They Called it Passchendaele

by Lyn Macdonald

  We set off, bumping down over the terrible surface of the road, and sure enough I came to a small signpost with a red cross and an arrow on it. We carried our chap down a small pathway and we found the dressing-station in a cellar, with hurricane lamps and stretchers on the floor and men waiting for ambulances to fetch them. The sergeant sat in the cab all the time. He was nearly foaming at the mouth by the time we eventually started off. When we got back to the lorry park the sergeant put in his report. He got the Military Medal. You should have heard the lads when they heard about that.

  Far away from the inferno of the bombardment in the Headquarters Chateau near St Omer, Sir Douglas Haig was also foaming at the mouth. It was 19 July and he had just received a letter from General Sir William Robertson, whom up until now he had considered to be his main friend and ally in the War Cabinet.

  It pointed out that official approval had not yet been given to his plan, although it also expressed the hope that this would be forthcoming ‘in a day or two’. Haig was flabbergasted. ‘In a day or two’, to be precise in exactly one week from today, the offensive was due to begin. When the ‘approval’ finally reached him two days later it was couched in terms of such misgiving that a man of lesser confidence might have been utterly demoralised. As it was, Haig was indignant and aggrieved not only that his preparations had been allowed to proceed thus far without the support of the Cabinet, but that the grudging words of the ‘approval’ made it perfectly obvious that the War Policy Committee had no confidence in the strategy of its Commander-in-Chief.

  Gloomily, Haig summoned a meeting of his commanders to discuss the final details of the plan, and the results of that meeting did nothing to raise his spirits. For several days past, the salient had been covered by drifting mist, and deprived of its eyes the Army had been unable to complete the aerial observations it desperately needed before the attack. Uneasily, fully aware that he might be making the wrong decision, Haig agreed to postpone the attack for three more days. Zero day would now be 28 July. On 27 July came another bombshell. The French were not yet in position, and at this late date Gough, commanding the Fifth Army, was reluctant to proceed without them. And so Haig agreed to yet another postponement.

  Zero hour was finally fixed for ten minutes to four on the morning of 31 July. These two fatal postponements allowed the guns an additional full week to continue the bombardment which originally had been planned to last for seven days before the attack. Day and night they thundered on. A thousand miles away a depression was forming far out in the Atlantic. A cool air-stream was moving slowly towards northern Europe, and there was rain on the wind.

  Part 3

  The Rains Came

  Chapter 10

  Taut as a clenched fist poised for the knock-out blow, the Fifth Army stood in position along the knuckle of the salient. The ration parties had been and gone, the last hot meals dished out, and 6,000 gallons of strong, sweet tea slopped into outheld mugs. The last fiery tots of rum scorched down a hundred thousand gullets to soothe the clutching, knotted muscles. As the minutes ticked towards zero, an omniscient presence, able to pierce the darkness of the cloudy night, might have discerned the outline of the salient by a straggle of rising steam as the army emptied its bladder before going over the top. Then they waited for the whistle, bowed under the burden of 801b of equipment – rifle, haversack, gas-mask, water bottle; bombs, ammunition, entrenching tools; and down the back of every fourth man, the pickaxe or shovel that would send him ramrod-straight into the battle, unable to crouch and dodge the enemy fire.

  Behind the jumping-off positions the guns leapt and spat fire as the gunners slammed round after round into the breech. On the left of the salient at the canal bank in front of Pilkem Ridge, the engineers could hardly make themselves heard above the din as they shouted orders to the pioneers and working parties. Ever since dusk they had been working on the mammoth task of throwing causeways over the canal, so that the guns, horses and supply wagons could follow the infantry across. It was hard, backbreaking work getting the scooplike, open-fronted skips, heavy with earth and rubble, to the water’s edge. Skill as well as muscle-power was needed to transfer the centre of the weight so that the skip would tilt up and cascade its load in the right place. There was no room for mistakes, and no time to spare to shelter from the shells that burst all around.

