Gough had already studied the reports. Everyone knew, so far as it was possible to know, what the situation was. The question now was, what could be done to improve it?
To their ears, the rumble of gunfire in the distance was no more ominous than the sound of the relentless patter of the rain in the tossing trees. The news of the first successes of the day, the capture of the first German lines, had been flashed to London, where in Fleet Street the headlines had already been set for the early editions of the morning newspapers.
GREAT ALLIED ATTACK
YPRES SALIENT WIDENED
FIRST DAY’S OBJECTS ACHIEVED
But it would have been more correct to say that the objectives of the first few hours had been gained, where they lay in the weakest outer perimeter of the German lines. On the left of the sector, the Guards had done wonderfully well and had got right up to their third objective, a tiny rivulet called the Steenbeek. But the enemy was ranged in force on its other bank and the Steenbeek itself, under the torrent of water that poured from the leaden skies, was stretching and widening, and dissolving the ground on either side into a glutinous soup. In the adjacent sector the 51st Highland Division had also reached the Steenbeek and hung grimly on to its position, in spite of shattering shell-fire and heavy counterattacks. The 39th had reached much further, as far as the Zonnebeke-Langemarck Road, but had been forced to fall back to St Julien, leaving in its wake a field of dead and wounded Tommies lying thick on the ground. They lay thick on the Frezenberg Ridge too, where Borry Farm and Beck House, gained at such awful cost in the afternoon, had been lost again in the evening. They lay on top of the Westhoek Ridge. They lay thickest of all around the Menin Road within sight of Glencorse Wood.
Recasting their plans, Gough and his commanders were under no illusions. There could be no question of pressing home the advance. Tomorrow the troops would have to consolidate. Tomorrow, at all costs, they would have to be relieved, for although the troops who’d taken part in the initial assault had been told that they would be withdrawn at nightfall, in the unexpectedly appalling conditions and the confusion of the front, there was no way of getting reliefs up until the Engineers had managed to make some sort of tracks to give them a foothold in the quagmire. Then there were the guns. How were they to be moved?
On the open site on which C.241 Battery stood awash at Hilltop Farm, Major Rory Macleod was not, at that moment, thinking of that particular problem. His whole concern was to keep his guns firing, for enemy shells were still thundering down on the infantry holding the ruins of St Julien. The Germans were firing from permanent, sheltered gun positions with solid dug-outs and shelters. At Hilltop there was no shelter at all. Not for the guns, not for the men, not even for the ammunition – and the new load of ammunition which had reached C Battery just an hour before was already sinking into the mud. Each shell had to be dug up and cleaned before it could be fired. It doubled the work, and the men were already weary. Macleod intended to work out a rota whereby they could each have an hour or two of rest in the coming night. There was no billet to rest in, of course. Whoever could be spared from the guns must simply make the best of it, and lie wrapped in a groundsheet somewhere between the shell-holes, under the endless rain. Already they were soaked to the skin. They wouldn’t be dry again for a fortnight. Still, they were better off than the infantry.
*
Less than two miles ahead in the inferno of shells exploding on the front around St Julien, the four Company Quartermaster Sergeants of the ist Battalion, The Hertfordshire Regiment, were looking for their battalion. They were hours late, for the ground had been impassable in places, but they had kept on going with their small party because they were bringing up the Herts’ supper – rations for 600 men.
CQMS G. W. Fisher, 1st Btn., The Hertfordshire Regiment, 39th Division
I saw my company off, with extra bandoliers of ammunition and so on, and I remember shaking hands with the officer commanding the company, Captain Lowry MC. He shook hands with me, and I looked at him and he looked at me and I knew he wasn’t coming back, and he knew that I knew that he wasn’t coming back. He said, ‘I’ll see you tonight up on the Green Line’ – that was their third objective. I said, ‘I’ll be there all right.’
