They Called it Passchendaele

by Lyn Macdonald

  DriverJ. McPherson, No. 2273, C Battery, Royal Field Artillery

  You couldn’t do anything about the dead, and there were so many bodies about that you got callous about it. All that time, before the push in September, I was up and down the Menin Road, up and down, up and down, taking ammunition on the backs of horses and mules up to the dump. They had to keep the Menin Road open, because it was the only way you could get up to that sector with horses and limbers, and it was shelled day and night. The Germans had their guns registered on it to a T, and the engineers had to keep filling up the shell-holes. They filled them up with anything. If a limber got a shell and was blown to pieces they just shovelled everything into the crater and covered it over, dead horses, dead bodies, bits of limber – anything to fill it up and cover it over and keep the traffic going.

  I was a driver in the artillery and it was our job to get the ammunition up. We could only take limbers so far because of the shell-holes, so we had to go up the rest of the way with a walking squad, leading the horses. Each horse carried four shells, two on either side – and they were the big heavy ones with brass cases. We used to go twenty of us together, leaving the wagon lines at about three o’clock, up to the dump to get our shells, and we reached the guns about seven o’clock at night – if we were lucky enough to reach the guns. We sometimes thought it was a complete waste of time. The gunners never saw half the shells. With the weight of them they were just sinking into the mud, and it was a complete waste of ammunition because they couldn’t find them.*

  The bombardment started all along the front on 15 September. They called them ‘practice attacks’, laying down haphazard drum-fire on different sections of the line, just as if an attack were imminent, in order to confuse the enemy. And the gunfire reached a pitch it had never reached before, for all the guns of the Second Army were now trained on the right half of the sector and those of the Fifth were concentrated on the left. Many of the batteries in the centre of the salient were registering their guns on the mound of ruins that had been the village church of Zonnebeke.

  Although Zonnebeke itself had long been pounded to rubble, it was ‘fresh’ ground. If the troops advanced at this point it would be a real advance, and from Zonnebeke the road swung off to the left and ran straight to Passchendaele. But the troops on the right were attacking again at Glencorse Wood, and like the men on the left in front of St Julien, they would be attacking through the decomposing bodies of their fallen comrades.

  On the grisly strip of land that still separated the British line from the German front on the old Zonnebeke-Langemarck Road, battalion after battalion had perished in successive attacks – the Herts, whose rations George Fisher had brought up in vain seven weeks previously; and the Scots, whom Rory Macleod had watched sinking and dying in the mud. During the night, Lieutenant Alfred Angel had brought his platoon forward ready to attack in the first wave. Their first objective was a small strongpoint just in front of the road, and they lay waiting for zero hour in shell-holes just fifty or sixty yards in front of it, crouched among the mangled remains of the dead.

  Lieutenant A. Angel, 2/4th London Btn., Royal Fusiliers, 58th Division

  Most of my boys were young Londoners, just eighteen or nineteen, and a lot of them were going into a fight for the first time. Regularly during the night I crawled round to check on my scattered sections, having a word here and there and trying to keep their spirits up. The stench was horrible, for the bodies were not corpses in the normal sense. With all the shell-fire and bombardments they’d been continually disturbed, and the whole place was a mess of filth and slime and bones and decomposing bits of flesh. Everyone was on edge and as I crawled up to one shell-hole I could hear a boy sobbing and crying. He was crying for his mother. It was pathetic really, he just kept saying over and over again, ‘Oh Mum! Oh Mum!’ Nothing would make him shut up, and while it wasn’t likely that the Germans could hear, it was quite obvious that when there were lulls in the shell-fire the men in shell-holes on either side would hear this lad and possibly be affected. Depression, even panic, can spread quite easily in a situation like that. So I crawled into the shell-hole and asked Corporal Merton what was going on. He said, ‘It’s his first time in the line, sir. I can’t keep him quiet, and he’s making the other lads jittery.’ Well, the other boys in the shell-hole obviously were jittery and, as one of them put it more succinctly, ‘fed up with his bleedin’ noise’. Then they all joined in, ‘Send him down the line and home to Mum’ – ‘Give him a clout and knock him out’ – ‘Tell him to put a sock in it, sir.’

