Passchendaele

by Paul Ham

  In fact, Haig did not ‘order’ the Canadian to commit his men. Instead, the field marshal did something highly unusual. First, in a meeting with Currie, Haig calmly laid out the reasons for the offensive: to establish an effective ‘winter line’ in Flanders in readiness for the resumption of hostilities in spring 1918; to keep the enemy pinned down during preparations for the Battle of Cambrai, set for November; and to assist the forthcoming French attacks in Champagne (i.e. at Malmaison on 23 October 1917).10 A fourth, unspoken reason was that Haig desperately needed Passchendaele as the trophy with which he hoped to validate the huge sacrifice of the preceding three months to a deeply dispirited prime minister.

  Having persuaded the reluctant Currie, Haig made a personal visit to the Canadian headquarters, and delivered a speech to the officers that none would forget – a notable achievement given Haig’s renowned inarticulacy. Haig had not come to order the Canadians to attack Passchendaele (which was entirely within his powers). He was asking, even pleading with them to do so.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Haig said, ‘it has become apparent that Passchendaele must be taken and I have come here to ask the Canadian Corps to do it. General Currie is strongly opposed to doing so, but I have succeeded in overcoming his scruples. Some day I hope to be able to tell you why this must be done, but in the meantime I ask you to take my word for it. I may say that General Currie has demanded an unprecedented amount of artillery to protect his Canadians and I have been forced to acquiesce.’11

  By recognising Currie’s reluctance to commit his men, Haig’s speech had the effect of personalising the decision at troop level: this would be a battle for the officers and men to decide; together they would prove themselves, to their commander and their country, again, at a moment when the world looked to Canada to redeem the sacrifice on the Western Front. Haig had read the psychology of the young soldier precisely.

  By now, Passchendaele village had become a sort of siren song to both sides. In Haig’s eyes, it had to be taken, regardless of the cost. The Germans had accurately assessed his dilemma. Hadn’t he told Lloyd George in June that his plan entailed the capture of Passchendaele within weeks? How could he end the year with his men floundering beneath the ridge on which the wretched village stood? It offered firmer, drier ground from which the Allies would have an unimpaired view of German positions to the north-east, far beyond the Salient. In turn, to deny Haig that advantage, the German commanders would defend Passchendaele to the last available man.

  Currie imposed several conditions on the use of his men, chiefly that the attack would not proceed until his preparations were complete. Like Plumer and Monash, he was a great believer in meticulous planning. The guns had to be brought forward, intelligence gathered, and his men rigorously trained in specific tactics (such as destroying pillboxes). The guns must be able to produce the densest possible barrage. There would be no repeat of the Anzacs’ disaster, of attacking without artillery cover. Dragging up enough guns was absolutely vital before he committed his men to the battle. Haig, in no position to argue, agreed at once to the Canadian’s demands.

  The struggle ahead would exceed anything in Currie’s experience. He submitted his plans on 16 October; the first attack would go in on the 26th. After a quick inspection of his resources, he realised he had far fewer guns than he’d been led to expect. Of 250 Australian heavies that were supposedly in situ, he found only 227, 89 of which were out of action. Less than half the 306 18-pounders were in working order, and most were ‘dotted about in the mud wherever they happened to get bogged’.12 Somehow the full complement of guns and ammunition had to be got forward, but the roads were impassable and the tracks of the light railway submerged.

  They got to work at once. Canadian sappers and pioneer battalions were deployed alongside Plumer’s Royal Engineers to construct two miles of new ‘plank’ roads (using elm or beech planks, nine feet long and 21 inches thick), 4000 yards of new tramlines and hundreds of gun emplacements positioned wherever necessary to effect a dense barrage. Currie ordered any lumberjacks to the rear to fell trees, to build a new network of duckboards.

  The work came at a high cost: German shellfire killed or wounded 1500 men at work on the new transport lines between mid-October and mid-November.13 ‘Dead men and horses all around. Thousands of men working,’ Private P. H. Longstaffe, of a Canadian pioneer battalion, wrote in his diary on 21 October. At the time, he and his comrades were building a plank road: ‘Rush job on road through swamp. Ammunition, mules and horses passing in continuous stream. Fritz shelling both sides.’14 Their efforts would save more lives in the coming battle, by ensuring an effective barrage.

