They Called it Passchendaele

by Lyn Macdonald

  Captain M. Greener, 175 Tunnelling Coy., Royal Engineers

  They were horrible lorries and you felt totally exposed in them because the road was always under shellfire, and you couldn’t just rattle through it since the wretched lorries would only do six or seven miles an hour. The men were always playing hell about having to go up and down in these lorries. We’d far rather have walked, but of course we had to take material up and down. When we got to the rest-billets, that was just as bad. What with the Germans shelling it practically every night, we had no ‘rest’ there at all. Still, we took advantage of that situation. At least, our quartermaster sergeant did. He made up his mind we were going to get rid of these appalling lorries, so he waited until the camp was being shelled, belted out of his dug-out and chucked a few Mills bombs at them until they were nicely ablaze. ‘Lost by enemy action.’ Very neat. We got Packard lorries after that.

  The transport went faster, but to the men clawing inch by inch through the clay deep beneath the salient, the work went painfully slowly. Then someone had a bright idea. A boring-machine, carefully designed for the purpose, would do the job faster than men. Six boring-machines would complete the job in no time. The order was given for one experimental prototype. It was built by the Stanley Heading Machine Company of Nuneaton at the then considerable cost of £6,000, a vast monster with a cutting head specially designed to make short work of tunnelling through the hard strata of clay that lay beneath the salient. It weighed seven and a half tons and it took twenty-four enormous crates to contain its components on the journey to Folkestone, and three General Service lorries to transport it from Boulogne. It arrived there on 17 February 1917, but it was not until 4 March that it was switched on.

  The chosen site was the tunnel at Petit Bois, but the task of getting the machine there, within yards of the German front line, was fraught with difficulty. Light railways intersected the front but they were meant for the transport of small wagons containing ammunition and essential supplies. The 74-ton monster was quite beyond its capacity. Again and again, night after night, the wagons were derailed by the weight of the top-heavy crates, and the cursing, sweating engineers were faced with righting them and manhandling the huge crates back on board. It was hardly miraculous that the Germans began to get wind of a ‘secret weapon’. They did not know exactly what it was but they did know that something was up, and the guns on the ridges above gave Petit Bois their undivided attention. Somehow, in that storm of shells and explosions the monster escaped unscathed. Under cover of darkness it was painstakingly uncrated and assembled, inched down the sloping shaft to the tunnel and switched on.

  The delighted engineers charted its progress; one hour, two feet forwards – two hours, four feet forwards – three hours, six feet forwards. The designers were right, the machine could work at three times the speed of men. They marvelled at the perfection of the tunnel that it carved, a smooth six feet in diameter. All the tunnellers needed to do now was follow its course to shore up the smooth – walls with timber, and carry back the clay which had been so effortlessly removed. At the end of their shift, seven hours after the machine had started, they switched it off. It refused to start again. When they crawled over to inspect the cutting head the tunnellers found that it was inextricably caught in the mud. It took a whole day of digging to free it and set it boring again.

  Now the engineers were in a dilemma, for the machine had to be switched off at intervals if it were not to overheat, but there was no retroactive mechanism to pull the bore back out of the earth when it came to a stop; and the weight of the clay which pressed in upon the drill was greater than the momentum of the engine designed to drive it forward. Again and again the great bore was dug out. Again and again it jammed. There were also problems with the electricity supply from the small generators, which could not produce enough consistent power to feed the monster. The fuses blew so often that the weary men who were nursing the machine along its checkered way ran out of heavy fuse-wire. When one of them, rather more weary and exasperated than his companions, also ran out of patience and mended one of the big fuses with the only wire he had to hand – which happened to be heavy barbed wire – the secret weapon gave up the ghost altogether. It had excavated just 200 feet of tunnel. The experts who had designed the machine and accompanied it so enthusiastically to Flanders set off back to London with their tails between their legs, abandoning the tunnel and leaving the wonder-weapon to sit there to eternity held fast beneath eighty feet of Flanders clay.

