Passchendaele

by Paul Ham

  And there it was. A few hundred metres in the distance, atop the ridge, the furthest Canadians beheld the remnant of a steeple rising out of the wreckage of a village, drawing them towards it like a totem to some lost civilisation. A few forward patrols even crept beyond the blue line and into Passchendaele itself, which the Germans appeared to be evacuating, they later said, under terrific bursts of British artillery.

  The two Canadian divisions (the 3rd and 4th) were now utterly exhausted and their relief vital before the final push. Overall casualties were exactly in the order of what Currie had envisaged: of the 75 officers and 1706 men of the 3rd Division, a quarter remained alive and unwounded. The 49th Battalion had lost 80 per cent of its men; others were decimated in similar proportions.38

  The survivors were relieved that night: the 1st and 2nd Divisions crept forward and exchanged places with their comrades in the frontline holes. Their orders were, first, to seize Passchendaele itself; then to capture the crest of the main ridge further east of the village. The Germans, too, were being relieved, with a new division coming up from Champagne, well aware that the British were fixed upon capturing Passchendaele and the heights ‘at whatever cost’.39

  The fresh Canadians resumed the attack at 6 am on 6 November behind another dense barrage that flattened whatever dared remain vertical. By now, the terrain resembled a scene from some sort of post-apocalyptic landscape, unrecognisable as part of our world. ‘Dante,’ wrote one British gunner, ‘would never have condemned lost souls to wander in so terrible a purgatory. Here a shattered wagon, there a gun mired to the muzzle in mud which grips like glue, even the birds and rats have forsaken so unnatural a spot … You see it best under a leaden sky with a chill drizzle falling, each hour an eternity, each dragging step a nightmare. How weirdly it recalls some half formed horror of childish nightmare.’40 Only a shattered tree trunk or the relic of a cottage occasionally pierced this unreality, reminding the dazed witness that this scene had once sustained life.

  Across this terrain, the Canadians now pressed forward. From Crest Farm, the fresh troops hugged the inside edge of the barrage so closely that ‘the Germans could not man their machine guns before the attackers were on top of them’, prisoners later confirmed.41 They were taken completely by surprise, utterly unaware that 2500 Canadians had gathered over the previous night just a few hundred yards in front of them.

  On the wetter slopes out of the Ravebeek Valley, the Canadians literally advanced knee-deep, and in places waist-deep, through mud and water.42 German aircraft launched low-flying strafing raids on their positions, the bullets whipping up the surface of the stew.

  Passchendaele itself fell with a whimper under the final assault, which took a little under three hours. The Canadians raced into the village with bayonets fixed, taking few prisoners. German troops hiding in cellars and rubble were quickly dispatched. In the final stage, Corporal Colin Fraser Barron dashed forward under covering fire and overran three enemy machine guns, for which he, too, would receive the Victoria Cross.

  The 27th Battalion eventually seized the centre of town, an expanse of rubble, thanks largely to Private James Peter Robertson, who burst into an unsilenced pillbox, bayoneted its occupants and swung their machine gun on a few fleeing Germans, in a display of lethal resourcefulness that earned him Canada’s ninth Victoria Cross of the battle for Passchendaele.

  By a little after 9 am, on 6 November 1917, all of Passchendaele, whose capture had obsessed Allied commanders and whose name would soon become a byword for senseless slaughter, was firmly in Canadian and British hands. ‘Despite stiff German resistance the entire attack went like clockwork,’ noted a recent Belgian history.43 Total casualties that morning were 2238, of whom 734 were killed or died of wounds; 434 Germans were captured.44 The remaining Germans had the worst of it: ‘If they stood up to surrender they were mown down by their own machine gun fire aimed from their rear at us; if they leapfrogged back they were caught in our barrage.’45 An act as farcical as it was ingenious marked the last day. Finding themselves bogged down and their weapons jammed under a horrendous German counter-attack, the 2nd Royal Munster Fusiliers saved themselves by hurling mud balls at the enemy, who, mistaking the projectiles for grenades, kept their heads down as the legendary Irish unit withdrew.46

  A distinguishing footnote to the battle was that, for the first time, the Allies had transmitted messages using continuous wave wireless sets, which had proved more reliable than runners, dogs and pigeons with muddy wings.

