Passchendaele

by Paul Ham

  Throughout the night of 8–9 October, one Anzac and two British divisions of Plumer’s Second Army staggered up to the 13,500-yard front, the tip of another vast arrow-shaped formation flanked by the rest of the Second Army, the Guards Division, as well as French units and Gough’s Fifth Army. Two cavalry divisions were within a day’s march of the front – such was Haig’s confidence of success. The question of how their horses would gallop across a swamp remained unanswered.

  In the pouring rain, far fewer heavy guns could be assembled. The carriages sank in the quagmire. Mules were the only means of delivering ammunition: a one-hour journey now took between six and sixteen. ‘If the animals slipped off the planks,’ observed one historian, ‘they often sank out of sight.’54 On arrival, each slimy shell had to be cleaned before use. Gun platforms made of beech slabs nailed onto a foundation of fascines and metal required two days’ work to construct. These, too, ‘began to sink into mud after a few rounds had been fired’.55

  And there was the question of Allied morale. Most British units were well below full strength. Many Australian brigades were severely depleted, their men exhausted from clearing tracks, hauling wagons and laying duckboards and telephone cables, ‘tasks which appeared physically impossible to perform, and which no other army would have faced’.56 Hundreds had been evacuated with trench foot or severe bronchial complaints, the result of sleeping on wet blankets or straw. Several Australian battalions contained just 150 men, out of the usual 750 or so, and a handful of officers. Some had ‘temporarily deserted’ and faded to the rear. Bean witnessed soldiers coming back down Menin Road, pale and drawn, placing one foot in front of the other, robotically, ‘as I had not seen men do since the Somme winter’. They looked ‘like a dead man looks, and scarcely able to walk’.57

  The British, too, were battered and exhausted. An untested British division, the 66th, designated to spearhead the attack on one part of the front, lost hundreds of men en route to the starting line. The march, which should have taken 90 minutes, according to a diarist of the Lancashire Fusiliers, took eleven terrifying hours, as the heavily laden men were trying to cross a swamp under torrential rain and enemy shellfire. Duckboards over the water-filled holes collapsed or were shelled. Many drowned. The loathed staff officers were sent to goad the fitter troops forward to the starting tapes. One brigade arrived twenty minutes after zero hour (5.20 am), and were flung straight into battle.58

  ‘It was an absolute nightmare,’ recalls Lieutenant P. King, of the East Lancashire Regiment, ‘… all the time the duckboards were being blown up and men being blown off the track or merely slipping off … we were loaded up like Christmas trees, so of course an explosion near by or just the slightest thing would knock a man off balance and he would go … right down into the muck.’59

  ‘[O]ur barrage had started,’ recalled Private A. T. Shaw of the same regiment, ‘but we had not then arrived at the jumping off point. Heavy German shells were already falling amongst us and shrapnel was flying all over the place. There were shouts and screams and men falling all around. The attack that should have started never got off the ground.’60

  The opening barrage was thin and ineffectual, as many had feared. Shells burst in the mud, losing their power, fell short or veered off target; gun platforms sank with every shot. The barrage failed to break the German lines or destroy the belt of fresh wire in front of the enemy trenches. The German machine gunners fired on the enemy unhindered. ‘No previous attack organized by the Second Army in the war had such an unfavourable start,’ writes one historian.61

  In spite of all this, the Anzac and British soldiers who had reached the starting tapes rose at the whistles and attacked. Some staggered or crawled or were even dragged into battle, exhausted, wet through and covered in mud.62 They advanced into lines of pillboxes crowded with machine guns that spat belts into the valley. Through all this, some British troops reached Passchendaele Ridge, and a patrol of British officers actually entered the ruins of the village, which they found deserted (as a result of Ludendorff moving the Eingreif to the rear again). The rain and German shellfire ended their audacity, and they withdrew. Thousands were left floundering below Passchendaele and Poelcappelle, easy targets for enemy machine gunners. Acts of searing bravery redeemed the failure; one action alone merited three Victoria Crosses.63 Whole units disappeared: fourteen men out of an Australian raiding party of 85 returned unwounded; no traces of the rest were ever recovered.