  The pre-battle preparation conformed to Currie’s chief priority: to preserve as many of his soldiers’ lives as possible. ‘Currie consistently sought to pay the price of victory in shells and not in the lives of men,’ an officer with the Canadian Corps Heavy Artillery later observed.15 And so, by the time the Canadian infantry reached their starting points, most of their guns were in place, pounding away at the German pillboxes and wire entanglements. A further 210 18-pounders, 190 howitzers and 26 heavy guns arrived from the Canadian divisional artilleries, delighting Brigadier General Edward Morrison, Currie’s commander of artillery.16 To complete this lineup, the Canadian machine-gun companies were rushed forward, and soon began sweeping the enemy’s supply lines with nightly fire, to deny them food and relief.

  The attack would proceed in three steps, of just 500 yards each: the first aimed to capture German positions up to the red line, on the high ground surrounding Passchendaele; the second would secure points along the blue line, from which to seize the village; and the third would capture the village itself and extend the gains to the ridge east of town (the green line). There would be pauses of three to five days between each step, to rotate the men and drag up the guns. A creeping barrage 700 yards deep, advancing at 40 yards every four minutes, would precede the attack.

  Before battle, Currie addressed his men. ‘With good judgement and guts,’ he declared, Passchendaele could be taken.17 He bluntly explained what they were up against: entrenched German forces lining the ridge, many of them encased in rows of concrete blockhouses. What followed applied the lessons Currie had drawn from his first-hand experience, chiefly at the Somme and Vimy: ‘if the Artillery preparation and support is good; if our Intelligence is properly appreciated; there is no position that cannot be wrested from the enemy by well-disciplined, well-trained and well-led troops attacking on a sound plan.’18 As a pointed diagnosis of why a string of Allied offensives on the Western Front had failed, this could hardly be bettered.

  The Canadians moved up on 18 October, to relieve the Anzacs and Tommies along a line bound by the Ypres–Zonnebeke–Passchendaele road to the south-west and the parallel road running through Gravenstafel to the north. They came by light train through the usual miserable conditions. Passing the casualty clearing station at Godwaersveldt (Godewaersvelde), the lads hung out of the train and waved to the nurses, shouting, ‘Keep a bed for us, Sister. We’ll be back in a few days.’19 The German gunners shortly shelled the hospital and the train, visible to enemy observation balloons, killing several nurses. The long march to the front wound past Ypres and up the Menin and Gravenstafel Roads, under shell-fire all the way.

  Some of the Canadians had been here before, in April 1915, when the Germans used chlorine gas on them. The landscape was unrecognisable now: a brown stretch of treeless bog that extended east to Passchendaele Ridge. All the former landmarks – villages, woods, farmhouses – had disappeared, and only the ‘roads’, shelled lanes of mud-covered planks, offered familiar orientation points. From here, they gazed across the Ravebeek Valley, the Anzac graveyard, now covered in water, liquid mud and soldiers’ remains, and utterly impassable. Some wondered how on earth their colonial predecessors had attempted to attack across such country. Instead the Canadians would attack Passchendaele from the flanks, along the slightly raised roads that bound the Ravebeek – the northern road he
ading along the Bellevue Spur and the Zonnebeke Road running from the south-west onto Passchendaele Ridge itself.

  They arrived in situ amid a cacophony of falling shells. Corporal R. G. Pinneo of the 10th Canadian Infantry Brigade thought it a joke when he found his ‘billet’, a bombed cemetery: ‘The graves and tombstones had all been knocked to hell by gunfire, and even the crypts and coffins had been blasted open. You could see the sheeted dead. We bivouacked as best we could.’20

  No sooner had Private Reginald Le Brun, of the Canadian Machine Gun Corps, reached his billet, in the ruins of a church, than a shell blew up the cook pot and the cook, and he and his men were left to eat cold emergency rations.21 The next morning, his commanding officer ordered him to take supplies up to the men in the frontline shell holes (there were no trenches this far up), as the mules could go no further. ‘It was only a quarter of a mile or so from the front,’ Le Brun recalled, ‘and the whole way was nothing but shell holes with bodies floating in them … maybe just legs and boots sticking out from the sides. The shelling never let up.’

