In the consolidations, lines of old trenches were avoided where possible, for these drew howitzer fire from batteries firing south-west from below Passchendaele on the left of the British line, and guns firing north-west from Tenbrielen, Zanvoorde and Commines beyond the Gheluvelt plateau on the right flank. These enemy guns were widely dispersed, and hidden within roofless houses, barns, and sheds. Before they were fired, smoke-screens were laid to hide the flashes.
At 5 p.m., while Phillip was checking the loading of limbers, three coloured balls, one directly above the other—red, green, yellow—broke in the sky, in the direction of the Menin road, and floated there. At once the British barrage opened up. Hardly had it died away when another trio of lights arose to the left, and again a great cauldron seemed to be bubbling.
“That’s up by Langemarck,” remarked Sergeant Nolan; while Cutts, heaving up a box of .303, seemed to have lost his strength. Nolan helped him, and said reassuringly, “The company will have got Jerry taped by the time we go up tonight.” The thought of the Alleyman machine-gun barrage on the beech-slab circuit made Phillip feel weak, too; so he went away to his tent to have a drink.
Half an hour later the S O S lights arose on the right, this time up by Polygon wood, where the Australians were fighting. Twice again, at 6.30 p.m., and at 7 p.m., the trio of rocket lights sailed up, the barrage crashed down, “hammer and tongs” said Nolan.
In a clear sky the sun went down, casting a purple tinge in the brick-red rays; and with the day the battle, too, seemed to have spent its force.
When the pallor of flares arose along the horizon, transport wheels began to roll and dip on all the roads of stone, rubble and wood; gun-teams, with horse and caterpillar tractor, hauled out their cannon, for the next step forward.
Chapter 17
FLANDERN I, FLANDERN II
The company remained in the line after the first artillery shock-battle, or step, in the G.H.Q. term of under-statement. Every Vickers gun was needed for the barrages on the German approach routes, while the second step was being prepared. Infantry rehearsals in rear areas took place daily; while tens of thousands of Labour troops—white, black, and yellow—worked in the back areas. The casualties among the British Labour Corps, as they laid wooden tracks for approach and supplies over captured ground, equalled those of the infantry in the assaults. Nothing in the Ypres salient had ever been cushy.
The first Plumerian step had taken the third German, or Wilhelm line, north of the Menin road; but only the lower slopes of the Gheluvelt plateau to the south.
The second step, six days later, again succeeded in the north, upon lower ground where bombardment had broken the beeks. But while it captured and held all of Polygon Wood, it failed upon the Gheluvelt plateau on both sides of the Menin road. Here the ground rose almost imperceptibly to the village of Gheluvelt on its crest.
During this battle, which took place in fine weather on Wednesday the 26 September, under a crescent moon (as recorded by Phillip in his pocket diary) there “were persistent rumours of hundreds of thousands killed”.
Perhaps the rumours were suggested by the dust clouds hanging over the battlefield like omens of doom. After the continued fine weather, all the upper Salient, except the areas of the broken beeks, was so dry, particularly the fine sandy leaf-mould of Polygon Wood, that high-explosive shells with instantaneous fuses burst without penetration: up went palls of detritus, to float in the hot gases ascending into the misty morning. This black cloud hung over the battle, visible presage of doom.
The Germans now had more machine guns in the mebus, or pill-box rows, and in shell-holes and cavities under deracinated tree stumps. In some sectors battalions fought to decimation. From Ypres, and the camps standing thickly in the forward areas of reserve, S O S signals were seen to be going up, again and again, when towards noon the smoky mist lifted and the sun shone clear.
Phillip heard the rumours, one after another. So general was the feeling of pessimism, in contrast to the good news of the advance from the staff-captain at Brigade, that he put in Company Orders that evening a warning not to spread tales of disaster.
These Orders were written out by the C.Q.M.S. every evening, at dictation by the senior officer present. At six o’clock he ordered them to be read out to those men present in the camp.
“That’s not what they’re saying at the divisional dump,” remarked Sergeant Nolan afterwards. “On all sides they are saying it’s been a washout.”
“Even the Aussies?”
“Well, no, sir, I can’t say as I’ve heard it from any of them.”
“Well, it isn’t true, according to the staff-captain. I’ve an idea that it’s been spread by the new drafts from Etaples, in for the first time. There was very nearly a mutiny when I was there, and many of the men, who were at the I.B.D.’s then, are now up here.”
“I dunno, sir, I feel a bit fed-up myself, sometimes. Where’s it all going to end? I don’t see as how any side can really win this war.”
