They Called it Passchendaele

by Lyn Macdonald

  Major R. Macleod DSO, MC, C.241 Battery, Royal Field Artillery

  We had a tremendous barrage down that morning. All you could see, in front of the German line, were red and yellow flashes of shells bursting. The Germans must have been completely demoralised, because although their artillery was firing back on the infantry as they tried to get across, there was hardly any machine-gun fire coming from the German trenches. But there was no chance of the infantry getting across. I watched them gradually trying to work their way forward, struggling like blazes through this frightful bog to get at the Germans. However, they were up to their knees in mud, and by the time they got half-way across, it was virtually impossible for them to move either forward or back. Then when we lifted the barrage, the machine-guns started to pick them off.

  I learned much later, after the war when I had access to the German unit records, that the Germans were so demoralised that they were all prepared in front of our infantry to come out and surrender as soon as our barrage lifted. But when it did, they saw the infantry struggling and realised that they couldn’t get to them, so they went back into their shell-holes and started shooting them up. They just went down into the mud. It was a sickening sight. It made me feel quite ill to watch it.

  Macleod might have felt even sicker had he known that it would be five weeks before the infantry succeeded in getting across the mud and craters of the one-time fields that lay between St Julien and the Zonnebeke-Langemarck Road. On the left, however, as Sir Douglas Haig had jubilantly informed Sir William Robertson, Langemarck had fallen; and the victory was due in no small measure to the men who had managed to cross the boggy Steenbeek two nights earlier and hung on to the precarious toehold at the foot of the rise where the Langemarck Road ran up to the village. But the taking of Langemarck was only part of a more ambitious plan. For the second objective, after the troops had cleared the ‘green line’ east of Langemarck, was to proceed to attack and occupy the strongly-held Eagle Trench some 700 yards beyond the village, and Eagle Trench was one of the most highly fortified German positions in the salient.

  The task of bridging the Steenbeek, so that the infantry could cross it and forge ahead to Langemarck, had been given to C Company of the 12th Battalion, The Rifle Brigade, led by Captain Albert Rissik; and Rissik in turn was depending on his right-hand man, his Company runner, Corporal Greenwood. They made an unlikely combination. Rissik was a Public School man and a schoolmaster. Greenwood was a mill-worker from Lancashire, with such a broad accent that the Southerners in the battalion had difficulty in making out a single word he said. But between Captain Rissik and Corporal Greenwood, understanding was complete. ‘We have a hot job on tonight, Greenwood,’ Rissik had remarked earlier in the day. Greenwood was not perturbed.

  Captain A. Rissik, 12th Btn., The Rifle Brigade

  The carrying party with the bridges was due to leave at 8.30., so half an hour earlier, at dusk, the runner and I move down through Iron Crossroads. We go down the road to the branchless trees on the bank of the stream, and measure off some forty-five yards to the first position, No. 1 bridge. We wait rather tensely for a bridge to appear. Greenwood goes to the rendezvous on the road short of the stream. Could they all make it down this well-strafed road? Absolutely deserted; but before long this bank would be rustling with assembling troops. As I wait, Very lights, shells and machine-gun fire divide the darkening minutes. Then a gigantic camel looms above me where I am seated on a tree-stump. It is the twelve-legged No. 1 bridge and Greenwood, thanks be. They prop it on end, and as I wade across the stream it is lowered on its rope. It is firmly tied down on both sides. Greenwood has gone back to guide in bridge No. 2.

  One by one, to my great relief, all the bridges loom up in turn. We have them all in position two hours before zero.

  The infantry crossed over and fought their way to Langemarck. By early afternoon some of them had even fought their way to Eagle Trench 700 yards beyond. At four o’clock, at the very moment that a smart and shining orderly was serving tea in delicate china cups to Sir Douglas Haig and Sir WiUiam Robertson at GHQ, Rissik and five of his men took tea in the fortified ruins of a captured farm near Langemarck in which they had set up their Company Headquarters. The food had been scrounged by Corporal Greenwood, for no rations had reached them.

