by Paul Ham
The thin barrage, he realised, had started beyond the German machine guns, freeing them to mow down the Australians, whose officers and NCOs had been killed within minutes. He found the dead ‘lying in heaps; it was the worst slaughter I have ever seen’. There was nobody left to lead the men.
At the entrance to the pillbox, Birnie found himself face-to-face with ‘seven Huns’. He waved his Red Cross flag. To his amazement, none of them fired. His three surviving stretcher-bearers met him there. Unable to carry anyone out, Birnie and his few men moved about the battlefield, dressing wounds, administering morphine, sitting with the dying. ‘It was heartbreaking work,’ he wrote, during which the Germans held their fire.
Then Birnie felt something hot shoot through his lower neck: ‘a sniper bagged me’. He fell into a shell hole. One of his men shouted, ‘Are you dead, Sir? Are you dead? God help those b----rs if they’ve killed you.’
Birnie crawled back to the shell hole that served as Bell-Irving’s headquarters, dressed his wound, swallowed a dram of whisky and returned to work, moving around the battlefield, an act for which he was later awarded the Military Cross:
To those in great pain and no chance of living, I gave enough morphia to put them out peacefully and it was pitiful to hear their thanks with white faces twisted into a smile, ‘Thanks Doc – I’m not afraid but this damn pain gets you down’, or a message to someone at home they would never see again.122
Just 48 of 750 men in his battalion had survived the battle, unwounded, he told his parents. His entire unit had ceased to exist.
The First Battle of Passchendaele had failed utterly: 13,000–15,000 British and Empire troops had been killed or wounded in a few hours, for no territorial gain and fewer German casualties.123 German machine gunners had fired with impunity in scenes as depressing as the first day of the Somme. The demoralised enemy of Haig’s imagination had proved themselves astonishingly resilient, and Macdonogh’s intelligence had been borne out.
Touring the battlefield with Godley three days later, Sergeant Wilson wrote:
I won’t forget my experience today if I live for a thousand years … The Somme was pretty bad I’ll admit but this is worse. I have never seen such destruction. It is hard to imagine that 4 years ago peaceful people tilled this same soil and that it was one of the most prosperous districts in Europe. Now, as I saw it today, well its [sic] simply an awful nightmare, a hideous reeking swamp seething with living (and dead) beings. A place that stamps itself on one’s mind and memory like a red hot iron.124
Platoon and company commanders wept with rage at the virtual obliteration of their units. Battalion and brigade commanders were shaken to the core at what they saw as futile bloodletting. Such carnage could not be allowed to persist. Plumer and Gough were now against continuing with the battle. In late October, Plumer’s staff met at his headquarters in Cassel and decided that Third Ypres should be abandoned.
Yet no senior soldier, or politician, openly called on Haig to terminate the offensive: the field marshal’s indomitable will seems to have overawed his commanders. Haig decided, on 13 October, that the battle would continue if and when the weather improved. Four fresh Canadian divisions under the command of Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Currie were ordered up to relieve the exhausted Anzacs, utterly broken after weeks of spearheading the offensives.