  The village that revealed itself to the Allied armies for the first time in three years was just a smear of rubble on a denuded plain. ‘The buildings had been pounded and mixed with the earth, and the shell exploded bodies were so thickly strewn that a fellow couldn’t stop without stepping on corruption,’ wrote one Canadian soldier.47 The dwellings and shops were a mash of bricks, tiles and rubbish. The tombs in the little cemetery had been tossed aside, and the open graves of the pre-war dead yawned to the sky. Fragments of the statues of Christ and the saints lay strewn about the wreckage of the church amid scattered splinters of stained glass. Surveying the whole area around the village, a British gunner discerned:

  fifty square miles of slime and filth from which every shell that burst threw up ghastly relics, and raised stenches too abominable too describe; and over all, and dominating all, the never-ending, ear-shattering artillery fire and the sickly reek of the deadly mustard gas.48

  The village the Allies had hoped to seize within weeks had taken three and a half months of ceaseless ‘wearing down’ to claim, for more than half a million total casualties.

  The village itself was, of course, merely a point on a map. The supposed military prize of the operation lay further: the lip of higher ground to the east of Passchendaele, the ‘summit’ of the last and highest ridge in the Salient. On 10 November, the Canadians turned their sights on this final objective of Third Ypres, the capture of which would hand the Allies, for the first time, a commanding view towards Roulers and the German positions to the north-east.

  The German defenders did not go quietly. They abandoned the ridgeline with a bang. The last Canadian attack cost the leading brigade 45 per cent of its strength. Of the 99 officers and 2610 men who spearheaded the final push, 58 officers and 1838 men survived unwounded.49 Days of usual horror awaited the medical teams: the bodies of the Canadian wounded mingled grotesquely with the putrid mud and water. Many could not be reached in time to save them, despite the furious efforts of the stretcher-bearers working beneath the muzzles of a few surviving German snipers.

  Their victory in Flanders had cost the Canadian Corps 15,654 casualties, precisely 346 short of Currie’s estimate. His artillery had fired 1,453,056 shells (40,908 tons) between 17 October and 16 November, 68 per cent of his total firepower. Mud had made it impossible to deliver the rest.50 Currie’s understanding of the conditions distinguished him from most of the other ‘Higher Authorities’, observed one Canadian officer, who thought it ‘incredible that men equipped with even fewer than average brains could ever send troops into such terrain’.51

  A section of Passchendaele Ridge was theirs at last. Was this the prize for which they’d slogged through mud and rain for months and watched so many of their friends die? For which hundreds of thousands had been shot, bombed, drowned, gassed and obliterated?

  No, Haig decided. After initially expressing himself well satisfied with the result, this heap of rubble, this rain-swept spine, was not worth the trouble; it was not good enough at all. The village and the ridgeline had no tactical usefulness whatsoever. Haig confirmed this in a letter to Robertson on 15 November, in which he terminated the battle: ‘Any further offensive on the Flanders front must at once be discontinued …’ Aware of the shocking impact of this admission on the government and the people, he added: ‘… it is important to keep this fact secret as long as possible.’ As damning was the recognition of the strategic uselessness of what he had won: ‘The positions already gained [i.e. Passchendaele] fe
ll short of what I had wanted to secure before the winter.’ He concluded that Passchendaele Ridge, between the village and the Ypres–Staden railway, ‘may be difficult and costly to hold if seriously attacked … I think this latter contingency must be expected as soon as the enemy realizes that he has regained the initiative.’52 Seizing the village thus fulfilled merely a symbolic goal in a battle that, since August, had lost any hope of achieving its ambition of conquering the Belgian coast.

