by Nick Lloyd
The shock of Menin Road produced a sudden sense of anxiety within the German High Command. Although Fourth Army reports glossed over the results of the battle and insisted that everything was all right, Crown Prince Rupprecht was not so sure. ‘We are making the old mistake of underestimating the strength of our enemy again and again,’ he wrote, angrily, as news came in of the attack. He admitted that he had been as much to blame as anyone (‘I too believed this time that, owing to their heavy losses, the English were no longer capable of renewing the great battle in Flanders’), having been totally deceived by the preparations for the new offensive. ‘Uncertainty about the intentions of the enemy, and the dependency of counter-measures thereon, is precisely one of the main disadvantages of defence’, he concluded gloomily. His Chief of Staff, General von Kuhl (who had made the same mistake), was away in Kreuznach for a meeting at OHL, and when he returned he could offer little to lighten the mood. The Army Group was crying out for replacement horses, but none could be provided; nor could an increase in their oat rations. They were also warned that ‘extreme economy’ should be exercised in the consumption of gasoline–and these restrictions would most likely remain in force until the spring. ‘I’m afraid we are still far away from peace’, Rupprecht wrote, in some despair, that evening.34
On 22 September, following a series of further counter-attacks around Tower Hamlets, which failed to wipe out the British gains, Kuhl ordered Fourth Army to review its defensive tactics urgently. It had been observed that the British were now placing less emphasis on artillery fire on the front lines, but on interfering with the movement of reserves in the rear of the combat zone–seemingly a reaction to how important the Eingreif divisions had now become. Furthermore, captured documents revealed that the British were adopting new methods in their attacks. In each brigade, three battalions would advance ‘in equally strong waves’, while a fourth, in reserve, would leapfrog ahead if circumstances permitted. Then they would dig in and hold the front with a deeply layered series of machine-guns, all the time protected by a strong, standing barrage. Thus, although there might be no breakthrough, the British could still be certain of achieving limited gains of ground. In response to this, Kuhl made three main recommendations. Firstly, German artillery must be reinforced. Secondly, ‘frequent offensive attempts’–essentially strong raids–should force the British to man their front line in greater strength and provoke them into unwise moves. And, finally, the Eingreif divisions should make ‘accelerated’ counter-attacks against enemy penetrations.35
Of all the people who should have been mightily impressed with Menin Road, Lloyd George remained curiously unmoved. From his perspective he had heard it all before and approached any news from GHQ as invariably tainted and corrupt. After spending the morning of 24 September in London discussing the war in the Middle East–where General Sir Edmund Allenby was gearing up for a major offensive against the Turks at Gaza–Lloyd George crossed the Channel and headed to the Western Front.36 When he arrived, he found the atmosphere at GHQ one of ‘unmistakeable exaltation’. Haig was ‘radiant’; Charteris ‘glowed with victory’; while Kiggell ‘had the air of a silent craftsman, whose plans, designed and worked out by his art in the seclusion of his workshop, were turning out well’. After Lloyd George had become sick of hearing about the ‘visible deterioration’ of the prisoners they were capturing, he told Haig that he wanted to see some for himself. He was eventually presented with ‘a weedy lot’ of Germans and seemed reasonably convinced; although he would later claim that GHQ had specifically ordered all ‘able-bodied specimens’ removed before his arrival.37
According to Maurice Hankey, Lloyd George’s visit to GHQ in late September was really the last time that he could have intervened and stopped the battle. But because he encountered ‘the usual optimism, emphasized by the picture of steady, remorseless execution of the plan’, there was, he claimed, little to justify stopping the offensive. One of the problems was that War Office news tended to be positive with ‘a considerable lag between events and the arrival of unofficial information which sometimes helps to elucidate the official reports’; meaning that by the time Lloyd George had heard contradictory rumours, events had moved on.38 It was, from his perspective, unfortunate that he happened to visit GHQ just when the British had achieved their greatest success since Messines, which did much to nullify the Prime Minister’s dry scepticism. It was becoming clear–no matter how much Lloyd George nagged or grumbled–that Haig was not going to call off his offensive unless directly ordered to do so. Therefore, if Lloyd George was going to reclaim control of Britain’s war effort, then he needed to grasp the nettle as tightly as possible.