  There were more hazardous set-backs, as German countermining increased in intensity. Blows and counterblows. Tunnels lost and restarted, and the mine at St Eloi lost altogether when the line was forced to fall back during fierce attacks as the Germans searched for the workings. Sometimes the fighting took place far below in the tunnels themselves. It often happened in the early days that in the shallower systems one side or the other accidentally broke into the enemy galleries.

  One day we broke into the top of an enemy gallery, and as the enemy were heard close by, an emergency charge of fifteen pounds of gun cotton was tamped and fired near the hole. Actually, while the charge was being lit, the enemy were heard trying to enlarge the hole which they had discovered in their gallery. After the charge had gone up and the mine was reported free from gas, an exploration party was organised and an advance was made into the enemy gallery. This gallery was lit by electric light and when the Germans heard our party advancing they turned on the light. But our officer had foreseen this danger. He had run ahead and had cut the leads of the lamps well forward of the party, with the result that only the part of the gallery occupied by the enemy was illuminated. Two Germans were seen advancing, one of whom was shot. Both sides then retired, and after two attempts to destroy the gallery with small charges we eventually placed a charge of 200 pounds in position and exploded it, with the result that the German gallery was entirely closed up and the column of smoke and gas of the explosion which arose from the shaft gave our gunners accurate information of its position, and very effective firing practice on the German trenches interrupted the German mining activity for some time. Our miners had been working for five days within twelve feet of the German gallery and had not been heard.*

  Such hair-raising escapades were usually in shallower saps; and shallower saps there had to be, well-sprinkled with listening-posts, so that the German countermining could be detected. But what the Germans did not know was that other, deeper systems of tunnels were being driven far below the tunnels they had detected. Work was going faster now, for the clay-kickers had arrived, the cockney navvies who had kicked their way through remarkably similar clay to drive the tunnels of the London Underground. Miners like Tom Newell, who worked in eleven of the Messines tunnels, were quick to pick up the technique.

  Corporal T. Newell, No. 12096, 171 Tunnelling Coy., Royal Engineers

  To be a good clay-kicker you had to be long-legged, young and strong. At the age of twenty-one I was all three. You lay on a wooden cross made out of a plank with the cross-strut just behind your shoulders. The cross was wedged into the tunnel so that you were lying at an angle of forty-five degrees with your feet towards the face. You worked with a sharp-pointed spade with a foot-rest on either side above the blade, and you drove the blade into the clay, kicked the clay out, and on to another section, moving forward all the time. With the old broad-bladed pick we could only get forward at best six feet on every shift, but when the clay-kicking method was introduced we were advancing as much as twelve feet, or even fourteen, on a shift.

  Early in 1917 almost five miles of tunnels had been excavated, and nineteen of them were complete. The carrying parties came up by night through the firing-zone, each man staggering under the weight of a fifty-pound bag of ammonal, knowing that it would need no more than a single bullet or a red-hot scrap of shrapnel to pierce the bag and blow him to kingdom come. ‘Fifty yards between each man and don’t bunch up anywhere.’ The order came out of bitter experience. Captain Greener was not th
e only tunnelling officer who remembered the ghastly night when half a dozen men of a party of the Kensingtons, all with ammonal on their backs, had clustered round the top of the shaft at the moment a rifle grenade came across. The consequences were difficult to forget.

  But now the big chambers had been excavated at the end of the tunnels, deep under the German positions; the ammonal was packed tightly into them; the wire of the firing mechanism had been led back along the tunnels; and the tunnels themselves were packed back for many yards with sandbags, so that the full force of the explosion would fly upwards to the objectives. The Germans were sitting on a time-bomb. But, except at Hill 60, their suspicions were allayed. Their listening parties heard nothing. Their counter-galleries were untapped. Beneath the screaming shells and explosions far above, the tunnels lay silent as tombs.