  The survivors fell back to the starting point, and scrambled for shelter. Some Australians dug in near the smashed Zonnebeke railroad, so exhausted and shell-shocked that Frank Hurley, lying near them, could not distinguish the living from the dead.64 Bursting shells blew horse-drawn ambulance wagons off the track, hurling their damaged human cargo into the mire. Helplessly the bearers tried to gather up the wounded and right the wagons, under rain and shellfire. Acute demoralisation set in.

  ‘My Dearest Mother,’ wrote Alfred Leahy on 10 October (having been told he would be recommended for a Military Medal or high award), ‘You have no doubt read in the papers of this great battle … Men were falling all around me, and the dying, dead and wounded lying about the field was indescribable. I do not wish to go thro’ the same again or witness such shocking sights …’65

  Through the crowded aid posts and field hospitals padres roamed, to deliver last rites. ‘Even when a man was very badly wounded and unconscious,’ recalled Padre S. Hinchcliffe, of the Northumberland Fusiliers, ‘I always believed that you could penetrate right down through his consciousness.’ He bent down and whispered in their ears, ‘Put your trust in God.’66

  In the shambles that now passed for the front, the men spent the night in shallow shell holes, many in the ruins of Zonnebeke, awaiting relief. But the relieving troops could not get through the German fire. Allhusen’s company, part of a relief battalion, succeeded after an epic journey. His men approached the Menin Road on the night of 6 October, ‘hopelessly depressed and exaggeratedly cheerful in turns’, he wrote. They rested in the ruins of a village for three days, cold and wet. He likened the mood in the mess to that of ‘a condemned cell’.67 Past Dead Mule Corner, the road met the duckboards. Further up the slope, at Sanctuary Corner, the shellfire worsened. One of his men received a ‘blighty’: ‘I have never seen anybody so pleased,’ Allhusen observed.

  Moving along Menin Road that night left him with a memory of:

  bursting shells, treading on dead men, frantic calls for stretcher-bearers long after the stretcher-bearers had gone, losing the way … everybody hurrying and swearing: then awful delays while the guide admitted that he was lost and made futile remarks such as ‘there ought to be a broken tank ’ere’ … all under heavy shelling with men being hit left and right.68

  His men found the unit they were supposed to relieve, a company of Bedfords, many of whom were huddled in a captured pillbox, ‘like ghosts, pale and wild-eyed, with long beards and coated in mud from head to foot’. Their present company commander (the first had been killed in the doorway to the pillbox) ‘talked incessantly in a light-headed way’.69

  Allhusen led his platoon to a trench filled with a foot and a half of water, ‘where they were to live’ amid men of strange regiments who were ‘wandering about lost and swearing’. It rained all night. In the morning, the sun shone. Allhusen surveyed ‘just the shapeless mess that remains when everything else has gone’. The mud rose ‘in squashy heaps out of pools and lakes of slimy liquid that were sometimes black, sometimes yellow … sometimes bright green – but never the colour that water ought to be’, he recalled. ‘Mixed with everything were stores, arms and equipment … and dead men. Sometimes these were in groups, sometimes single, while often there were only bits of them.’70

  This perceptive young lieutenant’s ‘strongest memory’ was ‘the hunted, haunted feeling which made men restless and sullen, wandering aimlessly about talking in disjointed monosyllables, and ultimately drove them mad’. The soldiers were always in a hurry, ye
t with nothing to do, as they waited to attack. They tried to improve the trenches – a hopeless task, ‘as every shovel full of mud thrown out slithered slowly back again’.71

  Shortly they prepared to leave the support trenches and enter the front line. Two men went down with severe shell shock: one shook ‘like jelly’ and ‘couldn’t speak’; the other ‘became paralysed, and was not expected to live’. Allhusen, now second in charge of his company, reached the front to find his commander standing knee-deep in mud, his teeth chattering, and on the edge of going ‘out of his mind’. In the distance, the German gunners were shelling their own troops, provoking laughter among Allhusen’s men. Golden rain – the flare that was supposed to warn the gunners that their rounds were falling short – fell all day over the German lines as they blew themselves up.