  At any rate, the main purpose of Third Ypres all along, Haig would later insist, was to pin the German soldiers in Flanders and destroy as many of them as possible before winter set in, buying time for the French to recover and the Americans to arrive. Haig did not openly say this until after the armistice. For now, Passchendaele was a tenuously held spoil of war, which played well in the press and spoke to civilian notions of the aims of battle – to seize and hold terrain. And so the village on the ridge began to insinuate itself into the public mind as sacrificial ground; a soldiers’ Calvary, whose seizure had summoned a sacrifice that Winston Churchill, in similar circumstances after the Somme, had raised to the realm of martyrdom. Currie was unmoved: the wanton sacrifice of his men for so little infuriated the Canadian, and the memory would torment him for the rest of his life.53

  The nature of the tragedy unfolding in Flanders had not fully penetrated the minds at home. The War Cabinet heard on 31 October – ten days before its official end – that the Flanders Offensive had been ‘quite successful’, and that the Canadians had gained more than they set out to take. The battle would end, under Haig’s orders, at a line due east of the village, to which Major General Frederick Maurice, the director of military operations, alerted the meeting.54

  The anticlimactic end of Third Ypres left no furrows on the face of the government. At a meeting on 2 November, the ministers reaffirmed the prime minister’s power to decide the extent of British support for Italy and whether and when the Flanders Offensive should end55 – the latter a seemingly perfunctory gesture given that Haig had just informed the War Cabinet that it would end on 10 November. The Cabinet let the war drag on to Haig’s deadline, nine days during which thousands of men’s lives were lost. Even as these Canadians were hurling themselves at the village, Lloyd George and his ministers were fiddling with dates, having dismissed Flanders as a sideshow and a failure.

  The government briefly acknowledged the capture of Passchendaele, on 7 November, as ‘a good step forward’ that had produced some casualties. This grotesque misrepresentation went unchallenged, with no debate. Their attentions were elsewhere, now: the eyes and ears of the press and the men in power were attuned to the fresh excitement in France, where the first massed tank offensive was about to start, in Cambrai.

  On the 11th, Haig called off the Flanders operation: he needed men at Cambrai and, at Pétain’s request, to take over part of the French lines on the Somme. At the same time, notwithstanding his protests, four of his divisions had left or were soon leaving for Italy, with the prime minister’s blessing and Plumer in command. They were to restore the situation after the dismal failure of the opening battles of Caporetto on 26 October (a series of clashes that would kill or wound 700,000 Italians and lose 3000 Allied guns).

  The thinning out of Haig’s forces meant that a skeleton detail of British troops, under General Rawlinson, would be left to defend Passchendaele for the winter. Theirs would be the least enviable role on the Western Front: three fresh German divisions had arrived in Flanders from Russia over the previous fortnight, and on 14 November the Germans heavily bombed the British positions in the vicinity of the wretched ridge.56

  ‘[N]othing could be worse for this country than that we should be driven back from the Passchendaele ridge,’ Major General Maurice, the director of military operations, warned the War Cabinet on 15 November.57 If true, the government had a curiously negligent approach to defending its most vital military asset. The British Army similarly talked up the tactical importance of Passchendaele. On 26 November, the commanders of the few miserable battalions sent to defend it received a cable:

  SECRET [dated 26/11/1917, distributed to

  offices of the 14th (Light) Division] …

  Copies to be handed in before proceeding to the LINE NOTES ON THE PASSCHENDAELE SECTOR: … The possession of the PASSCHENDAELE Ridge by the British is of the first importance, as it affords complete observation in an Easterly and North Easterly direction and may force the enemy to withdraw his artillery from WESTROOSEBEKE and from in front of MOORSLEDE.58

  In fact, Passchendaele was already terribly vulnerable, and in ‘a really untenable position against a properly organized attack’, Rawlinson wrote, in a blistering assessment of the situation. ‘We must therefore be prepared to withdraw from it, if the Germans show signs of a serious and sustained offensive on this front …’59 In short, within weeks of its capture, they were planning to abandon it. This made tactical sense, in a war of attrition, when only the body count mattered. But nobody was willing to use that argument on Lloyd George at that moment.

