by Paul Ham
One could persuasively argue that Passchendaele prolonged and almost lost the war for the Allies, given the staggering casualties and collapse in morale it produced, which directly led to the near-vanquishing of the British and Dominion armies in early 1918. Certainly, Lloyd George thought so. ‘The Passchendaele fiasco imperilled the chances of final victory,’ he concluded.22 And Paul Harris, a senior lecturer in War Studies at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and a trenchant critic of Haig’s war, writes of Third Ypres:
some phases had a quality more nightmarish than anything previously experienced. Whereas the British Army came out of the Somme campaign with remarkably good morale, Third Ypres seems to have left much of it distinctly despondent … It seems clear, therefore, that, in terms of morale, Haig had done proportionally very much more damage to his own army than to the Germans. The British Army (and their Dominion ranks) had been the only army of the Allies in a fair state of both morale and efficiency when Third Ypres began. Haig’s conduct at Third Ypres, especially in the latter stages of the campaign, can be regarded as amounting to reckless endangerment of the Allied cause.23
It is often asked why Britain did not join France’s defensive war. For one thing, ‘defending’ ran counter to all of Haig’s instincts. He was a basher, always ‘on the offensive’, physically and temperamentally. Yet Lloyd George and the French commanders, for different reasons, saw a defensive war as an appealing alternative to profitless attrition.
Their pressure spurred Haig to devote a whole section of his 1919 report to justifying his offensive. Under the heading ‘Why We Attacked Whenever Possible’, Haig wrote, ‘The idea that a war can be won by standing on the defensive and waiting for the enemy to attack is a dangerous fallacy, which owes its inception to the desire to evade the price of victory …’ – that is, a higher casualty rate. ‘A defensive strategy,’ he continued, implied a ‘distinct lowering of the moral [sic] of the troops, who imagine that the enemy must be the better man, or at least more numerous … Once the mass of the defending infantry become possessed of such ideas, the battle is as good as lost …’24
His argument pivots on the flawed assumption that braver soldiers, or ‘better men’, fight offensive actions, while cowards or lesser men fight defensive wars. This ignores the extraordinary courage of the German Army, which had successfully fought a three-year defensive war. Morale had held up throughout. Indeed, the Germans would lose the war as a result of their over-ambitious offensive in 1918.
Should Britain and the Dominions have fought a defensive war in 1917? There were compelling points in favour. First, the Germans could not afford to lose men at the rate of Britain and were thus reluctant to mount major offensives. Second, the attacking force usually lost more men than the defending one (which is one reason why the German Army had been defending for so long). Third, the Allies together would have imposed a formidable defensive barrier, as the British showed at First Ypres in 1914. Fourth, the French were committed to a defensive battle until the Americans arrived, under Clémenceau’s leadership, and wanted the British to join them. Fifth, British forces fielded far more heavy guns and machine guns than the Germans in 1917 and were producing them at a faster rate. And sixth, the Germans had fewer men than the Allies on the Western Front in 1917, and were unable to mobilise the bulk of their eastern forces until the end of the year and into 1918. And as every general knew, a vast numerical advantage, in the order of three to one, was needed to win a major offensive in an entrenched war of attrition. Haig never had that advantage.
That is not to suggest they should have sat and waited for victory to come. Rather, in 1917, Britain would have been defending, from a position of strength, until the Americans arrived and French returned. That was not the case in early 1918, when they had fewer men, fewer guns and dreadful morale, as a result of Passchendaele. It is something of a miracle that they held on, and won. Indeed, the Allies won by waging a defensive war (a ‘fighting withdrawal’) deep into French territory, drawing out the German supply lines then hitting back with the full complement of the American and French armies and the revived Commonwealth forces.
Against this, a defensive war did not sit well with the press and public, who, like Haig and his generals – though from a position of ignorance – were overwhelmingly in favour of great offensive actions. They wanted bold thrusts and gallant victories. And that is why Flanders went ahead despite the prime minister’s strong opposition to it before it began.
