They Called it Passchendaele

by Lyn Macdonald

  The salient was formed by accident, forged by retreat and held by iron determination. After the opening melees of the autumn of 1914, the weakened remnants of the Allied forces found themselves occupying a line that straggled inland from the coastal town of Nieuport along the southern bank of the River Yser. It bulged out to follow the rough semi-circle of low ridges to the east which seems to hold the city of Ypres in cupped hands, snaked back along the high ground to the west and, where it billowed down to merge with the plain, swung south past Armentieres and Arras, deep into France and east again to the Swiss border.

  Sitting astride the ridges above Ypres, the army was able to take an interesting view of its situation. In front of it was occupied Belgium, a land invaded but still unscarred by war, and across it at a safe distance was the ace in the German hand – the great railway junction of Roulers. It scarcely mattered that the line to Ypres and the coast had been effectively cut. The soldiers could see for themselves, as the steam engines puffed busily back and forth across the plain, that a network of communications ran back from Roulers into Germany itself, to the very gates of the Ruhr armament factories, to the very doors of the depots where troops gathered for the front.

  Behind them the land rippled gently down to the moated ramparts of Ypres. On a clear day, beyond its spires they could just see glinting in the distance the waters of the English Channel, disturbingly close to their backs. Ypres was the key to the channel ports – and the Germans knew it. It was obvious to them that the line of troops was thin and the sporadic gunfire told all too clearly of a shortage of ammunition (a quarter of the guns had been taken back from the firing-zone because they had no shells to fire). It would be a pushover.

  To a certain extent it was. In the autumn of 1914, in twenty-two days of bitter fighting the ragged British army was pushed over the rim of the ridges, down the slopes of the shallow saucer, downwards and inwards, closer and closer to Ypres at its back. And then, almost within hailing distance of the Menin Gate, it stopped.

  The place was Nonne Bosschen – Nun’s Wood, a wedge of thicket on the breast of one of those deceptively gentle rises halfway between Passchendaele and Ypres. The German commanders drew in their breath for one final crushing attack. Streams of guns poured up to stiffen the bombardment; the troop trains steamed into Roulers with reinforcements of crack Prussian Guards, fresh and untried, but trained to razor-sharp precision. As far as the depleted British Expeditionary Force was concerned, the only thing which could be remotely described as ‘reinforcements’ was the embryo Kitchener’s Army of volunteers, which – between vigorous bouts of button polishing – was still learning to form fours and shoulder arms on village greens and playing fields on the other side of the Channel.

  But reinforcements of a kind nevertheless arrived, hurrying up the road from Ypres in hastily formed platoons of cooks and spud-bashers, dishwashers and orderly-room clerks, sanitary orderlies and plump waiters from the officers’ mess, storemen and quartermasters, wagon drivers and messengers – a raggle-taggle bunch of non-combatants who had never seriously expected to find themselves at the business end of a rifle. This was a point of minimal importance in view of the fact that there were barely enough rifles to go round.

  Into the line they went to fight with picks, with shovels, with entrenching tools; but ready to snatch up firearms as they fell from the hands of the killed and wounded and to use them at point-blank range to drive off the enemy swarming across their trenches. The attackers were thrown back. The line held. The honours of the day, in that first battle of Ypres, belonged indisputably to Fred Karno.

  The remnant of the British army stood its ground, and gradually it began to grow. On walls and buildings all over Britain, the Empire and the Colonies, recruiting posters erupted in a rash of patriotic fervour. Boys newly grownup and only just weaned from a schoolboy diet of G. A. Henty’s adventure yarns, flocked to join up in numbers that, in the first months, were embarrassingly large for the military authorities to cope with. In France the recruits were desperately needed. But at home sergeant-majors approaching retirement looked in despair at the motley hordes they were expected to transform into battalions of disciplined soldiers, while quartermaster sergeants tore their hair and despaired of being able to clothe, billet and feed them. Nineteen was the official minimum age for enlistment, but recruiting sergeants could be helpful.