  I tried to reason with the boy, but the more I talked to him the more distraught he became, until he was almost screaming. ‘I can’t stay here! Let me go! I want my Mum!’ So I switched my tactics, called him a coward, threatened him with court-martial, and when that didn’t work I simply pulled him towards me and slapped his face as hard as I could, several times. It had an extraordinary effect. There was absolute silence in the shell-hole and then the corporal, who was a much older man, said, ‘I think I can manage him now, sir.’ Well, he took that boy in his arms, just as if he was a small child, and when I crawled back a little later to see if all was well, they were both lying there asleep and the corporal still had his arms round the boy – mud, accoutrements and all. At zero hour they went over together.

  For once the weather was not on the side of the enemy, although the signs had been ominous. However, after two weeks of comparatively dry weather, the drizzle and showers which had persisted for the forty-eight hours preceding the attack had only laid a slippery glaze across the surface of the earth. Beneath it there was a firm foothold, although the ground behind the German front was pounded into a mess of craters reaching almost lip to lip after the demented shelling of the last few days. But the drizzle ceased during the night and in the morning there was a mist lying over the salient. It was only a light mist, but it was heavy enough to put the Germans, for once, at a disadvantage. And the Allies had another ace in their hands, for the Australians, fresh from a long rest, were taking part in the battle. Part of their attack was to be from the Westhoek Ridge, down the slope to the shallow valley of the Hannebeke stream, and up the other side. On the extreme right of that sector lay Polygon Wood and just beyond, on the extreme left, were the ruins of the village of Zonnebeke, the objective of the British 3rd Division. Captain Baker was in command of the Company where the two sectors met.

  Acting-Captain L. J. Baker MC, 2nd Btn., Suffolk Regiment

  We were just on the right of the village of Zonnebeke as you looked towards the Germans, in front of Zonnebeke Lake. Our objective was a place called Le Moulin – at least, so it was marked on the map, but we couldn’t see a mill or any sign of one. We’d had no trouble getting up and there were tapes laid to show us our assembly positions. People say that the morale of the Army had gone down in those days – well, it hadn’t in our battalion. The idea of anyone refusing to go over the top was absolutely absurd. Of course, we were a regular battalion and although there were very few regular people left in it after the Somme, most of our troops were Suffolk men and we all had the same temperament – steady and slow, not dashing and daring. Reliable men.

  Well, we did it. We made it. We advanced about a mile, thanks to the mist. The trouble was that we couldn’t find this mill. I could see this patch of water and I said, ‘Well, that must be Zonnebeke Lake and that must be the church, what’s left of it’ – for it was just a pile of rubble – but I can’t see that windmill.’ And then as I was looking round I saw a faint trace of a track with some white rubble at the end of the track, and that was it. That was ‘Le Moulin’, just on the edge of Zonnebeke. We had no trouble, just the usual fighting, and we also had a shrapnel barrage which burst on the top of the mist. You could see the flash going in front of us and it was very accurate, and we followed that all the time until we got to our objective. It was so easy that some people got wounded, because they went on so fast into our own barrage and through it.

  On B
aker’s right the Australians were doing so well that they had the same problem.

  Sergeant J. Stevens, No. 2795, 58th Btn., 15th Infantry Brigade, 5th Australian Division

  It was just as though the battalion was carrying out an exercise during manoeuvres. There were only a few casualties, and we moved down into the dip and up the further slope through the 20th and then through the 18th Battalion, which had advanced well beyond its objective. Our colonel, Colonel Martin, had got to the first objective almost as soon as his leading platoons and set up an advanced headquarters, and he observed that some people were pushing too far forward and were being caught in our own barrage. So he sent the order forward that we should re-align the position and consolidate it.

  Acting-Captain L. J. Baker MC, 2nd Btn., Suffolk Regiment

  On that occasion, we were told not to dig trenches when we got to our objectives, because by now they knew from experience that that would draw artillery fire. So we were occupying a string of shell-holes. But when I looked over to our right, I saw these Australians standing there in broad daylight and digging in for all they were worth. I dodged my way over to contact their Company Commander and got hold of him and said, ‘Your chaps are digging trenches and you know we were told not to.’ He said, ‘Well, we’ve been ordered to do it and the boys prefer it.’ There wasn’t much I could do but I said to him, ‘Well, you know, you’ll be shelled and when you are I shall get it too. I shall get your “overs”.’ I had only just got back to my position when they had a hell of a blasting. It went on for hours, and when it stopped and I went back over to see them they were in something of a mess. But we all got everything we went for. Of course, the Germans tried to stage one or two counterattacks during the four days we held the position, and we could see them coming down the slope and our SOS went up and… slap… down it came on the Hun – shrapnel, machine-gun barrage – the poor old Germans. That happened two or three times. The trouble was that once our SOS had gone up and our shells started coming down, then the Germans thought we were going to attack and they shelled us.