*
So quietly had the attack been prepared, that the German Staff had thought that the British had broken off the battle. The attack came as a surprise to them. It was a stunning victory. But it was also a resumption of ‘the battle for Passchendaele’. Both German and British troops had just about had enough. Rumours of disaster started to spread from the battle front and so down to the base; and by way of hospital trains, to Berlin—and London. Hundreds of thousands killed, said the rumour-mongers, tired of the war, on both sides. The French had gone beyond that condition; they had had enough.
Phillip was beginning to think that what people usually believed to be true was usually wrong. His intelligence, diverted by his upbringing, was beginning to assert itself against the commonplace, and commonplace ideas from which he had hitherto flinched. For he had been fortunate to find in Harold West both friend and mentor, one who made him aware of the possibility of a balanced outlook on all human actions. Major West had access to facts which were not generally known. Thus, he told Phillip, while the “frocks” in Whitehall, “including the Prime Minister Mr. George”, were saying that the Chief was “blundering on, losing hundreds of thousands of men in his stone-wall tactics”, the facts were almost entirely to the contrary.
“The total number actually killed in both Second and Fifth Armies, that is, seven divisions, including the two Australian divisions fighting in the Salient on Wednesday, the twenty-sixth of September, was one hundred and eleven officers, and one thousand, one hundred and fourteen men. As for the Eingreif divisions, they are now being destroyed faster than they can arrive through the bottle-neck of communication into Western Belgium. London ignores this; it can only deprecate the ‘terrible slaughter by Haig’; but if Mr. George could see it plain, he would realise the great advantage of the Chief’s choice of Flanders as the battlefield area in which to carry out the Cabinet’s instruction to destroy the German Armies! The enemy has got only two railway lines: that is the whole point! And in case you think I’m bloody-minded, let me remind you that I am not a soldier by nature, but a country parson.”
*
After the attacks, and the counter-attacks, upon the ground beyond which the Germans could still hide their guns and the movements of their eingreif divisionen while looking down upon the British batteries and infantry, there was a pause. The late September sun had the glaze of ripening stone-fruit; but upon the earth, or that sector of scarcely twenty-five thousand acres which was the battlefield, its cornucopian virtue was denied. Europe had two ideas, Europe had two minds; Europe was sharing one death.
*
A week later, when the company was out at rest, the third step was taken, under a wasting moon declining to the west. It went forward along a tape line from the old junction of the Lauterbeek with the Broembeek in the north—where once the two brooks had met near the culvert under the embankment of the Ypres–Staden railway—to the high ground of Tower Hamlets on the Gheluvelt plateau just across the Menin road to the south. Rain had
fallen the night before the battle, but not enough to stop some of the low trajectory German shells from bouncing off the ground when they struck. The wall of flame that was the British barrage moving before the assault passed over lines of German infantry which had been waiting for their own attack, timed to start ten minutes later. Neither side had known of the other’s coming attack; first come were first to serve with the bayonet. Nearly all the Gheluvelt plateau was taken, and more than half the highest ground to the north between the Menin road and the village of Passchendaele, known as the Broodseinde Ridge.
But drizzle was the fore-drift of heavy showers of rain. On 7 October both Army commanders wanted to step, or thrust, no more. The Second Army troops had reached the original British trench line of October 1914, along the ridge. It had lain in front of the road from Becelaere to Passchendaele and Westroosbeke. Australian soldiers digging near Broodseinde noticed darker patches in some of the shovelfuls of sand, with finger bones, and blackened fragments of rotted khaki.
*
On the morning of 9 October the fourth step was taken. Fifth Army troops were to capture that section of Flandern I which remained untaken north of Abraham Heights near Gravenstafel; those of the Second Army to the south were to advance along the Flanders ridge to Passchendaele village. The German divisions were battered and demoralised: now for the possible knock-out, before the reserve divisions could be brought up on the single-line Belgian railways.
Four British divisions waited to entrain fifteen miles behind Ypres, whither the railway had been brought. The Cavalry Corps stood by, ready to exploit a break-through; while rain continued to fall steadily.
*
The day after the fourth step had been launched, two men, each with a long stick in his hand, were walking on one of the many duck-board tracks lying parallel to the Wieltje-Frezenberg road, alongside which was an almost continuous row of 18-pounder field-guns. Both wore thigh-length rubber wading boots, and mackintosh drivers’ capes which covered their box-respirators, revolvers, field-glasses, and haversacks. The senior of the two, whose diminutive scarlet gorget patches on the collar of his ranker’s tunic were concealed under a woollen scarf, carried, in addition, a map-case.
“I don’t see how the infantry can possibly move in this weather, Westy. Must the attacks go on?”
