Blood and Thunder

by Alexandra J Churchill

  On 4 October the British pushed for Broodseinde, their eye on Passchendaele and the high ground beyond. Overall the attack was another success, but these tactical achievements were far from cheap in terms of casualties. OEs continued to fall, and not all of them on the field of battle. Perhaps one of the school’s most pointless and cruel losses of the war came at the end of September.

  Ronnie Backus, who had travelled out with the 8th Rifle Brigade in 1915, had dug himself out after being buried alive, had been shot on the salient, and shot again on the Somme, only to suffer one the cruellest deaths on the Western Front. In the early hours of 23 September a gunner was making his way along the road to Steenwerck with a horse and cart when a flash of light drew his attention. He followed it and found a man lying face down in a ditch. The glint of Ronnie Backus’ wristwatch had caught his eye.

  A crumpled bicycle lay nearby. Gunner Deane of the 46th Royal Field Artillery cradled Ronnie’s head on his lap as he raced him back to his battalion on his cart, but he died shortly afterwards. Having dined with a nearby battalion he had been riding his bicycle home when he was hit by a blacked-out lorry. The driver didn’t notice and carried on trundling along.

  Despite only having superficial bruising, a post mortem revealed that Ronnie, having survived everything the war had thrown at him, had suffered massive internal inuries. As well as massive haemorrhaging into his stomach and a lacerated kidney, his left leg had almost been severed from his pelvis. The 23 year old was buried at Westhof Farm Cemetery.

  Plumer’s tactics were proving effective but they were also time consuming and winter was closing in. Strategically speaking these small advances were not going to make any kind of decisive breakthrough. If the ridge on which Passchendaele itself was perched could be seized before operations shut down for the winter then the Allies would be on a strong footing till spring. Thus another assault was planned, this time on Poelcappelle and the surrounding area.

  Ralph Babington was another OE to have come from Mr Le Neve Foster’s house. Like Robin Blacker he arrived at Eton late; in 1914, after a planned naval career evaporated due to illness. Like Simpson he was completely irrepressible when it came to the idea of fighting the Germans. He left school at Easter 1916 and arrived on the Western Front to join the 3rd Coldstream Guards the following spring. ‘In that small body there was a giant heart,’ a contemporary wrote. But it was a young heart, and a naive heart. Ralph was characterised by his obsession with getting out to the front before the war ended. Once there it was all his more mature fellow officers could do to get him to keep his head down, he was so keen to see what was going on across no-man’s-land.

  Unfortunately the rain returned just after the Battle of Broodseinde. On 8 October Ralph Babington began leading his platoon up towards their assembly position as the rain cascaded down. A German shell plunged through the darkness and into their ranks, killing Ralph and several of his men before they reached the battle. He was 19 years old.1

  The 2nd Coldstream Guards waded across the Broembeek towards Poelcappelle before dawn the following morning, waist deep in water and clinging to fallen trees and floating German debris. The Germans either ran away or came hurrying out to surrender, surprise etched on their faces. The thick mud meant that guns could not be wheeled into their optimum positions, and when the British artillery fired them it was on an unstable footing. The resulting barrage was far from consistent. The Guards were luckier than most. Whilst they and the French on their left enjoyed relative success, the same could not be said of the rest of the line. A few small advances were made towards Passchendaele, but they were pushed back. Even the Guards’ progress had merely brought them closer to Houthulst Forest. They had not dealt with the German defensive horrors that lay within.

  In all, seven more OEs would die in the assault on Poelcappelle on 9 October. Nobody put the brakes on the offensive despite increasingly atrocious conditions. Just three days later, abandoning Plumer’s cautious approach, they went again, spurred on by Haig’s ill-placed optimism. There was no measured attack this time. At the First Battle of Passchendaele on 12 October men were going to be flung against the supposedly teetering Germans in the hope that they would topple over.

  Victor Alexander Cazalet, ‘Teenie’ on account of his diminutive size, had left Eton in 1915. He shared his hatred of the war with his elder brother Edward, also an OE, and with one of his school cronies, Henry Dundas. But war was an inevitability in Victor’s future when he left school and he too joined the army.

