by Paul Ham
Holger Herwig’s exhaustive history of the German home front reveals the full extent of German impoverishment as a result of the blockade. The domestic economy staggered under the demands of fighting a total war without access to a seaport. By late 1917, the nation was stripped to the bone. Berlin had exhausted the metal reserves in the occupied territories, and now appealed to the German people to surrender any metal possessions. Cartloads of old pots, kettles, candlesticks, lamps, cutlery and other metallic objects arrived at the collecting stations.86 Churches yielded up their metals to the arsenal. By mid-year, few possessed a copper roof or church bell, virtually all of which would be melted down and used in weapons. The old Prussian Synod donated 10,312 church bells. Supplies of cotton, silk and fibrous materials vital for the manufacture of uniforms and blankets dwindled. ‘Wooden’ tyres were prescribed after supplies of rubber ran out (echoed in Japan in 1945 when kamikazes flew partly wooden planes). Oil and petroleum were in desperately short supply: after exhausting Romanian and Galician oil supplies, Berlin turned to ersatz measures such as ‘gasohol’, a blend of alcohol and petroleum.
The nation was slowly starving. German civilians were experiencing an epidemic of malnutrition. Most food necessarily went to the armed forces. A single corps of infantry, according to Herwig’s study, devoured one million pounds of meat and 660,000 loaves of bread per month, while their horses needed seven million pounds of oats and four million pounds of hay.87
Yet it was never enough. To preserve the food supply, the German Government imposed ‘meatless’ and ‘fatless’ days; and an ingenious array of ingredients replaced the staple diet of bread, milk, sausage and sugar. Black bread, fatless sausage, one egg and a few potatoes and turnips constituted the average weekly diet, and the German people even consumed ground European beetles. These measures merely delayed the encroachment of hunger-related diseases (cases of tuberculosis, for example, soared). Since the start of the war, the weekly calorie intake had fallen by a third, to 1000, and the civilian mortality rate had increased by 37 per cent. The hardest hit were the weakest – young children, the sick and the elderly – whose mortality rates rose by as much as 50 per cent.
In the spring of 1917, food shortages and soaring inflation led to the breakdown of civil life in Germany and the occupied territories. Annual domestic wheat production had almost halved, to about 2.5 million tons, and the meat ration was cut to half a pound per week, accompanied by the destruction of a million cows. With the terrible ‘turnip winter’ of 1916–17 high in their minds, the German people took to industrial action and mass protest against the soaring prices. In April, hunger strikes erupted in about 300 German factories, while about 150,000 Berlin workers in key war industries struck over the lack of food.88 Thousands of workers in several German cities demanded an end to the war. To offset the wave of strikes, the Berlin Government subjected all industries and factories to military law. Anyone capable of working was forced to do so. Social misfits, homosexuals, prostitutes, the mentally ill were pressed into service in factories, hospitals and farms.
By mid-year, the blockade had reduced Germany to a beggar nation. Her foreign trade had collapsed, from US$5.9 billion in 1913 to US$800 million in 1917.89 The treasury was technically bankrupt: tax receipts barely covered the interest on the soaring debt. In 1917, the worst year, the cost of the war topped 52 billion marks, while tax and other receipts were a mere 7.8 billion, creating a deficit of about 44 billion marks.90
The Germans could not rely on their main ally, Austria-Hungary: the Dual Empire had made no provision for a long, protracted war, and by 1917 was on its knees. Supplies of butter, fat, flour, potatoes and grains were exhausted or in short supply. The available potatoes were ‘not fit for human consumption’.91 As in Germany and Russia, inflation skyrocketed by late 1917, accompanied by food riots and destitution. On a typical day in Vienna, according to police, 250,000 hungry people formed some 800 queues outside the food markets and 54,000 people visited the soup kitchens.92
Sigmund Freud and other members of the bourgeoisie were reduced to buying their cigars and liquor on the black market at huge prices. Many city residents flocked to the countryside on so-called ‘hamster tours’ to steal extra food, provoking a police crack-down. In the face of such shortages, Berlin and Vienna appropriated food and resources from the occupied territories: Romania supplied oil; Serbia cattle, sheep and hogs; Poland grain, potatoes, coal, eggs, horses and wood; and Albania some 50,000 turtles – most of which found their way to the black market and onto the tables of the rich.
By Third Ypres, most German civilians were living below the subsistence level and many were slowly dying of hunger or illnesses relating to malnutrition. Hoarding and ransacking of the rural food supplies were commonplace. German housewives engaged in ferocious rows in queues and often ‘brutally snatched’ potatoes and fruits from farmers’ stalls. Mothers lashed out at an obvious target, the owners of expensive, well-stocked Berlin department stores, most of whom were wealthy Jews. Such German women ‘of little means’ were indeed ‘a potential time bomb’ for the Prussian authorities, as Herwig concludes.93
With their sons and husbands dead, wounded or fighting, and their children malnourished and sick, millions of German people were ripe for exploitation by a demagogue who would soon articulate their frustrations. Hitler had returned on leave in August 1917 and had witnessed with disgust the breakdown in civilian morale.94 German civilian deaths attributed to the hunger blockade (and related diseases) were 762,796, according to British and German official figures, with a lower estimate of 424,000.95 (Those figures exclude a further 150,000 German victims of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which ‘caused disproportionate suffering among those already weakened by malnutrition and related disease’.) By the war’s end, the loss of one million births were also directly attributable to medical conditions resulting from or exacerbated by the British hunger blockade, making it one of the first war atrocities of the twentieth century.96
Women drew the returning soldier’s immediate attention: his wife, his girlfriend, his sister, his mother, women in the shops, women in the street, their apparent warmth, their security, the pleasure they gave … all this he longed for. George Winterbourne, the semi-autobiographical hero of Aldington’s novel, was amazed at their ‘almost angelic beauty’ on his return to London. He had not seen a woman for seven months.97 These strange, smiling creatures, so alien, so adorable, with their soft skin and sweet voices, their delicious smells and colourful dresses, startled young men who had grown used to each other’s stink and grunts, hard lines and dead colours.
Most were hard at work. War had become a woman’s business as much as a man’s. Behind every soldier were women, assembling his weapons, tailoring his uniforms, dressing his wounds, urging him to do his duty, tearfully willing his departure. The war offered middle-class women a job, in war factories, industries and hospitals, and financial independence for the first time. Most willingly embraced their duty. The war benefited them. The suffragettes had set aside their campaign for the duration. Many younger women, who had dispatched men (or dull boyfriends) to the front by planting a white feather on their chest (denoting a coward), enjoyed new freedoms they hadn’t dreamed of in peacetime. By mid-1918, more than 7,310,000 women were employed in war-related jobs, of whom 947,000 worked in munitions production, 90 per cent of the arms industry’s workforce.98
A mood of libidinous abandon rippled across Europe when the war began, and showed no signs of abating in 1917. Women found the danger, the risk of violence and so many men in uniform sexually arousing. And women rekindled the returning soldiers’ desire, long dormant or limited to masturbation, fleeting acts of homosexuality (then illegal) and bleak moments with prostitutes, for whose rushed services the soldiers would form long, dismal queues outside the few legal brothels in France and Belgium. The tactile nature of trench friendships – the pre-battle embrace, the cradling of the wounded, the firm arm around a friend’s shoulder99 – were usually supportiv
e, not homosexual, in nature (though homosexual feelings were common enough). They expressed the affection of brothers-in-arms acutely aware that they might die tomorrow.
The first woman a soldier saw after months of war was typically a nurse, for whom he often felt an ‘extraordinary feeling of attraction’, recalled Sister J. Calder. ‘I’ve never known anything like it …’, she said, describing it as mutual sympathy and understanding, rather than anything sexual, between young men and women far away from home in the vicinity of a war zone.100
On leave, men tried to rejuvenate their sexual relationships in the few short weeks allowed them. Their departure date hung over any passion or tenderness like the shadow of a cowl. Winterbourne’s first encounter with the two women he loved left him feeling cold. He sat silently through a dinner party as his girlfriend and her fashionable set laughed and gossiped excitedly about nothing he understood: ‘He felt uncomfortable, like a death’s head at a feast.’101 It was not the fault of his friends. After a terrible row with the girls dearest to him, Winterbourne perceived a truth about himself: while they remained human, he had become ‘merely a unit, a murder-robot, a wisp of cannon fodder’. The girls sensed the change in him. One said, ‘It’s quite useless, he’s done for. He’ll never be able to recover …. What was rare and beautiful in him is as much dead now as if he were lying under the ground in France.’102
Winterbourne wandered the city, his thoughts mired in bitterness. He sat in a music hall and watched patriotic films about how all the girls loved ‘Tommy’: Tommy, who would defeat the Germans by dangling a sausage from his bayonet. And this estranged young man drew a brutal conclusion about leave in Blighty: ‘one of the horrors of the War was not fighting the Germans, but living under the British’.
This severe personal judgement is an extreme case: Aldington’s hero did not speak for the temperate and often loving reactions of other men on home leave. Yet many would feel the same sense of disillusionment, a feeling Aldington later described to his friend, the poet T. S. Eliot, whose poem The Waste Land is leavened with the imagery of a world destroyed.
As he sensed the ignorance of the people, heard the thunderous speeches in favour of war, and read the newspaper accounts of great victories he knew to be disastrous, a fissure opened in the soldier’s mind. On one side, he experienced the fantasy war on the home front; on the other, the bloody reality of the Western Front. And as time passed, the fissure widened into two irreconcilable perceptions, sending the soldier to the margins of society, where, like Neville Hind, he stayed silent and dared not speak of his experiences. Winterbourne’s girlfriend was not the only woman who yawned with boredom as she heard him describe the dreadful expression on the faces of gassed men.103
Some men raged at the whole political machinery that kept the country at war, the most sensational example of whom was Siegfried Sassoon, who had received the Military Cross for ‘performing suicidal feats of bravery’, according to Robert Graves. Sassoon’s disillusionment drove him to toss the ribbon of the medal into the Mersey River, and to urge his fellow soldiers to ‘throw their medals in the faces of their masters’. Though he hadn’t served at Third Ypres, Sassoon’s poem ‘Memorial Tablet’ immortalised the battle, with the line ‘I died in Hell – (They called it Passchendaele)’. In June 1917, an MP read Sassoon’s letter denouncing the war to a shocked Parliament. ‘The War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it,’ he wrote (see Appendix 7 for full text).104 For his pains, Sassoon was sent to an army doctor who diagnosed him as suffering from a nervous breakdown. He was confined to a mental hospital.
Many soldiers bitterly concluded that their correct place, the only place left to them, was back at the front with the men, where at least ‘you were doing something real’.105 The bleakest irony is that many sought solace in the war itself, and longed to return to the trenches.
And as the soldiers boarded the dark troop ship – their ‘old friend’ that would take them back to France – many shared a kind of love for the ‘barbaric but not brutal’ men on the voyage. ‘I don’t care a damn what your cause is,’ thought Winterbourne. ‘By God! I swear I’ll die with you rather than live in a world without you.’106
12
THE CRUELLEST MONTH
You cannot fight machine guns plus wire, with human bodies.
Sir Andrew Russell, commanding the New Zealand Division
… no pen or brush has yet achieved the picture of that Armageddon in which so many of our men perished
Philip Gibbs, war correspondent, October 1917
‘I am of opinion,’ Haig wrote on 28 September 1917, ‘that the enemy is tottering, and that a good vigorous blow might lead to decisive results.’1 In such hopes, which he shared with Gough and Plumer at a conference that day, Haig brought forward the next attack from 6 October to 4 October, ordered up six infantry divisions and placed five cavalry divisions at Plumer’s disposal behind the Yser Canal. High in his mind, as ever, was the prospect of a breakthrough, even if it involved the slow grind of ‘bite and hold’. At a minimum, Passchendaele Ridge should be his by mid-October.
Spurring Haig’s desire for swift action was Charteris, in whose wilful distortion of the truth the former retained a blinkered faith. Haig’s intelligence chief now claimed that the Germans had ‘used up’ 48 divisions in the Flanders battles since 31 July, ‘while we have only had 23 in the line so far’. Haig’s generals tended not to share his faith in Charteris: ‘it comes from Charteris I fear!!’ Rawlinson lamented, a common reaction on discovering the source of the intelligence.2 If the commander-in-chief ‘allowed himself’ to be deluded by Charteris,3 Haig’s decision to press on seemed, from one viewpoint, understandable: the soldiers’ spirits were high after the September victories, and the weather had been fine for weeks. The bite and hold tactics had triumphed at Polygon Wood: why should they not continue ‘working’ – i.e. grinding the enemy back – if the weather held? ‘In the air was the unmistakable feeling,’ wrote Bean, ‘… that the British leaders now had the game in hand and, if conditions remained favourable, might in a few more moves secure a victory which would have its influence on the issue of the war.’4
Reinforce success, Haig insisted at the commanders’ conference on 2 October. Don’t make the same mistake as the Germans, who, on 31 October 1914, during First Ypres, failed to finish off the exhausted British forces.5 The circumstances had been very different then, but Haig would not broach any dissent. He resolved to turn all his power on the Passchendaele offensive for as long as the weather held. He suspended parallel operations at Lens and on the Belgian coast, and postponed plans for an attack at Cambrai. At this point, his generals shared his determination to finish the job in Flanders: they believed they had found a way of cracking the enemy’s lines and only a change in the weather could prevent their destruction of the German forces in Belgium. As Rawlinson noted in his dairy, ‘If only the weather shall last … we shall do a very big thing.’6
Ah, the weather: the curse of High Command. The disobedient elements brawled in the commanders’ faces, confounding their mortal plans. Three rainless weeks had been a critical factor in the string of victories between 20 September and 3 October. The field of mud was now a dust bowl; shells skidded on landing, throwing up clods of dry earth. Yet the dry spell was about to break, according to ‘Meteor’, the British weatherman, Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Gold. ‘[A] miracle might save us from rain,’ he told the Second Army’s chief of staff in early October.7
Meanwhile, the German commanders, though alarmed by British advances, were far from demoralised or beaten. Ludendorff conceded the enemy had broken, for now, the system of flexible defence; the gruff old warrior now wrestled for an answer to Plumer’s slowly grinding steps. ‘Our defensive tactics had to be developed further, somehow or other,’ Ludendorff later growled. ‘[But] it was so infinitely difficult to agree on the right remedy.’8 He and his commanders settled on a radical reform: the Eingreif units would be brought up to the fron
t lines, in the hope of shocking the British forces when or even before they attacked.
News of Russia’s complete collapse gave a further boost to German spirits, with the prospect of reinforcements from the east: 82 German divisions were stationed on the Russian front; 36 could be moved west within sixteen weeks of the redeployment order.
The British and Dominion armies resolved to carry on, hopeful the good weather would continue. They would attack Passchendaele Ridge in three steps: the first, to be called the Battle of Broodseinde, would start at dawn on 4 October 1917. The New Zealand and three Australian divisions were chosen to lead the attack, across a 2000-yard front, the arrowhead of Plumer’s Second Army spread between ‘Bitter Wood’ and the Ypres–Staden railway, a front of some 14,000 yards (see Map 5). Their objective was to seize Broodseinde Ridge, an arc of higher ground a few miles short of Passchendaele Ridge that the British had not held since 1915. The Germans lining it had a direct view onto the Salient, spread out beneath them like a life-size map. The Anzacs were to advance 1500 yards in the first bite, across an extremely concentrated battlefield.
And so, once more, the lorries, mule-drawn wagons and light tramlines dragged the giant British war machine forward. Once more, the heavy guns and great masses of men and matériel came up. Huge dumps of medical supplies, blankets and stretchers were established in the forward areas. Advanced dressing stations and gas treatment stations were set up where a suitable shelter could be found. Starting tapes were laid. All of this proceeded within range of German shellfire.
The four Antipodean divisions were fighting together for the first time, and they assembled in exuberant spirits. Tens of thousands of heavily laden Anzacs came up the dusty tracks from Ypres, along the Menin Road, past Hellfire Corner, through the Birr Cross Roads, past the rising, shell-torn ground of Bellewaerde Ridge towards the forward trenches and shell holes lining the jump-off point. ‘The track from Bellewaerde to Westhoek Ridge,’ remembered Ed Lynch, ‘is … just a narrow strip of corduroy laid down across miles of unending muck, pock-marked by thousands of watery shell holes. The whole road is bordered by dead mules and mud-splattered horses, smashed wagons and limbers and freshly killed men who have been tossed off the track to leave the corduroy open for the never-ending stream of traffic.’9