by Paul Ham
A few gunners and soldiers remained on the ridge through December, freezing in the chill blasts of a Flanders winter. One was young Ronald Skirth, the nineteen-year-old bombardier, who found himself in a captured pillbox – facing the ‘wrong way’ – on the crest of Passchendaele with his commanding officer, whom he continued to detest, and another gunner, whom he claims was his friend Jock Shiels (although the Commonwealth War Graves register lists Shiels as having been killed on 18 July 1917). They were wet, dirty and lice-ridden, and lived on bully beef. Mules delivered ammunition. Of their four heavy guns, one had sunk to its axles; another had received a direct hit, wiping out its crew; and a third had self-destructed when the crew loaded it with a faulty shell, killing them all. One gun remained operational, had there been the crew to load it. So the three men sat in the middle of ‘a vast morass of flooded craters’, awaiting likely death.
‘I was convinced by now,’ Skirth would later recall, ‘that our C.O. had taken leave of his senses and was no longer capable of responsible action.’67 So intense was his hatred of his commander’s ‘blind pride and obstinacy’ and ‘complete indifference to the plight of his men’, that had he possessed any suitable weapon, ‘I would have had no hesitation in using it on him’.68
Lying awake in the pre-dawn hours, Skirth’s despair drove him to commit ‘the soldier’s unforgivable sin’ of leaving his post without his officer’s permission. He donned his respirator and helmet, stepped softly through the gas curtains and out into a night ablaze in flares. The German guns were quiet. He dashed to the surviving No. 1 gun: the crew had gone, the gun abandoned. He crawled back to an old command post, where he found the crew and his second-in-command, who informed him that the gunners had all been ordered to withdraw. Skirth’s commander, a Captain Ahab-like figure in this telling, had torn up the written orders to withdraw and refused to budge.
‘I was right,’ Skirth concluded. ‘We had a raving lunatic in charge’, who would only move ‘when Haig told him to …’ Skirth crawled along the duckboards back to his pillbox to deliver the news of the general withdrawal. On his arrival, his commander gave him a severe reprimand, which Skirth interrupted to report that the entire battery had withdrawn: ‘There are no men at No 1 gun. Repeat, NO MEN.’ To which his commander arrested him, muttered that he’d have him shot for desertion, and reached for his revolver. His friend intervened, and the two gunners backed slowly out of the pillbox.
At the gas curtain, Skirth shouted back at his officer to the effect: ‘My pal and I have had enough of you and your bloody war. We’re getting out of it, understand? We’re getting out. Call it desertion if you like. Call it cowardice if you like …’69 That was the last they saw of their commanding officer.
Outside, the German shelling had ceased. In the lull, the two men made a dash for it, scrambling back along the duckboards and through the Passchendaele graveyard. It was daylight, and the German guns resumed. Skirth prayed. Several shells fell on the graveyard and further obliterated the coffins and corpses. ‘You’re wasting your ammo, Fritz,’ he thought, looking back. ‘You can’t make the dead any deader.’ Further on, a shell killed his friend and wounded Skirth, who was eventually extracted and sent home, where he suffered a nervous breakdown.70
In the rear areas in the last days of 1917, the padres held services for the survivors of Third Ypres. In November, the Reverend Tanner, who had just been recommended for a DSO for helping the wounded, felt moved to deliver a service that reiterated three things he felt had upheld the spirit of the men during Third Ypres. They were: ‘courage, determination and dash when in action’; ‘cheerful endurance’; and ‘consideration and courtesy’ to the local people. He ended his sermon with an appeal to the men to put their faith in their ‘White Comrade’, the Holy Spirit: ‘When in action I know nothing better calculated to help a man control his fears … than the consciousness of the encircling presence of God …’71
The year of the Flanders Offensive began in a world thunderous with aggressive imperialism in which the divine right of kings held sway over millions and the monarchies that encrusted the face of Europe seemed unassailable. It ended in a harsh new light, in which kaisers and tsars and their senescent regimes were seen as eminently dispensable. Every monarchy in Europe trembled for its survival in the wake of the Russian Revolution, the removal of the Tsar and the plainly untenable reign of the Kaiser.