  During the first trip back, he heard someone calling for help:

  It was one of our infantryman and he was sitting on the ground, propped up on his elbow with his tunic open. I nearly vomited. His insides were spilling out of his stomach and he was holding himself and trying to push all this awful stuff back in. When he saw me he said, ‘Finish it for me, mate. Put a bullet in me. Go on. I want you to. Finish it!’ He had no gun himself. When I did nothing he started to swear. He cursed and swore at me and kept on shouting even after I turned and ran.22

  British feinting attacks were launched on 22 October, at Poelcappelle and elsewhere, to deceive the enemy into thinking the battle would continue along the entire front. Then, at dawn on the 26th, the Canadian infantry attacked along the two roads leading to Passchendaele: the 3rd Division on the southern road, flanked by Monash’s Anzacs and the 4th Division on the northern road, flanked by Gough’s Fifth Army (see Map 7).

  It started to rain, on cue, reprising the old joke that the heavy guns had punctured the clouds. The barrage was dense and slow enough to protect the Canadians’ advance, thundering across the field at just 50 yards every four minutes.23 Hugging the barrage, the Canadians scrambled up the Bellevue Spur, curse of the unprotected New Zealanders.

  The Germans thronged the ruins of Passchendaele village. Every corner hosted a sniper or machine gunner. It was a place of ‘smashed walls’ and ‘wrecked and torn remains’, recalled one German soldier, whose regiment arrived on 20 October. ‘In all directions there was yawning emptiness, ruins, rubble and destruction … no trenches, just shellholes in which our men took cover. The crater field stretched forward for three kilometres.’24

  When the first Canadians emerged from the barrage, a German gunner yelled, ‘Look, here they come through the fog!’25 Waves of them flooded over the crest of the Bellevue Spur, he recalled. Most were repelled, and forced back to their starting line. Lieutenant Robert Shankland DCM and his outsized platoon held on, shooting the dazed German resistance and seizing their shell holes. Then, under the cover of sharp diversionary fire, small raiding parties crept around the blind side of the bunkers and tossed grenades through the rear entrances and loopholes. Against all expectations, Shankland’s men established a foothold on the spur and held it.

  On the flanks, the Royal Naval Division, a famous British formation of pioneering ‘marines’, ‘got stuck in the mud’.26 By noon, the Naval Division was completely bogged down beneath a hail of fire from Paddebeek, site of a German command post. The future German author Leutnant Ernst Jünger happened to be reconnoitring the area with a detachment of fusiliers. He came upon ‘traces of the dead everywhere; it was as if there was no living soul to be found in this wilderness’. The Naval Division made no further attempts to attack that day – or, in Jünger’s words, to ‘throw disorganised and cruelly depleted units’ into the breach.27 The marines’ relief arrived under the cover of darkness.

  All night, Canadian and British patrols probed the lines of the Germans, who sent up a multitude of flares to try to locate their attackers under an illuminated sky. All next day, small bands of infantry burst out of the barrage and fell upon the Germans in sudden, savage increments that slowly prised open the enemy’s lines. Carrier pigeons bore the bad news back to German headquarters.

  By the end of the 27th, the Canucks had seized the high ground on Bellevue Spur, breaching the main German defensive line (Flandern I-Stellung), repelling waves of counter-attacks and earning three Victoria Crosses: to Shankland; Acting Captain Christopher Patrick O’Kelly MC, who led the capture of six pillboxes; and Private Thomas Holmes, who ‘singlehandedly knocked out two machine-guns, captured a pillbox and took nineteen prisoners’.

  Several Germans responded in kind, notably platoon commander Leonhard Abt, who, though wounded in the arm, held his position in the ruins of a house for ten hours under terrific Canadian fire from three sides, before being relieved. He would receive a gold medal for bravery, one of Bavaria’s highest military honours.28

  The Canadians dug in along the two approaches to the village, and were rotated over the next three days while the guns were moved up. Their casualties were as high as Currie had feared, if fewer than the staggering losses of the Anzac battles. On the first day, the two divisions had lost 2481: 585 killed and 961 wounded, with the rest missing, presumed dead.29 The 4th Division, represented by a single battalion (the 46th), lost almost 70 per cent of its men.30 The bearers went forth to collect the living, drawing lots each day to see which squad would venture first into no-man’s-land.