Since the end of the Great War, a chorus of voices have variously praised or condemned it. Thousands of books have examined the legacy of the war and whether it was just or unjust, inevitable or avoidable. Since the 1960s, the Great War has been variously and near-unanimously condemned as a tragic bungle, state-sponsored mass murder and/or a crime against humanity, which destroyed the best part of a generation and plunged the world into economic chaos and tyranny. The rise of Nazism and the Soviet Union would not have been possible without the conditions created by the Great War: on that, most experts are agreed.
In recent years, however, a new breed of self-described ‘revisionist’ historians have emerged to champion the Great War as just, ‘worth it’, and absolutely necessary. They hail the Somme and Passchendaele as vital battles in a necessary war against German aggression. They defend the war of attrition, more or less, as the only option open to Haig, and praise him for making the best of a botched hand. They have no truck with what they derisively call the war poet’s view of the Western Front – dispatching, at a stroke, some of the finest writers on the experience of the Great War (who also happened to fight it with great courage). On an operational level, some revisionists defend the huge attritional struggles as valuable lessons in the use of new weapons, such as howitzers, gas, flame-throwers and grenades; and new applications, such as the creeping barrage. They tend to aim their hostility at harmless targets – poets, artists, musicians and comedians (chiefly the late twentieth-century serial, Blackadder) – betraying an oddly fragile sensitivity.
The revisionists’ high priest is John Terraine, who bludgeoned the popular horror of the war in the 1960s with a stringently argued case that Haig had done all he could to win, within the limitations imposed on him. Terraine’s heirs are numerous, but their most recent ranks include Gary Sheffield, Sir Max Hastings and Gordon Corrigan. Sheffield’s central theme is that the Great War was a ‘forgotten victory’ over German aggression, which also provided the Allied commanders with a good education in strategy and weaponry. Hastings’ position is confused: he is absolutely convinced that Britain had no choice other than to go to war against Prussian aggression; on the other hand, as he stated in a debate recently, he admits that ‘if the Germans had not gone into Belgium, I would find it very difficult to say I would assuredly have said that we could and should have fought in 1914’.25 This does not cohere. If Germany really was the terrible threat to world peace and liberty that he claims, then surely Britain should have gone to war to defend France – and Europe – from Berlin’s aggression regardless of whether the German Army respected Belgium’s neutrality. Would the threat have disappeared had Germany bypassed Belgium?
The revisionists have no doubt that the war and its battles were worth fighting, despite the catastrophic cost. Passchendaele was ‘worth it’, they variously argue, as part of a victorious four-year struggle – here, they tend to march in lockstep with Haig’s last dispatch – that ended with the greatest feat of arms in British history. That may be true, in a pure military sense. But they fail to explain exactly what advantages accrued to Britain from fighting the war in the first place, or just how the war achieved anything worthwhile for Europe.
Victors tend to justify the act of winning, no matter how atrocious, wasteful or wrong-headed the conflict, on the spurious grounds that the end justifies the means: for them, victory is self-validating. Few British historians critically examine, for example, the illegal Naval Blockade, which they pass over as a valid instrument of war. By any other definition,
it was a war crime that killed almost 800,000 German civilians. Many strategists argue that winning is all that matters, regardless of the means, or the human or material cost. They discuss the strategic usefulness of poison gas as though it were a variant on the cavalry charge. In a world of banned weapons and laws against war crimes that is nonsense, of course: if might were right, the use of gas, firebombs and nuclear weapons would all be justifiable, as would torture and civilian slaughter.
It would be unfair, however, to cast the pro-First World War brigade as warmongers, as some critics have done. A curious emotional dissonance leavens their prose. Their conclusions seem ruptured, torn between the heart and the head, as if doubt lurks in the margins of their minds. On the one hand, they plunder the stock of popular phrases to describe the Great War – thus they agree that it was ‘catastrophic’,26 and ‘tragic’, in which the ‘butcher’s bill’27 was ‘appalling’28; on the other hand, they claim the war was absolutely necessary and worth the cost. This jarring of word and thought begs the question: at what point would the catastrophe not have been worth it? How many millions would have had to die, how many nations destroyed, how many fascist and communist seedlings sown, how many families struck down with grief, before politicians, the press and military revisionists would concede that the First World War was not worth it?
