THE British Expeditionary Force had fought itself to almost a standstill by November 1914. To coincide with Remembrance Weekend, Clive White looks at how the Craven Herald reported the action through the voices of the troops writing home.

BY November 11, 1914, the British forces on the Western front were in crisis.

Its "contemptible" little army, driven back by the mass ranks of the German infantry, was on its last legs.

On that day, the Germans almost tipped the balance, but for a stubborn band of British infantry, joined by cooks, medical orderlies, clerks and engineers, who refused to budge and drove the foe back near a small town called Hooge.

Over the next three weeks, the moving war turned essentially static as both sides dug in to protect the territory they held.

By that time, just three months after the outbreak of hostilities on August 4, about 10,000 British and German soldiers had been killed.

Back home in Skipton, details of the fighting were described in graphic detail in the Craven Herald by troops writing to their loved ones. And no details were spared.

Private Herbert Rhodes of the Yorkshires, of South Street, Gargrave, communicating in early November 1914, describes the first battle of Ypres, as the worse in English history. And he was right.

He wrote: "The losses are terrible. By Jove we have copped it. There are lots of chaps whom you know, wounded or dead. Let's hope for the best. And the sooner this war is finished the better."

Quarter Master Sergeant J Gillies, who was with the West Surrey regiment, writes to his relatives at the Black Horse, in Skipton. He describes four days of heavy shelling as they crouched in the trenches before having to retire.

"We've had a warm time and we've had some narrow escapes. My regiment didn't have many casualties on that day - just 20 officers and 40 others.

"The following two days were awful. The Germans shelled us terrifically and they were good. We stuck it as long as flesh and blood could stand and retired half a mile. That's when I was wounded."

Despite his wound, his thoughts were for the Belgium villagers, blasted out of their homes, their bodies lying about the countryside.

In the week November 6, a Craven Herald reporter interviewed 2nd Lieutenant Robert Fisher, of the Kings Royal Rifles, eldest son of Dr GE Fisher, of Skipton. He was home recovering from treatment he had received for a bullet wound.

He had fought at the battle on the Aisne and at Ypres describing the action as a "titanic struggle."

He talks of how the British and German front line trenches were only 80 yards apart but German shelling fell on dug outs further down the hill where men were resting.

No man's land, the space between the opposing trenches, was strewn with dead, most of them Englishmen.

"There bodies had been there for some months and were a grim reminder of the severe fighting for the possession of the trenches," he said..

He praised the German artillery, but not the infantry. "Had the artillery not been good they would not have made such a fight of it for their infantry is not seen to advantage and their cavalry leaves much to be desired.

"Concussion from the German shells is terrific and men are knocked insensible and known to be left for dead.

"I sat in a cave one day when two of these big shells bust just outside. No damage was done, but the concussion was so frightful that I suffered some sever headaches for more than two days."

Second Lt Fisher got his shoulder wound when he moved to the front line facing about 250 German guns.

He records how he got his "blight y" - an injury that took soldiers home for treatment. "It was at daybreak. Just before I got shot, I bowled over one of the enemy and eventually one of his pals made a mark of me."

The paper reports the preparation to receive the new first time soldiers from Bradford - the Bradford Citizen's Battalion - later the Bradford Pals - many of whom were slaughtered on the first day of the battle of the Somme, two years later.

The camp was built near Raikes Road and was approached from Gargrave Road along Salisbury Street.

It consisted of 40 wooden barrack rooms, officers and sergeants' rooms, cookhouse and stables to accommodate 1,200 men.

The war was yet in its infancy, but a slow realisation was forming that the conflict would last much longer than the Christmas deadline many soldiers had expected when they arrived in France.

The carnage was to get much worse in the years to come, but that professional army, the British Expeditionary Force, of about 100,000 men, which had been hugely outnumbered, had done its duty and essentially fought itself into extinction.

As one Tommy said: "One was not a soldier unless he had served at the first battle of Ypres."