  Every day the completed tunnels were tested with electrical charges to make sure that the mines were still operational, for there was always the chance that the explosive could have been affected by damp. Nothing happened. Up until May it was the best-kept secret of the war, and at this stage in the war the Allies badly needed a success. General Plumer was determined that they should have one.

  For two years General Plumer and his Second Army had held the salient, or what remained of it. For all that time he had ground his teeth at the Germans glaring down from above like some baleful evil eye; had groaned over the mounting casualty-lists; had stood by impotently, defending his miserable mudpatch.

  In almost three years of raging warfare the Allies had lost 2,000,000 men, killed, wounded or captured, and gained all too little ground. In places the line had been advanced a mile or so, but, in the main, nothing had changed except for the growing numbers of dead lying thick on the narrow strip of land that separated the trenches. The mingled stench of cordite and putrefaction lay like a cloud over the Western Front.

  It had lain thickest of all over Verdun and above the Somme. Now, across the front from Arras to the Aisne – where British, Canadians and French had been wiped out by the thousand in the push designed to bring the French, in one spectacular leap, within an arm’s length of victory – the stench of slaughter was so intense that even the Supreme Command, far away in London, gagged on it. Added to that there were reports that the French Army was in a state of mutiny. The eyes of the politicians and the commanders swivelled towards the north. There was nowhere else they could turn, for in spite of Lloyd George’s itching to divert guns and troops to Italy to deal a final deathblow to the soft underbelly of the Germans on the Austrian front, it was obvious, as the summer of 1917 approached, that a Flanders campaign was the only practical possibility. If, indeed, there ought to be a summer campaign at all. Lloyd George was inclined to think that the armies should continue a defensive holding-operation for the rest of the year and husband their resources for an all-out effort in 1918. Sir Douglas Haig (who had succeeded General French as Commander-in-Chief) thought otherwise. The Battle of Messines, long planned to gain the comparatively limited objective of breaking out of the salient, if successful could become part of a greater design. The charge was already set. It only remained to light the fuse.

  General Sir Herbert Plumer was equally enthusiastic, for above all, Messines was his baby. After two years of standing still with his feet held fast in the clay of Ypres, he was absolutely determined that his baby was going to be a bouncer. In the still incomplete tunnels at Hill 60 and St Eloi the shifts were doubled, and the effort redoubled. The maps and plans, long drawn up, were dusted off and meticulously gone over point by point. The roads from the south and from the ports rumbled night and day under the wheels of convoys of supply wagons and ammunition trucks. In the vanguard a thousand horses pulled the carriages of field guns that would soon take up position to reinforce the batteries due to fire the opening bombardment. The rails of the line to Poperinghe burned hot under the wheels of trains groaning with heavy artillery, and a million sparks rang off the cobbled roads beneath the boots of the men marching towards the salient to fight the battle.

  Chapter 4

  They marched in easy stages of ten or twelve miles a day. They were seasoned soldiers these, who had survived the Somme and Arras and Vimy, and most had already had bitter experience of the Ypres salient. Plumer was taking no chances with raw? troops. These men had come out of the line, and the drafts fresh from Blighty had been sent in to take their place. Fighting battalions had been rested, reformed and stiffened with returning wounded, now pronounced fit after gruelling retraining in the notorious camp at Etaples which the troops called ‘the bullring’. Most of them were glad to be out of it and back with comrades on the march.

  Behind the grumble of the distant guns it was spring in Fiance. Farmworkers in the fields waved as the endless khaki columns went by. Village children ran excitedly alongside the marching soldiers until their legs could keep up no more. And every girl from Armentieres to Poperinghe who had the slightest pretension to youth and beauty (and the soldiers assessed these qualities with the utmost generosity) blushed beneath a barrage of whistles, roars of bawdy compliments, and an interminable serenade which although incomprehensible became through repetition increasingly familiar:

  Landlord have you any good wine?

  PARLEYVOO

  Landlord have you any good wine?

  PARLEYVOO

  Landlord have you any good wine

  Fit for a soldier up the line?

  INKY PINKY PARLEYVOO.

  Farmer have you a daughter fine?

