Blood and Thunder

by Alexandra J Churchill

  Hugh Ross, an Etonian major in the Scots Guards, had been in a dugout along the garden wall at Elverdinghe for some time and had been intensely shelled day and night. Several of his men had been buried alive and they had had to dig them out. Hugh, at this time, was a shadow of a man and probably should have been nowhere near the line of duty. He arrived at brigade headquarters for dinner one evening covered in brick dust, exhausted and ‘nearly through’. Henry was in tremendous form and by the time he finished his routine, despite the fact that outside shells were dropping in the grounds, Hugh was singing along with him. Eventually they both collapsed on to the floor laughing and, for a time at least, Hugh felt a little better.

  Their dinners were a primary source of entertainment. Logie was a frequent visitor, Eric Greer rarely absent – ‘a brilliant and amusing talker and a great theorist on the war’. They would debate long into the night, cigars in mouth, as they discoursed on life and death. Just four days after the 4 June dinner at St Omer there was another ‘Pan-Etonian’ gathering, this time just a handful of officers, overseen by General John with Viscount Holmesdale and Ralph present. Two days later Ralph and Henry escaped again. ‘We talk pure Eton the whole time,’ Henry reported, but ‘bitter criticism of the higher command’ was another prevalent topic.

  Occasionally, on an evening walk, Henry and Oliver Lyttleton would play a four-hole round of imaginary golf. There were pretend clubs, carried by the brigadier and John Dyer. Logie Leggatt was fortunate enough to get over to see his aunt more than once. He was spoiled by the ladies present with two good meals and even a set of tennis before a sing-song.

  In the middle of July though, Logie picked up a minor injury that again threatened to remove him from duty right before a major offensive. The offending foot became infected but he was determined that he would be ‘skipping about quite happily’ by the time the Coldstream Guards attempted to cross the Yser Canal at the end of the month. Gilly Follett had organised for him to be treated at headquarters to ensure that Logie wouldn’t be removed from the battalion’s strength and whisked off to a hospital somewhere.

  Whilst laid up, Logie had time to contemplate what was about to occur. For some months his mother had been urging him to keep a diary. Now, with nothing else to do but mark time whilst his foot was repeatedly bathed in iodine, he decided to give it a go. ‘Perhaps it may be interesting to chronicle, as far as possible, my feelings during the next few days.’

  The plan for the big push was ambitious indeed. The man-made earthquakes at Messines had opened a lock on the Western Front so to speak. Now, if the situation was to be exploited, Haig needed to kick the door down. The offensive east of Ypres was to be the main thrust aimed at ending the war as far as British contingents were concerned in 1917. Following the abject failure of Nivelle’s attempts on the Aisne and the mutinous consequences of his disastrous campaign, there was no longer going to be French co-operation on the scale originally intended. Any thoughts of abandoning the attack were out of the question. If the Germans caught wind of the seditious atmosphere in the French Army and chose to capitalise on it, there could be disastrous consequences.

  Whilst political wrangling went on, military preparations continued. Gough had handed over all of his men in the Arras area and was given a new collection of troops with the same title of Fifth Army that would be based further north and included the Guards Division. Generals Plumer and Rawlinson had come up with an initial outline for the offensive but Haig decided that it wasn’t aggressive enough and amended it to incorporate a colossal 5,000-yard advance, beyond the range of friendly artillery towards Passchendaele.

  It might not have been the first battle in the area, but this would be the first major British offensive. It would also be the first time that the Guards had done all the preparation for a major offensive and then taken part in the initial assault, having been held in reserve at Loos and on the Somme. The sector they had been given was not ideal, primarily because of the presence of the Yser Canal. Up to 70ft wide it was shallow but composed of soft mud ‘into which a man sank like a stone’. It provided a sufficient obstacle for both sides to have let it be thus far in the war, content to look at each other from opposite banks. Now, in order to advance towards Pilckem Ridge, the Guards would have to cross it in the midst of battle. The Royal Engineers had constructed an imitation of it near Herzeele for practice, but it was still likely to cause heavy, heavy casualties.