From Montreuil, Lloyd George went on to Paris to discuss what looked like a promising glint of light in the international situation. On 19 September, London received a cable from its Ambassador in Spain, Sir Arthur Hardinge, which seemed to offer tantalizing hope of dramatic developments. ‘Minister of State says he had heard through a Spanish diplomatic representative that [the] German Government would be glad to make a communication to ourselves relative to peace.’ Apparently this feeler, which came from ‘a very exalted personage’ in Germany, had been put out to gauge whether His Majesty’s Government would be willing to listen to a suggestion for peace.39 This was an overture by the new German Foreign Secretary, Richard von Kühlmann, who had been authorized to see whether Britain would enter into talks about the possible restoration of Belgium, in return for giving Germany a free hand in Russia and returning her African colonies, which had been seized at the beginning of the war.
The question for Britain was whether a compromise peace with Germany was either possible or desirable. The War Cabinet was unsure of what approach to adopt, agreeable in some quarters to abandoning Russia to her fate, but wary of the effect on Britain’s other allies. In the end nothing came of the so-called ‘Kühlmann peace kite’. Both Haig and Robertson were opposed to doing anything other than keeping on fighting, and Lloyd George was caught domestically in his own rhetoric of the ‘knock out blow’, which compromised his search for a way out of the slaughter. At a meeting of the War Cabinet on 27 September, shortly after the Prime Minister had returned from France, it was agreed that Britain’s allies must be consulted and on 6 October the Foreign Office informed the relevant ambassadors in London. As might have been feared, their response was lukewarm. The consensus view was that the possibility of a separate peace should be dismissed out of hand. Furthermore, any kind of ‘round table discussion’ should only occur once ‘the main objects of the Allied efforts had already been secured’.40 Three days later, von Kühlmann, recognizing that there was no chance of splitting the Allies, reminded the Reichstag that Germany would never abandon her territorial claims in the west–principally Alsace–Lorraine–thus leaving any possibility of a negotiated peace in ruins.41
The failure of the Kühlmann peace note meant that the war in the west would continue into the following year. Above the Salient, sweeping dogfights took place between British and German fighters for control of the air, where no quarter was given, nor any expected. In what would become one of the most celebrated aerial duels of the war, Werner Voss, the German prodigy from Jagdstaffel 10 (with forty-seven kills), was shot down by Lieutenant Arthur Rhys Davids on 23 September. Voss was ambushed by a patrol of six SE5s of 56 Squadron led by James McCudden. As he later recalled: ‘The triplane was still circling round in the midst of six S.E.’s, who were all firing at it as opportunity offered, and at one time I noted the triplane in the apex of a cone of tracer bullets from at least five machines simultaneously, and each machine had two guns.’ By choosing to stand and fight–when he could have sped away in retreat–Voss showed an extraordinary level of dedication and bravery, even foolhardiness, but once he did the outcome was inevitable. After about ten minutes of frantic air combat–when most of the SE5s received bullet damage–Voss’s plane was hit and it went down in a steep dive, hitting the ground and disappearing ‘into a thousand fragments’.42
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On the ground, no time was lost in preparing for General Plumer’s second step. As before all major offensives, a daunting engineering and logistical effort was required to build the new roads and tracks that would allow the advance to continue. Fortunately, the weather improved and clear skies, with the accompanying choking dust, meant that Second Army’s engineers and pioneer units, labourers and drivers, were able to get to work. In I ANZAC Corps every spare man–pioneers, field companies and reserves–were ‘employed in pushing forward roads, tramlines, mule tracks[,] duckwalks [sic] and water supplies’. According to the Chief Engineer:
The country we are passing over is one sea of shell holes which are filled with water in the valleys. Our roads therefore, when crossing valleys, are floating. We put down a foundation of fascines, hurdles etc., and laid planking on these. The original country roads in the battle zone have totally disappeared in many cases, but as a rule we try to follow these lines of road, and some road metal is found in the shell holes, and the local people when making the roads must have selected the best lines i.e., as far as solidity of ground was concerned. As a rule the greater proportion of our forward roads must be built of planking as this means quicker work and we could not get sufficient metal up for metal roads.43
They did all this under intermittent, sometimes heavy, artillery fire. That month the construction parties from I ANZAC Corps suffered at least 550 casualties. It was deadly, but vital, work. Sweat would save blood.