On 24 October 1917, hearing that Russia’s Provisional Government was about to raise the bridges over the Neva River, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin fired off his famous Call to Power to the Soviet Central Committee: ‘The government is tottering. It must be given the death-blow at all costs.’72 The Bolshevik Revolution went into action in Petrograd that night, ousting Alexander Kerensky’s Provisional Government. Kerensky fled the country and the Communists took power.
Lenin’s ‘Statement of Bolshevik Demands’ sentenced to death the monarchies of Europe and the preservers of the capitalist system. ‘The Bolsheviki,’ he declared, ‘refuse to leave to capitalist Governments the task of expressing the desire of the nations for peace. All monarchies must be abolished. The peasants must at once take all the land from the landholders. Order must be strictly maintained by the Councils of Peasants’ Delegates.’73 On 15 December, Germany and Lenin’s newly minted dictatorship agreed an armistice, formalised as the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918, freeing the remaining two-thirds of Ludendorff’s Ober Ost forces for service on the Western Front.
The planets had realigned against the Allies. In the closing weeks of 1917, the members of the War Cabinet responded with deep anxiety to the news of Britain’s and France’s dire situation, the very opposite of what Haig had intended six months ago. The prime minister raged at Haig’s dispatches, which calmly informed him on 13 December that Passchendaele, though ‘unsuitable to fight a decisive battle in’, should be briefly held, in order ‘to wear out and break up the enemy’s advancing troops’.74 Pouring out all his scorn, Lloyd George would later sum up the Passchendaele battles as forcing ‘the British Army into a more dangerous position than it was in before the battle commenced’.75
The British forces now faced a critical shortage of men, Haig informed the War Cabinet, in a paper tabled on 6 December, and he urgently needed more recruits to continue the struggle. Haig was in earnest. From his perspective, the casualties were unavoidable and wholly necessary; the men had sacrificed themselves in the line of duty, a cost the nation must bear. That was the point of a war of attrition.
And now, by December 1917, Haig’s forces were 100,000 below ‘establishment’ level. He would need 500,000 to make up the deficit in the next six months. If Lloyd George refused to provide them, ‘the British infantry divisions in France would be 40 per cent below establishment by 31st March 1918’. In other words, the prospect of actual defeat loomed, Haig concluded. The War Cabinet concurred. In a debate on manpower on 6 December 1917, Lord Derby warned: ‘So far from there being any question of our breaking through the Germans, it was a question of whether we could prevent the Germans breaking through us.’76
Winston Churchill, the Minister for Munitions, agreed that the situation was ‘one of great danger’.77 Where would they find the men? Could they squeeze the war industries and farms, and slow down production, to release workers for battle? No, the ploughs were already idle for want of men, and on 26 October the War Cabinet had called for 10,000 soldiers to be released to work the ploughs, even if they had to be withdrawn from the Western Front. Perhaps the government could raise the military age further? Or even appeal to Ireland? If all else failed, would France kindly rejoin the war, or the Americans arrive?78
On one point, the prime minister’s mind was made up: he was determined not to meet Haig’s demands. Dismissing the ‘alarmist tone’ of the army, he argued on 10 December that the French and British armies together outnumbered the Germans on the Western Front by 1.2 million and had 400,000 more rifles.79 As usual, the prime minister glossed over inconvenient details. For one thing,
the French continued to protest that they were unfit for action. Most importantly, the Allied defences were now extremely precarious. According to a long charge sheet that Robertson presented to the Cabinet on 19 December: the British troops were untested in defensive war; the trench lines were fragile; and fresh German regiments were continually flowing over from the Russian to the Anglo-French front. (Indeed, in the two months ending mid-December, Germany had moved fifteen divisions from east to west, and 100,000 further enemy troops were being ‘combed out’ of the German forces in the east,80 delivering 154 German divisions and about 8000 extra guns to the Western Front by the year’s end.)81
‘Strategically we were in a bad position,’ Robertson warned the War Cabinet, ‘as there was very little depth behind our defences … Dunkirk was already within range of the enemy’s guns, and a short advance by the enemy would bring him within range of Calais and Boulogne. A retirement for even a few miles westward might therefore be disastrous.’82 The Admiralty even revisited the question of whether Britain was in danger of invasion. Nobody had anticipated so dismal an end to a year that began with glad premonitions of victory, of clearing the Germans out of Belgium by Christmas.