  The Germans were already showing signs of serious and sustained counter-attacks to recapture the lost ground. Ludendorff himself visited the Western Front on 20 November, underscoring Passchendaele’s importance in Germany’s evolving offensive plans, which had already assumed a tactical dimension in Flanders: German gunners had withdrawn their long-range heavy cannon to safe positions from which to shell the British troops defending Passchendaele Ridge. The prospect of losing it so soon even prompted a question in Cabinet, on 28 November, to the effect that hadn’t these long-range German guns rendered ‘our position … very unfavourable?’ To which Maurice replied that the British troops at Passchendaele were ‘uncomfortable’ but the Germans were worse off because ‘we held the high ground’.60 That not only failed to answer the question; it revealed his utter ignorance of the situation.

  An Australian captain, Norman Nicolson, had a better grasp of reality than most staff officers and generals. Near the end of Third Ypres, suffering from gas poisoning and a bad cold, and having lost his voice, he sat down and wrote in his diary:

  The Canadians have taken Passchendaele but it is impossible to advance guns for the mud and shell holes. It is the Somme all over again. The fire eating old generals and the pretty boys on their staffs don’t know what things are like up in front and keep ordering futile attacks that are doomed before they start because of the mud.61

  A frequent refrain, which was no less true in November than it had been in August.

  And here were Lieutenant Allhusen and his company, back in action after two months’ rest, approaching Passchendaele Ridge in late November. The village resembled an island, he wrote, cut off from any support and under constant German shellfire; the British troops were sitting there, being slowly wiped out. The only road into the village to relieve them ‘was naturally a death trap’.62

  Allhusen’s usual good cheer deserted him:

  The whole outlook had become unutterably black. All the battles of the Spring and Summer seemed to have been in vain … it had all ended in this, with fresh German troops streaming across from their long holiday on the Eastern front, to face our worn-out divisions and start it all over again.63

  The individual soldier’s mood, he observed:

  was one of complete and logical despair … The ideal was to lose a leg as soon as possible … the majority carried on mechanically, waiting for the next wound, while the weaker members went under, either to lunacy, desertion or self-inflicted wounds. The German army had reached the same state.64

  On the way to the front, one of Allhusen’s subalterns got a bullet in the arm, ‘and retired rejoicing’.

  On reaching Passchendaele village, Allhusen set up his headquarters in an old cellar on what had been the high street, 150 yards from the front. His platoons went forward, to relieve the men in the shell holes. He kept back his officers, servant, cook and a runner called Quicke, the last of six brothers, whose mother had appealed to the army to
give her surviving son a safe job. The army had declined her request, so Allhusen kept Quicke ‘in the safe end of the dugout’.65

  By night, Allhusen went out to inspect the forward posts; by day, he sat under constant shellfire in the cellar, reading. Each night, the closest shots made the planks in the roof sag, the mud crumble and the candles flicker. The cracks in the roof ‘seemed to get bigger while I watched. One had a distinct face, and eyes which followed me about.’ He speculated about what would happen if the cellar received a direct hit.66 Night liberated him to work in the line. By day, he returned to the cellar, ‘wondering how many men I was going to lose that day’. His company were soon down to their last few; by early December, his surviving corporals couldn’t answer for the lives of their men for another day.

  On the night of 8 December, the last before his company’s relief, Allhusen counted a shell falling near the cellar every two minutes. He and his staffs at in ‘dead silence’ like ‘six criminals … uneasily aware that the executioners must be coming soon’. The hours passed, and he tried to imagine rum and food. Then he awoke, dazed, in a shambles of dust and smoke. The direct hit had killed one of his men, and wounded the rest except Quicke. A piece of shell had put a hole through Allhusen’s foot, his boot a bloody mess.

  With the roof gone, and exposed to enemy shelling, they waited for relief to arrive. Long hours passed. Allhusen couldn’t walk. A big sergeant eventually appeared, picked him up and laid him on a stretcher. Thus began the ‘worst five hours of my life’, of being dragged back through Passchendaele, along Bellevue Spur, to an aid post, then a dressing station, always under falling shells. Six weeks later, he was on a hospital ship to England.