  Squatting in the open outside a gun store in the dubious protection of the canal bank, Bill Mathieson of the 96th Field Company, Royal Engineers, was being spared the task of bridging the canal; but only because he had been detailed to go over as OC’s orderly, just behind the attacking infantry, to survey the route of the supply road that must be driven forward on the other side as soon as the troops advanced. Knowing Major Storey, whom Bill privately considered to be a terror, he had a shrewd idea that the order to proceed ‘behind the infantry’ would be interpreted so literally that they would be grazing the heels of the advancing troops. It would not be pleasant, although Bill had the slight consolation of knowing that, here on the extreme edge of the salient, zero hour would be slightly later than elsewhere and there was a chance (although it wasn’t much of a hope) that, by the time they got going, the Germans’ attention might have been distracted by the attacks on the adjoining sectors.

  At the time Bill was hardly in a position to know that he himself (with some hundreds of his comrades) was directly responsible for the delay. In order to throw bridges and causeways over the canal to carry the advance, the engineers had first had to cut away the canal banks. The Germans, in their listening-outposts on the other side of the canal, had mistaken the noise of this operation for the sound of tunnelling. Remembering Messines, they had wisely evacuated their front-line positions and retreated to the steel and concrete security of a second line a thousand yards behind. Four nights previously, in the course of their stealthy patrols into No Man’s Land on the eastern side of the canal, the Guards had discovered this interesting fact and had moved into the trenches, after an operation of consummate ease which involved little more than announcing their presence to the skeleton force of Germans manning the outposts. So the Guards, at the extreme left of the salient next to the French sector, now had the advantage of being already at their first objective. In order to give the other divisions time to catch up, it had been decided that zero hour, on their front, should be delayed by thirty-four minutes.

  The Guards were to attack one minute after the sun rose at 4.23. The time had been precisely worked out at GHQ. The staff officers agreed, as they pored over the map, sliding their fingers over an inch or so of glossy parchment, that in thirty-four minutes exactly, the troops in the neighbouring sector (the 3 8th Welsh Division) would have caught up level with the Guards in their advanced position. The trouble was that the troops would not be advancing over glossy parchment.

  At the best of times a foot-slogger trying to cross a ploughed field in the country around Ypres would find it hard going across the furrows of heavy clay. And the showery weather of the last few days had laid a film of mud over the ground, so that the men slipped and slithered as they ran forward through a turmoil of mounds and craters. In trying to circumvent them, in trying to find a foothold in the slippery, clinging mud, it was impossible to keep direction, never mind keep in formation. Even without the German shells, which as soon as the attack started had begun to fall on the advancing infantry, it would have been difficult going.

  At first they made astonishingly good headway. In keeping with their reputation, the 51st Highland Division were going across like terriers intent on flushing rats from a hole. In the vanguard of the attack, through the bursting shells and fountains of thrown-up earth raining back on them, the 4th Battalion of the Gordon Highlanders were plunging forward towards the first objective. Watching through binoculars from the top of the canal bank, three young officers of the ist/oth Royal Scots, waiting to lead the second wave across, marvelled at the progress of the Gordons. To be more precise, two of them, Jock Gellatly and a subaltern called Campbell who
had newly joined the battalion, stood marvelling. The third, Jim Annan, waiting prudently with his men in the lee of the bank as they waited to cross in the second wave, kept yelling at them to come down. The battalion was almost ready to move off when the shell came over. Lieutenant Campbell was killed outright. Jock Gellatly s arm was gone, but he was alive. There was time – just – for Jim to see him carried into an ambulance, already fall of wounded from the shelling. Jock, at least, was out of it. As Annan moved his platoon on to Bridge 4 to cross the canal, another shell screeched overhead and exploded on the spot they had just left. Jim Annan glanced back over his shoulder. There was only a cloud of dust where the ambulance had been.

  Lieutenant J. Annan, 1st/9th Btn., Royal Scots

  Our objective was as far as we could go. The Gordons were doing well. They were advancing away ahead of us, so we only got a few stray 5.9 shells on the way across. We didn’t have a single casualty until we got to Minty’s Farm. It was a strongpoint, an outpost, fortified by the Germans and bristling with machine-guns, but the Gordons had taken it. They took it with the bayonet, like wild things, and when we got to it the dead were lying all around. Germans, grey against the mud, all mixed up with the dead Gordons lying there in their kilts. But they’d taken it all right. They’d even set up Battalion Headquarters there, and moved away on ahead. Of course the Germans had every one of their own positions marked on the map and registered by their artillery, so that if they had to get out of them and give them up they’d have the guns on them right away. So, just as we were coming up to Minty’s Farm, the shells started falling all around. We got a slashing there all right.

