They Called it Passchendaele

by Lyn Macdonald

  Dusk fell. It was time to go.

  Tom Cantlon was keeping a wary eye on the whereabouts of his officer as he marched with C Company of the 21st Battalion of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps towards the front. It was not an easy thing to do because it was dark now, and since the KRRs were to form part of the first wave of infantry to attack they had the longest distance to go to the front line.

  The KRRs were fed up. They’d been on the move, more or less, for thirty-six hours now. In an hour or so they would be going over the top, and they’d be going over without so much as a drop of rum. The rations had caught up with them all right, an hour or so earlier, but Jerry had seen fit to put over a salvo of whizz-bangs as soon as they had been dumped, and the precious rum jars had been smashed to smithereens. It was not an unusual occurrence. The jars were stamped with the initials of the Special Ration Department. The soldiers preferred to believe that the letters actually stood for the prognosis ‘Seldom Reaches Destination’. Tom had broken the gloomy news to Lieutenant Harrison, who was thereby saved the trouble of dishing out the rum ration.

  ‘Never mind, Candon,’ said Harrison, patting the water bottle slung on his hip, ‘you’ll get a drop before we go over. Remember, if anything happens to me, there’s a drink in this bottle.’

  Like many other infantry officers, Harrison carried two water bottles in an engagement, one containing whisky for the comfort of shocked or wounded men. Harrison was a good sort all right, and he was particularly good to his servant, Rifleman Cantlon. Every time he sent him off for a message, for a packet of cigarettes or a pad of writing paper, he would give him ten or twenty francs, and he never failed to say, ‘Keep the change.’ As a result, Tom always had plenty of money. This was just as well because Alf Bicknell, his mucking-in chum in No. 3 Platoon, never had any at all. Alf was a good-humoured cockney from Poplar who was always broke, and not only broke but mortgaged to the hilt. On pay parade days, back in camp at la Clytte, Alf managed to stay solvent for approximately thirty seconds after receiving his money. Hold out your hand. Receive five francs. Salute. One step back. Another salute. About turn – and Alf was broke again! But he was a good pal and Tom had no objection to sharing the proceeds of Mr Harrison’s generosity with him. What he did object to was Alf’s irritating habit of imitating the noise of approaching shells, a bellicose parlour trick which he had perfected to a fine art. He was doing it now as they trudged towards the line – as if there weren’t enough shells coming over and noise going on without Alf joining in. ‘Why don’t you shut it, just for a change?’ said Tom wearily. ‘Whizz-z-z-z-z-z-z BANG!’ replied Alf. Rumless, No. 3 Platoon plodded glumly on.

  With all the noise going on, it seemed ridiculous that the lads of B Battery had spent a couple of hours earlier in the day wrapping sandbags round the wheels of the gun carriages, to muffle their sound. Just before departure, they had even swathed the hooves of the patient horses who were pulling the guns. Ridiculous! Or so, in a moment of comparative silence, one of the bombardiers observed ironically to Sergeant John Miller. Sergeant Miller merely grunted in return. His job was to get the forward guns up as close as possible to the front line to cover the infantry as they went across. And with Jerry, monarch of all that he surveyed from the ridge that now loomed up faintly in front of them in the darkness, that was a task which could not have been achieved in daylight.

  Now there was only an hour or so of darkness left before the kick-off. It was little enough time to get even these light guns into position and ready to fire. They had to get them right up almost to the front line with, for once, no thought of finding any cover that would conceal the flashes as the shells streaked from the muzzles. Luckily, the carrying parties had already made many journeys to dump a plentiful supply of eighteen-pounder shells, so there was just one ammunition wagon at the back to worry about, but still it would be touch and go. There was no possibility of deploying as they moved up. The gun carriages had to stick to the road and the road was a mess. What with the Germans replying to the artillery bombardment for days past, and the shells still flying across, the road was littered with debris, broken wagons, dead mules, and even the bodies of dead soldiers scattered all over it. Some attempt had been made to push them towards the side of the road, but so thick was the movement of men and transport in these hours before the battle that it was impossible not to run over them. The men on the limbers knew that those forward guns just had to get there, but dark as it was as they bumped and jolted along, they were careful not to look down.

