They Called it Passchendaele

by Lyn Macdonald

  Even as the 2/5th Lanes were burying the long dead of the battles of August and September, the wounded who had been left behind when the Anzacs were forced back to their starting-line the previous day were drowning in the rising water of flooded shell-holes. Or, clinging to the muddy sides of craters in the chill of the driving rain, were quietly succumbing to exposure.

  But the Canadians were coming.

  Chapter 18

  The storm began to abate, and by 15 October the weather had improved. Now even the officers, even the commanders, even Gough himself, were beginning to be superstitious about the weather. In every attack it was the one uncontrollable factor. It seemed to the dispirited infantry that the real battle was with the elements and the terrible Flanders mud. It was almost a mockery when, after an attack, the air turned crisp and the sun shone from the hazy autumn sky, and it did little to raise their spirits. The battlefield was now so battered, so flooded, that the weak sunshine was as effective in drying the ground as a lighted match held over a bathtub full of water.

  In spite of the improved conditions, General Currie, in command of the Canadian forces, refused to move. He could not disobey Haig’s orders to throw the Canadian Corps into the attack; he could insist that the attack should take place in his own time. He would not move until sufficient guns could be concentrated to back up the infantry with a devastating bombardment. He would not move until the roads had been repaired and more had been constructed. He would not move until there were sufficient infantry tracks to allow his troops to reach the line well in advance of zero hour, so that they would be fresh and rested when the moment came for the attack. He would not move until there were enough mule tracks to supply them, and he would not even contemplate going ahead until heavy supplies had been built up in dumps very close to the line. When these preparations had been completed, and not before, the Canadians would attack. If every available man was thrown into the preliminary preparations, Currie envisaged that he would be able to mount a large-scale assault on Passchendaele on 26 October. The Canadians had come under the command of the Second Army, and General Plumer had no choice but to agree to Currie’s conditions.

  Everyone’s attention was now focused on the fortress of the highest ridge. But it was not enough simply to capture Passchendaele. Even if the Canadians succeeded they would simply find themselves in a deep and narrow salient with both flanks in the air. Before they made that final push the shoulders of the ridge must be secured, the front must be broadened.

  So, as the Second Army continued to push home attacks on the Gheluvelt plateau on the right, the Fifth Army went on battering in the area of Poelcapelle, and on its left the French pushed outwards into the Houthulst Forest. Once Poelcapelle had fallen, Westroosebeek would be a mere hop, step and jump away. If the troops could gain it as the Canadians advanced victorious on Passchendaele, the whole of the vital ridge, the last tier in the amphitheatre from which for so long the Germans had cocked a snook at the Allies, would be theirs.

  In the south the Canucks of a dozen brigades packed up and set out on the journey north. They were to get there as quickly as possible, and every piece of rolling stock, every lorry, every rackety omnibus was pressed into service to transport them. The fighting troops could wait. What General Currie wanted was labour, and he wanted it fast.

  Corporal D. R. Macfie MM and Bar, No. 6835, 1st Canadian Infantry Btn., Transport Section

  I was in charge of mules and men for four battalions. A whole brigade. I was called to Divisional Headquarters and was paraded up to this big bunch of staff, all red braid and all that, and they started asking me questions about pack trains. How many trips I could make over so many miles, and how much of this could be carried on so many mules. They told me to get a brigade pack-train organised, and they wanted the stuff so bad that the pack-trains would have to keep going night and day. Our base lines were at St Julien. There was an engineers’ dump there with everything – munitions, sandbags, shovels, water-cans, the lot. I’d get a list of what we had to load up. So many shovels, so many sandbags, so many water-cans, so much small arms ammunition. Then we’d get these mules, about twenty of them, and get them loaded up and their load balanced and then start off. It was a plank road. I went up to the end of the plank road and then it was a trail – just bricks out of buildings, thrown into the mud. In one part of it we had to go over a man’s back. He had been killed and just fallen into where they made the track. The clothes were all worn off his back with the mules tramping over him.