  As we were struggling up to it one of the boys got hit with a huge shell fragment. It sliced him straight in two. He dropped his rifle and bayonet and threw his arms up in the air, and the top part of his torso fell back on to the ground. The unbelievable thing was that the legs and the kilt went on running, just like a chicken with its head chopped ofl! One of my boys – I think it was his special pal – went rushing after him. He had some mad idea of picking up the upper part of the torso and chasing the legs to join him up. I shouted him back and he was wild with me because he wanted to help his pal. He couldn’t realise that he was beyond help.

  I had a terrible job keeping the men bunched up, to keep contact, and just past Minty’s Farm, for the very first time I saw a man going berserk with the shelling. He came running back towards us just like a spectre waving its arms, and shouting and yelling, ‘Mother! Mother! Mother!’ I left the platoon – I shouldn’t have done that, but I went a little way towards him and got hold of him and said, ‘Come on. Come on over here, till we see to you.’ But he was like a mad thing. He just shook me off and ran on yelling, ‘Mother! Mother!’ completely off his head. That was the last we saw of him. We had to get on. It had taken us half a day to get that three miles. It might have been half an hour or half a year for all you noticed the time going.

  Some way ahead, John Ritchie, who had gone over in the first wave with the 6th Gordon Highlanders, literally stumbled across a pal of his from the same street in Inverurie. In their schooldays Jock Marr had been the butt of much chaffing directed at his huge buck teeth. Now, in the clamour of the battle, looking down at the dead boy, at the terrible scarlet hole where his mouth had been, Ritchie thought, ‘If it hadn’t been for those teeth sticking out, he might have got away with it.’

  The 39th Division started their attack from the front line in front of Hilltop Farm, and Sergeant Bill Booth of the 11th Royal Sussex Regiment was making progress half-left to the first objective, the capture of Kitchener’s Wood. They had practised the attack over and over again on the training grounds in the south near Armentieres, at a place called Jesus Farm. The training area had been specially selected, so their officers informed them, because it closely resembled the country over which they would actually attack. The practice attacks had taken place in growing corn, with ‘Kitchener’s Wood’, a mile behind the enemy front line, represented by the lopped-off branches of trees stuck into the ground.

  Now, leaping, stumbling, slithering between the churned-up craters, dodging the bursting shells as he went towards the real Kitchener’s Wood on the breast of the Pilkem Ridge, Booth could see not the faintest resemblance, try as he might, between the practice and the real thing. Nevertheless, on one of those days of practice attacks in the summer sunshine, Sir Douglas Haig himself had given them his blessing. The soldiers advancing towards the tapes that represented the enemy lines in the trampled cornfield had seen a group of cavalry approaching.

  Sergeant W. Booth MM, No.390, 11th Btn., Royal Sussex Regiment

  As they got closer we could see that it was Sir Douglas Haig. We were told to get down. As he arrived at our front he halted. I was Platoon Sergeant so he called to me to come to him. I explained to him all the details of the attack. He nodded. He smiled. He seemed to approve. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Wish all your men the best of luck.’ Then he was gone.

  Now, at the head of his platoon – shouting at his men to keep up, stopping to hoist up an overladen Tommy who had tumbled on the rough, slippery incline, diving into the shelter of shell-holes as the explosions burst around them, and floundering onwards through a storm of machine-gun bullets – Bill Booth cast his mind back to his moment of glory in the cornfield and wished that Sir Douglas Haig could see them

  The eighteen-pounder guns of Major Macleod’s battery, C.241, at Reigers-burg Chateau, had been firing all night on an ‘interdiction task’. This meant aiming at the roads and tracks leading to the enemy front, to deepen the barrage and prevent the Germans bringing up supplies and, more important, reserves to their troops, who were hard-pressed by the punishing bombardment on their front line. Even while the firing was still going on, Macleod had managed to have the gun positions broken down so that the battery was ready to move forward as soon as the word came that the first objectives were gained and being consolidated. When it came, the drivers were standing by ready to ‘limber up’ the horse teams to the guns, the officers mounted their own horses and the battery was ready to go.

