by Nick Lloyd
Amid such awful carnage, acts of enormous courage and valour were commonplace. In 1/Otago Regiment, Second Lieutenants J. J. Bishop and N. F. Watson were both killed while throwing grenades through the loopholes of pillboxes; Captain C. H. Molloy was cut down as he led his company in a forlorn hope; while Second Lieutenant A. R. Cockerell managed to singlehandedly capture a pillbox and take forty enemy soldiers prisoner. Joined by one of his men, he kept going–head down, revolver in hand–and managed to silence another enemy blockhouse, taking another thirty-two prisoners.44 But it was all to be in vain. Two supporting battalions, 1 and 2/Canterbury, tried to move up, but ran into the same nightmare of machine-gun and sniper fire that rapidly brought any forward movement to a dead stop. ‘Party after party made the attempt from either flank,’ recorded the regimental account, ‘and though some got as close as fifteen yards from the pill-boxes, none succeeded in reaching them.’45
As for the Australians, things were little better. According to the war diary of 34/Battalion:
The general condition of the terrain over which the men had to attack was one of the two primary causes for the non-success of the operation. This was in many cases, particularly on the left flank, a marsh across the whole front, a succession of water-filled shell-holes, which not only reduced the rate of advance, but bunched the men together, endeavouring to find a track around the shell-holes. This gave the enemy splendid opportunities for his machine-gun fire.46
Lieutenant G. M. Carson of 33/Battalion was one of those who went forward that day. ‘I nearly got blown to pieces scores of times’, he remembered:
We went through a sheet of iron all night and in the morning it got worse. We attacked at 5.25 [a.m.] and fought all day at times we were bogged up to our arm pits and it took anything from an hour upwards to get out. Lots were drowned in the mud and water. The Bosch[e] gave us Hell but we managed to hold on to the little we had taken till night when we dug in.
Carson would win the Military Medal for his bravery in taking a German pillbox. ‘I waddled up and couldn’t get near it because it was held very strongly and it took one and a half hours to surround it. There were six guns and 30 Bosch[e] in it. I eventually got there but stayed only a few hours as we were compelled to get out.’ He returned from battle with only two of his men still alive, and both of them were wounded.47
The Australians did what they could. 10 Brigade, on the left, only managed to reach their first objective along the Ravebeek Valley, but 9 Brigade, on the right, was able to advance all the way to the Blue Line, on the outskirts of Passchendaele. Showing enormous fighting spirit, three battalions were able to reach the second objective–a march of over 1,700 yards–against heavy resistance.48 Here, on the highest part of the ridge, the 22-year-old commander of ‘B’ Company, 34/Battalion, Captain Clarence Jeffries, won a posthumous Victoria Cross for leading an attack on a series of pillboxes at Hillside Farm. Accompanied by Sergeant James Bruce (who had been a colleague of Jeffries’ father back home and who had promised to keep an eye on the young officer), Jeffries organized a bombing party and outflanked the enemy position (capturing four machine-guns and thirty-five prisoners in the process). Later that day they did the same, running forward, almost into the teeth of German machine-gun fire, to capture a bunch of forty prisoners on the outskirts of Passchendaele. But in this final assault Jeffries fell to the ground, mortally wounded with a bullet in his stomach.49
Sadly 9 Brigade’s heroics could not be maintained. The curse of communications meant that the advance was unknown to brigade headquarters for a number of hours. There was no buried cable and visual signalling was impossible in the smoke and mist, which left the battalions dependent upon their runners and a handful of surviving pigeons. It was impossible to hold on to the Blue Line without fresh and timely reinforcements, leaving the surviving officers in charge with an ominous decision. Their position on the forward slope of the ridge left them exposed to enemy machine-gun and artillery fire for most of the afternoon, including lethal enfilade fire from the Bellevue Spur; and, with no reserves in sight, eventually the order was given for the Blue Line to be given up. 9 Brigade’s casualties had been appalling: forty-nine officers and 915 other ranks had been killed or wounded in the attack on Passchendaele.50
It did not take long for word to spread of the horrors that had befallen the Anzacs. Alexander Birnie of 12th Field Company Engineers (4th Australian Division) was one of those who was wounded that day. He wrote to his parents on 26 October telling them his story:
My dear Mother and Father, here I am once more in England in peace and comfort with a bullet hole through my neck. If it had been an inch closer in I would now be lying out on the bloody Passchendaele Ridge with many hundreds of our good fellows who went West on that day–but you see it didn’t so let me try and give you an account of how 750 men went over the top and less than 50 came back.
