Divisional General in the early days of the war". On the 19 October 1914 he received notice that he was to be promoted to the rank of Lieutenant-General, and was marked to be given the command of a Corps when one next became available. 1st Battle of Ypres In late October 1914 the 1st Division was engaged in extremely heavy fighting at the First Battle of Ypres in Belgium, with its headquarters in a chateau at Hooge, recently vacated by General Douglas Haig commanding I Corps. During the course of the battle, at a moment of crisis with 1st Division's line under mounting pressure from a German attack threatening the destruction of 1st Division and I Corps as a whole and a breach of the line being contested, Lomax received an offer from Haig of reinforcements from I Corps rapidly diminishing reserve troop strength being sent up to his sector to shore up its crumbling defences, Lomax refusing by reply, stating: "More troops now only means more casualties, it is artillery fire that is wanted". On 31 October 1914, at the height of the battle, with the Germans launching repeated mass man assaults on the weakening British line, supported by concentrated barrages of fire from their artillery, a meeting took place at the chateau H.Q. between Lomax and his 2nd Division counterpart, Major-General C. C. Monro. An eye-witness at the scene noted that the officers' staff parked along the roadside outside the building provided an obvious target to German artillery spotters seeking targets to call fire down on to. A German aviator is thought to have noticed the gathering and reported it to a German artillery unit, which fired several 5.9" shells at the chateau. Both sides had been targeting chateaux on either side of the line in an attempt to kill senior officers to gain some advantage in the dead-locked battle by this stage. The first shell exploded in the chateau's garden, causing the staff officers at the meeting to go to the windows of the garden room to see the result of the detonation, when the second shell landed in front of them, the blast killing six and seriously wounding Lomax and another officer. A third shell struck an empty part of the house, its owner, Baron de Vinck, narrowly escaping injury from that blast. General Monro had stepped into another room in the building with his Chief-of-Staff