All this produced a mood of extreme tension in Parliament, ‘almost amounting to panic’ on 5 December when Brigadier General Lowther, military secretary to the commander-in-chief, Home Forces, told the House of Commons that the situation on the Western Front was worse than it had been in 1914.83 He only slightly overstated the case: with Russia completely out of the war, and France and America not yet ready, the British and Dominion armies had been forced onto the defensive for the first time since the outbreak of hostilities. They would stay that way for the foreseeable future. Haig ‘had no offensive plans in mind at present’, Robertson told the War Cabinet on 19 December, a complete volte-face from the aggressive spirit of July.
And so, as the world entered its fifth year of war, the Allies were forced to dig in again. In late December, France’s new prime minister, Georges Clémenceau, recalled 270,000 Frenchmen to the colours ‘for the purpose, not of fighting, but for digging trenches’.84 For their part, the British troops seemed to have lost their digging skills. They were unable to ‘dig their trenches properly’, Britain’s secretary of state for war, the Earl Derby complained to the Cabinet on Christmas Eve. The German trenches were ‘very much better than ours’, he said, reprising an old refrain of 1914–15. Robertson replied that he had spoken to Haig about the matter, but unfortunately ‘our troops were not good at digging trenches’.85
An element of blackest farce might be said to hang over all this, over the spectacle of men returning to the killing grounds whence they had come, to re-dig trenches along the lines they had dug four years previously, and resume the slaughter on the orders of their Lilliputian commanders … were it not for the fact that millions of lives were in play, rendering the farce grotesquely real.
If the world felt very much like 1914 all over again, facing the same old battlefields, gridlocked along a trench line, the new weapons, the smell of new gas and the evolution of the barrage reminded them that three and a half years had passed. In all other respects – the uncompromising politicians, the all-conquering generals, the acquiescent civilians – little had changed.
15
THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
Here lies the noblest work of God.
Epitaph to Private H. R. Sloggett, killed in action on 21 October, aged twenty, buried at Tyne Cot Cemetery in Flanders
After swearing, a year earlier, that there would be no more Sommes, in December 1917 Lloyd George found himself staring at casualties on that scale. British and Dominion soldiers killed, wounded, missing (presumed dead) or taken prisoner in October totalled 4956 officers and 106,419 other ranks, according to the monthly return sent by the director of military operations to the War Cabinet on 2 November (the figures did not include the ‘wastage’ of the Canadian battles of early November).
Yet if ‘normal average monthly casualties’ – i.e. when there was no severe fighting – were 35,000, the return said, then the actual casualties in October 1917 ‘were about 76,000’.1 If this macabre clarification was supposed to console the prime minister, it had the opposite effect. Lloyd George read the casualty figures in a state of stupefied rage.
Total losses during the whole of Passchendaele, between 31 July and 10 November, were 271,000 British and Dominion troops, compared with about 217,000 German. (For a full breakdown, see Appendix 1.) Factoring in their small populations, the Dominion forces suffered disproportionately. Passchendaele temporarily crippled the spirit of the Anzac divisions, killing or wounding 38,000 Australians, 15,654 Canadians and 5300 New Zealanders. ‘[F]or these smaller nations, Passchendaele was their most costly engagement of the war, indeed their entire military history,’ writes Craig Tibbits, of the Australian War Memorial.2
Nobody can agree on the precise number of British and Dominion troops killed at Third Ypres, but it is likely to be between 80,000 and 100,000, or 10–13 per cent of the 750,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers, sailors and airmen who lost their lives on the Western Front. French losses at Third Ypres were 1625 killed or missing and 6902 wounded or taken prisoner. The six French divisions had fought in a quiet sector, under Pétain’s policy of ‘limited offensives’, soundly defeating the Germans in the area and capturing 1500 prisoners.3 Clearly they were not as unfit as Pétain had led Haig to believe.