  ‘How old are yer?’

  ‘Seventeen and a half, sir.’

  ‘Run along, sonny, and come back when you’re nineteen… tomorrer.’

  The recruiting offices were besieged by boys desperate to get a sniff of the fighting before the war ended, as it surely must, by Christmas. And not only in Britain but throughout the British Empire, from Calgary to Cape Town, from Bombay to Brisbane. Soon on every tide the troopships were arriving, their decks lined with waving, cheering soldiers in stiff new-smelling khaki. By April 1915 the weary troops who had held the precious salient around Ypres throughout that first cold and soggy winter had been reinforced by a cheeringly strong contingent of Canadians and a reputedly tough-fighting regiment of the Indian Army. The French sector was being strengthened by troops from their colonies of Algeria and Morocco and gradually the first newly-trained battalions of Kitchener’s volunteers trickled across the Channel. Armaments and ammunition were still in short supply and guns were restricted to firing a certain number of rounds a day, but the salient had what it had previously so woefully lacked – men. And manpower, at that stage in the war, was all-important in the eyes of military commanders, schooled and nurtured in the tradition of cavalry campaigning. Caught up in the detail of the task of actually getting something which approximated to an army on to the field, the commanders could hardly be blamed for failing to realise that this war would be fought under different rules, under different circumstances and under conditions of undreamt-of hardship.

  The harbinger of all the horrors to come arrived late in the afternoon of a perfect spring day. And it arrived at Ypres. The first heavy shells began to crash into the town late in the morning, sending the Saturday-market crowds flying to the shelter of the cellars, and at midday the guns began to pound the outlying villages and the roads leading from them into Ypres. So far the civilians had done their best to ignore the war, but when the gunfire tailed off early in the afternoon the population was in turmoil, and soon a procession of refugees was on the move. With whatever belongings they had been able to salvage piled on to wheelbarrows and handcarts, they poured westwards out of the town, swarming along the roads that led to Elverdinghe, Poperinghe and Dickebusch. They passed farms and meadows where green peacetime grass had long since disappeared under regiments of bell-tents; and field kitchens where steaming cauldrons of stew bubbled and simmered, ready to be ladled into canisters and transported to the troops in the forward areas beyond the canal.

  Some horse-drawn limbers were already clattering on their way, loaded with ration canisters. Seated on them, taking their ease while they could, were the men of the carrying parties on whose broad backs they would travel the last lap into the line. That is, if they ever got there, for in spite of the MPs who were doing their best to control the chaos, the sweating horses were making heavy weather of getting the wagons through against a determined tide of refugees, who were less frightened by the threats of the cursing drivers than by the threat of the big guns behind.

  At five o’clock the guns started up again. Walls crumbled and crashed in the dying town, as if to encourage the last stragglers on their way. On the extreme northern edge of the salient, far to the left, there was the distant popping of light field artillery. But it was disregarded by those who happened to notice it between the roars of the heavy shells that were hammering Ypres into dust and debris. It was common knowledge that Algerian troops had just taken over the French line on the Canadians’ left, and no doubt they were quite properly firing on enemy objectives as an exercise in order to register the accuracy of their guns. It was known as ‘shooting yourself in’, a preliminar
y which was as necessary for the efficiency of the gunners as it was unpleasant for the enemy, who were naturally provoked into replying with retaliatory gunfire. In reality the situation was somewhat different. So different that no soldier on earth had ever experienced anything like it before.

  It came on the breath of the light evening breeze as it sprang up in the north, a thick yellow-grey cloud that rose from the enemy lines and drifted gently across to the Algerian positions, enveloping the terrified men in a retching, throat-catching suffocating fog. Behind it came the German infantry, fixed bayonets at the ready, seen terrifyingly through streaming eyes as they loomed out of the trailing vapour, helmeted and gargoyle-masked. As they advanced, the Algerians broke and ran, staggered or crawled away from them and from the deadly gas, but the sanctuary they sought was down-wind. The gas travelled on their heels.