  Plans were also being made for the all-important artillery bombardment that would precede the battle. More than 3,000 guns had now been drawn into action and positioned almost wheel to wheel, ready to blaze away at the Germans along the entire front. In the run up to the big day the countryside would be gradually pounded out of all recognition as the Allied artillery attempted to weaken the German position.

  Yet again progress across the battlefield was to be marked by a series of coloured lines. The first, the Blue, constituted the German front line and the Gheluvelt Plateau. Gough’s men would then move on to the Black Line, the second enemy position on the reverse side of the Pilckem Ridge. Further south it would take in more of the Gheluvelt Plateau. Advancing on to the Green Line the Fifth Army would move across the Steenbeck, a stream that became a flooded nuisance in bad weather. The fourth objective, the ambitious Red Line, was way off towards Langemarck.

  Logie Leggatt was jotting down his thoughts on his sickbed and had put them into categories including courage, friends, memories and death. He decided to expand on some of his themes. ‘Of myself I expect I am the most hopeless coward,’ he wrote. ‘I am imaginative, absurdly soft-hearted and cut a contemptible figure at the dentist.’ He had been chatting with a fellow OE and Colleger in the artillery at Poperinghe a few weeks beforehand and he had remarked to Logie that it must be very difficult to be gutless if you were in the Guards. ‘I appreciate what he means,’ Logie wrote. ‘If one is at all impressionable – and I am very – the discipline, the whole atmosphere begins to grip one as soon as one joins the Division.’ As a sportsman he had never shied away from a good struggle and this, he hoped, was an indication that he would do himself justice in the coming fight.

  He thought of his friends constantly. ‘Ralph, whom I love next to the family … praise be that Ralph is or should be safe.’ Almost without exception the others that he listed were also Etonians. His other fags, masters, then Edward Lyttelton and old Luxmoore. ‘It is … easy to see why Eton is to me such a vivid personality. Eton is simply the cumulative charms of my friends.’ Logie’s memories were also dominated by school. ‘My visit to Eton when I heard I was going to get in, my various matches and exams.’ Sights and smells jogged his recollections. ‘The smell of wall mud, the sound of the doves in school yard, or Lupton’s tower clock, or a fives ball [rebounding off a wall].’ He could go on and on and it was beginning to sadden him.

  Logie did not contemplate the idea of his own death, but the memories of his contemporaries in College that had left him haunted his sleep. Like Regie Fletcher, Logie couldn’t believe that one could cease to exist; he refused to believe it. ‘The utter annihilation of such characters is quite impossible; they must all be very much alive – somewhere.’ He sought to put it into some coherent form for his family. ‘Death is simply a jumping-off trench to another and far greater objective.’ This gave him no small amount of comfort. ‘That being so, if I am to be scuppered in this push, I realise I go in the best possible company, and with hopes of speedily meeting my old friends again.’

  Whilst Logie was laid up with his sore foot, preparations for the offensive continued apace. Practice runs crossing the canal at Poperinghe got larger and larger in scale until 500 men at a time slopped across the shallow waterway. The junior officers were still unaware on which date they would be attacking, but dumps had to be created and filled. They and their men carried out continual fatigues to and from the front line as they stockpiled equipment and stores as far forward as possible.

  German animosity increased accordingly and as the G
uards and the Royal Engineers trekked backwards and forwards they were subjected to heavy shellfire. Evelyn Fryer was terrified, especially when working in the dark. Boesinghe, ‘which in ordinary times was no bed of roses’, now became an inferno. He remembered one trip in particular. He took ninety men to move heavy trench-mortar bombs to a gun position and they were shelled all the way there and all the way back, shells skimming off the top of the trenches as they moved along. Weary men stacked their loads at the end of their perilous slog, ‘praying that the next salvo would not send them all sky high’. One Guardsman referred to it as ‘house-moving in Hell’.

  The preliminary artillery bombardment began on 16 July. With no built-up areas to aim for in the Guards’ sector and a large space until any network of German trenches, the heavy artillery concentrated on woods, farms and any known pillboxes, whilst the field guns kept up a sustained fire on known defences and tried to cut the wire. Nearly twenty trench mortars also bashed away at the enemy’s front line whilst machine gunners fired high to harass them with a hail of bullets.