  Corporal H. Greenwood, 12th Btn., The Rifle Brigade

  The Captain sends me to the KRR s HQ, to find if our rations have gone there by mistake. But they haven’t. Two wounded Tommies and one wounded German are lying in their pillbox. I return with this news and am sent back to Battalion HQ, taking Lewis with me, to find the Adjutant and ask for rations for twenty men. We get water, biscuits, jam, tea and sugar. With these I make tea for six of us and then have a rest. Afterwards Captain Rissik decides to go across to a German pillbox some seventy yards away, to use it if it is empty; but we find Germans there with a guard from the Shropshires. Four are wounded, one has dysentery, one is unwounded. The Captain talks to them in German. He tells them he will bring them part of our rations and some water. He gives each of them a cigarette and we return to take them back some rations. Then, Sergeant Greaves arrives. There was trouble at Eagle Trench.*

  Captain A. Rissik, 12th Btn., The Rifle Brigade

  Sergeant Greaves brought the message over half a mile of open country, heavily muddied, and he was sniped at all the way. He arrives panting, full of consternation. Our battalion is occupying only part of Eagle Trench where it dipped down at the right. The rest of the trench, a massive affair, a great mound built up to give at least eight feet of trench depth, is still in German hands; and our heavy guns are shelling the section we hold, under the impression that it is still held by the enemy. The men have had to evacuate the trench and fall back 200 yards.

  Rifleman J. E. Maxwell, 11th Btn., The Rifle Brigade

  Our people all climbed out except me. I was at the end of the trench, so I was the last. I was collecting my rifle – because it was a crime to lose your rifle, a serious crime – and I had to take up all my other things: pick, shovel and rifle grenades. I was just gathering all this up when a shell came over, just on the lip of the trench, and buried me right up to my neck. They dragged me out absolutely shell-shocked. The Lance-Corporal said, ‘What’s the matter?’ and I simply couldn’t speak. They sent a man to take me back, because I could hardly walk, and he half-dragged me back to the doctor’s dug-out a bit in the rear. He just looked at me and put a ticket on to my uniform tied to a button. By the time I was dragged back to the first-aid dressing-station on the canal bank in a stream of other casualties, I couldn’t walk at all; I simply fell down. So they put me on to a stretcher and took me in an ambulance to No. 62 Casualty Clearing Station at Proven. They tipped me on to a bed and by that time the mud and filth was all solidified round me like a suit of armour, and I well recall one of the nurses who was trying to strip me saying, ‘Well, we can’t get his uniform off. We’ll have to cut it off.’ So they did. Of course, there was nothing peculiar in that. They had to cut nearly every uniform off the blokes when they were brought in.

  Next day the attempt to recapture Eagle Trench had to be given up. In the 12th Battalion alone, 1 officer and 31 riflemen were known to have been killed; 12 officers and 148 riflemen were wounded; 7 riflemen were missing; 1 in every 3 of the men who had gone into the line had come to grief.

  Captain Rissik himself made one last valiant attempt, gathering the men who had evacuated the line, and after their own artillery had stopped firing on it led them back.

  Corporal H. Greenwood 12th Btn., The Rifle Brigade

  The 10th Welsh Battalion arrives to relieve us and we hand over the line. We make our way back over the Steenbeek stream, Stray Farm, Candle Trench, Caesar Avenue and over the canal bridge 6A. There we get an issue of rum. Captain Rissik gives me a cigarette and we have a smoke. The Captain tells me he is going on leave. I say that I am glad to hear this news.

  General Gough spent the evening studying the situation reports from the different sect
ors of the front. When he had finished, he ordered a staff-car for ten o’clock to be ready to drive him south to Haig’s headquarters.

  At ten o’clock the following morning, having spent an uncomfortable night together in a cellar in Courtrai, George Winterbourne and his companions in misfortune – weary, filthy, bedraggled and only marginally drier – were marched into a hall to await interrogation. A German officer came in, immaculately uniformed, booted and spurred. He looked them up and down and remarked, quite affably, and in perfect English, ‘Hello, what’s this? Another English attack, is it?’

