by Paul Ham
Those who penetrated beyond the wire would reach the German frontline trenches, the thinly manned sections of the Albrecht Stellung. Beyond these, they would encounter fresh trench lines interspersed with concrete pillboxes containing machine guns and knots of shock troops. All of this would have to be destroyed before the Allies reached the battle zone proper, the Wilhelm Stellung and the Flandern Stellungen I, II and III (Flanders Positions 1, 2 and 3), each of which consisted of trench systems hundreds of yards deep, set about 2000 yards apart, under the protective gaze of more rows of concrete bunkers positioned with interlocking fields of fire. Unlike the elastic defence at Arras, where the forward troops fell back, all these forward forces were ordered to ‘fight it out in situ, and to break up the enemy attack … until help arrived’. They were to remain in place ‘however severe the attack’,66 under orders that effectively condemned tens of thousands of German men to a uniquely horrible death.
The German defensive bands ran broadly parallel, but the first two crossed each other at Glencorse Wood, on Gheluvelt Plateau, perhaps the most heavily fortified position on the German front. The final trench systems straddled either side of Passchendaele Ridge. Carefully positioned to the rear of each stage, and on the eastern side of Passchendaele, unseen by Allied eyes, were further regiments of Eingreif reserves. The whole defensive system was about five miles deep, from the thinly defended front lines at the foremost lip of Gheluvelt Plateau to the thickets of the German forces proper, heavily concentrated near and beyond Passchendaele.
And the Germans had greatly increased their troop numbers in the time Haig had allowed them: 65.5 divisions now fought under Rupprecht’s Heeresgruppe, of which General Sixt von Armin’s Fourth Army counted for sixteen divisions (frontline and reserve), up from twelve in early June. Supporting them were scores of new machine-gun nests, and batteries of artillery, carefully hidden behind the ridges with a clear view of the Salient. Their guns had trebled in number, from 389 to 1162.67
Most of these reinforcements had arrived between mid-June and the end of July 1917, just before the start of Third Ypres. No doubt, the Allies retained their supremacy in manpower (1.5 men to one) and artillery (three guns to one), yet these were not enough to defeat a heavily entrenched enemy.68 Von Lossberg’s improvements threatened a bloody and infuriating stand, aided by a new form of gas, an invisible, highly toxic vapour that eluded detection and, though usually not fatal, was ‘extremely painful’.69 The vapour emanated from an oily fluid that settled in the trench floors and in the creases of clothing, burning through uniforms and blistering the skin. The worst cases suffered temporary blindness and sloughing of the scrotum. The fluid’s strange, mustard-like smell soon gave the gas its name.
In sum, the German commanders could not have hoped for a more helpful interlude between the thunder of Messines and the start of the British offensive in Flanders. Rupprecht was optimistic: ‘I am awaiting the attack with great calmness, since on an attacked front we never have been provided with reserves so strong and well trained.’70 And von Lossberg was supremely confident. Surveying his newly fortified lines, the fireman of the Western Front echoed the Crown Prince: ‘never has an army been in a better position before a defensive battle’.71
And never was an army better primed for an offensive battle. In the British camp, in late April, the elite Brigade of Guards (a divisional unit comprising eight battalions of Coldstream, Grenadier, Scots, Irish and Welsh guards) were enjoying a sports day, and rejoiced in the news that they were heading for Ypres ‘very soon’. At the day’s end, their commanding officer, Major General Sir Geoffrey Percy Thynne Feilding, addressed them:
I want to say how pleased I have been with your bayonet fighting today …. You are out here for one purpose and one purpose only – to kill Boches. From what I have seen every man here today is good for two or three Boches. That’s what I want. You all of you put any amount of viciousness and beef into your work today, with no fancy work. That’s what I want … Also that you may have an opportunity of showing very soon what you can do against the real thing in the open!
To which hundreds of his men cried, ‘That’s what we want!’ And the general roared with laughter.72
8
AUGUST 1917
The entire earth of Flanders rocked and seemed to be on fire. This was not just drumfire; it was as though Hell itself had slipped its bonds. What were the terrors of Verdun and the Somme compared to this grotesquely huge outpouring of raw power?