  An Australian unit managed to relieve the East Lancashires that night, to the astonishment of Lieutenant P. King: ‘three tall figures’, one of whom was ‘actually smoking’, jumped into his shell hole. ‘Who the hell are you?’ King asked. To which one soldier replied, ‘Well, we’re the Aussies, chum, and we’ve come to relieve you.’ Delighted, King warned that he had no trenches, rations or ammunition, and could only offer a map. ‘Never mind about that,’ said the Australian. ‘Just fuck off.’72

  As the Australian reinforcements waited for dawn, they ate iron rations and drank cold tea. The cries of the wounded persisted all night. Every so often, a man fell into a crater and sank. ‘We heard screaming from another crater,’ recounts Sergeant T. Berry of The Rifle Brigade. Berry tried to create a chain of rifles to reach the man, now up to his neck:

  He went down gradually. He kept begging us to shoot him. But we couldn’t shoot him. Who could shoot him? We stayed with him, watching him go down in the mud. And he died. He wasn’t the only one. There must have been thousands … 73

  The Allies gained none of their goals that day. Their ‘total repulse’ by the Germans produced a further 13,000 British and Anzac casualties, of whom 4000 were killed: this by a supposedly broken enemy. Charteris was forced to face reality, as he revealed in his diary entry on 10 October:

  It was the saddest day of this year. We did fairly well but only fairly well … there is now no chance of complete success this year … there is no purpose in it now, so far as Flanders is concerned.74

  The only man who could have ended the hell in the Salient remained mysteriously silent. The prime minister had insisted on retaining the power to halt the offensive should circumstances dictate, as they did now. Many years later, Lloyd George would defend his inaction by claiming that Haig and GHQ had kept him in the dark about the progress of the campaign – a piece of fiction as bogus as the casualties were real. In fact, the events on the Western Front were well known to the War Policy Committee, through which Lloyd George had by now acquired near dictatorial powers.

  Instead, in early October, with his Italian campaign failing, Lloyd George busied himself with a scheme for a new front line, this time in Turkey. The prime minister’s idea was to take Germany’s southern ally out of the war via the stick of an attack through Palestine and the carrot of generous terms to Constantinople. He raised the Turkish card at War Committee meetings on 3 and 11 October, with all the zeal of his Italian adventure. Three of his colleagues were in favour; Bonar Law feared another Gallipoli.

  The matter of Third Ypres rarely intruded on these deliberations. On the few occasions they discussed it, the War Policy Committee tended to dismiss it as a foregone failure, unworthy of their attention. Haig had failed even to reach Passchendaele, after two months of bashing, complained the prime minister on 3 October. Curzon argued in fairness that the weather had hampered the offensive. Regardless, Lloyd George barked, there was little chance of Haig seizing Roulers or Klerken Ridge (beyond Passchendaele) that year.

  By the 11th, the prime minister had persuaded himself that a winter Palestine/Turkey campaign ‘was the only operation to undertake’, notwithstanding the firm objections of Major General Arthur Lynden-Bell, former chief of staff in Egypt, who knew better. The terrible battle at Poelcappelle that had ended two days earlier excited little comment. The prime minister merely regretted that he’d taken ‘too sanguine a view of the Flanders offensive’ and promised to raise the matter with the War Cabinet in three weeks if Haig’s position had not improved: the nod, in other words, to continue the offensive until further notice.75

  If any moment should have justified the prime minister’s intervention, surely this was it. Every day, Lloyd George knew, thousands of men were being killed or wounded for little result. Yet neither he nor his committeemen saw fit to act. And again, the prime minister exhibited none of the thunderous moral energy with which he would later denounce the battle. The fact that the waging of the Flanders campaign was ultimately his to decide seemed not to impinge upon the committee’s discussions at the time, as Prior and Wilson’s devastating study concludes: ‘It would continue not another day if they denied it authorization’, yet the prime minister ‘failed to raise a finger to stop it’ when he had the chance.76

  The prime minister was, of course, answerable to the Conservatives in his Cabinet. And there were other reasons for his inertia (as we shall discuss in Chapter 17). For now, Lloyd George put himself in the rare position of listening. He summoned a panel of military experts on 11 October to examine the whole panoply of war-related issues that were causing ‘most anxiety in the War Cabinet’: the Russian collapse; the delayed French recovery; the abandonment of the Italian offensive; the exhaustion of the supply of British manpower; the endless delays of the Americans; and the U-boat war (the only bright spot being that September’s shipping losses had been ‘exceptionally low’).77 Meanwhile, the rain poured down in Flanders and thousands of young men were on the move again, trudging to their doom.