  Another English attack, at least in the salient, was precisely what Gough intended to prevent, if it was within his power to do so. He put his case forcibly to Haig. He spoke of the terrible loss of men for every yard of ground gained. He stressed the difficulty of getting rations and ammunition up to the line. He spoke of the guns sinking into the morass. Of the terrible exhaustion of the infantry, and the impossibility of their being able to succeed in what they were being asked to do in conditions that were not merely appalling but hopeless.

  When it came to the advance of infantry for an attack across the waterlogged shell-holes, movement was so slow and so fatiguing that only the shortest advances could be contemplated. In consequence I informed the Commander-in-Chief that tactical success was not possible, or would be too costly, under such conditions, and advised that the attack should now be abandoned.*

  In spite of everything, in spite of the monumental losses, in spite of the fact that each success so far had also been half a failure, Haig remained confident in his strategy. Gough left him, more dispirited than ever. There was no going back. And no matter how sincerely Gough believed that there was little possibility of going forward either, his men were now irrevocably committed to the toil, the agony, the weary crucifixion of the long slog through the mud to Passchendaele.

  Part 4

  ‘O Jesus Make it Stop’

  Chapter 14

  Pastor van Walleghem:

  17 August. We hear little news concerning the results of yesterday’s battles. If one broaches the subject with the officers, they know nothing, or they simply say that it was ‘all right’, which seems to indicate to us that things are not all right.

  9.30 pm. Five German aeroplanes over Reninghelst, probably attracted by the bright lights of the cinema, theatre and canteens. The police always seem to be most strict towards the civilians as regards black-out, but are extremely lenient where the Army is concerned. Not surprisingly, five bombs were dropped near by, killing two and wounding three.

  The troops had poured into Reninghelst from every camp and billet for miles around. Fresh out of the line, or waiting to go in, either way a concert would divert the mind from that other world of mud and flying steel just a few miles away. So the Tommies and Canucks queued up in the warm summer evening (for now that the attack was over, as if to set the pattern that was to persist with awful certainty for the next two months, the weather had improved).

  Rifleman H. E. Lister, No. 2330, 12th Btn., The Rifle Brigade

  It meant a lot to us when we came down the line, because there was nowhere to go, you see, it was all desolate. It made a great difference to the troops, though of course a lot of the troops didn’t think of anything more than going in the estaminet and getting a drink. Captain Gilbey started the Very lights and he had men out of the whole division. When they weren’t acting at night, they were doing such jobs as taking up the rations. They didn’t go actually fighting, but they were all serving soldiers. There was one number that always used to bring the house down, and they always sang it. It was called ‘Living in the Trenches’ and it was sung by the comedian in full kit with a blanket or pack, a French loaf, a couple of Mills bombs and a couple of candles:

  Oh what a life, living in a trench,

  Oh what a life, fighting with the French,

  We haven’t got a wife, or a pretty little wench,

  But everybody’s happy in an old French trench.

  When we move to the attack

  You should see my blinking back,

  Rifle, sword and ammunition

  All in the Alert position.

  One smoke helmet, haversack,

  Fourteen bombs inside my pack.

  Iron rations, some dubbin for me boots,

  And Gawd help you if you don’t salute.

  Everybody’s happy, everybody’s glad,

  It’s the seventeenth bloody shell we’ve had.

  Whizz-bangs, coal box, shrapnel soar

  And a blinking mine underneath the floor.

  It always used to bring the house down. It was so typical of what we had to go through, but somehow making a joke of it when you knew you had to go back to it made it all just bearable.

  It was ‘just bearable’ because there was now a new attitude of fatalism among the troops. If it had your name on it, you would get it. If it hadn’t, you would be all right. Meanwhile, a concert was a concert. So, as the German planes circled the concert hut at Reninghelst and dropped their bombs on the village, the troops sat on, merely clapping and stamping a little louder to drown the sound of the explosions. But it was only bearable if you still had your nerve, if you had not yet been pushed quite to the limit of endurance. A mile or so away at Proven the bombs were also dropping, and in the big marquee that was the shell-shock ward at No. 62 Casualty Clearing Station, John Maxwell lay recovering from his ordeal of the previous night.