  The heavy section, Machine Gun Corps, was also on the move. They had little, if anything, to do with machine-guns. To be precise, they were the tanks. The men who manned them as they lumbered up behind the troops, waiting to jump off, were the young buccaneers – at least in their own eyes. For they were the dashers. Adventurous lads, whose comfortably-off families had been able to indulge their sense of adventure by endowing them with that exciting mechanical toy of the pre-war years – a motor cycle. And a motor cycle, in those days before the war, was adventure indeed.

  The lucky few were a band of brothers bound together by subscription to a periodical – The Motor Cycle. Its pages they had eagerly studied week by week, turning them with fingers from which no amount of scrubbing would entirely remove the grease-stains. Nick Lee was one of this exclusive coterie, and one of the first to have answered an appeal in its columns for recruits who were able to drive and had a sound knowledge of the internal combustion engine. They were needed for a new unit to be called the Motor Machine Section of the Machine Gun Corps. The original idea, back in 1915, was to form teams of two men, one to ride the motor cycle and the other to man a machine-gun mounted on a side-car. Such teams, it was imagined, would be able to range far, wide and fast over battle-zones, wreaking havoc on the enemy as they went. In theory it was a good idea. In practice, as the armies settled down to trench warfare, it was useless. So the army was left with a nucleus of young men of high calibre who, by now, were all crack shots. What was it to do with them?

  The answer was to train them to use the new secret weapon. It was Winston Churchill’s idea and, as First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill had had a finger in the pie of the development of the revolutionary ‘land ships’. They looked like nothing on earth, but by stretching the imagination no more than a little the huge lumbering monsters might just pass for travelling water tanks; and so, for security reasons, ‘tanks’ was chosen as a cover name. The crews had other names for them and each crew christened its own tank. One was called Autogophaster, another Otasel. The tanks in Nick Lee’s section were named after shows then running in London: Oh I Say, Look Who’s Here, Watch Your Step, We’re All In It, So Search Me. Nick’s crew christened their first tank Keep Smiling.

  The tank and its crew had managed to keep smiling, more or less, through a number of more-or-less disastrous attacks over terrain which was totally unsuitable for tank movement. Then Keep Smiling was knocked out by shell-fire in November 1916. Her crew thought it appropriate that her successor should be christened Revenge.

  Now, as Revenge and the sister tank Iron Rations sat with the other tanks of A Battalion close to the jumping-off point, her crew felt particularly pleased with themselves. It had taken them three days to make the journey from their base, travelling by night and parking by day in a wood or ruined farmhouse in order to escape aircraft observation, and two days before departure it had been decided that the name of every tank should start with ‘A’, the identifying letter of the battalion. No problem, the boys agreed. They would change the name to Avenger. The suggestion was turned down and authority decreed that Revenge and Iron Rations should become respectively Apple and Apricot. But, in the midst of the battle preparations, no one had time to supervise the rechristening ceremony closely. It was Jock Duncan’s idea to blot out the original name by smearing a temporary coating of mud and water over it, and it was therefore a simple matter, at the first stop, to rub the mixture off again. So Revenge and Iron Rations were going into battle
under their own cock-snooking ‘colours’.

  It was quiet in the tank with the engine switched off, and the crew talked among themselves as they waited – the driver, Jock Duncan; the corporal-in-charge, Nick Lee; Fillingham; Preece; Chapman; Bolton; and Banner, who was universally known as ‘Connie’ because of his incessant talking about his sweetheart who bore that name. Suddenly it became quieter still. An hour before the battle the big guns stopped and the German batteries, doubtless thankful for the respite, stopped too.

  The area around Wytschaete is renowned for nightingales. Apparently undeterred by the pulverising shell-fire of the last few days, as silence fell over the front they began to sing. The night was warm and starry. The foil moon sailed high in the sky. Forty minutes before zero hour everyone was in position. Everyone except C Company of the 21st KRRs. They were lost. Or at least Tom Cantlon’s platoon was lost, for the trenches were crammed with men encumbered with equipment, and in the communication trenches it was impossible to make your way except in single file. Tom had long ago lost sight of Lieutenant Harrison, or any other officer for that matter. The jumping-off positions had been taped and marked ‘first wave’, ‘second wave’ and so on, with assembly trenches numbered right up to ‘32’ at the rear. But the infantry of the 41st Division were spread right across their sector of the front, at the bottom of the ridge between Messines and Wytschaete, and the 21st KRRs could have been anywhere on the first-wave tapes. As the guns fell silent, No. 3 Platoon began to get really worried.

