1915: The Death of Innocence

by Lyn Macdonald

  In the early evening of 5 July a special train left Victoria Station carrying the Prime Minister, with Lord Kitchener and other members of his Cabinet, to Dover en route to Calais for a meeting with their French counterparts. Sir John French travelled from his GHQ at St Omer to join them. It was not an entirely satisfactory conference, for the proceedings were in French, a language in which not all the British delegation were fluent, but they believed that certain agreements had been reached. The Dardanelles campaign would be continued and, in the near future, there would be no large offensives on the western front, although ‘local attacks’ would be carried out vigorously, as the British understood it, to harass the line – but not to break it. In view of their still-meagre stocks of rifles and ammunition and the amount required merely to hold the line, they calculated that no all-out offensive would be possible within a year. Lord Kitchener had forecast that by the spring of 1916, he would be able to have seventy divisions in the field – although in the opinion of Lloyd George this optimistic estimate showed a cavalier disregard for the problems of equipping them with rifles or supplying them with the guns and ammunition without which, as he acerbically pointed out, they might as well stay at home. Nevertheless, the army in Flanders had now swelled by three divisions of the New Army, and thirteen more would follow before autumn. The British were therefore able to agree to hold a longer front and to extend their line north of Ypres and south towards the Somme.

  The meeting ended amicably. If Marshal Joffre still nursed ambitious ideas for renewing the offensive on the western front he did not succeed in communicating them to the British staff and their political masters, and they departed well pleased. The Prime Minister, wishing to have a look at the war for himself, stayed on in France, with Lord Kitchener and the Secretary to the Cabinet, Sir Maurice Hankey. The highlight of their short stay was their visit to Ypres.

  General Plumer was not at all happy about it. For one thing, protocol demanded that he should personally escort the visitors, and he could ill spare the time, and for another, Ypres was far too dangerous for sightseers although the Prime Minister did not seem to appreciate the risks. He lingered for a long time at the Menin Gate chatting amiably to some soldiers while Plumer, standing by on tenterhooks, could only express his displeasure by ‘looking daggers’ at his hapless Chief of Staff, General Milne, who had arranged Mr Asquith’s programme. The Prime Minister lingered even longer in the square, shaking his head over the ruins, asking an inordinate number of questions which might as easily have been dealt with in a safer place, cocking his head as he listened for shells and inquired about their calibre. He even insisted on personally measuring the largest of the shell craters. Lord Kitchener was rather more interested in casting a connoisseur’s eye over two small statues which still stood miraculously intact in their niches, on the wrecked facade of the Cloth Hall. He was clearly itching to get hold of them and his interest was so unabashed, his desire so palpable, his dilemma so obvious, that General Milne and Hankey shook with silent mirth. ‘I rather think,’ murmured Milne, ‘those statues are in greater danger now than they’ve ever been from German shells!’

  Fortunately for General Plumer’s peace of mind the few shells that came over that morning exploded well away from the centre of the town, but he was heartily thankful when the party drove off with General Milne to tour the heavy gunline and to inspect some reserve trenches at a good safe distance from the line.

  Visitors to Ypres were not encouraged. Civilians could not enter the town without the permission of the military, and could not even come into the war zone without a pass from the civil authorities. It had taken Aimé van Nieuwenhove ten wearisome days of form-filling and string-pulling before he managed to secure an official permit that allowed him to spend three nights in Poperinghe and another that enabled him to spend six hours and no more in Ypres. He fervently hoped that it would be long enough to retrieve the family fortunes.

  It was more than two months since he had locked his front door for the last time and wondered, ‘What will be left when we return?’ In view of the news that had reached him in Paris he had a fair idea that the answer to that question would be ‘Not much.’

  Aimé van Nieuwenhove.

  The purpose of my journey was to excavate in the garden of Uncle Pierre Liebaert, to find all the stocks and bonds the old man had buried in August 1914, which he had had to leave behind and which added up to hundreds of thousands of francs.

  Although I wished to perform this service for Uncle (also a refugee in Paris and becoming more and more miserable each day at being parted from a large part of his fortune) I also had a strong desire to see for myself the ruins of our home and of our unhappy town in general. On 17 July, three days after leaving Paris, I came into Ypres at seven in the morning, with a one-horse wagon and two workmen I had picked up in Poperinghe. On reaching the outskirts of Ypres, I confess that I felt apprehension flooding back. Of course I had lost the habit of risking life under bombardment. Fortunately for me it was not very heavy that morning, although the previous evening a policeman had been killed by a shell near the prison.