  RiflemanJ. E. Maxwell, No. 445014, 11th Btn., The Rifle Brigade

  The bombs were very near, and in the ward I was in some of the patients went berserk. They were very, very bad cases of shellshock, much worse than I was, and two of them in particular got up and ran amok in the ward with their hands over their heads, screaming and screaming and screaming. It was shocking as it was all in the dark, for they’d had to put the lights out because of the air raid, and they were charging around banging into things and this dreadful screaming going on all the time. The nurses were wonderful and it was amazing how they dealt with the situation, and after a while they managed to get the blokes calmed down and back to bed. Then the doctor came, after the raid was over, and gave them an injection.

  A wound in the body would heal in time; a wound of the spirit was harder to cure. For the majority of the soldiers, sanity depended on not thinking ahead, of living for the moment and accepting each moment as it came. Their philosophy was simple. If you were a soldier in the line, you were either alive or you were dead. If you were alive, there was no need to worry. If you were dead, you were unable to worry. Therefore what was the point of worrying? If you could, you joked, and now that the war was into its fourth year even the deep soul-weariness of the interminable fighting was turned into a joke.

  ‘How long are you in for, Bill?’

  ‘I signed for seven years or Duration.’

  ‘You’re lucky! I’m Duration.’

  It was the catchphrase of that August in 1917 – Roll on Duration – the classic response to the news that there was no jam in the ration sandbag, that two companies of your battalion had gone west in an attack, that there was no clean shirt to exchange for your lice-ridden one, that you were on a carrying party tonight, that you were going up the line in the morning. Roll on Duration.

  The men working at the engineers’ dump on the Pilkem Ridge shouted it several times a day, whenever a little railway engine puffed up the newly-laid track pulling truck-loads of supplies and ammunition. The REs had been quick to notice that its identifying number was ROD 1945. ‘Roll on Duration nineteen forty-five!’ they yelled with unfailing regularity, every time it hove into sight. After a while, the driver got fed up with the joke.*

  Now that the lines had moved forward, the spidery narrow-gauge railway-tracks reached well up towards the front. The tracks were constantly being damaged by shell-fire, and the troops of the Light Railway Sections were hard put to it to keep them operational. It was bad enough coping with the repairs that were the result of the attentions of
the Boche, but when other accidents happened their fury knew no bounds. Tanks and limbers could obviously not be expected to go the long way round, so in certain places there were movable ramps which could be laid over the railway lines to let the traffic across. One tank commander, Captain Birks, had the misfortune to be crossing a ramp as an engine approached. He had judged the distance to a nicety, and all would have been well had it not been for the fact that the tank stalled as it was half-way across the ramp. The locomotive was too near to stop, and the resulting mess made the name of the Tank Corps stink throughout the Light Railway Section. Their locomotive was damaged almost beyond repair but in the collision it had obligingly knocked the tank over on to the right side of the ramp, and as the jolt had started the engine up again, the tank was able to go on.

  It was 22 August – a date which does not figure prominently in the official annals of the battle for Passchendaele because the actions were not considered to be important enough to rank in history as a ‘battle’. Nevertheless, the events of that night stayed in the minds of many men for the rest of their lives. One was Jason Addy. The other was Rory Macleod. It is also remembered by the survivors of four companies of the 13 th Royal Scots and the 1 ith Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, who were in support when the leading companies of their battalions set off again up the terrible Frezenberg Ridge in one more weary and desperate attempt to carry out orders by securing the fortifications of Beck House and Borry Farm. Two hours after zero, a handful crawled back. They did better than the Seafbrths on their left, for none of them came back at all. Only beyond them was there the least measure of success, where the 7th Cameron Highlanders succeeded in sweeping the Germans off the rising gradient of Hill 35 and establishing a foothold on its crest.