  *

  Some of the 36th Ulster Division had also had trouble in finding their exact position. Lieutenant Witherow of the 8th Battalion, Royal Irish Rifles, had at last succeeded in rounding up his men. He was relieved and excited too because he knew that they were about to make history. They were positioned at Kruisstraat, just to the right of where the great Span-broekmolen mine would go up, and they were to be the very first troops across in the vanguard of the first wave of infantry. On their left was the 16th (Irish) Division, and for the first time in history Ulster and southern Irish regiments would be fighting side by side. There was a certain advantage in being the first troops across, for the enemy would have no time to set up a retaliatory bombardment, but nevertheless casualties were bound to be heavy. Lieutenant Witherow looked around at the impassive faces of the soldiers near him. Happy is the man, he thought to himself, who has not got a vivid imagination. But still, who was to know what another man might be feeling? Doubtless his own expression was equally impassive.

  In his advanced headquarters some miles away in a railway carriage on a siding near Godwaersveldt, Sir Douglas Haig was sound asleep in bed. At his headquarters, rather nearer the front, General Sir Herbert Plumer began to pace the floor.

  All along the front the plungers that would fire the mines were brought out from the dug-outs, and the engineers waited in a ferment of anxious excitement. It was General Plumer s plan but it was also their work which was about to be proved. In a matter of minutes all the planning, the toil, the preparation would culminate in the greatest man-made explosion the world had ever seen – or felt. No one quite knew what the effect would be. It was not entirely impossible that it would set off an earthquake or, at the very least, a shock wave which would bury the troops alive, German and Allied alike. At three o’clock along the length of the front from Ploegsteert to Hill 60, after checking the time on the illuminated dial of his watch, each officer gave a quiet order. Right along the front the troops, as quietly as their heavy equipment would allow, scrambled out of the assembly trenches to lie flat behind the rear parados. All except No. 3 Platoon of the 21st KRRs.

  ‘Well, every other blighter in this platoon’s had a go at finding the battalion,’ announced Tom Cantlon in a hoarse whisper, ‘I might as well have a go too.’ He pushed his way to the front and the platoon pressed on. They knew that they were very near the front line, but unless they found the battalion in the next five minutes they would be left behind and lost in the confusion as the troops advanced. Five minutes later, by a happy fluke, Tom stumbled on the right trench and scuttled into it with the platoon at his heels. Suddenly they were challenged in a whisper: ‘Halt. Who goes there?’

  Tom found himself staring down the barrel of Lieutenant Harrison’s revolver. ‘It’s only me, sir.’

  ‘Where the devil have you scurvy lot been? There’s only seconds to go now, before the mines go up.’

  Mines? It was the first No. 3 Platoon had ever heard of them.

  ‘Quick, up behind the rear parados or you’ll be buried alive.’ Lieutenant Harrison scrambled up behind them and the men lay flat and waited. The silence of suspense pressed down on 80,000 men lying prone on the earth. Some of the troops were astounded to hear a nightingale sing as they waited.

  The tension was worst of all at Hill 60, where the Germans were known to have been tunnelling within inches of the charge. It was by no means certain that they had not reached it, for the listening galleries and tunnels had been cleared many hours before. Lieutenant Todd, lying out behind the jumping-ofi” trench with his men, mentally went over his instructions. If the mine did not go up the infantry were not to wait for it. They were to go ahead as soon as the barrage opened. But what would happen if the explosion were merely late? Todd tried to push the thought from his mind and glanced at his watch. Ten seconds to zero.

  In front of Spanbroekmolen, Captain Greener was standing upright in a trench. Immediately behind him a dark shape flapped slightly in the breeze that preceded the dawn, and somewhere in the back of his mind he marvelled that an observation balloon could have been brought so close to the front line. Its crew lay flat around it beside the piled-up gas cylinders, ready to start the job of inflating and hoisting the balloon as soon as the troops went over.