German official medical records for the period between 21 May and 10 December 1917 tallied total casualties of 236,241, including 32,878 killed, 38,083 missing (killed or captured), and 165,280 wounded and evacuated.4 Those figures refer to a period 40 days longer than the dates the British official historian set for Third Ypres. The comparable dates, of between 1 June and 10 November 1917, show German casualties of 217,194, of which the total killed and missing were 67,272 and total wounded 149,922. Thus Germany ‘won’ the body count, with 54,000 fewer casualties. Despite this, statistical fetishists continue to declare Third Ypres an Allied victory by body count; or a ‘draw’, with each side losing ‘about 250,000’.
In their defence of Third Ypres, some historians cite the fact that British losses were fewer than the Somme (where 481,842 were killed or wounded, though the offensive lasted five weeks longer). Or they point to the daily average ‘wastage’ at Third Ypres as ‘only’ 2323, whereas the Somme killed 2943 on an average day; the Hundred Days offensive in 1918 killed 3645; and the mother of all massacres, Arras, killed 4076 per day. Or they compare the number of men killed and wounded per square yard of front gained as a measure of progress. These macabre calculations are for the night owls of military history, ready to swoop on the remains of the most disturbing human tragedy to buttress a theoretical case for attritional massacre.
The long-running dispute over which side suffered the most casualties need not detain us beyond acknowledging that Britain’s official historian, Brigadier General Sir James Edmonds, grossly overstated German losses at 400,000 in his book, almost twice the actual figure and 130,000 more than Commonwealth losses.5 It is unthinkable that an official historian would wilfully miscalculate the body count on this scale, to support his case that Britain ‘won’ or to appease the British defenders of Third Ypres. Yet, unless one believes he made a genuine error, that is the only conclusion one can draw. Edmonds seems to have all-too-hastily overlooked a vital German source in reaching his figure.6 Even without this source, it seems odd that the brigadier general failed to question a tally that contradicts basic military doctrine and the word of the great von Clausewitz, who stipulated that in a war of attrition the defending army almost always suffered fewer losses than the attacking one. Many historians have settled on a ‘compromise’ figure, of 250,000–260,000 casualties on either side, which they claim to be ‘about right’. This also flies in the face of the basic military lessons they hold dear. Like Edmonds, they appear to have inflated German losses by adding every minor wound and sickness, as Sheldon charitably suggests, ra
ising the question, ‘when is a casualty not a casualty?’7 The German answer seems reasonable: when the ‘casualty’ is able to carry a rifle.
Lloyd George’s blood boiled as he pondered such catastrophic losses: a gain of five miles for so many dead? Had we really lost 17,000 officers, he railed, seven to every two of theirs?8 Like most interested civilians, he saw the war’s progress in terms of territory gained per man lost. The grim truth about attrition – that these casualty levels had been factored in as the cost of Haig’s ‘wearing down’ war, in which it mattered little how much ground was gained – either eluded the prime minister or was too awful for him to face. In Lloyd George’s eyes, Haig was a butcher and a madman and had to be stopped before he dismembered the nation’s youth. Henceforth, if the British leader could not extract his commander’s resignation by pressure and humiliation, he would try to manacle Haig to a defensive strategy by denying him the supply of men.
A dreadful scenario ran in tandem with these deliberations, and deeply troubled the British leader. Lloyd George well knew that someone would be held accountable for such catastrophic losses, and he henceforth resolved to ensure that it would not be him. He would be known to posterity as the prime minister who won the war, not the leader who had had the power to terminate the massacre and failed to do so. To which purpose he now set in motion the dark arts of political self-exculpation: Third Ypres may have ended, but the battle for the ear of history had just begun.
Tommies and Fritzes, Diggers and Canucks, Jocks and Kiwis, privates and generals, professional soldiers and nineteen-year-old conscripts, virgins and middle-aged fathers, Anglicans and Lutherans, Catholics and Jews, poets and postmen, farmers and clerks, Tyneside cottagers and heirs to grand estates, Bavarians and Saxons, Irish fusiliers and the Black Watch, Old Etonians and Australian stockmen, New Zealand rugby players and Canadian lumberjacks, Prussian officers and Coldstream Guards, the brave and the fearful, the dutiful and the dissipated, ‘our beloved son’, ‘my dear husband’, ‘my love’, ‘our boy’: Third Ypres killed them all, with the indiscriminate power of a natural catastrophe.