  We were shelled all the time, because with their observation balloons they could see the whole area. We could see the balloons sitting up there looking right at us. The most nerve-racking would be the searching. You never knew when the shells were coming, or where they were coming. You just got kind of stupefied and went on with your work and never noticed anything. I came home one night and went out to clean my horse, and I noticed a little blood on his side. So I picked around, got my jack-knife and picked out a shrapnel-ball between his ribs. Then I looked at my saddle and it had gone through the pigskin flap – just where my leg would have been if it had been in the stirrup. Boy, I sure wished it had been!

  The Germans were edgy. Once before they had been caught off guard, thinking that it was too late in the season and that the weather was too stormy for the Allies to continue the attack. Now, with the fighting on the flanks continuing undiminished, they were well aware that another major assault was more than likely. Short of themselves attacking, their only means of thwarting it was to pound the line, to pound every road and track, every gun-site, to saturate the salient and its back areas with shells and bombs as fast as they could be fed into the guns and loaded on the aeroplanes. The Germans were well aware that troops were arriving in greater concentrations than ever.

  Corporal R. G. Pinneo, 10th Canadian Infantry Brigade

  Our arrival at Passchendaele was on a train that took us up through Vlamertinghe to the outskirts of Ypres. There we got off. The first thing I saw as I got out of the train and looked to the east towards the German line were five German observation balloons in the sky. I said to myself, ‘It won’t be long now.’ And it wasn’t. While we were still unloading our equipment the Germans started to shell the train. The confusion was murderous. We were dodging here and there, trying to shelter. Trying to unload at the same time. We were lucky. We only came in for the first of it and we managed to form up and start off through Ypres. The company behind us got it hard – they had sixteen men killed and forty wounded. We were shelled all the way as we marched through Ypres to the Menin Gate and out the Gravenstafel Road. We called it the Grab-and-Stumble Road.

  We stopped at this cemetery and we thought at first they were pulling our legs when they said this was our billet. It was a terrible place, there was no cover, no place to go, no dug-outs or anything. The graves and tombstones had all been knocked to hell by gunfire, and even the crypts and coffins had been blasted open. You could see the sheeted dead. We bivouacked as best we could. All night long a British battery of fifteen-inch howitzers just at the back of us was blasting away and the Germans were answering. There was a direct hit on the runners’ bivouac of the 44th Canadian Infantry Battalion – and that was the end of them. Ypres was a terrible place. I was there three times and I never heard the name without a shiver of apprehension.

  Acting Captain E. Mockler-Ferryman MC, Royal Artillery

  Our troubles on the Steenbeek began on about the thirteenth. To our horror a sixty-pounder battery arrived and dumped itself down on the road, five yards in front of our pillbox. A sixty-pounder makes more noise firing and has a bigger flash than any other gun. The Boche hates them like poison and always does his utmost to destroy them. To make matters worse, ammunition was scattered in heaps all round our dug-out, so that we were in a continual state of wondering when we might be blown to bits by an explosion. As a result of the three days’ rest after the battle of 12 October, the Boche guns had begun to settle down comfortably in their positions and t
o annoy us considerably. He shelled us all day and all night and added to our joys by coming low over us in broad daylight, dropping bombs on the roads and battery positions. Three or four of the sixty-pounder dumps went up from time to time, though luckily they were only charges and not shells. We lived in hourly dread of an eight-inch concentration, which we knew was bound to come sooner or later.

  On 18 October, in the Second Army sector in front of Passchendaele, the first of the Canadians went into the line to relieve some of the hard-pressed Tommies and Anzacs. Even for those who had been in the salient before, it was a revelation.

  GunnerJ. J. Brown, No. 41217, Canadian Field Artillery

  We had been behind St Julien in the gas attack in 1915. Now I wouldn’t have recognised the place. The whole area was utterly devastated, just a few bits of foundations left. There was no trace of the farms or barns that were there in 1915, nothing but this ocean of mud and dumps and a few battered pillboxes. We were sent in to relieve a New Zealand gun battery and we had to go a long way to get to it, up a plank supply road. Having just come from billets we were all spruced up in nice clean khaki suits, and we hadn’t gone far when we saw some infantry coming down from the line, all tattered and dishevelled and covered in mud. When they spotted us they started waving and yelling, ‘Turn back, boys! You’d better not go any further. There’s a war going on up there!’