11.
‘War with a Big W’
There is not a bit of cover anywhere, not a tree or dug-out of any description. Nothing but mud and dead.
Stanley Roberts1
26 September–3 October 1917
Following the Battle of Menin Road, Haig was eager to strike again as soon as possible. ‘In view of the fine weather which our weather experts think is likely to last for a week,’ he wrote on 21 September, ‘it is most desirable to take full advantage of it, and of the superiority which we have now gained, for the time being, over the enemy’s aeroplanes and artillery.’2 It had been arranged with General Plumer that Second Army would attack again, with I ANZAC Corps capturing the whole of Polygon Wood and Zonnebeke, while units on its flanks continued to advance in line. Should this be successful, a third step could then take place towards the main ridge at Broodseinde and the Gravenstafel Spur.3 Haig was determined to keep going, come what may. ‘My plan is to press the Ypres offensive as vigorously as possible’, he noted on 23 September. There was all to play for.4
Plumer’s second step–the Battle of Polygon Wood–opened at 5.50 a.m. on 26 September. It had been prepared in the same intricate manner as his other battles and produced much the same result. Once again two Australian divisions, 4th and 5th, would make the main assault, pushing forward about 1,200 yards towards the Flanders I line south of Zonnebeke, while clearing the main obstacle on this part of the front: Polygon Wood. Lieutenant Sinclair Hunt, a former school teacher from Croydon, New South Wales, was part of 55/Battalion (5th Division) as it made its way up the line the evening before the attack. They were led in silence by a group of guides, who had taped out the route they would follow to their jumping-off point, which lay at the southwestern tip of Polygon Wood. What had once been a pleasant young forest was now ‘totally devoid of any life’. Not even green young saplings could survive in such a blasted place, which was regularly swept by heavy fire. ‘The whole road appeared like a forest of charred and splintered stumps standing about three or four feet high’, Hunt remembered. Every so often a flare would fizzle up from the German positions, causing them to crouch and freeze ‘so that Fritz would have no idea of what was happening’.5
Once they were in position–lying in shell holes or scrapes in the ground–they waited for the moment to attack. The German defenders seemed to have sensed something was up. Flares were fired ‘with unusual frequency’ and soon a scattering of shells fell along Hunt’s sector, causing some casualties, but fortunately missing most of the attacking waves. Gradually the minutes ticked down.
A fog had fallen and we could see Fritz flares only hazily through it. Ten minutes, a man rose here and there to tighten a belt or to stretch his cramped limbs. Three–the fog was more dense, and sections became very restless as they quietly fixed bayonets and prepared to advance. A gun behind boomed louder than the rest, suddenly the whole earth seemed to burst into a seething bubbling roaring centre of eruption and as at the touch of an enchantresser’s [sic] wand, out of the ground sprang a mass of men in little worm like columns–each wriggling its way forward to a sparkling shouting seething line of earth, fire and smoke in front of them.
After seventy-five yards they saw their first Germans, just bodies ‘chewed up by the barrage’. After 100 yards they ran into ‘a platoon of scared Fritzes’, hurrying towards them with their hands in the air. They soon reached the great mound at the far side of Polygon Wood (the ‘Butte’, which was once used for musketry training by the Belgian Army), cleared out a dugout, and then re-formed their platoons for the next stage of the attack.