  In September 1916 a Household Battalion was formed in London, drawing in men from reserve units of the Blues and Royals to serve as infantry. By this point Cazalet’s extraordinarily close family was already suffering the loss of Edward. He had been killed with the Welsh Guards on the Somme in September 1916 as part of a nonsensical relief that took place mid battle and cost the fledgling battalion a large perecentage of its officers. A year later, having witnessed first hand the horrors of Arras, Victor had reached the rank of captain and got his own company.

  He had been on leave, but arrived back at Poperinghe on 5 October in yet another rainstorm to find that his battalion had been providing support for the assault on Broodseinde. The men were traipsing about exhausted, wet and coated in mud. He appeared to have missed the show and was not sorry. He would much rather have had his bed, his fire and his copy of Mansfield Park than shells, mud and Germans. Victor’s joy was short-lived when he was told that he would have to go up into the line with the battalion almost immediately as another officer was ill. ‘My heart sank so I could hardly speak,’ he admitted. ‘I am not really a coward, but the sudden contrast was a little trying.’

  Plumer and Haig had decided to push again for the high ground around Passchendaele. Victor’s division would be pushing on the left of Poelcappelle itself. The march up into the line was absolutely miserable. They trudged over duckboards that sank further and further into the slime under their feet whilst the downpour continued. Victor tried to put his mind somewhere else and as he trudged along mile after mile he was pondering government policy reform on old age pensions and tax reductions amongst other political issues.

  They were joined by a guide who was to escort them across the shell-torn, wire-strewn, waterlogged landscape to their starting spot. He dumped them in the middle of a field where they were given a few waterproof sheets to put up. In the wind and pouring rain Victor couldn’t figure out what on earth to do with his, so he stuck a rifle and a bayonet in the ground to prop it up, pinned the sides down with rum jars and tried to get some sleep.

  ‘Lord, what a noise’ was all he could say about the barrage that signified the beginning of the assault on Poelcappelle on 9 October. The shells were falling rather close. He sat up next to his pathetic tent and watched them with a backdrop of a beautiful autumn sunrise. ‘The whole world seemed to be lit up, and the sky was bright with German SOS signals and the flashes of guns. Gradually the morning broke, but the noise went on … The most lovely sunrise made us feel there were other things in the world except war.’ They sat in that awful field all day until they were ordered back to the camp they had started from in pitch darkness. ‘So we bundled the men out of shell holes, all half asleep and very hard to wake and find, and still more difficult to make them put their equipment on and get a move on.’

  Victor and his men were entitled to hope that their ordeal was over but the following afternoon they were told to go and relieve an Essex battalion. They would soon be required to make an attack. ‘Imagine this on tired men. It was Wednesday, no one had slept since Sunday.’ Loading themselves up with bombs and shovels they met more guides and began trudging back towards the front line. ‘We three officers dug little niches in a hole and tried to settle ourselves for the night, but the cold again kept us from getting much slumber.’ After freezing in their shell hole all night it transpired that still no orders had arrived for their attack and so they sat and waited. ‘Then the shelling began, and it was dreadful just to sit there helples
s and get shelled.’

  Finally their orders arrived. ‘Twenty-four items to be read, digested and explained to the men before dark and no-one allowed to stand up, only run from one hole to another.’ Shellfire was taking its toll on Victor’s company whilst he was called to a conference in a mud-smothered pillbox crammed with a dozen or so officers. Their objective, they were told, was a cluster of German defences known as Requette Farm. They rounded off affairs and then came uncomfortable, wooden partings. ‘Good luck old chap.’ ‘Take care of yourself.’ ‘The very best of luck.’ As cheerful as they tried to be, they knew they would never again stand in the same room as a complete group.