  For the first time the relieving artillery brigades were not hauling their guns forward; they simply took over the guns where they stood embedded in the swamp. Still the Canadians poured in.

  Nurse C. Macfie, No. 11 Casualty Clearing Station at Godwaersveldt

  We used to see the trains going past at Godwaersveldt, for the railway line ran past the casualty clearing station. And we would wave and the boys would be hanging out of the train waving back. They used to shout, ‘Keep a bed for us, Sister. We’ll be back in a few days. Keep us a bed.’ And we knew that very likely they would be back the next week, as patients, for we had terrible casualties in October even when the stunts weren’t on. The shelling was terrible. We never had a bed empty and we never stopped. We were under fire ourselves a lot of the time; they’d started using these long-range shells, and night after night we were bombed, because there was the railway line and a big RE dump just opposite us. We had to douse the lights and lie flat. I remember the night of 20 October because it was the worst of all. The bombs rained down. We thought we’d been hit. But it wasn’t us, it was the CCS just up the road. Oh, what a shambles it was! A terrible sight.

  There was no warning that night and Sister Madeleine Kemp was just going on night duty. Holding a hurricane lamp in her hand, she had squelched across the duckboard pathway to the big marquee of the postoperative ward when an orderly ducked out through its canvas flap. She stopped to speak to him just as the first of the bombs fell. Sister Kemp and the orderly were killed outright. So were five of the soldiers in the marquee. A hundred more severely wounded men were wounded yet again by shrapnel and flying splinters.

  As soon as the graves could be dug, the long funeral cortege wound its way past the tents, along the road, past the station and up the lane to the left, where row upon row of white wooden crosses marked the cemetery on the slope of the hill. It was a big cemetery, for with three casualty clearing stations at Godwaersveldt there were many deaths and many burials. There were eighteen coffins in the cortege, and the engineers from the dump near by who had supplied them had also supplied a party of men to carry them on the 300-yard journey to the graveyard. The nurses followed, as many as could be spared from the wards, and as the cortege passed No. 11 CCS other nurses joined them – Catherine Macfie, Sister Lyle, Sister King, the Matron.

  A train chugged past, bound for the front. It was packed with Canadians hanging out from the doorways of the open trucks, on the look-out for pretty nurses. It passed in silence. As the train cleared the level-crossing over the lane that led down to Godwaersveldt, it revealed a group of local people waiting to join the procession. The villagers of Godwaersveldt knew the nurses well. Most of the nurses had found a family who would sell them a few eggs or who, for a small sum, would do the personal washing which none of them cared to entrust to the far-from-tender mercies of the Army Laundry. In return the nurses were always willing to smile, to have a chat, to bandage a grazed knee, to admire the photograph of a poilu son or husband. Now the people of Godwaersveldt had come to pay their last respects to ‘Soeur Madeleine’.

  There were more than a hundred mourners in the cemetery. It was a perfect autumn morning, with bright sunshine and a hard frost and a low ground-mist drifting over the clustered white crosses and the eighteen open graves. After the padre had finished the service and the coffins had been lowered, the nurses filed past, each sprinkling a handful of muddy earth on to Sister Kemp’s coffin. As the engineers began to fill in the grave another sound rose above the steady crump of guns at the front. It was the first of the day’s convoys of soldiers who had been wounded in working parties during the night. As the ambulances trundled into sight the nurses pulled their capes closer about them and hurried along the road, back to work.

  In the days before the ‘stunt’ of 26 October, the casualties sustained by the working parties surpassed those of the infantry.

  Private P. H. Longstaffe, No. 922096, 107 Canadian Pioneer Btn., 1st Division

  21 October. Up at 2.30 am. Very dark. Breakfast. Started at 3.15. Long walk past transports and ammunition column. Arrive at Dump at 4.30. Work on plank road. Huge guns all round. Mud awful. Dead men and horses all round. Thousands of men working. Rush job on road through swamp. Ammunition, mules and horses passing in continuous stream. Fritz shelling both sides.