  It is impossible to describe the appearance of the town. It was a dreadful sorrow to find nothing but burnt-out shells and charred walls where there once were houses. At last we arrived at the site of our house in the rue de Lille. The gable-end of the house facing on to the street was still standing, as well as some of the inner walls. I quickly clambered in to inspect it. The cellars were filled up with a pile of bricks and debris. With the help of the workmen I started to dig, but everything I found was charred and useless – even the bronze of the clocks that I pulled out of the debris had melted and the bottles in the wine-cellar turned to cinders as soon as one touched them. After that I dug up a big zinc container buried in the garden which contained books of designs for lace. Then I went round to the rue de Chien to Uncle Liebaert’s house and there we started to dig. Although I myself had buried three strongboxes containing his stocks and bonds and part of his silver, I couldn’t find the most important strongbox because one of the party walls we had used as a marker had disappeared. The shell which had struck the wall had left a huge hole where the wall had been – and where I believed the box had been buried as well. However, after digging in it for less than an hour in drizzling rain and with shells coming over from time to time, the box came to light. It must have been because of the great depth at which it was buried that the shell had not reached it – although it very nearly had. ‘Well,’ I thought to myself, ‘Uncle’s in luck!’

  It was not quite ten in the morning. The men took their cart to the water-tower to load up some furniture belonging to one of them, and I had still three hours in hand before I was obliged to leave at one o’clock. I spent them walking round my garden to see if anything was left of my plants and trees and on the lawn I found the three cages of the canaries just where I had left them at the time of my departure. The big garden seat is still at the foot of the garden. Despite the rain I wanted to make the most of my time so, with a full heart, I tore myself away from all that had once been my delight and, accompanied by the Belgian policeman I had been obliged by the authorities to bring as an escort, I took a melancholy walk round all the streets of the town, ending up at the water-tower. We went into an abandoned house while we waited for the men to finish loading and made a snack of some food which we had had the forethought to bring with us.

  We left Ypres about half past one and arrived at Poperinghe at five in the evening, just twelve hours after leaving it. It had been some job! Nevertheless that evening I felt great satisfaction at having succeeded so well, and looked forward early next morning to sending a telegram to Uncle Liebaert to let him know that all his fortune had been retrieved intact. I spent the whole of Sunday in Poperinghe with friends I met there.

  It took the whole morning running hither and thither to get my passports stamped for the return journey, and in the afternoon I went to see a servant of ours at Crombeke. At last, I set off at one o’cloc
k on Monday for Hazebrouck and from there caught the train for Paris the following morning, arriving at seven in the evening.

  After having placed Uncle’s possessions in his hands I took another train for Neuilly-Plaisance where, happy and pleased with my journey, I found the whole family at the station. I brought back a suitcase containing our jewellery and table silver which a fortnight earlier I had asked a friend, R. Clinckemaille, to dig up from our garden, because at the time I had not expected to be going to Ypres myself. My journey was not accomplished without difficulties on every side, but its result made quite a few people happy – and even more will be happier still when the war at last gives way to peace.

  That time was a long way off, and it was just as well that van Nieuwenhove had managed to recover the hidden money and valuables, for living in Paris was expensive. It would be almost four years before he came again to Ypres, and by then it was almost razed to the ground. It had taken exactly seven days to accomplish his mission. He reached Paris on 19 July. In the Ypres salient, two hundred miles to the north, it was a day of notable excitement. They intended to blow up Hooge.

  Major Cowan of 175 Tunnelling Company was in charge of the project, Lieutenant Cassels was in charge of the work, and a detachment of coal-miners, newly co-opted into the Royal Engineers, was responsible for actually doing it. They were not young men, they were untrained and, to say the least, unskilled in soldiering. They were also unused to marching and it had been a wearisome business getting them from the railhead to the front. But they were experienced miners and once they had reached the line and were given a job to do, they knew precisely how to do it. The pit-men were not particularly enjoying their strange surroundings and when the Germans shelled, which was most of the time, they were clearly happier underground – and that was all to the good, for the tunnels had to be dug at top speed and there was no time to be lost. After several false starts and many alarms the work was completed in less than a month. But there had been anxious moments.

  Major S. H. Cowan.

  A wire was brought to me saying that Cassels had heard mining under our own trenches. After convincing himself that the Germans were under us, he had reported to the infantry officer in command and had organised a retrenched line round their probable ‘crater’. It was too late to attempt to blow their mine as they were already under our feet. Cassels then withdrew his men – who are not trained soldiers – to Battalion Headquarters, then, on the advice of the Colonel, to their back billets. I consider he did right.

  It would be pathetic, were it not so absolutely absurd, to count how many people there are who are willing to swear that the Germans have actually mined under our trenches from no other evidence than lying on the ground and listening to every blessed overground noise there is. One case we traced to a sentry kicking his heels together twenty yards away. Two other scares were traced, one to a nest of young rats, the second to a loose shutter in a ruin about a hundred and fifty yards away which kept on ‘dabbing’ irregularly in the wind. But I must own that everyone’s nerves are at their very worst between midnight and the very welcome dawn.

  There is only one way of hearing real underground sounds and that is, dig down about six feet, then forward for about ten feet under your own parapet. Next, hang a curtain to shut out noises from your own people, who should be sent away for twenty yards or so. Then, at last, lie down and perhaps you’ll hear the Germans. If you do, it’s time to send for the Corps Travelling Company, but meanwhile, you’d better keep on listening, remembering all the time that so long as you do hear him you are safe. When he stops work all you can do is to clear out and wait, ready to rush his crater before he arrives.