  ‘Then began the most awful night I ever remember,’ Victor recalled. ‘It was pitch dark, impossible to distinguish any landmark and no one knew the ground. And such ground. It is quite impossible to describe, the shell holes, craters and such being beyond belief – dreadful.’ He was deeply religious and throughout this nightmare spell he sat and prayed, trying to calm himself into acceptance and to find some meaning in what was going on around him.

  The journey to the assembly point was a disaster. The Householders were struggling along in a downpour when a shell landed right in the middle of them and wounded nearly a dozen, including stretcher-bearers:

  It seemed that the acme of hell on earth had come. No stretcher-bearers, ten wounded men in the wet groaning for help. The company all mixed up … Oh the rain! … We tried to dish the rum and water out to all these frozen, soaked, tired men. Meanwhile I was trying to get some men to carry the worst of the wounded who could not walk. One poor man, I remember, kept yelling for help, and I could not do anything until the stretchers came back … It was doubtful they ever would.

  The first battle of Passchendaele began before dawn on 12 October. As soon as the British barrage opened the Germans responded furiously. One shell landed in the middle of the Household Battalion. ‘It blew us all over,’ Victor wrote. He heard a fellow officer say, ‘It’s got me.’ ‘I feared it had, [a fragment] had gone right through his steel helmet and reached his skull … I waited a few minutes by his side trying to get him to speak, but I saw that he was breathing his last, so I left him to his servant and went on with the battle.’

  The battalion was under heavy fire from Poelcappelle itself. Victor formed a defensive flank out of scattered Householders and waited for the barrage to lift. Up and down the battlefield men were being sucked to their deaths in the unforgiving mud and drowning in shell holes. Mud clogged up the rifles and put them out of action. Even some trench mortars and machine guns had to stop firing because the ammunition was so filthy and wet.

  Finally Victor and his exhausted collection of survivors managed to storm Requette Farm. They found four enemy machines guns in a pillbox and twenty-five men that they seized as prisoners. They fell on leftover rations of German black bread like animals. As the day wore on the Householders clung on until they were almost completely surrounded and forced to fall back. Their machine guns were smashed and they had run out of food, water and ammunition. As evening approached, the last thing Victor would have wanted to see was another order to attack, but along it came. He was being sent two platoons of the Rifle Brigade for support and he was to retake the farm. It was physically impossible. The Householders could do little more than expend the last of their energy trying to repel a German counter-attack and the idea was abandoned.

  The attack on Passchendaele had failed. It had cost the British Army 13,000 men. Some 80 per cent of the Householders were casualties and of fifteen officers, only Victor and one other were still in one piece. In return they had gained a few hundred yards, and then lost it again. For five days Victor had been scratching a living with his dwindling company in the most despicable setting and they had gone some sixty hours without sleep. Across half the days of that week in his diary he simply scratched angrily one word: ‘HELL’.2

  After the first battle of Passchendaele operations were scaled back dramatically, but the Ypres offensive was tragically pressed on across a much shorter front in horrific conditions. Some 12,000 men perished in a second assault on Passchendaele itself and four days later British and Canadian troops were thrown forward again. The village finally fell on 6 November but it was hardly significant against what it had cost in human life. All the strategic objectives that had made it so important now seemed to have been forgotten.

  The Third Battle for Ypres finally ceased in mid November. The battle would become symbolic of the horrors of industrialised warfare and the carnage of the Great War. No fewer than sixty-five Old Etonians had died on the Western Front since July and a third of them had still been pupils at Eton in the summer war was declared. Only two of those that fell would be commemorated on the Menin Gate. The loss of life had now become so staggering that William Butcher, a Colleger who left Eton in 1910 and died with the London Regiment on 16 August 1917, would be one of the very last of the tens of thousands of names marked down for it. The men who fell in Flanders after this date and were lost on the battlefields overflow on to the memorial at Tyne Cot. No less than 34,952 of them are commemorated on the panels that border the cemetery, overlooked by a cross of sacrifice mounted on top of a pillbox. Nine of them are OEs who fell during the fighting on the Salient in the summer and autumn of 1917.