  22 October. Up at 2.30. Drizzle of rain. Fritz overhead. Dressed and ate in darkness in shell-hole and lost tea. Same walk as 21 Oct. Arrive 4.15. Terrific bombardment opens up. Hundreds of guns all around us flashing and banging away. Impressive sight. Guns being hurried up. Exciting scenes as mules and horses flounder in mud. Wrecked tanks and pillboxes all round. Worked on road, sandbags and carrying planks. Shells dropping quite close. Up to our knees in mud. Shell on road, three killed, five injured. Horrible sights. Quit at 11 am.

  That same night, as the working parties toiled around the clock, the first of the Canadian infantry who were to attack Passchendaele on the twenty-sixth were moving up the line. But in order to delude the Germans the bombardment was thundering down across the entire fiont of the salient; while, on the left, the Fifth Army and, beyond them, the French mounted a vigorous attack between Poelcapelle and the forest of Houthulst. It was here more than anywhere that the fiont was confused. It straggled so haphazardly among shell-holes and pillboxes in the swamp that mistakes inevitably were made. During the hours of darkness, a ration party of the ioth Essex was only just prevented by a French patrol from delivering its load to a pillbox which was still occupied by the enemy; while some British officers in an advanced dug-out were surprised when the sacking hanging over its entrance was pulled back with the unfamiliar enquiry, ‘Herr Hauptmann?’ On discovering his mistake the unfortunate German sergeant dissolved into loud and noisy tears. His distress was due neither to weakness nor fear. He pulled a paper from his pocket and between sobs waved it in disconsolate explanation. It was a leave pass to Hanover, effective next morning, and he had been taking it to his captain to be signed. It took some considerable time and several shots of whisky to pacify him sufficiently and send him, under escort, down the line. It was left to the corporal signaller to sum up the feelings of his captors. ‘Poor old Jerry. I’d have let him go,’ he remarked, to no one in particular.

  Two hours later the ioth Essex went into the attack with the Norfolks, and, having lost more than a third of their fighting force, succeeded in capturing Meunier House and in distracting the attention of the enemy from General Curries dispositions and intentions in front of Passchendaele.

  Major Sansom of the 16th Canadian Machine Gun Company had marched his group of machine-gunners all the way
from Lens to Ypres. On the evening of 23 October they eventually arrived. No billets had been arranged for them. The officers – Sansom, Taylor, Stinson and Gauvereau – managed to beg shelter in a dug-out in the ramparts. The men had to fend for themselves.

  Private R. Le Brun, No. 790913, 16th Canadian Machine Gun Company, Canadian Machine Gun Corps, 4th Canadian Division

  The only space we could find was alongside the heap of rubble that had once been the cathedral. There was nothing much left of the road. We laid our groundsheets in a circle and made camp. We had a limber that carried our rations, the guns for our section, ammunition and the officers’ kits. The driver of the limber put up a tripod to hang the large stewpot from, while we lay back on our groundsheets watching the fire. Suddenly there was a tremendous explosion and we were all thrown backwards. The fire and the stewpot had exploded into the air. It turned out that the cook had made his fire directly over a layer of five-inch shells which had been left by an artillery unit before us and had sunk into the mud. The cook, who had been bending over the pot, was badly wounded. The stretcher-bearers took him away to the dressing-station but he didn’t have much of a chance. We were very depressed. We felt heartbroken. We lay down again on our groundsheets. It was bitterly cold and none of us slept much that night. Next day we were on our way on our terrible journey up the line.

  We went on a main plank road, which was a mistake because the Jerry planes were buzzing about, and we were bombed incessantly. It raised havoc with the horses and mules, the trucks and the limbers – we lost a lot of them and most of the day we spent trying to get reorganised. As we neared the front the officers mapped out their headquarters in an old German pillbox, and then they picked out another spot nearer the front for a delivery point for ammunition, water and rations. This was as far as the mules were allowed to venture. There had been a lot of casualties among the mules and they were trying to conserve them, but it seemed to us that their attitude was that one mule was worth twenty good men. We had to take a careful note of this dump, because they were putting us into the line, and every morning two or three of us had to get down there and carry our supplies to our shell-holes and dug-outs at the front.