Perhaps those who argue that the First World War was ‘necessary’, and that the Somme and Passchendaele were ‘worth it’, should submit their views to my Scroll Back Test. Knowing what we know now, of the cost in blood, grief and economic loss, imagine you’re able to travel back in time to 1914 to serve as a mediator between the governments of Europe. How would you advise them to act on the brink of hostilities? Would you urge the Entente to go to war because you genuinely believe, in accordance with the views you hold today, that Germany was a tyranny intent on world conquest and had to be crushed (ignoring the fact that Germany’s political system at the time was just as democratic and progressive as Britain’s, and the Berlin government negotiable, well into 1914)? Or would you advise the governments of Europe to pull back from the brink and negotiate a peaceful settlement (as they succeeded in doing in the crises of 1905, 1911 and 1912–13)? In the first instance, you would have unleashed the Four Horsemen, but your advice would cohere with your views today. In the second, you would have saved the world from a holocaust, and yet contradicted everything you’ve said or written since in support of the case for a ‘necessary war’ against Germany.
The Great War was an avoidable tragedy that condemned Europe, the fount of Western civilisation, to political degeneracy, economic collapse and totalitarian rule. Even many of today’s ‘revisionist’ historians, who argue that the war was necessary, recognise this. ‘The British,’ writes Sheffield, ‘could have perhaps have been [sic] more generous in [their] response to the emergence of German power.’29 Nor was war inevitable, he concedes: as late as July–August, Germany and Austria ‘might have got their way without fighting’.30 By then, it was too late: Russia had mobilised and the Prussian commanders were effectively in charge in Berlin.
In this light, the recent process of ‘normalising’ Passchendaele as ‘worth it’ appals sensitive-minded civilians who, in the intervening years, have longed to find some redemptive meaning in all this.
Many ordinary people despair of the ‘expert’ view of the Somme and Passchendaele as ‘necessary’ battles in a ‘just’ war. They find deeper meaning in the war poets’ portrait of the Western Front as pointless butchery, the rupture of the human soul, conveyed in the most powerful lines ever to emerge from a battlefield: those of Wilfred Owen, David Jones, Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Richard Aldington. Graves’s Goodbye To All That and Aldington’s Death of a Hero are surely the most bitter expressions of this sensibility; Owen’s poetry and Jones’s epic, In Parenthesis, the noblest. The greatest literary voices on the German side were the veterans Erich Maria Remarque, whose novel and memoir All Quiet on the Western Front gave the German nation a heartfelt morality play; and Ernst Jünger, the highly decorated German officer, whose novel Storm of Steel delivered the unadorned truth about the professional soldier.
A subtler literary response was that of the British soldier-poet Edmund Blunden. He was one of the few who fought at Passchendaele, the memory of which became a ceaseless torment, so much so that his friends worried for his sanity. His poem ‘Third Ypres’ summoned a nightmarish vision of devolved humanity in ‘uncreation sunk’:
The more monstrous fate
Shadows our own, the mind swoons doubly burdened,
Taught how for miles our anguish groans and bleeds,
A whole sweet countryside amuck with murder;
Each moment puff ed into a year with death.
Still swept the rain, roared guns,
Still swooped into the swamps of flesh and blood,
All to the drabness of uncreation sunk,
And all thought dwindled to a moan, Relieve!
But who with what command can now relieve
The dead men from that chaos, or my soul?