Birnie spent the day as a stretcher-bearer. ‘It was heart breaking work’, he remembered; ‘one could do so little and there was so much to do… We could not carry men away but we dressed them, sometimes we simply had to hide in shell holes, it got so very hot.’ Then he was shot by a sniper. ‘Something red hot shot through my neck and I fell into a shell hole. I don’t remember much more for a while until I heard poor old Steven say “Are you dead, Sir? Are you dead? God help those buggers if they’ve killed you.”’ But incredibly Birnie survived. He continued working among the dead and wounded, dodging flurries of shellfire and the odd burst of machine-gun fire. Despite his injuries he kept going, doling out vials of morphine for those with no chance of survival, and listening, with tears in his eyes, as they uttered their final words. When he eventually reached a dressing station, plastered with mud and blood, Birnie was utterly worn out. As he sat down to have his wound dressed, he remembered a verse from his childhood: ‘It’s not the fact that you’re dead that counts, but only[:] how did you die.’51
Yet again the German defensive position on the Flanders I Line had proved incredibly tough. Exhaustion, fear and shock brought on by the endless bombardments may have shredded the nerves of the defenders, but when the time came, they resisted with every ounce of courage and determination they possessed. The true horror of what happened to the New Zealand and Australian battalions was revealed in the combat report of 6 Jäger Regiment, which held the Bellevue Spur. It recorded that:
Despite the heaviest of losses, the troops were in the best of spirits, probably mainly due to the first-rate impact of their guns and in view of the colossal losses among the English. The day was a particularly great day for the machine-guns. As sufficient ammunition was available, and delivered efficiently all day–during the course of this day alone, more than 130,000 rounds of machine-gun ammunition were delivered–all targets that presented themselves could be taken under continuous machine-gun fire. Some of the machine-guns fired up to 15,000 rounds. The consumption of [small arms] ammunition was very significant too. A corporal reports having fired 700 rounds. As the field of fire was often very wide, and as the English presented the most worthwhile mass targets all day long, the effect of the machine-guns was truly devastating for the enemy. It was probably above all thanks to the machine-guns that, despite an enemy incursion on both the right and the left side of our section, the enemy was neither able to roll up the flanks of the battalion, nor to turn its incursion into a breakthrough towards the back.