  It was a harrowing experience for the enemy troops manning their lines but in return the Germans showered the Guards with gas shells. It was especially bad every morning at dawn when the enemy pummelled them lest this be the day of the attack. When daylight came the repair work would have to start so that when men came out of the trenches at Boesinghe they were physically and mentally exhausted by their work and by the strain of constant alarms and prolonged stints wearing their gas helmets.

  By 22 July Logie had managed to get a boot on and was hobbling about in the bright summer sunshine. Twenty-four hours previously his participation in the advance had hung by a thread. As he put it, it was a race between GHQ and his foot. Two days later he reported a stifling hot day as he returned to his battalion. The attack was to be delayed by almost a week. As it transpired, zero day would now be 31 July 1917 because the French had requested longer to prepare. General Feilding immediately organised his men so as to give the two attacking brigades as much rest as possible.

  Logie arrived just in time to take part in the last dress rehearsal for the big show. ‘It is extraordinary to think how elaborately we’ve sapped up our lesson when the poor old 13th Rifle Brigade were flung at half-an-hour’s notice against trenches they knew nothing about. One does feel that nothing has been left to chance.’ The following day, to his delight but not, he guessed, to that of general headquarters, the weather broke and the rain came pouring down. It took the edge off the heat. Nervous anxiety was building. ‘The second bell has gone; the crowd is clearing, I’m anxious for the umpires to get out!2’

  The 3rd Coldstream Guards were manning the front line as anxiety built in anticipation of the grand offensive. Then suddenly the Germans carried out a manoeuvre that played right into their hands. In the early hours of 27 July two wounded men of the Welsh division next door were seen jumping up and down on the opposite bank of the canal. Charlie Hambro, who had been Captain of the XI as late as 1915, went out to fetch them. When they all came back it was with the news that the enemy trenches on the other side of the canal appeared to have been completely abandoned. Charlie submitted a report that claimed, along with the observations of the wounded men, that there was a conspicuous absence of any Germans all the way back to the Steenbeck, a stream that flowed through what was to be the battlefield.

  As it transpired, the Germans had partly run away from the bombardment without orders and partly panicked about the sound of the Royal Engineers tunnelling in the canal banks. This was only to fashion chambers in which to store equipment but it was enough to make them flee. With the Messines mines in mind, General Feilding did not need any more encouragement. Swiftly, he decided to have his men cross the canal that day without any artillery support to seize the opposite bank, thereby removing an extremely dangerous and potentially costly obstacle from the path of his men just days before they were due to attack.

  Having been caught out the Germans began firing on the new British positions ferociously and when Charlie Hambro’s battalion was withdrawn forty-eight hours later he was one of four officers who had to be removed from duty owing to shell shock. The brigade, commanded by Ma Jeffreys, had however pulled off an impressive feat. The Guards Division would now have control of the canal. The only amendments necessary on the day would be slight adjustments to the timing of the artillery planned to protect them and a short delay to zero hour to allow the troops on their right to come up level with them.

  The Guards had made it to the eve of Haig’s Flanders offensive, but not without cost. General Feilding himself was almost killed along with Ralph Gamble on 4 July when a stray shell whizzed right by them and exploded nearby. General John went on a walkabout the day before the battle and came back in a depressed mood. ‘One meets nothing but wounded men, and one is obliged to keep stepping over dead bodies.’ Eric Greer noted in mid July that the 2nd Irish Guards were down to ten fighting officers and two in reserve. Two more, including a company commander, were put out of action forty-eight hours before the battalion went into action. Evelyn Fryer inherited a company of Grenadiers on the eve of battle because his own commanding officer was wounded. He remembered with particular sadness one of the men. He had been designated to attack on the far right on zero day and he joked proudly that he was the right-hand man of the Guards Division. A shell put paid to his ambition a week before the offensive commenced.