Haig’s decision to persist amounted to ‘one of the lowest points in the British exercise of command’ during Third Ypres, concluded Prior and Wilson.125 If so, Haig clearly did not share this assessment of his powers. Exceeding his own standards of unwitting understatement, he confided in his wife on 14 October that the ‘rain has upset our arrangements a good deal’. The bad weather, he wrote, had also fouled an officers’ afternoon garden party.126 Haig was not being wilfully callous; his mind simply failed to rise to the occasion. His letters and diary suggest a spectator in the wings, at this stage of the battle, not a commander at the centre of events. He exhibited no sense of regret at the staggering losses. He writes as though they were inevitable, not his responsibility, simply the cost of attrition. No doubt, he wished to spare his wife the gruesome details (though he could be very candid with her when he chose). He ended this letter with the hope that ‘before long’ the weather would improve and the ground become ‘as dry as it was in 1914 at the end of October’.127
The press echoed Haig’s optimism, with the same curious detachment from reality. The Birmingham Gazette rejoiced in the Tommies’ defiance of the weather, as if the want of an umbrella were their chief discomfort: ‘The Germans could hardly have anticipated that we should strike again so soon in weather which would keep most troops under cover.’128 Several papers, including the Gazette and the Liverpool Echo, quoted Haig’s verdict on the battle: ‘We have driven the Germans practically out of the whole depth of their defensive front … The early reports back from the fighting lines are very encouraging. At 7.40 a.m. it was reported that all was going splendidly …’ Haig later corrected this: ‘Since my last report the weather has closed in as thick as pease soup … and I understand operations have been brought to a temporary standstill.’129
Haig gave a pithy answer as to why he pressed on, in his 1917 report to the Cabinet: ‘progress’, he explained, ‘had not yet become impossible’.130 If these words meant anything, they meant that Haig would decide, not the rain or the mounting losses, when progress would become impossible. Until then, he would drive his men to the limits of endurance.
Haig justified this decision on the basis of the comparative wastage figures that he dispatched to the War Cabinet on 16 October 1917, which suggested he was ‘winning’ the battle of attrition. The figures stated that 32 of 66 British (including Anzac) divisions had been ‘sent away exhausted’ or soon would be, compared with 53 of Germany’s 72 divisions (see Appendix 8).131 This little chart of dubious accuracy neglected complicating factors such as the arrival of fresh German divisions and the severity of the collapse in morale in both armies. For Haig, however, the numbers were a restorative, and cemented his faith in his forces’ resilience. They would simply go on and on until the Germans were destroyed or surrendered.
The next day, the War Cabinet examined Haig’s wastage report alongside the total losses in Flanders up to 5 October. According to the latter, which excluded the terrible battles of Poelcappelle and First Passchendaele, British and Dominion casualties were 148,470 against German losses of 255,000.132 The striking thing about these numbers is not merely that they were wrong – the reverse more accurately assessed the comparative body count, as later research has shown – but that they provoked so little discussion in the government. The War Cabinet concluded that it was ‘not in the public interest’ to publish the totals and wrapped up the meeting by deciding that Lloyd George would make an ‘occasional statement’ to Parliament to correct persistent ‘false’ rumours that ‘Colonials’ were doing most of the fighting (at that point, the Dominions were certainly leading most of the battles – see appendices 8 and 9).133 So much for Lloyd George’s later claim that the generals had hidden the truth about the extremity of the situation from the government. The Cabinet had all the information before them; they simply failed to act on it.
Instead, the government chose this moment (16 October) to send Haig a message of congratulations, in recognition of his ‘dogged advance of 4½ miles in conditions of great difficulty’:
Starting from the position in which every advantage rested with the enemy, and hampered and delayed from time to time by most unfavourable weather, you and your men have nevertheless continuously driven the enemy back with such skill, courage and pertinacity as to have commanded the grateful admiration of the people of the British Empire.134
What was Lloyd George’s dark purpose, wondered Haig and Robertson, as they scanned this missive of silken praise, addressed to them at a time of reversal and crisis? Haig decided, with a mixture ‘of conceit and cynicism’, that public support for his leadership must have pressed the government to act.135
In truth, the prime minister had not a shred of faith in his commander-in-chief, and was busying himself with a fresh plan to subordinate Haig to French command. The prime minister believed that if Haig was not actually insane, then he was ‘wholly indifferent to human suffering’, according to one view of Lloyd George’s thinking.136 This time, however, the prime minister hoped to avoid the charge that he was undermining his field commander, thus enraging the conservative press. His letter of congratulations may thus be seen as a new tack in his ‘wearing-down war’ against Haig, to lull the target into a false sense of security: by congratulating his commander for doing everything he had asked him not to do, Lloyd George had prepared the ground to launch a fresh assault on Haig – under the cover of praise.
