1918 The Last Act

by Barrie Pitt

  Troops in the support line counterattacked, at first along the communication trenches. These were always cut on the zig-zag, and to clear them of enemy occupants, it was necessary to lob bombs over the top from one arm into the next, using the resulting explosion as the signal for a charge around the corner – and twice enemy groups came at the British bombing parties from the further end of the arm to contest their way with pistol and bayonet. Eventually, the bombing parties were held up by yet another hazard – one of their own ‘knife-rests’, swathed in coils of barbed wire, had been toppled into the trench, and rifle fire from the far corner shot down two men trying to remove it. As the bombing party waited, baulked, whistles blew in the support trench behind them, and the rest of the support company clambered out into the open to charge between the shell-holes and the wire thickets towards the now ominously silent positions of the front line.

  Immediately, the line pricked into life with German rifle and machine-gun fire, and as the charging men passed the position of the baulked bombing party they were enfiladed by the enemy in the front portion of the communication trench. Inevitably, their ranks thinned and the survivors went to ground, so the bombing party in their turn left cover, went overland to the next arm, cleared and dropped down into it, then resumed their systematic, bloody advance along the trench. As they reached the final arm leading to the front line, the survivors in the open arose and flung themselves across the last stretch of shell-pocked ground, over the parados and into the trench. The ensuing brawl was bitter, brutal, but brief.

  By 8.25 a.m. the positions in the front line along one section had therefore been restored. True, the two companies holding them at dawn had been virtually annihilated – but so had the companies which had attacked them, so from the Staff point of view it remained merely to be seen who had the larger reserves. But in the meantime there was urgent business for the fighting men to attend to: bodies were flung out to build up the parapets, blown-in sections of the trench hastily re-built, dug-outs cautiously inspected for lurking foes, ammunition and bombs rushed up through the communication trenches.

  But although this section of the front line had been retaken, the enemy still remained in a longer stretch to the left – and it soon became evident that no mere bombing party working along the trench line would shift them. So in the afternoon, a reserve battalion was brought up from the rear, put into the crest line and ordered to attack over the open ground. This battalion was the 1st Artists Rifles. At 2.15 p.m., without the benefit of support from either artillery or even trench mortars, the men of the battalion clawed their way out of the crest line, and against a background of snow-covered hill and grey sky, those who had not been immediately shot down, marched forward in obedience to their orders. Before they had covered twenty yards, the ground behind was blotched with khaki forms – some still, some writhing – and soon the wire thickets, the shell-holes and the inexorable pressure of mounting fear caused groups to form, as clusters of men automatically but unconsciously sought the chimerical protection of the herd. Officers shouted at them, waving them apart, beckoning them on – and the groups would split, inevitably leaving more of their number on the snow, to bunch again ten yards further on amid new wire belts, on the lips of more craters, still under the pitiless rain of fire and amid the crash and clatter of battle.

  Halfway between the lines, the survivors went to ground in the exiguous cover of shell-holes and the slight – virtually imaginary – ridges in the snow. Officers scurried from group to group, encouraging the wounded, assessing the hopes for another advance. At last word was passed that no further movement would take place until dark, so with bayonet and entrenching tool they all began to dig themselves in; and if their efforts made little impact on the icy ground, the exercise at least kept their blood circulating. But it also made them thirsty and their water supply had been left far behind in the rush of the morning, while the noise of their activity revealed their positions to the observant German infantry. As dusk approached, rifle-grenades were arching slowly over the dividing ground, exploding viciously in the newly dug positions.

  With dusk came a considerable increase in enemy rifle and machine-gun fire. More German troops crossed from their own lines and reinforced those who had occupied the captured positions all day, bringing with them an apparently unlimited supply of flares, which climbed into the sky with slow and sometimes arresting beauty to burst and flood the desolation with powdery light, giving it the stark, inhuman character of a charcoal sketch. With the help of this perilous illumination, men dragged or carried the wounded back to the doubtful protection of the support trench, a signals officer crept from trench to forward positions and from shell-holes to communication trench trailing out behind him an ever-lengthening skein of telephone wires (uselessly, for surface-laid communications are almost invariably the first casualties when action starts), and the Regimental Sergeant Major earned grudging tribute by organizing carrying parties with hot soup for the men in the shell-holes. The abandoned water was eventually brought up – no mean feat, for it lay at the bottom of a valley into which the enemy had been astutely pumping gas shells, which burst with loud pops of prudish affectation and left their lethal, creeping cargo insidiously to fill the trap.

  By midnight, the Artists were ready to continue their advance. They lay on the edges of their shell-holes or within their own individually dug shallow ditches, gripping their rifles, counting the seconds, muttering their invocations, awaiting the signal. And just before it was due, shadowy forms arose from dead ground in front and advanced towards them behind a fulminating screen of stick-bombs. Some of the Artists rose and charged forward to escape the bursting bombs and meet their antagonists in the open, some stayed where they lay and if they survived the bombs coolly picked off their attackers: once again machine-guns chattered, and men of the support battalion poured in enfilading fire. The enemy went to ground, and those who could do so crawled back to their trenches.

  Once more the wounded were collected, the signal lines re-laid, the survivors counted, the position re-assessed. It was not favourable, for casualties were mounting – but as suggestions for withdrawal would inevitably be countered with the irrefutable fact that the enemy had probably suffered the same proportion of losses, nobody made such a suggestion. At 2 a.m., another attempt was made by the Artists to advance, and a few more yards were gained before the survivors were once more driven to earth – to begin again the dreary, heartbreaking attempt to carve cover from the ice-hard ground. The wounded went back, the signals officer came out, a nineteen-year-old second lieutenant found that as the result of casualties he now commanded the company on the left flank, and because the intelligence officer found that the usual methods of collecting information had become in the circumstances too uncertain and laborious, he rose to his feet and stalked rather officiously about no-man’s land discovering where the men were concentrated, where the gaps lay, what obstructions would impede the next advance. He then returned overland to the support trench and reported all this to his commanding officer.

  At the same time as the Artists were ordered to re-take the lost ground on the left, another reserve battalion of the 63rd Division had been ordered to re-establish the position on the right. With, however, a refreshing independence of mind, the battalion commander decided that in the existing situation his men’s lives were of more value than time, so he waited until dusk. Then, while there was still just sufficient light for his men to see the ground immediately in front but not sufficient for the enemy to see them, he sent out probing patrols with orders to keep quiet, to keep low, and to lie flat and still the moment they heard any sound indicative of hostile presence. When their eventual positions were reported to him, he slowly fed more men up towards them and in due course his attacking force were all lying close up under the shoulder of the ridge, occupying the same sort of cavities as those in which the Artists had passed their agonizing afternoon, but much nearer to the enemy and in full strength.

  Moreover it a
ppears that the enemy were completely unaware of their presence, for when at midnight the signal for the attack was given, the men swarmed over the crest and into the trenches without a shot being fired at them, and in the resulting mêlée with the astonished foe they re-took the line at a cost of only three casualties.

  The position now was that the crest line was still held along its entire length, and only one mile-long stretch of the forward positions originally held by the division was still in enemy hands.

  The rest of the night passed in ominous quiet.

  Half an hour after dawn – following the customary prolonged bombardment – the German infantry attacked again, in wave after wave, with the heaviest concentration against what they had every reason to believe was the soft spot in the line. Here lay the remnants of the original attacking companies of the Artists, now reinforced from the supporting companies whose men held the communication trenches leading forward. The enemy, therefore, attacked into a sack – after their own artillery had liberally plastered the area and while it was still shelling the crest.

  There are in existence statistical tables which indicate that for every casualty caused by a rifle or machine-gun bullet, there were two caused by shell or shrapnel fire. The action fought on Welsh Ridge during the morning of December 31st, 1917, does not bear these figures out, for despite all the havoc intended by the German batteries, the British infantry were still in their trenches and mud-holes when the barrage lifted and they made extraordinarily good practice against the advancing hordes. The Germans had apparently learned nothing from the coup de main performed a few hours before by the British reserve battalion, and they used similar tactics to those which had decimated the Artists during the previous afternoon. They moved quicker – running, not walking – but they came upright across open ground in broad daylight, and what momentum they gained in the first rush from their own positions they lost when they reached the new shell-holes, blown a few minutes beforehand by their own guns.

  Although some of the leading waves did reach the Artists’ line, it was only a small proportion of those who had clambered out on to the churned and blood-bespattered snow, and as the German infantry advanced into the gap, they were subjected to a sustained and withering fire which melted them away. Some seemed to stumble and then quietly subside, some turned head over heels like shot hares, some were frozen in motion as though transfixed, then to fall in a paroxysm of threshing arms and legs; some continued their onward rush with blood spuming from them until nervous reflex ended and they crashed to the ground. Those few who reached the Artists’ parapet were bayoneted or shot within seconds. Nowhere did they penetrate the crest line and as they had made no direct attacks on the flank position, the only results of the German attack were high losses for themselves, smaller losses for the British.

  In the early afternoon attempts at attack and counterattack died away. Less than a mile of trenches had changed hands, and those who had been driven out now occupied the more favourable position. The Germans re-arranged the short lengths of line which they had occupied so as to face the other way; the men of the 63rd Division strengthened the junctions of their new positions, and flank companies drew back to the crest line, giving themselves better fields of fire and more protection; it was a pity that the position had not been utilized before.

  The action at Welsh Ridge had lasted just over thirty hours. It had cost the 63rd Division 65 officers and 1,355 men in killed, wounded and missing. There is no reason to believe that the German losses were less. The unchanging pattern had been traced, at the unchanging cost in human life.

  There was little other fighting along the Western Front that day – sporadic sniping, routine shelling, a few lengths of trench blown in by mortars: it is probable that the average daily ‘wastage’ of some two thousand men of all nationalities due to action or sickness caused by the conditions in which they lived, was maintained.

  As light began to fail, the armies stood to. Flares and star-shells rose into the sky with the evanescence and sinister loveliness of tropical plants; the crater-studded, moon-like waste spasmodically vibrated to the percussion of desultory shellfire and explosion. More men were killed, more were wounded, more died. As midnight approached there were sounds of music and singing along the line of the German and Austrian trenches; there was a little mild celebration among the British but none, it seems, among the French.