Normally, the rations went up on limbers, but the mud was so bad that we had to take them up in panniers on pack mules. The conditions were so bad that we saw some of the artillery people, who were taking their ammunition up that way, actually having to shoot some of their mules, for they were right up to their stomachs in mud. They just couldn’t get them out. When we eventually got to what had been the first German line, the officer in charge of the transport said, ‘Well, this is as far as I can take my mules. I am dumping the rations here. You must make contact with the companies and get carrying parties down to take the rations up.’ So, he about-turned with his mules and off he went. There were four Company Quartermaster Sergeants, myself and three others, and we decided between us that two of us should go forward to try to find the battalion, one would stay with the rations, and the other one would try to find Brigade Headquarters to get some indication as to where the battalion might be. We tossed up for the different jobs and it fell to my lot to have to find Brigade Headquarters, so I set off. There was a most tremendous bombardment going on all the while. After a long time, I found the Brigade Headquarters. They were in an underground German concrete pillbox just in front of St Julien. I went down the stairs, saluted the Brigadier, told him who I was, explained the position and said, ‘Could you give me any instructions, sir, that would help me to find the battalion?’
He just stood and looked at me. We were both standing on the steps, and the pillbox was rocking like a boat in a rough sea with explosions. After a while he said, ‘I’m sorry, Quarters, I’m afraid there isn’t any Hertfordshire Regiment.’
Of course, I was flabbergasted but a Company Quartermaster Sergeant doesn’t argue with a Brigadier. I said, ‘Well, sir, my problem is we’ve got rations for 600 men, including four two-gallon petrol tins of rum, can you give me any instructions as to what to do with it?’ He thought for a moment or two, then he said, ‘Well, Quarters, everyone’s had a very hard day today so distribute it to anyone who happens to be about that you think could do with it – and then get back to your transport lines.’
We got rid of the rations to all sorts of people who were coming by – pack mules and transport people, artillery men, engineers, anybody at all. But we kept one two-gallon can of rum for ourselves for the trek back. It was five or six miles to the transport lines, through all the mud and rain, and we needed something to get our courage up to tell them that the battalion had been wiped out. We were all that was left. The few of us who’d been left back at the transport lines. About 10 per cent of the strength.*
The divisions which had been standing by, ready to go in to relieve the exhausted men out in the forefront of the battle, made hopeless attempts to get up the line, but after a little way they had to be withdrawn, and squelched their way back again to damp bivouacs in the rear. The engineers worked on. Bill Mathieson and Major Storey had been out all day on the Pilkem Ridge, surveying and marking a route over terrain that, in the course of the day, had turned from mud to swamp, so that the vital road could be built which would enable supplies and guns and even tanks to move to the new front line for the next attack. Miraculously, the road had been pushed forward a considerable distance beyond the causeway over the canal, but as Mathieson and Storey made their weary way back at nightfall, they were able to make out through the rain and gloom a terrible debris of shattered limbers and the bodies of men and horses, grotesquely strewn among the craters. In the half-light, little groups of stretcher-bearers were still wading through the swamp among the carnage. Limbers were still rumbling up the newly-built stretch of road, heavy with great loads of raw beechwood planks. Rain streamed from the horses’ manes and poured off the ground-sheet capes of the Tommies and sappers who plodded behind, heads bent against the storm, as th
ey went forward to carry on the work. Away to left and right, men were struggling to lay duckboards in a tortuous track that snaked round and between the shell-holes, and all around them exploding shells sent fountains of mud and water roaring into the air.
Rifleman J. E. Maxwell, 11th Btn., The Rifle Brigade
By dusk, we’d been at that job for eight hours or more and the wounded were still coming down. Two of the RAMC people stopped just by our working party. They were carrying a young German private, obviously very seriously wounded. They laid the stretcher down on our duckboards and asked if anyone spoke German. Our lance-corporal said, ‘Yes, I can speak a bit.’ They were older men than us, and one of them said, ‘Well, just have a word with this lad if you can, will you?’ So he bent over the stretcher and said something to this boy. Some words of comfort in German. And the boy looked at him, and he said just one word, ‘Mutti.’ Then he died. We knocked off, but I kept thinking about him. They were in the same boat as ourselves.