As he schemed, the prime minister drew renewed confidence from the continuing victory over German submarines: by the end of October, German U-boats had sunk just ten vessels out of 99 British convoys, or 0.66 per cent of the total.137
Meanwhile, the survivors of the October battles rested, wrote home and looked forward to mail. On the 18th, Allhusen thanked his mother for sending chocolate, toffee, Horlicks and apples. They were ‘an absolute blessing. You’ve no idea what a difference these things can make … The chocolate kept the remains of my platoon going.’138
13
THE FACE OF FEAR
… the horror of Verdun was surpassed. It was no longer life at all. It was mere unspeakable suffering.
General Erich Ludendorff
Little is known of the German soldiers’ experience of this relentless bashing. How the world looked and felt to a man sitting in a hole in the ground as the vast instrument of his destruction moved towards him tends not to be asked or answered in most histories of the Western Front. Many experienced a kind of negative epiphany, an annihilation of the self, a helpless resignation to a power that reduced him to the status of an insect; others discovered a strange, careless inner strength, coupled with a reckless indifference to his own suffering.
As with the British Army, indeed all armies, the German soldier’s lot was a world away from that of his commanders: Rupprecht, Ludendorff, von Kuhl and von Armin. There he sat, in the path of a literal storm of steel, night after night, for weeks. How on earth had the German soldier resisted, for so long, the combined power of the British Empire, under the mightiest artillery bombardment ever unleashed? Why had his commanders insisted that he defend these wretched ridgelines to the death?
In early October, the German commanders surveyed the tactical war with rising alarm. Their heavy losses were admittedly disturbing. Morale had taken a serious blow. Yet they viewed the broader, strategic outlook with sanguinity. If the German Army could hold Flanders until the winter, Germany might win the war, Ludendorff believed.
Rupprecht, who commanded the German Fourth Army in Flanders, was less persuaded, but he shared Ludendorff’s reasoning. It ran like this: the British were racing against time. By early October, the British commanders (as they themselves well knew) had no hope of capturing the U-boat bases on the Belgian coast. Yet if Haig had stopped the battle at that point all his efforts would appear in vain and his ‘unimagined losses’ a worthless sacrifice. So Haig had no choice other than to continue fighting, to salvage something from the wreckage of his doomed campaign. The only ‘something’ worth fighting for was the Salient’s high point, Passchendaele Ridge, the possession of which would allow him to claim a partial victory and resume the struggle for Belgium in the spring of 1918.1 By then, the full complement of the German Army would have arrived from the Eastern Front, a prospect Ludendorff relished, especially as they would arrive before the Americans. Until then, the German commanders resolved to commit all their resources to the defence of Passchendaele – and bleed the British and Dominion armies, as they had the French at Verdun. In short, the Germans, too, were fighting a wearing-down war – but from a position of defensive strength.
Certainly, the German frontline battalions had been badly mauled. The quick succession of British and Anzac bites had worn them down to the point of physical and nervous collapse. The incessant artillery battering had pinned the German forces to the front, so much so that it was extremely difficult to withdraw the infantry from the combat zone. ‘Men had hardly departed when Command called them back again to the front,’ notes the German history of Flanders, ‘battalions often had to start a counter-attack in the middle of their relief time.’2 Losses to sickness, such as gastric disorders and trench foot, were rising alarmingly.
Yet German morale would not reach the point of collapse until mid-1918, confounding the hopes of Haig and Charteris, and confirming the verdict of Macdonogh. Nonetheless, the German commanders were deeply concerned. On 18 October, von Kuhl proposed a general withdrawal from Flanders – an idea von Armin stoutly resisted, arguing that relinquishing any ground risked the destruction of the U-boat bases. For now, the German soldier would stay in the line.
So Fritz sat there, grimly hanging on to his position in the ridges above Ypres. How the ordinary German soldier found the ‘inner combat strength’ to withstand the British attacks is one of the mysteries of history. The sentiment ‘Damn Fritz, he just won’t die’ spoke for the feelings of many Commonwealth troops in the face of an unbreakable wall of grey uniforms.