  Just south of the Ypres Salient a battalion of the Royal Sussex were in the line, and among their junior officers was the poet Edmund Blunden. Afterwards he wrote:

  At the moment of midnight December 31, 1917, I stood with some acquaintances in a camp finely overlooking the whole Ypres battlefield. It was bitterly cold, and the deep snow all round lay frozen. We drank healths, and stared out across the snowy miles to the line of casual flares, still rising and floating and dropping. Their writing on the night was as the earliest scribbling of children, meaningless; they answered none of the questions with which a watcher’s eyes were painfully wide. Midnight; successions of coloured lights from one point, of white ones from another, bullying salutes of guns in brief bombardment, crackling of machine-guns small on the tingling air; but the sole answer to unspoken but importunate questions was the line of lights in the same relation to Flanders as at midnight a year before. All agreed that 1917 had been a sad offender. All observed that 1918 did not look promising at its birth.

  It was the fourth New Year’s Eve of the war.

  2. At Home

  ‘A superficial review of the appearance of the vast battlefield as a whole [at the beginning of 1918] would lead to the conclusion that the Central Powers were winning the war,’ wrote the Prime Minister of Great Britain in later years. If he felt this at the time, he was far too astute a politician to allow the slightest inkling of it to colour his public utterances.

  Mr. Lloyd George had gained his pre-eminent position upon a declared policy of pursuing the war to a victorious conclusion, and despite the war-weariness with which he was surrounded, he knew the grim resolve beneath it. The slightest deviation upon his part from this aim, any suspicion that he might consider a negotiated peace, would result in the fall of his Government and his own dismissal from office – and he had laboured far too long and fought far too hard for the position to give it up lightly: not that Lloyd George was simply a narrowly and selfishly ambitious man, for no one can rise to high political rank – especially in time of crisis – unless he sincerely believes that his own policies, directed by himself, are the best for his country.

  And it was Lloyd George’s sincere conviction that the direction of Britain’s war effort by her military leaders had already led her by successive bloodbaths to the brink of disaster, and that unless they were strongly curbed they would shortly plunge her in. The generals seemed to believe that they had a blank cheque upon the nation’s manhood and that the reserve was inexhaustible.

  During the past three years the British armies had managed to wrest from the enemy a wretchedly few square miles of worthless territory at an utterly prohibitive price, and it was poor consolation that the French losses had been as great. As for the contention that German losses had vastly exceeded those of the Allies, this remained to be proved, and was a point upon which Lloyd George was extremely sceptical. Verdun had cost the French 350,000 men, Allied losses on the Somme had been in all 600,000, and Passchendaele had cost the British alone some 300,000 men in killed, wounded and missing. The last two years had cost Britain in numbers of young, fit men in the prime of life, something not far short of the entire population, men, women and children, of a very large city – and the High Command were decidedly nettled when more ‘cities’ were not immediately made available for their plunder.

  By birth, race and temperament Lloyd George was naturally suspicious of any traditional and established form of authority (he had as a boy been in trouble for throwing stones at the local landowner), and that of a military hierarchy headed in the field by a wealthy Scot of ancient lineage and close, plutoc
ratic connections, aroused his strongest antipathy. To the battle against them, he brought immense talents, considerable resource and an almost demoniac energy.

  He was possibly the most accomplished orator ever to occupy the highest office in British politics. Every tone from the raucous shout of violent abuse to the soft music of sweet reasonableness was his to command – and an agile brain and quick sensitivity laced his speeches with biting irony, broad humour or scintillating wit as occasion demanded. He was a compact man, with a striking head and gleaming eyes of intense vitality: few people were surprised that he had become Prime Minister once they met him, fewer people who came into continuous contact with him, trusted him, probably because they sensed that he was far quicker-witted than they were.

  But the British public did because he had persuaded them that he was resolved upon total victory and nothing that he had done or said since assuming office gave them reason to believe that his resolve had weakened. His support outside Parliament was thus broad and firm; it was his position inside the House of Commons which necessitated the utmost care in manœuvre, and a combination of diplomacy and ruthlessness which must sometimes have taxed even his subtle brain to the limit.

  For he was a Liberal Prime Minister ruling in Parliament only by the grace of the Conservatives, and the artifice and intrigue by which he had obtained his precarious position – according to current rumour – endeared him to nobody who heard of it.

  At the outbreak of war, the position of Prime Minister had been held by Mr. Asquith, a man of wide culture and distinguished mind, leading a united country to war and supported by a House of Commons which recognized him as its greatest figure. Until the disasters of Neuve Chapelle and Loos in 1915, Mr. Asquith had not even deemed it necessary to form a coalition government, but even when the mismanagement of the Gallipoli campaign forced him to invite the Conservative Opposition to join the Cabinet (filling vacancies caused by the shelving of, among others, Mr. Winston Churchill), he still directed the business of the Government with a degree of inflexibility which was apparently inseparable from his temperament.