A mile and a half away in a captured German dug-out near the Steen-beek, Jim Annan and a handful of others were uncomfortably settling down for the night. They could have done with some of the rations that George Fisher of the ist Herts was giving away to all and sundry in the murk a mile away, for no Company Quartermaster had reached them, and they were having to make do with iron rations – bully beef and hard square biscuits. They dared not show a light, for they were within yards of the Germans, across the Steenbeek, and the open gap which had been the Germans’ rear entrance was now facing the enemy lines. It was a doorless aperture, framing a curtain of rain that changed from green to blue to silver to fiery red, against the backcloth of rocket flares and explosions. Gusts of rain blew in, drenching the crouching men inside, and over the lip of the aperture the muddy water trickled and splashed and plopped into the ever-deepening pool that covered the concrete floor.
Lieutenant J. Annan, 1st/9th Btn., Royal Scots Regiment
Uncomfortable!I should say it was. Our kilts were soaking, and when you sit in the freezing cold with a wet kilt between your legs it’s beyond description. It was really only a two- or three-man pillbox. We managed to squeeze in five or six, so we took turns to squat in it for a bit, then we’d crawl outside and let some of the other fellows in. We had blokes wounded, badly wounded. We’d laid them on Jerry duckboards – because we’d no stretchers – but this entrance to the pillbox was so small we couldn’t get the duckboards through. So there was nothing for it but to cover the men with groundsheets, lay them on the open ground in the shelter of the back wall of the pillbox, and post a sentry there to keep an eye on them. Then there was a lull in the shelling, and through the machine-gun slit on the back wall of the pillbox we heard this terrible kind of gurgling noise. It was the wounded, lying there sinking, and this liquid mud burying them alive, running over their faces into their mouth and nose. We had to keep heaving the duckboards up and trying to put some other stuff underneath, just so that the fellows wouldn’t sink so much. We couldn’t understand why, in the name of God, anyone had ordered an attack like that over terrain like that. It was impossible.
A hundred yards away, John Ritchie had not been fortunate enough to find a place in the dubious shelter of a flooded dug-out. When he and his mates had settled themselves on the slippery sides of a deep shell-hole, there had been a foot or so of water in the bottom. By midnight, it was up to their armpits. At least, remarked someone, it softened their supper for them, the ration biscuits so hard that they squeaked against your teeth. The thought consoled no one. Every man among them, every man along the confused line of the front, had been awake now for more than forty hours and had been marching or fighting for the last twenty-four.
The eight Corps Commanders, although reasonably sheltered in the comparative luxury of their headquarters’ billets, also passed an uneasy night as they tried to make some sense of the situation on their fronts and worried about the outcome of the battle. At their meeting with Gough, it had been agreed that the attacks should proceed as soon as the reliefs could get in. On 2 August (and now that it was past midnight, that meant tomorrow) fresh troops would go ahead for the original objectives in the sectors where they had not been reached in the first assault. Then, on 4 August, the divisions now resting on the Steenbeek would attack the village of Langemarck. But it could only be done if the weather improved. First, it would have to stop raining.
As the miserable, grey dawn stretched leaden fingers over the Passchen-daele Ridge and crept across the salient to Frezenberg, Bill Morgan, dozing in a shell-hole, awoke with the rain still beating down on his face. It was a large shell-hole, half-full of water, and half a dozen men clung cramped and exhausted to its sides. Opposite Bill was an officer of the Cameron Highlanders who had crawled in during the night. He lay at an awkward angle, his mud-coated legs sticking out from beneath a bedraggled kilt. There wasn’t a mark on his body, but his head lay under the water. Bill could see his face quite clearly. The eyes were closed. He had slipped in and drowned in his sleep.