Charles Bean would later call the artillery barrage on 26 September ‘the most perfect that ever protected Australian troops’, crashing out in front of them ‘like a Gippsland bushfire’.6 As it moved on to the second objective, perfectly on time, Hunt and his men followed as closely as they could (‘the boys hugged it to a yard’). There were occasional short rounds–including one that just missed Hunt and failed to explode–but they did not dent the eagerness of the men to close with the enemy. ‘Before the last shot fell on a Pill Box it was swarming with “Aussies” who scrambled all over it looking for “Flues” or ventilators through which to drop a bomb. Fritz, however, did not want any coaxing in most cases, but ran out with hands up at the first call and shewed [sic] no signs of fight. Indeed we found the rifles in most of the “Boxes” without even bayonets fixed.’ Hunt was elated at what they had done. ‘The advance itself was the finest we had ever experienced’, he said proudly. ‘The artillery barrage was so perfect and we followed it so close, that it was simply a matter of walking into the positions and commencing to dig in.’7
On the left, advancing towards the Flanders I line at Molenaarelsthoek, 4th Australian Division made good progress. ‘The barrage fell at the appointed time, 5.50 a.m., and lifting three minutes later our troops commenced to advance moving close under it. Distances were adjusted between waves after all troops were in advance of our front line’, recorded an after-action report. Although the morning was misty and visibility difficult, which meant officers had to rely on their compasses to keep direction, the fury of the bombardment cleared all before it. ‘The density and power of the Barrage had a very demoralising effect on the enemy as evidenced by his abject terror, and willingness to surrender’, recorded Lieutenant-Colonel Harold Paul, the commanding officer of 49/Battalion. ‘A few isolated cases occurred where snipers did use their rifles, but they were promptly dealt with.’8 By 7.15 a.m. 16/Battalion was on the first objective (the Red Line) and within an hour ‘leapfrogging’ troops were on the Blue Line with German soldiers ‘surrendering freely’.9
More problematic were the operations on the flanks, where the barrage was less dense and ground more difficult to cross. In the north V Corps achieved most of its objectives, but fell short of reaching Hill 40, a German position north of Zonnebeke, which remained in enemy hands. The attack had gone largely to plan, but after the infantry were held up by the Zonnebeke stream, they lost touch with the creeping barrage and suffered accordingly–machine-gun fire stopping the attack about 600 yards from the final objective.10 In X Corps, on the southern flank, the situation was more precarious, in part because of a heavy German spoiling attack that had gone in the previous day. 33rd Division had already sustained about 5,000 casualties and had been fighting for over twenty-four hours when Zero Hour came. The division was hastily reorganized, with the reserve brigade (19 Brigade) reinforcing the attacking waves, which swept forward that morning ‘with extreme bitterness�
��.11 Fortunately, 15 Australian Brigade helped to re-establish the line and push on to their objectives at the far side of Polygon Wood. The fighting in this shattered, broken woodland was incredibly bitter.
It was here where two Victoria Crosses were won: Sergeant Jack Dwyer (4/Australian Machine-Gun Company) and Private Patrick Joseph Bugden (31/Battalion). Dwyer, in charge of a Vickers machine-gun team, won his for leading the defence of the position throughout 26 and 27 September. Oblivious to danger, moving from shell hole to shell hole, directing machine-gun fire against the numerous counter-attacks that came through the blasted remains of the wood, he showed remarkable bravery, not to mention uncommon luck. At one point, his machine-gun was destroyed by a direct hit from an artillery shell, so he gathered his team and led them back through the enemy barrage, where they were able to bring up one of their reserve guns. ‘Paddy’ Bugden showed a similar level of bravery, but unfortunately he was not as lucky. He went out into no-man’s-land at least five times to aid the wounded, but on the final occasion he was mortally wounded by a shell splinter. He was just twenty years old.12