Three battles fell on or around 19 October. By the traditional date, 19 October 202 BC, Scipio broke Hannibal's army at Zama, in a battle decided by panicking elephants and returning cavalry, and Carthage lost the Second Punic War. In October 1595 Jan Zamoyski's small Polish army held a fortified camp at Cecora against the Crimean khan and won Moldavia for its own candidate at the negotiating table. On 19 October 1914 the First Battle of Ypres began: five weeks of fighting that nearly broke the British line at Gheluvelt, buried the war of movement in Flanders and left Ypres in Allied hands.
Zama, 202 BC: Hannibal's last battle
Hannibal had been fighting in Italy for more than a decade when Carthage called him home to face Scipio, the Roman general who had carried the war to Africa. The two armies met near Zama, in what is now Tunisia. Before the battle the two commanders, it is said, met alone between the lines with only interpreters beside them. In Polybius's account Hannibal offered to give up Sicily, Sardinia, Spain and the islands between Italy and Africa, and Scipio refused and told him to prepare to fight.1
Hannibal put more than eighty war elephants in front of his army, the largest number he had ever used, with three lines of infantry behind them: mercenaries first, then Libyans and Carthaginians, and his veterans of the Italian war held back as a reserve. Scipio did not close up his maniples in the usual checkerboard. He lined them up one behind another so that open lanes ran through his army, filled the lanes with light infantry and told them to fall back if the elephants came.2
When the battle opened, Roman trumpets and horns sounded all at once. Some elephants panicked and turned back on Hannibal's own Numidian cavalry, others ran harmlessly down the lanes, and the rest were driven off the field with javelins. On the wings, Laelius with the Italian cavalry and Scipio's ally Masinissa with his Numidians routed the Carthaginian horse and chased it away.3
The infantry fight was long and savage. The mercenaries in Hannibal's first line broke. The Carthaginians and Libyans behind them would not take them in, so for a time the mercenaries fought their own side, and Hannibal then kept the survivors out of his veterans' ranks. Scipio re-formed his lines over a field covered with bodies and threw them against Hannibal's veterans. The struggle was even until Laelius and Masinissa came back from the pursuit and fell on the Carthaginian rear. That decided the day.4
The cost at Zama, and the peace
Polybius and Livy both give about 20,000 Carthaginians and allies killed and almost as many taken prisoner, against about 1,500 or a little more Romans killed. History Hit gives about 2,500 Roman dead. Hannibal escaped with a few horsemen to Hadrumetum. Summoned to Carthage, he told the senate, in Livy's words, that he had lost not a battle merely but the whole war, and he urged peace.5
The terms were hard. Carthage kept its lands in Africa but surrendered its warships except ten triremes, could make no war without Rome's permission, gave a hundred hostages and agreed to pay 10,000 talents of silver over fifty years. Scipio returned to Rome with the name Africanus. The day itself is uncertain: History Hit gives 19 October 202 BC, while Buller's EBSCO summary gives only the year. For the whole story, see our article on the Battle of Zama and our article on Scipio Africanus.6
Cecora, 1595: a camp on the Prut
In 1595 the Ottoman court planned to end Moldavia's self-rule and turn it into an ordinary Ottoman province. Jan Zamoyski, Grand Hetman of the Crown, set out to stop it and to put a ruler friendly to Poland on the Moldavian throne: Jeremi Mohyła (Ieremia Movilă), who on 27 August 1595 swore to recognize the Polish king as his overlord.7
At Cecora, on the river Prut, Zamoyski built a fortified camp. In October the Crimean khan Gazi II Giray arrived with his Tatars and Ottoman troops. Jerzy Ronikier gives Zamoyski about 7,000 men against about 20,000. The Tatars could not break into the camp, and sorties by Zamoyski's cavalry drove them back. The historian Ilona Czamańska describes the battle as undecided, with a certain advantage on the Polish side.8
What followed was won at the negotiating table. The Ottoman commander, Ahmed Pasha, turned out to be unusually willing to come to terms, and an agreement dated 22 October 1595 dropped the plan for an Ottoman province and accepted Mohyła as ruler of Moldavia on the old terms. Mohyła helped his cause by handing the khan seven villages. For the commander, see our article on Jan Zamoyski.9
Dating Cecora
Ronikier gives 18 to 20 October for the fighting at the camp, and the agreement is dated 22 October. Neither Ronikier nor Czamańska gives casualty figures.10
The First Battle of Ypres, 1914
After the Marne, each side tried to get around the other's northern flank in what became known as the Race to the Sea, and the armies met in Flanders. The battle around Ypres officially began on 19 October 1914. The British fought it in three official phases: Langemarck from 21 to 24 October, Gheluvelt from 29 to 31 October and Nonne Bosschen on 11 November.11
Germany threw in its Fourth and Sixth Armies, including new reserve corps raised in 1914 from wartime volunteers, many of them students and school leavers with little training. According to John Rickard, Sir John French opened with an attack on 21 October in the belief that only one German corps stood in front of him, and Douglas Haig had to halt it that afternoon when his I Corps met far stronger forces.12
Gheluvelt, 31 October: the day the line nearly broke
On 31 October the main German attack broke through at Gheluvelt, on the road from Menin to Ypres, and took the village. Brigadier-General Charles FitzClarence then sent the 2nd Battalion of the Worcestershire Regiment forward. About 370 men crossed open ground under fire, reached the chateau grounds, where survivors of the South Wales Borderers were still holding out, and threw the Germans back. John Rickard puts the attackers at 364 men, outnumbered about five to one. The battalion lost 187 men killed or wounded, close to two in five of its strength that day, and the line was restored.13
The same day, a few kilometres south in the Hollebeke sector, Sepoy Khudadad Khan of the 129th Baluchis kept his machine gun firing after his officer was wounded and the other gun was knocked out. The rest of the detachment was killed, and Khudadad Khan, himself wounded, pretended to be dead and crawled back to his regiment after dark. He became the first soldier born in India to be awarded the Victoria Cross, and received it from King George V.14
The last attack and the Langemarck legend
The last great German attack came on 11 November, when the Prussian Guard broke into the British line at Nonne Bosschen wood. Artillery fire cut the guardsmen off from support, and a counter-attack by the 2nd Oxfordshire Light Infantry drove them out of the wood. After that the German threat faded.15
On 11 November the German army report also claimed that young regiments had charged west of Langemarck singing "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles". Historians treat the report as inflated: the Western Front Association places the action at Bixschoote and says Langemarck was probably chosen for its German-sounding name. The story grew into a legend of young volunteers sacrificing themselves, later taken up by the Nazis. According to the Western Front Association, Hitler wrote about it in Mein Kampf, and from 1933 to 1944 Germany marked 11 November as Langemarck Day.16
Losses at Ypres
Figures vary widely and cover different periods. John Rickard gives 58,155 British casualties for 14 October to 30 November. He notes that by the end of the battle the BEF had suffered 86,237 casualties since August, most of them among the 84,000 infantry it had landed with: the old regular army was largely gone. He gives about 50,000 French casualties. The German official history gives 134,315, but that total covers three battles, Lille, the Yser and Ypres, so it is not directly comparable.17
The sources do not agree on when the battle ended: the French date it to 13 November, the British to 22 November and the Germans to 30 November. Ypres stayed in Allied hands, and the fighting around it settled into stalemate and trench warfare. For more, see our article on the Battle of the Marne and our article on Ypres.18
Also on 19 October
In 1781 the British garrison of Yorktown marched out between the American and French armies and laid down its arms, which effectively decided the American War of Independence. The siege is told on our 28 September page.19
In 1813 the French retreat from Leipzig ended in disaster when the bridge over the Elster was blown up too early, with thousands of French troops still in the city, and Marshal Józef Poniatowski drowned trying to cross the river. The Battle of the Nations is told on our 16 October page.20
Also on this day
- 1595: Battle of Cecora. In Moldavia, Jan Zamoyski's Polish army defended a fortified camp on the Prut at Cecora against Tatar and Ottoman forces of Khan Gazi II Giray.