General Hermann von Kuhl, recalling 31 July 1917
British prisoners are saying – and this has never been heard before – that they wished that they had shot their own officers who were leading them into the slaughterhouse. They have had enough of this butchery!
Crown Prince Rupprecht, 16 August 1917
And now Gough’s infantry were moving into position. Throughout June and July, a quarter of a million men of the Fifth Army approached the central section of the 15-mile front, which ran from Diksmuide in the north to Westhoek and Hooge in the south. Thousands came marching through northern France, en route to Belgium. ‘A lovely moon was shining,’ recalled the medical officer Captain Harold Dearden, of the Grenadier Guards, ‘and the battalion looked like a great dusky caterpillar along the white road, the stretchers carried by the company stretcher bearers giving an added affect of horns along the creature’s back.’1
Tens of thousands came up by light railway, open trolleys packed with men, waving their tin hats for the cameras and singing. A favourite was ‘Good Old Whiskey’: ‘Here’s to good old whiskey, mop it down / Here’s to good old whiskey, mop it down / Here’s to good old whiskey / It makes you feel so friskey [sic] …’ etc.2 Others came by lorry, travelling by night with the headlights off, jolting through the flash of shells and the starburst of Very flares, towards the Ypres front. ‘It was just fumes and dust and smells all the time,’ recalled Driver L. G. Burton, ‘and sometimes there was gas too, sometimes incendiary shells. You could see them glowing red among the brick ends.’3
The march had moments of strange, earthly beauty, dashed by the sudden intrusion of war, noticed Captain Dearden. ‘The trench,’ he wrote in his diary near Elverdinghe, on 21 July, ‘was passing under some beautiful willows … and the sides of it were all sparkling in dewy grasses and flowers, while the duckboards stood out under your feet almost as if phosphorescent. I thought how lovely to smell the dampness of the grasses and put my hand to the elbow in them – they smelt of sulphur and gas only!’4
Gough’s Fifth Army comprised four corps; a corps contained three infantry divisions, each of 20,000 men, nearly twice as large as a German division. Flanking them were six divisions of the First French Army, to the north, and several divisions of Plumer’s Second Army to the south, incorporating the Anzacs. Lines of bell tents accommodated them in the forward areas, from where they would soon advance up the communication trenches to the fire trenches and jumping-off points at the front line. Behind the infantry, two cavalry divisions assembled – at Dickebusch, south-west of Ypres, and Elverdinghe, north-west of Ypres – ready to charge to the Passchendaele-Staden ridge once the infantry had broken through.
‘[N]o one has any idea when, if ever, we are going to pop the parapet,’ wrote the Australian colonel Alex Wilkinson to his younger sister, Sidney (‘Sid’) on 8 June. ‘If we do I shall be a certain starter … I should hate to be left behind. Nowadays we wear exactly the same clothes as the men when we attack. I don’t like the idea much but we have no choice. I far prefer to be dressed as a gentleman!’5
German artillery tried to spread panic in the British ranks throughout July, firing thousands of gas rounds. Gas gongs rang out somewhere in the British lines almost every night. The men slept with their masks always by their sides; the officers in their dugouts behind heavy gas curtains. On 12 July, the Germans used mustard gas for the first time. It incapacitated about 1200 troops that day, and many more later.6 Post-mortems of the lethal cases revealed severe internal ulceration of
the throat and abdomen; the health of those who survived was often permanently impaired.7
Nobody saw the mustard gas coming, wrote Private Neville Hind:
[T]he poor fellows who were in the first attack … got excited, rushed about, snatched up their rifles – and each time they touched anything, were badly burned and blistered … The gas thereupon attacked eyes, nose, mouth, and throat. They breathed it, with disastrous internal results … I am not exaggerating when I say that … a great many battalions were left with only a remnant of their men.8
The effects of the new weapon shocked the field hospitals. ‘They cannot be bandaged or touched,’ said a British nurse working with mustard gas cases. ‘We cover them with a tent of propped-up sheets. Gas burns must be agonizing because usually the other cases do not complain, even with the worst wounds, but gas cases are invariably beyond endurance and they cannot help crying out.’9
Among those pouring into the British lines was nineteen-year-old Lieutenant Desmond Allhusen, the Old Etonian whom we last saw at Messines. Allhusen now commanded an ‘unlucky platoon for officers’, as his sergeant cheerfully informed him: his predecessor had gone mad. His regiment’s role in the coming offensive was to launch diversionary attacks, to make the enemy think the offensive was starting here, north of Messines. They served as lures, sitting ducks for enemy guns: ‘[E]very day we were treated to at least one barrage’.10