  Five seconds to go. The officer beside him bent over the plunger. Four – three – two. Far to the rear, as if in signal, a single gun fired.

  ZERO

  Lieutenant J. Todd, 11th Btn., Prince of Wales’ Own Yorkshire Regiment

  It was an appalling moment. We all had the feeling, ‘It’s not going!’ And then a most remarkable thing happened. The ground on which I was lying started to go up and down just like an earthquake. It lasted for seconds and then, suddenly in front of us, the Hill 60 mine went up.

  2nd Lieutenant J. W. Naylor, Royal Field Artillery

  Our plunger was in a dug-out, and the colonel and I were actually standing outside the dug-out because we both knew what was going to happen and we wanted to see as much as we could. The earth seemed to tear apart, and there was this enormous explosion right in front of us. It was an extraordinary sight. The whole ground went up and came back down again. It was like a huge mushroom.

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

  The earth seemed to open and rise up to the sky. It was all shot with flame. The dust and smoke was terrific. And all this debris falling back.

  Rifleman T. Cantlon, No.33419, 21st Btn., King’s Royal Rifles

  We could hardly believe it. We couldn’t take our eyes off it. We’d only known about it a minute or so before and we could hardly believe our eyes. None of us had seen anything like it ever. It was just one mass of flames. The whole world seemed to go up in the air.

  2nd Lieutenant J. W. Naylor, Royal Field Artillery

  I can see it now! It was tremendous. One almost felt ‘Good old England.’ You wanted to wave a little Union Jack. Thank God we’ve done something. It had a tremendous moral effect. To sit there day after day in these ghastly trenches with nothing of any importance happening and suddenly you get a major thing like that. It goes home. It’s good!

  Corporal T. Newell, 171 Tunnelling Coy., Royal Engineers

  We all just stood looking. And then the officer beside me, the one who’d pushed the plunger, I heard him say, ‘There! That’s avenged my brother.’

  And then the barrage started. The infantry went over.

  Chapter 5

  MESSINES RIDGE

  CA
PTURED

  ATTACK ON NINE-MILE

  FRONT

  BRILLIANT BRITISH

  SUCCESS

  OVER 5,000 PRISONERS

  The following

  telegraphic dispatches

  were received from

  General Headquarters

  in France yesterday:

  11.05 am – We attacked at 3.10 am this morning the German positions on the Messines–Wytschaete Ridge on a front of over nine miles.

  We have everywhere captured our first objectives and further progress is reported to be satisfactory along the whole front of the attack. Numbers of prisoners are reported already to be reaching collecting stations.

  The Times, Friday, 8 June 1917

  Tom Cantlon, who had seen service on the bloody battlefields of the Somme and Arras, had never seen anything like it.

  Rifleman T. Cantlon, No. 33419, 21st Btn., King’s Royal Rifles

  They didn’t seem to have any wits about them. We didn’t even have to bother to take them prisoner. We didn’t have to trouble about sending anyone to escort them back. We just saw them coming at us through the smoke, running towards us like jelhes. They didn’t know where they were. You just jerked your thumb backwards and they ran off towards our lines – and on we went.

  Waiting in an assembly trench to go over in the second wave, the ioth Worcesters could see nothing of the battle but smoke and flame from exploding shells. As dawn spread across the sky the dust thrown up by the erupting mines still hung thick in the air. Through the fog the first wounded started to appear, but the first inkling that Henry Russell and his companions had that the battle was going well was when the Germans started stumbling towards them.

  Acting Lance-Corporal Henry Russell, No. 39891, 10th Btn., Worcestershire Regiment

  They were white, haggard and half crazy with fright. One big German, naked to the waist and with horrible wounds on his face, chest and back, staggered in our direction. Shorty bawled to him to cross the trench by the bridge which had been placed near us overnight. The wounded man misunderstood, and thinking that some fresh horror was overtaking him, suddenly gathered strength and took a flying leap into the midst of us. This was rather startling, but with the help of a certain amount of dumb show we directed him to the nearest dressing-station, and after we had helped him out of the trench he went on his way. The second line was taken and more wounded and prisoners came into view. Carrying parties with bombs and ammunition set out for the new lines, and then came the order to advance.