Working furiously, the Jäger battalions improvised rudimentary cleaning sections, where muddy weapons could be brought in, cleaned up, and then sent back out to the front line, making sure that the fire never slackened off. As if that were not bad enough, the combat report also recorded how the effect of artillery upon the struggling attackers was ‘absolutely exquisite’. By letting off white flares they were able to direct shells to wherever they were needed, while also launching hundreds of mortar bombs, which caught ‘the often concentrated enemy with direct fire’.52
Such an intensity of defensive firepower produced carnage. It was in fro
nt of the Bellevue Spur where some of the worst scenes were played out: doomed battalions slugging forward over heavy ground; lines of infantry getting cut down by brutal machine-gun fire; shell holes filled with brown muddy water, now washed red with blood. Colonel Hugh Stewart, a classics professor from Christchurch and commander of 2/Canterbury Regiment, was appalled at the dire vista in his sector. Over 600 dead New Zealanders lay in front of the German barbed wire at the Bellevue Spur and were strewn, like torn rags, along the Gravenstafel road. ‘They had poured out their blood like water’, he wrote bitterly, summing up the reasons why. ‘As the obstacles were overwhelming, so the causes of failure are easy of analysis.’ Certainly, the whole operation was rushed, without sufficient time to reconnoitre the ground and prepare adequately, but Stewart regarded these as only contributing factors. ‘The reasons for our failure lay rather in the inevitable weakness of our artillery barrage, the nature of the ground, the strength of the machine-gun resistance from the pillboxes, and above all in the unbroken wire entanglements.’53
For Major-General Sir Andrew Russell, the New Zealand commander, 12 October was a bitter reminder of the need never to take anything for granted in war. ‘Attacked this morning at daybreak’, he wrote in his diary, ‘we, and indeed all other divisions, were held up at the start by M.G. [fire]. Evidently the artillery preparation was insufficient, the barrage poor, and it goes to show the weakness of haste–our casualties are heavy.’54 An astute soldier, meticulous and professional, Russell had worked hard to forge his division’s reputation as elite troops who never failed. He visited the front several days later and saw for himself the strength of the German position. He realized that his attack had been rushed, but he still insisted his staff should have known and done something about it.55 In total, Russell’s division suffered 3,000 casualties, including nearly 1,000 dead–the only time in the war that they would not achieve their objectives and the single worst day in New Zealand’s military history.56
Monash wrote to his wife on 18 October, bitter at the latest setback. ‘Our men are being put into the hottest fighting and are being sacrificed in hare-brained ventures, like Bullecourt and Passchendaele, and there is no one in the War Cabinet to lift a voice in protest’, he complained. He wrote again three days later, seemingly in a more collected frame of mind. Casualties were evidently still bothering him and he described in detail the system they had evolved for the evacuation of the wounded from the front lines to the Advanced Dressing Stations–almost as if he wanted to reassure himself that everything possible was being done. The average ‘carry’ from the battlefield was over 4,000 yards, with each casualty requiring sixteen stretcher-bearers to get him home (four relay teams of four). ‘Of course, the whole of this enormous department is, relatively speaking, only a small side show in the running of big battle, but throughout every department of the work, both fighting and feeding up supplies, stores and ammunition, I strive to introduce similar systematic methods and order, so that there shall be no muddling, no overlapping, no cross purposes, and everybody has to know exactly what his job is, and when and where he has to do it.’57 He was visibly relieved when he handed over his sector the following day, 22 October. The Anzacs were done.
14.
‘Not Worth a Drop of Blood’
It was no longer trench warfare, but mud-hole warfare.
A. H. Atteridge1
13–25 October 1917
Day in, day out, the endless, dangerous monotony of life in the Ypres Salient went on. In mid-October, Lieutenant Godefroy Skelton was posted to a section of Royal Engineers deployed out at the northern edge of the Salient near Houthulst Forest. He had spent the summer at Second Army headquarters at Cassel, but now he found himself among the wilderness of the front. ‘We had to live in bell tents in the open and the horse lines were a sea of mud’, he noted. ‘All was mud and shell holes… and the German pillboxes made of concrete in our lines were sinking in the mud and canting at all angles.’ They were tasked with myriad jobs: building thick sandbag walls around captured pillboxes (to shelter their entrances from shellfire); keeping duckboard tracks in a good state of repair; marking tapes out in no-man’s-land; and training their mules to carry packs of engineering supplies up to the front. When not in the line, Godefroy occasionally had to complete the ‘painful task’ of writing letters to the families of the men who had been killed under his command. It was a far cry from his time at Cassel, where he had lived ‘in style at the largest hotel in town’.2
Working constantly in poor conditions, often over sodden, gas-poisoned ground, which meant long hours spent in his gas mask, it was little wonder that Godefroy soon began to feel on the verge of a nervous breakdown. ‘I think at this time I was becoming “nervy”,’ he admitted, ‘due to the strains and constant fear of death or wounding and the responsibilities of the work of the sappers and the large working parties of infantry.’ When he reported to company or battalion headquarters, he found himself not wanting to leave, so he put off the moment when he would have to run the gauntlet between machine-gun and sniper fire, taking solace in whisky to help numb the senses. Indeed, Godefroy was not alone. Everyone who served in the Salient felt that they left something of themselves there; found themselves unable to stand the ravaged battlefield or the claustrophobic pillboxes they sheltered in, which may have been sprinkled with quicklime, but always smelt of the dead. Stanley Roberts, a driver with 49th Division–one of the divisions that had been shattered at Poelcappelle–believed that it was ‘no longer a Darwinian survival of the fittest, but the survival of those who stay safely away from this terrible holocaust, whether in civilian occupation or comfortable billets, either at the Base or in England. The strongest, healthiest man cannot refuse death when a shell hits him and smashes his body to blood clots. My faith in war is wavering…’3
There was no doubt that the Ypres battlefield, with its toxic, gas-scarred moonscape, littered with mutually supporting pillboxes, proved immensely trying to men’s morale. Shellfire was probably the worst thing that soldiers faced and it could take an enormous toll on their spirits. ‘My wife sometimes asks me what shell-fire was like’, recalled Lance Corporal H. S. Taylor (1/10th King’s Liverpool Regiment):
It varied of course, differing between a barrage and individual shelling to a specific target. In the latter case you had a chance to run before the next shell arrived. The most hateful were the German Whizz-bangs, which as the name implies arrived without warning fired with a flat trajectory these small shells about 12 lbs., I think, sometimes came through the parapet, indeed I once saw a soldier wounded in this way and by some miracle not only had the shell failed to explode, but had lodged partly in his chest and he survived. 5.9’s were unpleasant and accurate, to our disadvantage. One heavy howitzer shell was nicknamed a ‘Jack Johnson’, and another of that calibre a ‘Coal-Box’ because it left a very large pall of black smoke hanging about. Some big shells made a noise like a train going through a tunnel, others passing high overhead made a gentle whistle or a sort of swish. Shells coming in your direction made a different noise altogether, and even gave you a moment to take whatever shelter you might think would assist your further survival in a seemingly mad world.4
It never entirely stopped ‘raining iron’ in the Salient, but in those brief moments when the storm abated, men’s thoughts centred on more prosaic matters: trying to ward off the crushing tiredness and stay awake; the constant itching from lice that roamed over their bodies; and when they would get hot food and water or when they would be relieved.
Given the lack of suitable trenches on the battlefield, it was inevitable that some men took shelter in hastily converted German pillboxes. But these were not enjoyable places to stay in, and could turn even the toughest of men into nervous wrecks. Victor Fagence, a Lewis gunner with 11/Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment, had been wounded in the hand on the morning of 31 July and took refuge in a recently evacuated pillbox. Ominously, a 12-inch armour-piercing shell had come through the roof, but not explo
ded, which made Fagence understandably nervous about remaining. Yet he stayed where he was, reasoning that the shell had been fitted with a percussion fuse (not a timed one), so that it would not explode as long as it lay undisturbed. Yet this caused some panic when others joined him later that evening:
All through the night there was a continuous stream of people coming to the ‘pillbox’ for shelter and it was necessary for us inside to shout out ‘mind the dud shell on the floor, don’t kick it for Christ’s sake!’ Fortunately no one did kick it or we would probably all have ‘kicked the bucket’ by being blown sky high.5
Unexploded ordnance was not the only thing that could be found in pillboxes. Major F. J. Rice, a battery commander with 18th Division, remembered taking cover in a bunker known as ‘the Kennels’ (near Saint-Julien), which was notorious for attracting shellfire. ‘The floor of the pillbox was composed of duckboards on boxes in order to keep us clear of the filthy black water underneath, which was too deep and too foul to be baled’, he remembered. ‘If anyone trod on a loose board and disturbed the water the stench was indescribable, but it was the only concrete covering in the neighbourhood, so we stuck to it. Perhaps there were some Germans at the bottom of the water…’6