  The chaos behind the lines became uncontrollable. On the Poperinghe Road, bedlam broke loose as teams of half-crazed horses and riders plunged on to it from the road leading to the Yser Canal, closely followed by mobs of infantry streaming back across the fields. Ambulances, hastily summoned, added to the traffic of confusion, and the demoralised troops, some wounded, lay blind and choking along the roadside. By eight o’clock the situation was all too clear. Fifty guns had been abandoned and there was an undefended gap in the line four miles long.

  It was the Canadians who saved the day. They were in the most desperate situation of all, for the collapse of the French lines meant that they now had four miles of absolutely nothing on their left. Not being able to use their infantry in the dark, the Germans switched their tactics to heavy shelling. All night the bombardment continued but somehow, in spite of it, the Canadians managed to deploy to the left to cover the gap, somehow they managed to mount a counter-attack, somehow the casualties were evacuated, somehow reserves were brought up and spread in pitifully small numbers along the gap to try to establish a new line. They had little chance ofsucceeding.

  The Germans rushed in no less than forty-two fresh battalions, and against them, devastated by heavy bombardment, the effort of twelve Canadian and six weak British battalions was unavailing.

  The sensible thing would have been to withdraw from the salient, abandoning Ypres, and to establish a stronger line in the rear beyond the canal bank, a tactical possibility which had indeed been earlier considered. But emotion was riding high, at least in Britain, where the flags waved and the drums beat and the newspapers trumpeted forth glory in every edition. Public opinion, like Queen Victoria during the Crimean War, was not interested in the possibility of defeat. Public opinion, however, was not trying to hold the salient. Public opinion was not manning a line of trenches bombarded by six times as many German guns as there were guns to retaliate. Public opinion was not required, for want of gas-masks, to urinate on its sock and clap it over its nose as more noxious gas-clouds rolled inexorably towards it.

  The appalling casualty-lists were read with horror, but in the spirit of the times they only served to stiffen the resolve of a nation in mourning. For these were not casualties of the regular army of professional risk-takers which, in any event, now hardly existed. They were the volunteers, ‘Our Boys’ who such a few short months ago had marched off, wreathed in beams of enthusiasm, to do their bit, and ‘Our Boys’ must not be said to have done their bit in vain. If they had died to protect Ypres, then Ypres must not be given up.

  For somewhat different reasons, the French commander, General Foch, was of the same opinion, which in no uncertain terms he brought to bear on the perplexed Commander of the British Force, Sir John French. The Germans must be kept occupied in the salient so that too much pressure might not build up on the line further south. The Commanders of the Army on the spot saw things differently. General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, heading the Second Army, proposed to draw back and reduce the salient to Ypres and its outskirts. French refused to consider any such thing, promptly removed him from his command, and appointed General Sir Herbert Plumer in his place. Plumer’s first action as Commander was to order an only slightly less drastic strategic withdrawal. By then French had no alternative but to agree, and at the end of May 1915, five weeks after the first gas attack, the withdrawal took place. In those five weeks 60,000 men had been killed, wounded or were missing. The grim and dreadful salient was consolidated. One day people would call it immortal.

  Chapter 2

  The salient was tiny. In the north it had been pushed back right to the bank of the canal, leaving the Second Army the merest precarious toehold on the other side. Then the line crept gradually forward to enclose Ypres in a loop that reached a scant two miles up the Menin Road, swung round to Zillebeke, and bulged back again to run below the high ground of the Wytschaete–Messines Ridge. The Germans, now occupying not only the high ground but the nearer villages of St Julien, Pilkem, Verloren-hoek and Hooge were like schoolboys standing round the edge of a pond, plopping stones into the water. But the ‘stones’ were shells fired by batteries of heavy guns which, clustered as thick as flies on a pool of treacle, radiated out from the rim of the salient.