A few German soldiers took extreme measures to pre-empt the consequences of fear, such as chaining themselves to their guns. At Bullecourt, Norman Collins encountered a wounded German who had chained himself to his gun and thrown the key beyond reach: ‘Some of the bravest men we’ve ever bumped into have been Fritz gunners …’3 Or perhaps, at Flanders, these men had been reduced to an insensate state, whose ‘deadening indifference’ to suffering summoned ‘an almost automatic and calm reaction to the terrible events on the battlefield’, as one German history contends:
You are simply stuck in it, and you start to worry as little about the possibility of dying in the wet shell holes as you do about the even smaller possibility of leaving them alive. Death has lost its terror, since it has been standing next to you as a constant companion every hour of the day and night. The front instinct finds its best breeding ground in that state of ‘couldn’t care less’: verve turns into patience, courage into calm, bravery into resilience against any events of an exterior or interior kind.4
In this light, the Battle of Flanders had created a ‘new type of German soldier’, one who, resigned to his fate, placed little or no value on his life, on medals or on words of praise. Such a man scorned military discipline, hobnobbed with his platoon and company commanders who lay in the mud beside him, and viewed every rear area commander with contempt. Such foot soldiers were affectionately known as Frontschwein (frontline hogs). In this light, they were not dissimilar to their British, Dominion and French counterparts, who held the red-tabbed staff officers in the rear in equal contempt.
The Frontschwein:
upheld a kind of camaraderie amongst themselves which could not have been more self-sacrificing or loyal, but they considered it their right to ‘pinch’ the warm bread and rabbits from the field kitchens and the fresh vegetables and unripe potatoes from their garrisons. They knew whose shoulders the fate of the front was resting on at the decisive moment … and they accepted their duty as a matter of course and without pathos. That’s how the indestructible, 100-times proven, never to be defeated, ‘Frontschwein’ was created.5
On the morning of the Battle of Broodseinde, the Frontschwein were actually preparing to attack, not to defend, contradicting everything Haig and his intelligence chief had assumed about the state of the enemy. The German commanders ‘planned a large-scale counter-attack to retake the ground lost on 26 September to the south of Zonnebeke up to the Polygon Wood for this morning’.6 All through the previous night, they had ‘dithered’ over whether the heavier British artillery was ‘normal destructive fire’ or the ‘softening up’ that usually preceded an infantry charge. Towards morning, they decided it was the former, and upheld the order to attack. At 5
.30 am, the German artillery opened up on the British and Dominion lines, killing or wounding, as we’ve seen, many Anzacs approaching the frontline.
At 6 am, when the British guns erupted, the German troops were still hoping to persuade themselves that the ‘awful intensity’ of the shelling was ‘simply English defensive fire against the beginning of the German attack’, according to the German history. The scale and density of the barrage soon corrected that assumption: ‘[T]he width across which this raging barrier of fire extended from the Houthulst Wood up to the canal to the south of Ypres soon taught them that the expected severe enemy raid had started.’7
The German experience of those October battles, the darkest month of the war in Flanders, bear witness to the capacity of the mind and body to endure unthinkable strain. Consider a few reactions of the men who survived the British barrage of 4 October, the worst day for Germany in 1917: ‘The aim was to snuff out all life,’ Unteroffizier Paul Stolz remembered thinking. ‘Shell after shell smashed into our ranks … Many were buried alive … In amongst the dark clouds of the explosions, fountains of dirty yellow soup-like clay spouted out of the craters, along with huge clods of earth, tree trunks and chunks of concrete.’8
Major Freiherr von Sobbe, commander of Infantry Regiment 92, watched his men kneeling in their trenches and praying for salvation:
The earth seemed to want to swallow up everything. The battalions clung on amidst a crazy maelstrom … Bodies trembled, pulses raced … Some of the men hunched there in silence, stripped of all their emotions … Many prayed, perhaps for the first time in a very long time: ‘My God, do not forsake me’ and, mixed in with their prayer was the glimmer of hope of men still trying desperately to hang on to life … One soldier after another was hit and rolled away into a shell crater … 9