  It was one of many false alarms, but it was an understandable mistake, for the Germans were indeed working underground – but they were working beneath their own line, burrowing dug-outs and constructing the first of the concrete strongpoints they believed would make it impregnable. It was perfectly obvious to the German Command that their tenancy of the high ground around the salient would not go unchallenged for long. The British had tried once to wrest it back, and they would certainly try again. Since the capture of their old front line on the lower slopes of the ridge, the Germans had been working day and night. They had built a tangle of new trenches, strong and deep, looping back on themselves to form four-sided redoubts, girded with stout wire, and pushed forward to enclose the remnants of Hooge Chateau, left in No Man’s Land after the fight on 16 June. All that was left of the chateau was a few tumbled walls, little more than fifty yards from the furthest point of the British front line where it reached out round the ruins of the old stables. The chateau was the original objective, for it was suspected that the Germans would regard it as a stronghold. But every day, as his men worked in the lengthening tunnel below, Lieutenant Cassels made a point of visiting the front-line trench and peering through a periscope at the German line, looking for the tell-tale signs that would show that the ruins were being fortified. After several days of close observation, he concluded that they were not. But he spotted a still better target – two newly completed concrete redoubts, a little way apart, each big enough to hold a company, and pierced with threatening apertures, wide enough to provide machine-guns with a deadly field of fire.

  The plans were changed, and the tunnel was diverted to run towards the new objective. It was to be a Y-shaped tunnel now, with a subsidiary arm running from the main passage and two chambers packed with explosive, one under each of the redoubts. But the time was short, the work was necessarily hasty, and on the left, the minor tunnel deviated so far from the second redoubt that the charge was bound to miss it altogether. This was a severe blow. There were only days to go. The plans had been made, and the infantry was standing by to follow up the explosion, to consolidate the crater while the enemy was still staggering from the shock, and by breaching his stoutest stronghold, to pave the way for the capture of the ridge.

  In desperation, Cassels came up with a bold plan and managed to persuade his superiors to agree to it. He proposed to pack all the explosive into a single charge beneath one redoubt in the hope that the force of a single mighty explosion would also destroy the other. To make quite sure of success, it was also decided to use an explosive not commonly used by the Army. It was three times as powerful as gunpowder and, knowing perfectly well that there was a stock of it in France, Major Cowan sent an indent to GHQ for three and a half thousand pounds of ammonal.

  This request caused consternation, and not a little puzzlement at GHQ. No one was familiar with ammonal and the indent was passed to the V Corps Quartermaster, with a request for clarification. He was equally at a loss, but he was struck by the idea of consulting the Medical Officer at Corps Headquarters, and the MO replied without hesitation. Ammonal, he informed the startled Quarter-master , was a sedative drug prescribed to subdue cases of abnormal sexual excitement. He added, thoughtfully, that so far as he knew, no such cases had yet occurred among V Corps troops.

  This provided food for thought. It was hard to fathom why 175th Company was demanding almost two tons of the stuff, presumably for the use of its two hundred men! The Quartermaster might have been forgiven for wondering in bafflement what manner of men they were.

  Further inquiries disclosed the difference between the use and effect of the explosive ammonal and the drug ammonol and cleared up the misunderstanding, but it all caused delay. The mine was to be fired just before the infantry attacked on 19 July. Three days before the deadline, the ammonal had still not arrived and Cassels frantically set about begging and borrowing whatever explosive he could lay hands on from neighbouring companies and local stores, which – for obvious reasons – did not hold large stocks of such dangerous material so close to the line. He scraped up less than fifteen hundred pounds, and although it contained a small quantity of ammonal, the rest was conventional gunpowder and gun-cotton – poor stuff by comparison. It was nowhere near enough, but the attack could not be postponed and it would have to do. But he doubted whethe
r it would do the job. The miners worked all through the night of 16 July, pulling the heavy bags of explosive down the long tunnel, and tamping them into the chamber beneath the largest of the German redoubts. Next day when the long-awaited wagon-load of ammonal arrived, the probability of failure became in an instant the certainty of success, for now Cassels meant to use the lot, augmenting more than half a ton of explosive, already laid in the mine, by more than twice that quantity of three-times-as-powerful ammonal. It would be the heaviest mine ever fired in the war, possibly in history, and, fired at a depth of only twenty feet, no one was quite sure what the effect would be.

  But Major Cowan stifled his qualms and Cassels set to work. In the afternoon of 19 July, with less than five hours to go before zero, he reported that the job was finished and the mine was ready to blow. Cowan immediately left for the line to see the show.

  Major S. H. Cowan.

  At 2.30 p.m. Hart and I set out. We motored to Ypres and left the car close to the old Lille gate. Then up by a road I’m seriously beginning to dislike. Luckily there was no shrapnel, but even before we got to the village (Zillebeke) we got into the belt of country where all the German bullets which come over the top of our parapets generally settle down – hence their name ‘overs’. It’s a funny sound, an ‘over’, a high-pitched whining buzz followed by a ‘whit’ into the earth or a louder noise against a tree or a wall. Shrapnel is my pet abomination when in the open. They are quite pretty to watch when their noise increases and then diminishes, but if it keeps on increasing most people prefer the view of a ditch dry or wet.