  At some point in history the Flanders plain lay under the sea. It is reclaimed bogland, which it was only possible to inhabit and cultivate by constructing a complicated network of drainage ditches that farmers, under penalty of a heavy fine, are still obliged to maintain. In spite of the ditches, when there is heavy rain the land quickly becomes waterlogged, for there is no gravelly topsoil to filter away the moisture, nothing but a yard or so of heavy clay, which in all but the driest weather gives soggily beneath the feet. Beneath its covering of meadows and hopfields Flanders is a natural bog. When the guns started up and the shells plunged down, shattering the drainage and tearing the earth apart, it rapidly turned into a quagmire.

  To the hard-pressed troops holding the salient, the guns never seemed to stop. It was a unique military situation. Two armies, one virtually surrounding the other, and both on the defensive. The Allies were sitting tight in defence of the salient, while the Germans sat tight around it in defence of the high ground. For more than two years, apart from some fierce localised skirmishing, it was stalemate. The British were there to stay, and so were the Germans who had the advantage of men, materials and abundant supplies in a wide back area, which unlike the narrow strip of land between Ypres and the sea was relatively unharassed. They used this advantage to dig themselves in as no army had ever dug in before, with ferro-concrete reinforced with a forest of iron rods, each one five-eighths of an inch thick. As soon as the new Allied line was established around the truncated salient the Germans started to build.

  It was useless to try to construct a conventional trench system with deep dug-outs such as the Germans had on the Somme: in the northern swamp, trenches simply filled up with water as fast as they were dug. The answer was the concrete pillbox, with walls and roofs three feet thick, over which mud and sandbags could be stacked for camouflage and further protection. The idea originally was simply to shield the support and reserve troops from the ever-increasing fire from British howitzers and field guns, but they withstood bombardment so successfully – the shells merely bounced off them – that it was soon realised that as strongpoints they would be well-nigh impregnable. So, taking advantage of the cover afforded by the folds in the shallow slopes, the construction work went on, tier upon tier, until the saucer of the shallow valley was an amphitheatre of concrete strongholds with narrow slits through which observers had a grandstand view of everything that moved on the stage-like salient below.

  Except for the dug-outs which had been burrowed into the thick ramparts around Ypres and some parts of the back areas well behind the town, the Allied troops had no such comforts. For one thing (and it was the old, old story) there was a shortage of concrete and a feeling that such shelters would not be worth the trouble and expense. More important, the Allies were, at least in theory, an army on the attack and the provision of such sturdy bastions might have been detrimental to the offensive spirit of the troo
ps. So the British and Colonial forces had to throw up breastworks of mud as best they could and crouch behind their barbed wire in a series of stinking ditches half-sunk in the morass. For more than two years this was the British front line.

  Keep your head down. That was the rule in the salient if you intended to survive. Even the Germans had picked it up. Where the two lines were close together and things were quiet, there was a daredevil excitement in making contact with the enemy, just to remind yourself that there was someone out there in the dank blackness beyond the line.

  ‘I want to go home to my wife!’

  The wail would come from some soaked and fed-up Tommy shivering away the long hours between the issue of the rum ration and the dawn stand-to; and if within earshot there happened to be one of the many Germans who, before the war, had worked in a barber’s shop in Hackney or in a West End restaurant, a shout would return.

  ‘Keep your head down, Tommee, or she’ll be a bloody widow!’ And, as his companions in the trench cursed him for an idiot for attracting the unwelcome attentions of the enemy, a machine-gun would rattle and spatter across the mud, sweeping the length of the trench, searching and probing for the unwary in the sudden eerie light of a flare.

  The big guns, too, searched and probed. All day the reconnaissance aircraft, both British and German, were buzzing the skies across the salient. Almost as high the great whales wallowed, each carrying a sharp-eyed observer in the basket below. The grey balloons were British, the black ones German. But the Germans also held the ridges, and from them artillery officers, through binoculars engineered to high-powered magnification by Messrs Zeiss, could delineate almost to the centimetre not only the roads but the duckboard tracks along which the troops would have to travel when darkness fell. With Teutonic precision the guns were trained along their length.