It was 1 August, the first day of what was destined to be the wettest August in living memory.
Chapter 12
It went on raining as if some malevolent deity had opened a tap in the heavens. It rained in sheets, in torrents, in cataracts. It rained as no man since Noah had ever remembered it raining before. It rained without stopping for four days and four nights.
The water falling from the sky on to the lower slopes of the ridges where the troops were grimly holding on to their ragged front line was augmented by water pouring from the high ground in front of them, in cascades that turned every stream into a torrent, every ditch into a watercourse and every trench into a creek of mud and effluent. It soaked into the earth and seeped up again from below as the Tommies who found themselves on open ground shovelled into the mud and threw up breastworks of slush for cover. They despaired of finding any dry ground, for no matter how deep they dug, it was mud, mud, mud that turned to liquid as soon as it was exposed to the rain, in trenches that filled with water as fast as the troops could bail them out with mugs and tin hats. But they had to go on trying to consolidate the line, to find a way of wedging a Lewis gun on the crumbling rim of some slimy hole, for there they were and there they had to stay.
In spite of the weather, the Germans were not content to sit in the shelter of their concrete strongholds but were throwing their men out into the morass in violent counter-attacks, supported by devastating machine-gun fire and terrible shelling from their positions up the hill. By some kind of miracle, a strong force of Germans managed to wallow across a porridge of churned-up mud and bodies between the Zonnebeke-Langemarck Road and St Julien, and retook St Julien itself. Later, at their last gasp and in a feat that was little short of miraculous, the bone-weary remnants of the men they had thrown out, managed to regain it. In most places it was stalemate.
The Army sat hunched, sheltering as best it could from the flying shells and rain that fell so heavily that Major Macleod, struggling towards his new forward observation post a thousand yards ahead at Oblong Farm, found it exceedingly difficult to register his guns on their objectives, for the simple reason that within five minutes his artillery map disintegrated and turned to pulp in his hands.
The Engineers worked on. The roads and tracks crept forward. The supply columns struggled as far as they could towards the line with materials for the roads, ammunition for the guns and rations for the troops – if they could get that far. Not many rations did reach the line. There were iron rations, of course, tins of bully beef in their haversacks and a reserve supply in the haversacks of dead comrades. There were sodden biscuits. There was the possibility of brewing tea on a tommy cooker contrived from a cylindrical cigarette tin filled with strips of wadding, judiciously soaked in methylated spirits before departure for the line. But there was only that possibility if you could find a match dry enough to light the wick. There were the wounded to be tended, cheered and comforted as they lay soaked, unconscious or quietly moaning.
There was little enough that could be done for them. Like everyone else, they had no alternative but to wait until the reliefs came.
By midday on Saturday the rain had gone off. A watery sun was doing its best to sneak around the clouds. The relief had come up. Damp and weary, the boys were going out of the line.
The wounded, or those of them who had survived four days’ exposure to the elements, were going out too, carried by comrades or stretcher-bearers on a four-hour journey through the swamp to the ambulances that would take them to the casualty clearing stations. It was not amazing that the casualties of the battle had been reported to be light, for only a fraction of the wounded had been able to crawl back or be carried from the field. Now the convoys were pouring in, and the nurses were rushed off their gum-booted feet.
Sister J. Calder, No. 19 Casualty Clearing Station at Remy Siding
In a camp hospital it’s dirty because the ground is earth, there’s no linoleum on the floor, nor wood. It was simply grass, we were walking on grass all the time – or rather it was grass before it turned into mud. And, of course, we were shelled and had shell-holes round about. It was that week at No. 19 that Matron fell into a shell-hole one night when she was doing a night round. We searched for her all over the place, because she was needed in the hospital and couldn’t be found. Finally she was found dragging herself out of this shell-hole, a great deep one from one of those very heavy high-explosive shells. She’d been in it an hour and she’d just managed to prevent herself from being drowned, for it was full of water.
They Called it Passchendaele Page 16