  Inevitably we had casualties. The most unfortunate thing was that I accidentally wounded one of my own men. It was the same night, and it was bright moonlight and Jerry had started shelling gas. We had our gas-masks on and were squatting in this shell-hole when a runner chap came along with a message, and he was standing up there silhouetted against the moonlight. I shouted, ‘Come down!’ – but, of course, he couldn’t hear me because of the gas-mask, so I pulled him by the leg. Unfortunately, as he fell down into the shell-hole, a bayonet leaning against the side went right through his thigh. It started to gush blood and I was absolutely horrified. I said, ‘I say, I’m frightfully sorry about that!’ Well, this chap was grinning all over his face and he said, ‘Oh, that’s quite all right, sir – it’s a Blighty one, isn’t it?’ He was as pleased as Punch. Of course, I had to give him a note to the MO. I scribbled it on a piece of paper and said, ‘This is not a self-inflicted wound. I did it.’

  They called the fighting of that week the Battle of the Menin Road and by the standards which had been set since the campaign began on 31 July it was a success. Inverness Copse was cleared. At last the bloody stumps of Glencorse Wood were in Allied hands. A brigade of South African troops had swept over Beck and Borry. Most of Zonnebeke was taken, and the British had at last managed to cross the graveyard of their soldiers in front of St Julien and make their way across and beyond the shattered cobbles of the Zonnebeke–Langemarck Road. The London boys had taken their objective. In the attack, Lieutenant Alfred Angel was severely wounded, lost an eye and was ever after known as ‘Nelson’. The boy he had slapped in the shell-hole the night before received multiple gunshot wounds and did ‘go home to Mum’. Merton, the fatherly corporal who had comforted him, was killed by the same burst of fire and never went home at all.

  But the line had been advanced and, in places, by up to a mile. It was good, but for Haig’s purposes it was not quite good enough, for on 23 September he was finally forced to cancel the amphibious attack on the coast which had been the corner-stone of his argument in favour of the Flanders campaign. The advance had been won only by throwing in a greater concentration of men and guns than ever before. But certain key areas were still holding out. On the right, Tower Hamlets beyond Shrewsbury Forest; in the middle, a part of Polygon Wood; while above Langemarck the mighty Eagle Trench still guarded the approaches to Poelcapelle. All three would have to be conquered before the Allies could start to move forward on the last lap towards the Passchendaele Ridge itself.

  Eagle Trench was the big stumbling block. It had been one of the objectives in the attacks of 20 September, but it had resisted them just as it had resisted the efforts of the 20th Division to capture it on the day Langemarck had fallen almost three weeks before. It was a stronghold and the Germans had thrown in crack troops to defend it. In spite of their efforts, and in spite of the fact that, even after some reasonably dry weather, conditions north of Langemarck were still wet and marshy, some local attacks had succeeded, and parts of the formidable trench that snaked and curved through the muddy flats had been captured. But the centre, the most important part, was still in German hands. Behind its high ramparts of sandbags, supported by three massive concrete strongpoints forty yards to the rear, the German stormtroops who defended it resisted all efforts to eject them from their position, which they had been ordered to hold at all costs. The British were now beyond them on either side and, for once, it was the Germans who were in a salient. Ironically, this was partly the reason why it was so difficult to throw them out. An attack on such a narrow front supported by the usual artillery bombardment would cause as many casualties to the British troops in the line of fire as it would to the Germans. It was equally obvious that such a bastion could not be taken by unsupported infantry armed only with bombs, rifles and bayonets. A barrage there must be, and the only solution seemed to be to use a barrage of trench mortars firing lethal, short-range, accurate missiles. On the night of 22 September the trench mortar guns were brought up to the front and every available man was rounded up for the action. Captain Percy Coltman had been in hospital with trench fever and had just returned to rejoin his battalion.

