World War, used equally by all sides.
Once the combat troops were arranged, the colonel focused on assigning tasks to the reconnaissance company and the communications platoon:
"Barack, your reconnaissance company is well-equipped with observation gear. I want you to assign men to the church bell tower to observe the enemy's assembly points and the impact zones of our artillery. We haven't deployed any firepower in the church and won't fire from it, so the enemy isn't likely to prioritize bombing it.
"Lelouch, you'll lead the communications platoon. Transmit the ballistic calibration data to division headquarters as quickly as possible. Whatever data Barack feeds back to you, send it out immediately."
The colonel obviously intended to use long-range radio feedback for artillery spotting, a fairly standard operation.However, the proliferation of radios was still extremely low in 1914. In reality, frontline troops rarely possessed this kind of real-time communication capability.
In this era, only the regimental level on the Western Front could call in precision artillery support. For the Russian Empire on the Eastern Front, or the even more backward Ottoman Empire, radios were only issued down to the division level, making their artillery response far more sluggish.
Lieutenant Barack and Lelouch acknowledged their orders and set off to handle their respective tasks.
...
Fifteen minutes later, the Belgin artillery bombardment finally ceased.
With a single order from Lieutenant General Berghem, the commander of the 1st Belgia Division, thousands upon thousands of Belgin soldiers began to assemble, preparing to launch their charge.
But they quickly realized something was wrong.
Artillery shells began to fall in twos and threes, splashing into the sea north of the coastal highway or plunging into the flooded zones to the south, kicking up plumes of water that shot several meters—sometimes over ten meters—into the air.
Because they landed in the water, most of the kinetic energy from the explosions was absorbed. To the soldiers on the shore, the blasts didn't sound particularly overwhelming, and few were startled at first.
But within just three to five minutes, the incoming fire grew increasingly accurate.
Finally, shortly after the Belgin army began its charge, two 150mm heavy artillery shells and five or six 105mm shells slammed squarely into the dense crowd.
Severed limbs flew in all directions. Brain matter and blood sprayed wildly, and agonizing screams filled the air. Panic spread in an instant.
"What's going on? Where is this artillery fire coming from? Could those few 77mm guns in the town possibly pack this much punch?"
Seeing his soldiers blown to pieces through his binoculars, Lieutenant General Berghem felt the blood rush straight to his head, his eyes turning bloodshot.
"No! That's definitely not the firepower of a small 77mm gun!" the commander of the division's artillery regiment beside him warned the general.
"I don't care what it is! Mass our remaining guns and execute counter-battery fire as quickly as possible!"
Berghem knew his counter-battery capabilities were abysmal. His division had lost all its large artillery pieces during their long retreat, leaving him to rely entirely on the meager handful of small guns left over from the 6th Belgia Division.
But no matter the situation, they could not sit there and take a one-sided bombing without returning fire! That kind of despair was the surest way to cause a total collapse in morale.
They had to execute counter-battery fire. They had to fight back, even if they couldn't win! Even if it was just for show, it might give the infantry a little confidence.
The artillery commander had no choice but to bite the bullet and carry out the order. Meanwhile, Berghem frantically telegraphed the French forces five kilometers to the west, hoping their 75mm artillery groups would coordinate and provide counter-battery support.
Time ticked by. Radio communications and waiting for a reply took time. For at least twenty minutes, the Belgin forces could do nothing but sit there and be bombarded in vain.
Many of the advancing troops were driven straight back, beginning to scatter like birds and beasts as they fled to the rear, refusing to stay on the coastal highway a moment longer.
The vanguard Belgin soldiers who had already been pushed into engagement range and were caught between advancing and retreating found themselves in a miserable situation.
The battalion charging at the very front realized that their allied forces behind them had fallen out of step and no longer dared to advance. Left charging alone on the coastal highway with no cover on either flank, they faced a German Army defending with absolute resolve. The moment the Belgin artillery stopped, the Germans dispatched their interception forces to the frontline trenches on the outskirts of the town.
From within the ruined buildings at the edge of town, over a dozen MG08 Heavy Machine Gun emplacements emerged, having just maneuvered into position and deployed.
Intersecting machine-gun fire swept across the area relentlessly. The long-range heavy artillery in the distance didn't even need to spot their targets; having dialed in the correct range, they rained shells down on the coastal highway. It didn't matter if anyone was standing at those exact coordinates—they bombed it all the same.
Although the absolute number of artillery pieces the German Army fielded wasn't large, their firing rate was pushed to the limit. They fired with blistering speed, laying down an endless curtain of steel.
To achieve a longer range—chasing the goal of "one-sidedly massacring enemy artillery from beyond the reach of their guns"—cannon shells had to sacrifice a certain amount of explosive payload.
A 150mm howitzer shell could carry over ten kilograms of explosives, with some holding up to twelve or thirteen kilograms, making the explosive filler account for twenty to thirty percent of the projectile's total weight. (The total shell weighed between 50 and 60 kilograms. The most extreme high-explosive shells of later generations could dedicate 40% of their weight to explosives, but during World War II, it was generally less than 30%, and during the First World War, it was only 20%.)
By contrast, the explosive payload for a 150mm cannon was generally under ten kilograms. The prototype gun currently being developed by Krupp for the German Army, which would later become the K16 Cannon, held only 6.8 kilograms of explosives. Its theoretical blast power was only half that of a howitzer of the same caliber.