Blunden’s was a calm patriotic soul. The bitter volleys of Graves and Aldington he eschewed as ‘a betrayal of the experience of the war, and of those … who died in it’.31 In one poem, ‘Illusions’, he asks the reader’s forgiveness for finding beauty, loveliness, in the trenches, before the ‘Terror’ shatters his reverie, and he sees ‘death’s malkins dangling in the wire’.32 The ‘steely glitter’ of Blunden’s eye, to whom the horror is ironic, aberrational, redeems him from the charge of enclosing a charnel house in lyricism, of composing ‘quatrains in an abattoir’.33 Long after the war, he continued to believe in the possibility of love, rendering him unacceptable to the ‘Modernist’ literary set, for whom love was a perversion and compassion a sickness – a style of ‘cultural criticism’ to which the German philosopher Theodor Adorno appended the grim epitaph: ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’34
It is time to offer some of my own conclusions about Passchendaele, based on my work in the preceding pages. Primarily, I believe that the poisonous relationship between Lloyd George and Douglas Haig offers a fresh, human perspective through which to understand the battle. Their mutual hatred and furious disagreement on how to fight the war led to a near-complete breakdown in communication between the prime minister and his commander-in-chief. The collapse of a partnership so vital to British security needlessly prolonged and thus, to a real extent, exacerbated the tragedy of Passchendaele.
Let us ask ourselves, for example, the question that has vexed historians, soldiers and academics since 1917: why did Haig prolong the battle after 9 October, when heavy rainfall, terrible losses, the advice of senior officers (though not Gough or Plumer) and the evidence of his eyes pointed to futile slaughter and counselled against continuing? We already know the official military explanation: Haig pressed on because he felt he was on a winning streak; perhaps the weather would hold; the Germans were on the brink of collapse, etc. He could hardly halt below the village, on a mud plain within German sights, where nobody would have lasted ‘any more minutes than necessary’, as Harington observed.35 Nor could Haig withdraw to Pilckem Ridge and regroup – a sensible option in military terms, as Sheffield states, but ‘to give up territory so recently captured at such heavy cost, was psychologically and politically impossible’.36
And militarily unsound, he writes, in a remark of devastating consequence that he curiously underplays in his recent book: ‘To accept the logic of a battle of pure attrition, that ground [Passchendaele] was unimportant …’37 The ‘logic’ was to destroy as many of the enemy as possible; it didn’t really matter where.
There is a darker explanation for Haig’s decision to keep slogging away, rooted in the psychology of power and pride. Haig was a proud man who had been brutally used by a politician he loathed. According to Haig’s original plan, the capture of Passchendaele had always been his ‘fall-back’ position if the battle failed to advance as he ho
ped.
In this light, had Haig failed to reach the village, the prime minister would have been the first out of the blocks to damn him as a total failure. Not only Haig’s job but his entire reputation and legacy were at stake. Had he called off the battle on 9 October, at such immense cost in soldiers’ lives, having fallen so short of the goals he had laid before the War Cabinet, Haig would have handed Lloyd George the perfect chance not only to sack him but also to destroy his name under a barrage of schadenfreude.
Lloyd George admits this in a revealing paragraph in his memoir:
There were two courses open to Sir Douglas Haig [around 9 October]. One was to go to the Cabinet and admit that the campaign was a complete failure based on an absurd miscalculation of essential facts. He would have to own up that the criticism directed against the scheme by the Prime Minister had been justified by the event. The other course was to persevere stubbornly with his attacks, knowing that at the worst he would gain some ground, with a chance that one day the enemy morale might break … He gambled on the latter chance rather than face the dread alternative of a confession of failure to the politicians … 38
There is a further, metaphysical dimension to Haig’s persistence: the lavish religious tones of the word ‘Passchendaele’ resonated with politicians, civilians and journalists as a symbol of redemption, of Christ’s sacrifice, of Easter. Passchendaele was ‘popular’. By this reading, the Allies were fighting a righteous war towards a shell-strewn Calvary. Possessing Passchendaele exerted a near-mystical hold on certain soldiers’ minds. None paused to ask why or when Passchendaele had become a vital military target. (By November, it had no strategic value as an end in itself; its value as a jumping-off point as part of an attack on the coast had ceased to exist). The men simply assumed it must be, and not only the ordinary soldiers. When General Godley ordered thousands of New Zealanders to their deaths in a battle he knew they couldn’t win, he was acting in the thrall of Haig’s orders to seize the village.