  ‘Am I going to die, mate?’ one terrified, badly wounded lad pleaded with his bearer, as they waited in a hole for a pause in the shelling. ‘Don’t be stupid, fella,’ said the bearer. ‘You’re going to be all right … You’re going to be back across the ocean before you know it.’ The shelling eased, they set off, and the boy died on the way to the dressing station.

  The Germans were no longer sparing stretcher-bearers, it seemed. His party passed the bombed remains of an earlier stretcher party: ‘There were nothing but limbs all over the place. We lost ten of our stretcher-bearers that day …’31

  At 5.50 am on 30 October, Currie ordered his fresh divisions to attack. The rain resumed. The Canadians were expected to capture the positions they had failed to reach on the 26th, to ‘secure good jumping off points for the final attack on Passchendaele’.32 By 8.30 am, some had reached the blue line, an astonishing achievement in the conditions – notwithstanding the tragedy that befell the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, near ‘Duck Lodge’. Relentless German fire tore apart this renowned unit, killing or wounding 363, including 80 per cent of the officers and 60 per cent of the men; just 200 survivors attended the Last Post at sunset that day.

  The Patricias earned three Victoria Crosses during their decimation. Lieutenant Hugh McDonald McKenzie, married with two children, took command of a platoon who found themselves pinned down in shell holes near an undefeated German pillbox. From his hole, McKenzie hatched a plan to seize the box: he rounded up a few bedraggled men and led them off. Promptly shot through the head, McKenzie had inspired a comrade, Sergeant George Mullin, to creep around the side of the bunker and silence it with grenades and a revolver. Both men were awarded the Victoria Cross, McKenzie’s posthumously.33 His devoted men buried him beside the pillbox and put up a cross to mark the spot; his grave could not be found after the war. Today, he is listed as missing.

  An astonishingly resolute company of about a hundred men led by Major George Pearkes stormed across the higher, less soggy ground towards ‘Vapour’ and ‘Source’ farms, and held these against frenzied German counter-attacks that steadily decimated Pearkes’s party to about twenty. ‘I have eight 2nd Canadian Mounted Rifles and twelve 5th Canadian Mounted Rifles,’ he reported later that day. ‘All very exhausted. Do not think we can hold out much longer without being relieved.’ For outstanding courage, Pearkes would also
receive the Victoria Cross.

  Other Canadian units succumbed to the mud and rain and tremendous fire, and ‘failed to reach the Blue Line’, in the curt official summary. Some barely advanced a few yards before losing most of their men. The 49th Battalion was virtually shot to pieces as they went over the top: just four officers and 125 men (of the usual 750) remained alive and unwounded within a few steps of leaving their trenches. Among the casualties was Private Alexander Decoteau, a famous Canadian long-distance runner who had competed at the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm; the 29-year-old, of Indian extraction, was killed by a sniper.34 Most of his battalion were destroyed during the course of the day: by 2 pm, the 5th Canadian Mounted Rifles had lost three-quarters of their men.

  A bright spot was the capture of Crest Farm by a single brigade of the 4th Division, who exploited a perfectly executed artillery barrage and overran the German defence. Crest Farm was no longer a farm, of course, just another point in the bog that apparently offered a ‘good springboard’ for the final assault on Passchendaele. Thus far that day, the Canadians had advanced a few hundred yards, in places not at all, for the loss of 2321 men, of whom 884 were dead.35

  One officer’s explanation of the failure cited the usual culprits: impassable ground, troops unable to keep up with the barrage, poor communication, runners killed or wounded, pigeons too saturated to fly. One phrase in the draft seemed ‘to him so damning’ that he chose not to use it in the final version: if the infantry advanced upright, ‘they were an easy target’, he had written; ‘if they advanced on all fours the men were exhausted in a few minutes’. He summed up: ‘any prospects of success under these conditions was nil’.36 To which the historians Prior and Wilson appended a comment that speaks for us all: ‘Even today the vision of sections of Haig’s army crawling into battle in an attempt to stay alive induces a sense of inexpressible melancholy.’37