  Well aware that they would have weak, if any, artillery cover, Haig ordered his ragged armies up for another attack, which would be known as the First Battle of Passchendaele. They were given two days to prepare. The ensuing battles would thus rely on pure hope over hard experience. The commanders cast precedent aside, as if the lessons of Loos, the Somme, Gheluvelt and even the immediately preceding Poelcappelle, so profligate with soldiers’ lives, were worth nothing. Haig continued to persuade himself, and told French President Poincaré, that enemy morale was at rock bottom and the German soldiers lacked the ability to fight.78 Even Plumer believed one more push might carry the day. Old Plum, hitherto a model of caution, now tended to set goals that were beyond the capacity of his army. As the British official historian concludes, the task allotted the Anzacs on 12 October was ‘beyond the power of any infantry with so little support’.79

  A powerful dissenting voice intruded on the eve of the next bite. Lieutenant General George Macdonogh, director of military intelligence at the War Office, argued that the Germans were far from defeated, and that fresh formations were arriving from the Russian front. Macdonogh’s sane intervention had no influence on Haig, who vented his feelings in his diary:

  I can’t think why the War Office Intelligence Dept. gives such a wrong picture of the situation except that General Macdonogh (DMI) is a Roman Catholic and is (perhaps unconsciously) influenced by information which doubtless reaches him from tainted (i.e. catholic) sources.80

  A charitable reading would set aside this squalid sentiment as Haig’s personal prejudice, which had no place in a decision that would determine the outcome of a battle and the fate of thousands of men. Yet Haig’s dislike of Irish Catholics was a palpable force in his thinking, and went hand-in-hand with his dim view of those under his command. One of Haig’s apologists rather absurdly argues that the Pope’s ‘pro-German stance’ somehow justified Haig’s suspicions of Macdonogh’s intelligence.81 The Vatican’s August peace proposal had condemned the war in general; the Pope had not taken sides.

  In any case, as it happened, Macdonogh had not received tainted intelligence, and Haig had a responsibility to examine it: the Germans defending Passchen
daele Ridge along the Flandern II-Stellungen were indeed gathering in strength. Macdonogh drew on the bigger picture, the situation in Russia and elsewhere in France, whereas Haig at this time tended to rely on his soldier’s instincts and Charteris’s wishful thinking. Obviously the Germans were heavily mauled – Haig was ‘not totally wrong’, writes Sheffield82 – but they were far from defeated.

  In the event, Haig ignored Macdonogh. He would continue bashing away with every man he could get hold of. If his geographical goal was Bellevue Spur, his actual goal was to kill or wound as many Germans as possible. Bellevue Spur juts out of Passchendaele Ridge above the Ravebeek Valley, through which flows the Ravebeek ‘stream’, now 50 yards wide and waist-deep. Surrounding it were hectares of thick brown stew. Few guns could be marshalled through this mess – not nearly enough to raise a barrage. ‘Horses were useless in such mud so the guns had to be inched forward by manpower,’ wrote one New Zealand gunner, ‘pulled out of the muddy water in one shellhole to slide forward into another.’83 Their carriages sank, their wheels buckled, their axles broke. The few guns that reached their intended positions had no firm ground on which to absorb the recoil shock, and sank deeper with every shot.84 Topographers, too, with their heavy plane-tables and tripods on their backs, and trig observers with their theodolites, on whom the gunners relied to locate vital grid references such as Passchendaele church, faced a near-impossible task through the Flanders mud.85 The pack mules took seventeen hours to deliver the ammunition: every time a mule got stuck, the eight rounds strapped to its back had to be removed and cleaned, and the animal dragged clear of the mud and reloaded, until it happened again.

  A severe problem arose the day before the offensive: the 66th Division had failed to hold its section of front, in the Ravebeek Valley. An Australian officer went forward to find out why. He found scenes of despair. ‘Never have I seen men so broken and demoralised,’ he wrote. The Tommies were: