They Called it Passchendaele

by Lyn Macdonald

  At five o’clock in the morning of 1 October, we got to Boulogne. We were freezing cold and as stiff as a board, and we didn’t care a hoot. There were three large boats waiting to take the troops on leave. We were the first eight men on the first boat. We were the first off at Folkestone. We ran up the platform with our packs and our rifles and got into the train in the first compartment behind the engine – and we were the first off and through the barrier at Victoria. There was an air raid on when we got there and we were told to take cover. Well, we laughed at that. We weren’t likely to be frightened of a Zeppelin after what we’d come out of. But the Underground was closed and there were no trains running, so we walked all the way to Euston to get the night train. We had to stand in the corridor all the way, but in the morning we were in Scotland.

  Somewhere in mid-channel on his joyful journey to Blighty, Dick Findlater passed a troopship full of less high-spirited soldiers who were travelling in the opposite direction. One of them was Bert Stokes, refreshed after Messines by a few weeks in a quieter sector of the front in France and the glorious culmination of a fortnight in Blighty. On Monday, I October he was on his way back. During his absence, the New Zealand Field Artillery had moved.

  Gunner B. O. Stokes No. 25038,13th Bty., NZ Field Artillery, 3rd Brigade

  Tuesday, 2 October. Back in the battery routine again, but what have we come back to? Passchendaele! The guns are in position near St Julien. The boys do not seem very keen about the prospects. Curly Cooper was wounded in the foot the first night I was back, and the same morning Jack Cantry had his foot crushed by a limber. So the battery is short-handed. To my delight I was informed that I was now to be a gunner permanently. Previous to now I have been spending a lot of time driving as well as taking my turn on the gun. Each man coming into the battery starts off driving whether he likes it or not. When I went into camp in New Zealand I said I wanted to be a gunner, so I was trained as a gunner and had nothing to do with the horses. Others wanted to be drivers and they were trained in the riding school. I arrived in France in midwinter and the first night I was billeted in a hayloft above farm animals. At six o’clock next morning the Sergeant came to me – a newcomer to the battery – and said, ‘These are your two horses.’ I replied, ‘I’m not a driver. I’m a gunner.’ To which his reply was, ‘You’re a bloody driver now.’ So that’s the way the army does it. For over six months I had two horses, and most of the time a sore bottom. I had only been on a horse a few times in my life.

  3 October. Today we moved our wagon lines from Poperinghe to near Ypres. The two brigades just pulled into an open paddock, no horse lines, no biwies, nothing. We got a few bivvy sheets and made a sort of shelter. At night it was my turn to go up with the ammunition. We filled the packs with shells from the wagons at the lines and walked all the way to the guns leading two horses. It was a long way and I thought we would never get there. We passed through Ypres, my first time in the town. It is a pitiable sight now, shell-shattered and in ruins, with the famous Cloth Hall looking stark and naked with one wall standing. The traffic on the roads was very heavy. As I passed through for the first time I marvelled and wondered at the immensity of the war and the sad state of Ypres. I am sure Webster could not have fully described the scene as I saw it tonight. Not with all the words in his huge dictionary. Fortunately we only had to do one trip. We got back to the lines at 11 pm, and, believe me, being just back from leave, I am tired! But the weather was fine and the ground reasonably dry where we went, so it was not too bad.

  It was bright moonlight, and strangely quiet on that night of 3 October. Both the British and German guns were holding back, ready to unleash a massive bombardment in the early hours – for both sides were planning to attack at dawn. The Germans had initially planned their attack for the morning of the third, and had only postponed it for twenty-four hours to give themselves time to stiffen their lines with reinforcements that would replace the heavy casualties of the last few days. It seemed to them a propitious moment to try to wrest back some of the ground they had lost, for such was the condition of the ground that they were convinced that the Allies could not possibly move their guns forward. With little artillery support, the infantry holding the front line would be easy meat.

  But somehow the impossible had been achieved. The gunners and horses had toiled and strained and heaved and dragged the guns uphill through the swamp, and now they were ranged in position behind the infantry. Throughout the night of 3 October the long khaki lines of soldiers moved in single file up the infantry tracks into the damp and dripping ditches of the front line. Beyond them, long lines of grey-clad soldiers were moving down the hill into the German lines. Both armies settled down to pass the hours until zero as comfortably as they could. In the early hours of the morning, the wind changed. Clouds began to scud across the bright half-moon sky. Soon it was blotted out altogether and the men in the trenches looked up and cursed as it began to rain.

  It had been decided that, for once, there would be no preliminary bombardment. Zero hour was timed for 6 am, and the British commanders were banking on the element of surprise. The Allies were going to attack along the entire front of eight miles. But the four German divisions were massed on the high ground between Becelaere, in front of Polygon Wood, and the Broodseinde Ridge in front of Zonnebeke. It was along this part of the front that the Anzacs were waiting to plunge into the assault.

  The rum ration was being issued. The men were waiting, ready to pick up their loads and go over the top at six o’clock, when with a crack, at 5.30 am, the German barrage opened and shells began to rain into the closely packed ranks of the Anzacs waiting at the jumping-off positions.

  W. J. Harvey, 24th Btn., Austrialian Infantry Force

  They pounded our position with high explosives, including minen-werfers and eight-inch shells, and we had tremendous casualties. It was the heaviest shell-fire the battalion had ever encountered on the jumping-offline. It was hardest on our battalion and on the 21st next to us. We had forty killed, including two of our platoon officers, and taking into account the wounded a third of our men were put out of action. Everyone kept their nerve, although it was a terrible strain to lie there under that sort of fire without being able to do a thing about it, knowing that there was a terrible struggle ahead and that we’d be going into it well under strength. It seemed an eternity before our own guns opened up and we got the order to advance.

  With gusts of wind from the west driving the rain into their backs, the Aussies scrambled forward into the bogland where the waters of Zonnebeke Lake had spilled over into the low ground in front of the Broodseinde Ridge. It was still more than half-dark, and as they struggled on between the two barrages smoke from the explosions covered their advance. It wrapped them in a haze that hid them completely from the Germans, who were packed into their front-line and assembly trenches with no shelter from the fierce shelling which they assumed was raining down in retaliation to their own bombardment. When the barrage lifted and the first Aussies loomed out of the mist, the Germans were taken completely by surprise. The Australians were no less surprised to find a strong force of Germans waiting with fixed bayonets, ready to go over the top and packed into their trenches in such numbers that they were unable to deploy to defend them. Infuriated by the havoc the German shelling had wrought in the assembly line, the Australians went savagely into the attack, wielding bayonets to such effect that a large number of the unfortunate Germans, seeing that the Australians were in no mood to take prisoners, shammed dead or wounded to escape the onslaught.

  W. J. Harvey, 24th Btn., AIF

  After we had passed on, a number of these Huns rose up and started firing on us from the rear. That, naturally enough, made the boys see red. Their deaths were real enough after that.*

  The German forces were completely overwhelmed and by 7.30 the troops were ready to go on to the next objective. By 9.30 the 24th Battalion had captured all its objectives and was ensconced on the Broodseinde Ridge eating the Germans’ brea
kfast. For, apart from over-running two gun positions and capturing the guns intact, they had also captured three enemy food-wagons. The hot soup was by then on the tepid side, the black bread was not particularly attractive to Australian palates, but who cared!

  Just past the Broodseinde-Becelaere Road, Lieutenant Ball and a party of men rushed and captured a pillbox and found to their delight that it was a German HQ, still occupied by an Intelligence Officer and his staff. Lieutenant Ball took them prisoner and sent them back, heavily guarded, to the Allied lines; meanwhile the men took stock of their booty. It was quite a haul. By the time Ball had sent his unwilling guests on their way and returned to the pillbox the men were making merry. Every one of them, smokers and non-smokers alike, was puffing a German cigar and delightedly swigging Rheinwein – a bottle apiece. They had found two boxes of German carrier pigeons in the pillbox, and it was unanimously decided to send an appropriate message or two back to Fritz at his Divisional Headquarters.

  The German Command had inevitably lost contact with its front lines and, knowing only that violent fighting was going on, some German officer must have watched with relief as the three pigeons fluttered into their homing boxes at Advanced Headquarters well beyond the Passchen-daele Ridge. The content of the messages was somewhat unexpected: ‘Deutschland iiber Alles! Ha! Ha!’ and ‘Hock the Kaiser – I don’t think!’ The third, carefully composed by Lieutenant Ball, was an unprintable request for certain information of an obscene and personal nature. It had the audacity to ask for a reply. The rest of the pigeons were plucked and stewed. They sustained the signallers and runners throughout what all of them agreed had been a satisfactory day.

  But it had been a costly one. By the end of the next day the strength of the 24th Battalion alone was reduced by exactly half. They had 10 officers left of the 20 who had gone into the line and just 253 out of 500 fighting men still in action. But they were in glorious possession of the Brood-seinde Ridge, and looking back over the rain-swept salient, took stock of their victory.

  W. J. Harvey, 24th Btn., AIF

  From the Broodseinde Ridge the whole field was under observation, and as we gazed back over the country we could see quite plainly the movements of our own units on various duties – guns, transport, men, the lot. The ridge was a prize worth having. Hundreds of German prisoners were now struggling back through our lines. By now we felt really quite sorry for them, they were in such abject misery. You could see by the strain on their faces that they’d had a bad time under our shell-fire. A lot of them were wounded and those who could were hobbling along as fast as they could to get away from the lines. There was one German officer, I remember. He was almost running in his hurry and, when someone tried to stop him for some reason, he said in English, ‘Let me go; I’ll get out all right. Damn the war!’ We let him go.

  It was the New Zealanders who, in the adjacent sector to the left of the Australians, had attacked over Abraham Heights and the Gravenstafel Ridge and got a foothold on the ridge of Passchendaele. On their left the British had made a small advance towards Poelcapelle beyond the notorious Eagle Trench. But the rain and the wind had blown up into a storm of lashing rain and gales. After two weeks of weather that was merely showery, the salient was once more awash. There was little chance of counter-attacks, but nothing more could be achieved until the troops could be relieved and the guns dragged nearer to the front. With every hour that passed the task seemed more and more impossible. On the confused front at Poelcapelle the troops watched and sheltered as best they could. Sometime during the hours of darkness, separated from the rest of the signallers, and with no chance of finding their battalion until morning, Harold Diffey and his friend, Corporal Pugh, found a reasonably dry stretch of trench a little way behind what they imagined to be the front line. They were wet, exhausted, bedraggled and, not to put too fine a point upon it, lost.

  Private H. Diffey, No. 21927, 15th (London Welsh) Btn., Royal Welch Fusiliers

  Of course, it had been an old German trench. Even at this stage there were a few stretches about that you could call by the name of trenches. But we were suspicious as soon as we dropped into it, because the Germans were always very careful when they retired – they never left anything behind but empty tins and ashes of fires – and, lo and behold, we saw this new equipment and a rifle at the entrance to this dug-out. We immediately suspected that there were Germans about, keeping very quiet. I still had the signal lamp with me, so I pulled it round off my shoulder and shone a beam of light down the concrete stairs, and there at the bottom of the steps sat a German soldier, apparently asleep. We get down – shine the lamp – no German to be seen. Pugh sees a candle end. We light it and then we see a pair of boots sticking out under a lot of sacks, so we pounce on it and haul out this German. Just a little bloke and frightened as hell. Jabbering away in German, which we don’t understand a word of. We search him. You’re supposed to search all prisoners, but what we’re after is cigarettes. We’re dying for a smoke. He doesn’t smoke. No fags. But he pulls out photographs of his wife and children and points to himself and says, ‘Saxon, Saxon.’ We take him to mean that the Saxons are friends of the British. I say to Pugh that we’re supposed to escort him back to the transport lines. Pugh says, ‘Well, I’m bloody sure I’m not going back with him, with all this iron flying about the sky!’ Then he has an idea. ‘Keep him here,’ he says. ‘If any Jerries counter-attack, he can shout up the stairs to them. If any of our fellows come along, we can shout up the stairs. We’re safer here than in London!’

  We sit down on the floor and after a bit the little Jerry relaxes. We go to sleep, all three of us huddled together for warmth.

  The storm continued. In spite of gale-force winds and driving rain, orders were issued for a fresh all-out effort. But first the guns had somehow to be dragged forward, and fresh troops, already on their way, moved into position.

  The soldiers wading thigh-deep in mud and water remarked wryly on the presence of the Royal Naval Division, and yelled at them as they marched into the line, ‘Blimey, that’s torn it. We knew they’d have to send the Navy in.’ The Navy, clinging to their rain capes and their dignity, gave a certain familiar signal in reply.

  On 6 October, with the bad weather showing no signs of abating, Generals Gough and Plumer conferred late into the night. In the morning they jointly proposed to Sir Douglas Haig that the campaign should be brought to an immediate close. Courteous as ever, optimistic as ever, elated by the advance of three days before, Haig refused to entertain the suggestion. Plans had already been made for a fresh attack on the ninth. Bad weather – which might clear up at any time – was not sufficient reason for cancelling it. The men had been splendid. Haig was proud of them. And Passchendaele was at last within their grasp. It needed one – just one – final effort to reach it. The campaign could not be abandoned now that the Germans must surely be at their last gasp.

  Thirty-six hours later the troops were on their way, shuffling up the long miles of sodden planks towards the tapes at the starting-point in the valley that lay at the foot of the Passchendaele Ridge.

  Chapter 17

  The bleak rain-swept expanse of mud which was the rendervous-point for the 2/5th East Lanes on the afternoon of 8 October was a far cry from the trenches in the sand-dunes at Nieuport where they had been holding the line all summer. Only a few days before, they had been brought back to the Ypres sector to miserable billets in the ramparts of the city, where they had been under almost continuous shell-fire. Admittedly at Nieuport they had been under the noses of the vigilant German guns in the next bay, and the ever-present floodwater had made life unpleasant enough. But there was fresh air to breathe and the clean ocean on their doorstep, so that Nieuport, which during their stay they had considered to be no picnic, seemed in retrospect like paradise compared to the stinking gas-soaked slough of the Ypres sector. Lieutenant Paddy King wondered how his boys of B Company were managing to keep so cheerful. They were almost all Burnley lads – ‘B for Burnley’ they
used to quip – and Paddy himself was almost the only southerner among them. But there hadn’t been a lot of quipping that day, and B Company, marching out through Ypres and into their first experience of the awful salient, had been strangely silent. Paddy King for once would have been happy to hear the strains of the long-familiar and boringly repetitious ‘Burnley Mashers’, with which B Company was apt to regale reluctant listeners on every possible occasion:

  We are the Burnley Mashers,

  When we go out at neet,

  The lasses all admire us

  and think we look a treat.…

  But trudging back from the final briefing to company commanders, Paddy King thought his men presented a sorry sight, either standing in dejected groups or squatting miserably over dixies set on the smouldering tommy cookers that, given time, might just produce a lukewarm drink of tea. The four-mile march from Ypres had taken almost five hours. Now they were ‘resting’ in the mud at the foot of the slopes they called the Heights of Abraham, before setting off at dusk on the long trek up the line. Many of the men were sick and shivering in the chill wind and Paddy King felt none too good himself, for there was an epidemic of feverish colds in the battalion and most of the Burnley Mashers had streaming noses and rough, sore throats. There was hardly a boy in the company whose solicitous mother would not have immediately packed him off to bed with a lemon drink and a hot-water bottle.

  Their orders were to capture the lower slopes of the Passchendaele Ridge and the attack was timed to start at 5 am. The Colonel had given his company commanders a very clear idea of the conditions they would find at the front, and King now passed on the information to his NCOs. The name of the objective was printed quite clearly on the trench map. In front of it lay two closely-printed lines of the black crosses that denoted the presence of strong German defences. It was called Waterfields. The area just to the left was marked with the name ‘Marshbottom’.