In comparison, a 105mm long-barrel cannon held at most two kilograms of explosives, meaning its theoretical blast power was only on par with a 75mm-class howitzer.
But right now, none of those details mattered.
The desperate situation of being "one-sidedly beaten without the ability to strike back" was the final straw that caused the Belgin troops to break down.
The vanguard Belgin infantry battalion was caught flat-footed by the blanket of heavy artillery fire and intersecting machine-gun sweeps. They were entirely wiped out in the open field on the eastern side of the town, failing to even reach the first street.
Some of the soldiers weren't dead yet; severely wounded, they lay on the ground, wailing as they waited for death. The German machine gunners ceased fire once they saw that the entire enemy force had gone down.
The problem was that the heavy artillery group over a dozen kilometers away had no idea the enemy had fallen. They continued to pour fire onto the predetermined coordinates, dropping a fresh wave of shells every ten to twenty seconds.
The heavily wounded were blown to death, and the already dead were blown to pieces. The heavy artillery didn't intend to desecrate the corpses; they had no way of knowing whether to cease fire, so they kept bombing even the dead.
The psychological shock of such a scene was devastating.
The German Army might have been able to withstand a full day of artillery fire and still hold their ground, refusing to retreat. But that was because they were hiding in the town's ruins, employing an elastic defense, meaning the vast majority of the shells failed to inflict any substantial damage.
In contrast, the charging Belgin troops were taking artillery fire on a road devoid of cover. Every single shell that landed reaped a fresh harvest of lives.
To make matters worse, thanks to the floodwaters, the low-lying areas south of the coastal highway were entirely submerged. The narrowest stretch of ground the Belgin infantry could pass through was only a few hundred meters wide.
As a result, once the German heavy artillery dialed in their range, they only needed to aim at that several-hundred-meter-wide corridor and fire blindly. It was virtually the same as dropping shells directly onto a clustered pile of bodies!
It could be said that the Belgin army's previous decision to blow the dikes and flood the land had come back to bite them.
The boomerang was bound to return eventually.
Those twenty minutes were the most excruciating Lieutenant General Berghem had ever experienced in his life.
"Have the French still not initiated counter-battery fire? Why?!" Lieutenant General Berghem repeatedly urged and cursed his allied commanders, as well as the commander of his own artillery regiment.
Finally, the despairing reply from his artillery commander shattered whatever lingering hopes Berghem still harbored:
"General! We've observed the enemy's ballistics. We can confirm that their artillery positions are firing from at least fifteen kilometers to the south! We don't possess a single gun that can reach that far! We can only sit here and be bombed!"
This "professional assessment" crushed the fighting spirit of Berghem and every regimental commander serving under him.
"Retreat! Fall back immediately! Abandon the attack! The entire army is to fall back and escape the range of the enemy's heavy artillery! No unit is to march on the coastal highway! Scatter as much as possible and move through the beaches and mud flats on either side!"
The 1st Belgia Division, reputed to be the most fiercely loyal to the king in the entire Belgin army, chose to flee in disarray after their vanguard reinforced battalion was wiped out without a single survivor, and the remnants of their main regiments were severely crippled by the bombardment.
Even if the king himself had distributed the royal family's ham and brandy to the soldiers, and emptied the treasury of all its gold and silver coins to increase their pay, it wouldn't have been enough to make men march into a one-sided slaughter to seek their deaths.
...
"It looks like we've finally won. The Belgin troops made one last desperate leap, failed, and broke their backs on the landing."
Watching the Belgin army retreat in a chaotic rout through his binoculars, Colonel List let out a sigh of relief.
Lelouch had already earned the colonel's deep trust, so he was standing by his side. He even had the privilege of taking the binoculars from the colonel to observe the battlefield for himself.
Watching the fleeing Belgin forces, Lelouch offered a polite reminder: "Sir, perhaps we shouldn't let our guard down just yet? So far, we've only shattered the Belgin army's will to fight and their morale. They no longer want to attack, and they no longer have the courage to do so.
"But 'not attacking' isn't the same as 'willing to surrender immediately.' If the remnants of their three divisions all shrink back toward Ostend and dig in to wait for reinforcements, just waiting for the French to attack and extract them, we'll still be in danger.
"They might think that we only have about two battalions left, whereas the French forces stretching from Dunkirk to De Panne will only continue to grow. Today it's a little over a division, but tomorrow it could be two, and they might even bring in heavy artillery.
"If the Belgin forces just sit tight, defend their positions, and turn this into a waiting game to see who outlasts who, they might wear us down and win. If we want to be secure, we need to find another way to quickly annihilate them entirely, or at least persuade the Belgin forces to surrender."
The colonel nodded. "I'd like nothing more, but bridging the gap between a rout and a forced surrender is easier said than done."
The current state of the Belgin army was quite similar to the historical French army in 1917. Following the Nivelle Offensive at the Chemin des Dames, the French troops had their spirits broken; the frontline soldiers mutinied and refused to launch any further attacks, but that was as far as it went.
'Is there any way to push those Belgin troops who refuse to attack one step further, to the point of surrendering?'
After agonizing over the problem for a long while, Lelouch calmed his mind.
Then, he noticed a battlefield detail he had overlooked earlier, and a plan began to form in his mind.