  Captain P. Coltman, 11th Btn., The Rifle Brigade

  It was a Saturday afternoon when I got to the transport lines, and they said that the battalion was in the line and it was stunting the following day. It was our so-and-so luck that we always stunted on a Sunday and almost as soon as I’d reported I got a chit from the Adjutant, a man named Bosville, telling me to go up the line and join them. They gave me a guide and we set off as soon as it got dark. He was a terrible guide. Of course, it was a long way up; we had to go right up over this flooded ground and over the Steenbeek. Long before we got that far, the guide was in trouble. We were going up one of these duckboard tracks and every now and again I’d hear him say, ‘Oh, my God’, and with a great splash he’d slip off the duckboard and fall in a shellhole full of water. I don’t know how many times I hauled him out, so at last I got so fed up with it – because it was very unhealthy at that point, there were shells coming over all the time – that I said, ‘Look here, would you like to go back?’ He said, ‘Yes please, sir, I would, because as a matter of fact I’m night blind.’ So he set off back and he hadn’t gone fifty yards before he got a shell to himself. That was the end of him, I’m afraid.

  I went on and eventually I found where the battalion was, and they had their HQ in a pillbox. I went inside and Davidson was sitting in a corner dozing; his upper denture was flopping about over his lower lip, he was so fast asleep and snoring. I woke him up and he said, ‘Oh, thank God you’ve come, Colty.’ He said, ‘Look, come outside,’ and when we got outside he said, ‘Look over to the left there. See that bit of wood sticking up there?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘See that other thing sticking up over there on the right? Well, those are your boundaries and you’re going over at seven with the right half of the battalion.’ So I said, ‘Well,
where are they?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘they dug in last night.’

  I went forward and found them in one of these old German trenches we’d captured, and the first man I saw was Snarey. He was a runner I had, a mill-hand in Lancashire in private life, and he had not the slightest fear of anything. As a matter of fact he’d got a sword stuck in the wall of the trench, and he’d got his dixie and some shredded-up sandbag canvas and candle-grease alight in a tin, and he was heating up some pork and beans.* Well, it was nearly time to go, so I said, ‘Put that away, Snarey, no time for breakfast.’ He said, ‘All right, sir.’ But we went over shortly after that and I just happened to glance round to see that the men were keeping direction, and there was Snarey, rifle slung, and he was spooning his pork and beans out of his dixie with the lid of a Three Castles cigarette tin. I can see the green band round it now. And that’s how he went over! He was a wonder, that chap.

  The attack was preceded by the trench mortar barrage, and when they had fired the last round the gunners shot up a white Very light to signal the troops across. The bombing parties had crept forward under cover of the barrage, and the moment it ceased they bombed their way along Eagle Trench from either side while Coltman led his men in a frontal attack.

  Captain P. Coltman, 11th Btn., The Rifle Brigade

  We had very little trouble, we were attacking with swords – we always attacked with swords – but the bombing boys had done their job and the Germans were coming along the trench with their hands up.* We got 102 Boche out of it, but I rather think not all of them got back to the cage. We had one nasty moment. They were coming along with their hands up and there was one evil-looking devil and he suddenly picked up a rifle that was lying on the parapet of the trench. Quick as a flash, he fired at one of my sergeants, who was standing on the parapet with a Mills bomb in his hand, marshalling them out of the trench. He shot him right through the ankle. My sergeant just lifted his foot and his face contorted a bit, then he pulled the pin out of the Mills bomb, waited about a second and a half and slung it at this Boche. I saw it happen. It hit him in the head and blew his head off. Well, it didn’t take us long to clear them out after that, although we were a little bit busy for a time. And we cleared them out of the two block-houses at the back of the trench. In fact they started to run out of them when they saw it was all up in Eagle. We had set up a couple of Lewis guns by that time and we made it hot for them as they went. Of course, we had casualties ourselves. We lost quite a few men. As we were moving I jumped into a shell-hole and there was one of my boys there, down on one knee, ready to go on. As soon as the moment came, I shook him on the shoulder and shouted, ‘Come on!’ As I shook him his tin hat fell off and half his head with it. He had been scalped as he waited. I had to leave him where he was, for at this moment the Germans were massing for a counter-attack. We could see them about 400 yards away forming up in a line, so we were working our way over across to reinforce the line of the 10th Battalion on our left flank. Luckily I was able to find two enemy machine-guns which they had abandoned on their way back, and I got some of the chaps on to them and we managed to stop the counter-attack. In fact by going a bit forward to stop it, we managed to get further than we had really been supposed to and we consolidated there, with Eagle Trench quite a bit at our back – and their block-houses too.