  For all the suffering on the Western Front, the trials of those that had survived were far from over as far as 1917 was concerned. Part of the reason that Haig had persisted for so long on the Salient in the face of deteriorating weather was to mask a highly secretive attack being planned. Some 60 miles to the south, an Old Etonian General had an eye on breaking through the Hindenburg Line.

  The Hon. Sir Julian Byng had arrived at Eton in 1874 and gone through Mr Mozley’s house with his two brothers. To avoid confusion in a world where everybody referred to each other by their surnames they were known as ‘Byngo’, ‘Bango’ and, in Julian’s case, ‘Bungo’. (To make things even more confusing he would one day take up the banjo.) He described himself once as the worst scug in the school and his reverence for his studies was indeed evident when he traded a Latin book for two ferrets and a pineapple. He came from a large family and as a seventh son had had to pay his way through the army by trading polo ponies. It had been worth it, for in April 1917 he proved his capabilities by commanding the Canadian Corps through their triumphant seizure of Vimy Ridge on the opening day of the Battle of Arras.

  Byng’s reward was promotion to command of his own army that summer. His Third Army was resident in a sleepy part of the line to the north of the Somme. In fact it was so calm that the Germans had been sending their exhausted men there to recover and had dubbed it ‘the Sanatorium of the West’. What if, the orchestrators of this new plan thought, they could surprise the enemy and smash through the Hindenburg Line between the Canal de l’Escaut and the Canal du Nord?

  Manpower was an issue and so the plan put in front of Haig in mid September called for a revolutionary new type of attack. Unlike the low-lying, saturated terrain about Ypres, the ground was perfect for the use of tanks and so hundreds of them would be employed. Instead of a lengthy and loud bombardment that would alert the enemy, tanks would be used to smash through the wire, absorb enemy fire and forge a path for the infantry following behind. The Germans could be overrun before they realised what was happening to them. When it transpired that victory was not imminent in Belgium, Haig approved Byng’s attack and preparation began in earnest at the end of October. Brigade commanders were informed early on, but at battalion level silence prevailed.

  John ‘Marcus’ de Paravicini was said to be the youngest major in the British Army. He was one of those who was to be kept in the dark until the assault towards Cambrai was imminent. Born in 1895, just a stone’s throw from Eton at Datchet, he was descended from Robert Walpole, the first British prime minister. The middle son of a renowned sportsman, who was an FA Cup winner with three England caps and an outstanding cricketer, Marcus had gone straight into a banking career with Bar
clay’s on leaving Eton in 1913. He volunteered as soon as the war began but having rushed himself on to a waiting list of young men wanting to be officers in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, he dashed off a letter to the War Office a fortnight later. He had learned just how many men were waiting for commissions and asked them to re-route his application to one of Kitchener’s battalions. As a result he was sent to the 11th King’s Royal Rifles and by the age of 21 had risen to second-in-command of the battalion. Marcus had served on the Somme and pursued the Germans to the Hindenburg Line, as well as taking part in operations at Langemarck for Gough and in Plumer’s subsequent operations.

  Had he not been wounded, Marcus’ brother Percy would have been present with the battalion, but it was Marcus alone who arrived in the Cambrai sector in mid October with the battalion and settled near Fins. Their division, the 20th, occupied a complicated part of the lines that undulated up and down various valleys and spurs. The attack was to begin on 20 November, although Marcus would not be told until a week before. The King’s Royal Rifles were not stupid, though. They were withdrawn to the rear to undergo training in conjunction with tanks and new ammunition dumps were springing up all around them. Not only was something clearly afoot, it appeared to be something big.

  Byng’s caution bore fruit. Under a thick veil of mist nearly 500 tanks were pulled together, the noise of their movement masked by the sound of British airmen buzzing overhead in the days leading up to the battle. As much as 137 miles of armoured cable was being run out in front of Marcus’ division for communication, and for four nights guns were wheeled up, camouflaged and then quietly left in position. On the night of 19 November, intermittent bursts of machine-gun fire masked the rumbling of the tanks as they formed up ready for battle.