  On the canal, the camouflage nets had been whipped off the bridges and now they were teeming with mule trains, with messengers, with men and materials streaming forward to the battlefront and, streaming back, a straggle of wounded and stretcher-bearers. Beyond the incline of the ridge, fumes of gas and cordite lay like a second stratum below the heavy rainclouds that were gathering above the battle. Now that the enemy guns had pulled themselves together and settled down after the initial attack, they were not only firing on the advancing troops but sending heavy shells further back to disrupt the advance of the reinforcements. It was a mile from the canal bank to the top of the hill. For Macleod and his cavalcade of guns and horses, advancing diagonally, it was close on two miles. They rode through the bursting 5.9 shells as if they were on parade, strung out in order of march.

  As they breasted the rise and looked beyond, Macleod looked back. A stream of gun batteries, nose to tail, stretched back right to the canal bank. A moment later, disaster struck. Just as C Battery was crossing the reserve trenches, the access bridge which had been hastily thrown across the night before collapsed under the weight of a wagon. It took an interminable half-hour to haul it out again and repair the bridge. In the cratered, muddied ground, there was no way of dispersing, so an entire brigade of artillery stood still on the wooden track, presenting the enemy on the ridges beyond with the finest target of the day. The Germans, perhaps, had their hands full with targets nearer at hand, for the British infantry were still making progress. Pulling into his position a little way out in what had been No Man’s Land, sweating from the effort of controlling his terrified horse as it bucked and reared and whinnied in the blast of an exploding shell which had almost thrown his rider out of the saddle, Rory Macleod had no time to take in more than a general impression of the scene.

  A shallow indentation ran just behind the breast of the hill rising to Kitchener’s Wood away on the hal
f-left. Taking advantage of this slight cover, the batteries pulled in one after the other until the shallow end of the valley was as thick with gun-barrels as bristles on a brush. The ground in front of them sloped gradually down to Admiral’s Road (in No Man’s Land, until that morning) and then to a hump-backed ridge. Behind it were the formidably fortified ruins of the hamlet of St Julien, and although machine-guns were still spitting busily all around it, the next wave of troops were already on the other side, making for the road ahead that linked the villages of Zonnebeke three miles to the right and Langemarck barely three miles to the left. The towers of the two village churches had long ago been shattered and turned into nothing more than grid references on the maps of British artillery officers, and the villages themselves were mere heaps of rubble. But they were visible, and their names had been bandied about so easily in the briefings before the attack that hardly a soldier on the field would have believed his ears had he been told that Langemarck and Zonnebeke, by the end of this day’s fighting, would seem as unattainable as the mountains of the moon.

  The guns were barely in position when the SOS signals began to go up from the vanguard of the advance as the Germans massed for a counter-attack. A few minutes later it began to drizzle and a grey Scotch mist rolled over the battlefield. One by one the landmarks disappeared from view, until even Kitchener’s Wood on the rising ground a scant mile away was only a darker smudge on the grey curtain that blotted out the horizon. Only the coloured SOS rockets could pierce it. In response, the grim-faced gunners sent round after round, barrage after barrage, of shells,trying to break up the German counter-attack, shortening the range as the troops fell back; and when yet another breathless runner brought back new information on the position of the infantry, shortened it yet again. The artillery officers knew that things were not going well. Before the afternoon was out Major Macleod, checking his dump of shells, realised that, in answering the SOS signals which had come so thick and fast, he had almost run out of ammunition. He sent a message back to the wagon lines. He must have more ammunition and he must have it soon. By four o’clock the rain had turned into a steady downpour that lashed and spattered and bounced and trickled into the earth. On their open site, unprotected by the sandbagged pit of a permanent gun position, smacking up showers of mud with every recoil, the guns were ever so slowly sinking.