Allhusen led a working party up to the front line:
an endless toiling in the dark … always losing the man in front, or being lost by the man behind; everybody hurrying, trying to pass some special danger point before the inevitable shell came; then, the agonizing suspense when a flare went up and everybody stood motionless, cursing everybody else for moving, a long line of giant-like figures standing in absurd attitudes, the centre of a landscape as light as day; then, as the light died down, a sigh of relief and a hurrying forward again, men now cursing each other in whispers for making too much noise; worst of all perhaps the handing over of stores at some Company Headquarters, probably a well-known shell trap, sorting and counting things in the dark, signing receipts and hanging about … with the somewhat chilling knowledge that Germans were watching and listening somewhere in the darkness.11
On the night of Saturday 16 June, Allhusen and his men reached the frontline trenches. The Germans were 300 yards away, across a turnip field overgrown with coarse grass. He shared a hole cut in the trench wall that he compared with ‘the once popular torture of putting people in a cage too small either to sit up or lie down in’. By night, the trenches came alive with patrolling, digging, setting wire, receiving deliveries, dispatching runners, preparing for the coming attack. By day, the men rested and did comparatively little. Both sides tended to greet the dawn with a ‘light’ bombardment of gas and heavy explosives, during which Allhusen and his platoon ‘sat in our gas masks watching our breakfast getting cold’.12
Three days later, he noticed ‘certain sinister preparations’: sappers had begun installing a long line of ‘dummy men’, realistic models of soldiers made of wood and canvas, which they laid face down, ready to be pulled up by a rear cord. The next day, these armies of manikins were sent into battle: they ‘rose’ and ‘advanced’ through smoke flares, drawing German retaliatory fire. Within minutes, just one dummy was left standing. While the ruse distracted the Germans, a brigade of real British riflemen attacked the enemy lines, ‘killed a lot of Germans’ and captured many prisoners.13
In July, Allhusen’s men were relieved – ‘food, drink and water to wash in, and beds were all waiting for us’ – pending their next rotation to the front. Within a few weeks, they would hear a lot about ‘Menin Road’, a name that sent ‘a nightmare throughout the whole army’. Soldiers returning from it ‘shivered when the Menin Road was mentioned’, Allhusen wrote, ‘and talked of it with a horror that I could not understand. I wondered vaguely what it was like.’14
For weeks, the batteries had been hauling up the guns, fixing the gun platforms into the spongy soil, firing off ranging rounds, and unloading thousands of cases of ammunition. There were 3000 guns, of all sizes – howitzers, 18-pounders and auxiliary weapons – the heaviest borne by truck or horse-drawn carriages. ‘Massed artillery was drawn together the like of which the history of warfare had never seen before,’ records a German historian. ‘Enormous piles of munitions were stacked up everywhere … The whole might of the British Empire was mustered in methodical preparation to enter into a battle the duration, extent and means of which followed new principles hitherto unheard-of.’15
One battery commander then approaching the front was Lieutenant Allfree, the country solicitor and father of four, who arrived at corps headquarters in Poperinghe, three miles west of Ypres, on 24 June with his twenty-man advance party. One Colonel Budgeon showed him his designated battery position, in woods just short of Woesten. The colonel insisted that the guns be half-buried in pits to conceal them, rather than set on platforms.16 Major Bell, Allfree’s commanding officer, objected that the guns would sink if it rained. Budgeon wouldn’t budge: the guns must be placed in pits.17
On 13 July, Allfree and his battery got their Movement Order, and were trucked to their billets in the village of Reninghelst, south of Poperinghe. Told to move his guns into position that night, he set off in a jeep, towing his gun carriage behind it, up the road out of Poperinghe. His lorries had already departed. Diverted by shellfire to Elverdinghe, he soon caught up with his trucks, which had stopped by the side of the road. The drivers were reluctant to continue: shelling up ahead had knocked out several vehicles and horse-drawn wagons. Allfree could hear the rounds exploding, but ‘I had to go on. So I spoke to each of the lorry drivers, and told them what they had to face …’ He ordered them ‘to get on with all speed, and not to stop for anybody or anything’.18 It was crucial to get the guns and supplies forward by daybreak, before the lorries became visible targets.
His driver proceeded carefully; the spokes on the wheel of the gun they towed had ‘jarred loose’. Already, they had been forced to leave another gun behind due to a mechanical fault. They soon reached the scene of the shelling ahead – ‘disembowelled horses and smashed up wagons and lorries and the smell of blood and high explosive’.19 There was so much traffic the German guns couldn’t miss striking a lorry if they got the range of the road right. Allfree drove around the mess. Two shells burst just behind and ahead of his vehicle. Then the gun carriage’s axle came loose on the pot-holed road, and he abandoned it. He arrived without any of his guns, which were brought up the next day. Such was the exhausting journey to his position of just one British artilleryman.
Allfree’s men set up the battery on the dead flat, soggy ground north of Ypres, near the ruins of the village of Boesinghe. Beside them, to the north, were the light-blue-uniformed French gunners, veterans of Verdun, with whom he and his men shared rations. Due east was the Steenbeek Canal, running north to south, the wettest section of the front, and beyond it ‘Bocheland’.20 The battery hid their guns in a small copse behind a clearing that contained the officers’ mess, cookhouse, office and phone exchange. The officers slept in two huts erected under trees to the rear; the men tried to sleep in shallow dugouts near the battery, but nightly shelling forced them to move. Exhausted from lack of sleep, they were given the basement in the ruins of a nearby house.21
On 14 July, Allfree prepared for action. ‘The feature of this offensive we are about to engage in,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘is to be a most intense artillery bombardment of the Enemy’s trenches, wire and strong points for about a fortnight before the infantry attack.’22 The next day, he visited his forward OP in a bombed house in Boesinghe, a few hundred yards from the German front lines, ‘crouching and hurrying past the open gaps’.23 Inside the ruin, he climbed a heap of bricks to the OP, a chamber of iron girders and concrete on the upper level, from where he raised a periscope covered in a sandbag slowly over the concrete wall: ‘Through the eyepiece … I now saw for the first ti
me the face of the ridge on the other side of the canal … and systems of Boche trenches.’24 He began to check off the features of the landscape against those on his map: the edge of a wood, a crossroads, the ruins of a farmhouse – yes, they were all there.
His telephonist, sitting below, received a call from the battery commander, who wanted to know if he could ‘range the battery on trench junction at [he read off the coordinates] … will you let him know if you can see it all right, Sir.’ Allfree found the reference and, using his protractor, measured off the degrees between it and the nearest features, the crossroads and the corner of the wood.
Five minutes later, they fired the first round on the target. It exploded slightly short and to the left. ‘45 minutes to the right and plus,’ Allfree instructed the telephonist, who relayed the message. The battery fired another round: ‘1 degree right and minus.’ After six to ten rounds, the guns were ranged accurately.25
In the German camp, the Fourth Army in Flanders had swollen to 65.5 divisions by mid-July, 43.5 of which had arrived since Messines, supported by 600 aircraft and 1162 guns (550 heavies).26 Commanded by General Friedrich Sixt von Armin it deployed four combat groups strung out between the North Sea and the River Lys: a Marine Corps, defending the line from the coast to Schorbakke; the Diksmuide Group, holding the line to the Staden-Ypres railway; the Ypres Group, with its right flank near Pilckem and left flank two miles due east of Ypres, embracing the villages of Langemarck, Poelcappelle, Zonnebeke and Passchendaele; and the Wijtschate group, with its left flank near the ruins of the Hooge Chateau, defending the line across the Menin Road passing Zillebeke to the east up to the canal bend near Hollebeke.