  Perhaps the most crushing loss from a military point of view came on 20 July. ‘Byng’ Hopwood, another OE and commanding officer of Ralph’s battalion, was walking down a communications trench with his second in command when both were hit by a shell. He was the fourth colonel that the 1st Coldstream Guards had lost during the war. Ralph had been ‘devoted’ to him and was understandably devastated. The battalion had lost sixty men and six officers, all of them invaluable so close to an attack. Just behind the division was a cemetery named Canada Farm. When the division arrived in mid June it was a mere scattering of graves. By 30 July it was full of Guardsmen killed preparing for the attack on Pilckem Ridge.

  From his bed at headquarters Logie had had plenty of time to contemplate the big day in the notes he had been making for his family. ‘Sometime in the next fortnight I shall be requested to pop the parapet, cross the … Yser Canal, and step lightly out in the direction of Pilckem Ridge.’ It didn’t matter how he was supposed to cover the ground, or why. The fact was that it seemed likely that many of them would not return. So how did he face this? He didn’t feel ready, but he was not in control of events as they spiralled towards the attack so what could he do other than try to overcome this doubt and perform as expected? In the run up to the battle his overriding concern was for his family, his parents, his brother and his young sister.

  It was with some trepidation that Evelyn Fryer set off for the assembly trenches south-west of Boesinghe. That position had been shelled mercilessly with gas every morning at dawn and they expected no different on 31 July. He moved off in ‘a state of pent up excitement, trying to appear calm, but inwardly seething.’ Almost without exception the Guards Division was in position by 10 p.m. that night.

  Eric Greer was ensconced in a German dugout that now acted as his battalion headquarters. Although only 27, as commanding officer, he was determined to have his battalion of Irish Guards adequately prepared and he went to great lengths to see to everything. He even issued his company commanders with postcard-sized notes that had a map of their sector on the reverse. Once in battle, Eric wanted them to mark their position on the map with an ‘X’, scribble a note and send it back with a runner. Before setting off Logie quickly penned a note to his parents. ‘Well old things, tomorrow it happens … There’s a deuce of a noise going on … But I’m feeling very fit and keen and calm; far less excited than [at] Lord’s … I feel it is out of my hands now and I pray merely for guidance and courage. Needless to say I’m wearing my Wall scarf, symbol of victory … So goodbye and thank you once again.’

  The initial a
ttack would be made by the 2nd and 3rd Guards Brigades as planned; half of them advancing to the first and second lines (Blue then Black) before the remainder of the troops passed through on their way to the third objective, the Green Line. Finally, elements from the 1st Guards Brigade would pass through the whole lot on their way across the Steenbeck, swinging up to join with the French on their way to the final, Red Line. If, by some chance, the Germans completely folded, tentative plans existed to move towards Langemarck itself.

  Arthur Gibbs, a young subaltern in the Welsh Guards, had left Eton at the same time as Logie Leggatt and gone up to Brasenose College, Oxford. He had heard the guns on the Somme but the barrage that began at 3.50 a.m. on 31 July 1917 was a chastening experience. ‘I should like some of our munitions workers to come over and see the results of their efforts at home. I have just been thinking of the millions of people who have been working day and night for months for a victory like this.’ Evelyn Fryer was listening in his assembly trench when the 3rd Battle for Ypres commenced. ‘Hell was let loose … Hell had been let loose many times before, but I doubt she got quite so much off the chain as on this memorable morning.’ The noise was terrific; shells and machine-gun fire from behind them all adding to the din. In the Guards sector as the barrage went off two special companies began loosing off flaming oil drums, setting fire to everything they touched as they span towards the enemy.

  When dawn came it hardly looked like summer. The threat of rain hung in a dull overcast sky. As the rest of Gough’s army moved off in pursuit of their objectives the Guards stood their ground, waiting for the troops beside them to come up level with their position after the unexpected advance across the canal four days previously. At 4.25 a.m. the barrage lifted and Eric Greer’s battalion moved off into desultory shellfire. Twelve minutes later, with unexpected ease, they had reached the Blue Line. Next to no opposition had stood in their way; in fact they had seen precisely one dead German by the time they began consolidating their position.