  PARLEYVOO

  Farmer have you a daughter fine?

  PARLEYVOO

  Farmer have you a daughter fine?

  Fit for a soldier up the line?

  INKY PINKY PARLEYVOO.

  Then up the stairs and into bed

  PARLEYVOO

  Then up the stairs and into bed

  PARLEYVOO

  Then up the stairs and into bed

  Da-da-da-da da-da-da-da…

  INKY PINKY PARLEYVOO!

  And so on, in a thousand ever-bawdier variations. If Mademoiselle from Armentieres hadn’t been kissed for forty years, there wasn’t a Tommy in the British Army who was not ready, willing and able to rectify her forlorn situation immediately.

  The strains of ‘Tipperary’ and ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ might very well be bringing a lump to the throats of audiences at concerts and music-halls at home, but the troops on the march preferred more exclusive ditties. In that respect the 11th Battalion of the Prince of Wales’ Own West Yorkshire Regiment was more fortunate than most, for it had the distinction of counting a genuine songwriter among its officers. He was 2nd Lieutenant Levey, who came from a musical family and, having been named after a well-known violinist of the day, sported with pride his given names of Sivori Antonio Joachim. The ditties which he had composed for the delectation of the junior officers of his mess had permeated downwards (which, in the light of their frequent and lusty renderings, was not remarkable). The 11th POWs had adopted as their marching anthem a song which celebrated the comparative delights of a training camp in Blighty:

  Rugeley, Rugeley,

  We’re all enjoying it hugely.

  To and fro we gaily go,

  We’re always on the tramp,

  But if you think that Cannock Chase

  Is a lively and attractive pla-a-a-ce,

  You’ll be rugeley awakened

  When you come to Rugeley Camp!

  So sang the 11th as they foot-slogged towards the salient, and their indulgent officers joined in – Hobday and Knowles, Todd and Ostler, Miller, Wood and Porter and, of course, Levey himself, his huge frame towering above them all as he marched in front of his company on legs like tree-trunks. Of them all, Jim Todd was the only one who would still have two legs to carry him out again.

  In the back areas of the salient the troops trained and trained again. Life was pleasant enough for the newly arrived troops, manoeuvring in the May sunshine over untouched fields and meadows which were marked and t
aped out to represent the areas of attack. Advance with your company. Stick with your platoon. Stop and consolidate at your objective while the next wave passes through you to the next line of attack. In one of those pleasantly unopposed practice attacks 2nd Lieutenant Jim Todd of the 11th Prince of Wales, waiting at the tape that represented his company’s objective on the crest of Hill 60 for the 12th Durhams to pass through, was astounded to recognise a corporal of the Durhams as John Wilson. When the two young men had last met they’d been kicking a football around the park in their native Sunderland. But in this more serious game there was only time for an exclamation of surprise, a hasty greeting, a clap on the shoulder and the Durhams were past and on their way to the next innocuous objective.

  In addition to the field practice, the officers attended briefings. Convoys of them were brought from training camps all over the area to study the ground they would attack, on a vast-scale ground model of the Messines-Wytschaete Ridge which had been laid out on the slopes of the Scherpenberg. It had been painstakingly constructed by the sculptor Cecil Thomas, now an officer in the 23 rd Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment, and it was not unusual to see General Plumer himself on one of the wooden observation stands gazing down on it intently. In those weeks before Messines, Plumer seemed to be everywhere. Often close to the front line (too close, thought his staff), inspecting the arrangements for himself, or touring the gun lines as more and more batteries pulled into their positions. Next morning he would be in Bailleul, taking the salute in the main square, for whenever it was possible he made a point of greeting – albeit in such a formal way – the troops coming into the salient and into his command. He even popped up at St Omer in the south and visited the Second Army School of Instruction – a training school for officers. Six weeks before, as the smartest soldier in his platoon, Bill Morgan had been picked to go there.

  Private WMorgan, No. 24819, 10/11th Btn., Highland Light Infantry