“One thing I’d have you know, Phillip, is that the Chief remembers the fact that the Germans made a crucial mistake on the last day of October, 1914, when they chucked in their hand at the very moment when they had his First Corps on the move down the Menin road. That was the only occasion in this war so far when a battalion of Guards, the Lilywhites, broke, and some of their men threw away their rifles and left the battle. But you were there, and will know more about it than I.”
“I think it had happened just before we went up the Menin road. But I do know that the Germans thought the woods behind us were stiff with reserves, also that our fifteen-rounds-rapid was from automatische pistolen, because one told me so on that Christmas Day. He said they had no more reserves, and as we had so many, the attack was stopped.”
“I hadn’t heard that.” ‘Spectre’ West looked around him, at the brown waste land occluded by drizzle, and said, “If only the Chief could have had his own way, and attacked up here last May, instead of down south, as demanded by Joffre … the Messines mines had been ready, you know, for the attack in 1916, only the French insisted, then, that we should attack north of the Somme. So Third Ypres was put off in 1916, and again last spring. With the result that everyone can now see—only everyone, as usual, will draw the wrong conclusions. Now we must get a move on.”
Cold squally rain began to drive into their faces.
They reached the transverse one-way limber track across the Pilckem ridge, and turned north to the St. Julien road. “I want to have a look at the batteries in the Steenbeek valley.”
The teak track, nine feet wide, was in places aswim in the slipslop watery top-mud of the 6-, 8-, and 10-foot crater zone of the southern end of the Pilckem ridge. It lay behind what once had been a farm lane: the farms were now pill-boxes—Rupprecht, Uhlan, Jasper, Von Hugel—which had been captured on July 31.
Howitzer batteries, one beside the other, now squatted on the line of the original lane, between which and the teak track lay a light railway, with sidings for shell dumps.
“How goes it?” asked ‘Spectre’ West, his scarf opened to show his red tabs to a battery sergeant-major.
“Still on the first objective, sir.”
The teak planks, 2½ inches thick and 9 feet wide, were scattered like the empty shucks of great insects caught, sucked out, and rejected by other squat insects within these webs of the dark side of the moon. A flash of light, a tremendous thud, a tearing sound in the sky: another 6-inch howitzer shell began its parabola eastwards.
Shattered limbers, with dead mules and horses, lay continuously beside the track. Now they were descending to pale gleams of water out-numbering the tippings of brown earth before them, upon which lay the track, like the flattened ribs of some prehistoric serpent. A sort of trestle bridge, which had been built to carry the track over the swamp, was broken and upended. Direct hits on it had scattered the wooden causeway. A notice said that cocoanut matting had been laid to the right of the trestle posts, two feet below water level.
*
‘Spectre’ West was one of three 2nd-grade General Staff Officers attached to Operations (A), G.H.Q. Each of the three majors understudied a Lieut.-Colonel (G.S.O. 1), commanded by the Brigadier-General who was Director of Operations in the B.E.F. Major West, who had been given a free hand where to go, had authority to visit any headquarters of any unit from infantry battalion and artillery brigade to Army. He had immediate access to any commander, from lieutenant-colonel to general.
He had been called various names during his travels, not all bestowed with good humour. They included G.H.Q. Spy, Ticket Inspector, The Tout, and The Bagman. He had a Vauxhall car with driver, and could come and go as he pleased. His job was to find out what was wrong, to hear and discuss ideas for correction, and to report what he had seen immediately on return to Advanced G.H.Q., which occupied about a score of railway coaches, fitted up as offices and living rooms, in a railway siding near Dunkerque, on the Belgian coast.
*
Some of the field guns on the west depression of the broken course of the upper Steenbeek, roughly marked by stumps of shattered willow trees, were unable to fire. Sand-bags or rather mud-bags filled with stone chippings had been laid on a double layer of faggot bundles for the foundations of the gun-pits. Upon each foundation two platforms of beech planks, one nailed crosswise upon the other, had been laid. But each kick-back after firing shook faggots, stone-bags and double-deck down unevenly, taking wheels and trail with them, until axles were aswirl. One gun had water lipping at its muzzle.
“The blasted Staff give us impossible jobs because they never come anywhere near the line, but live a life of ease at the base,” said one gunner subaltern, bitterly. “The barrage was bound to be a bloody wash-out when the rains started again. Look at my bloody guns! I ask you! What possible bloody sense was there in ordering an attack under these conditions?”
“What was the barrage like?”
“Weak, spluttery, no bloody good! We couldn’t get our guns up, so we had to fire at extreme range.”
“Six thousand yards?”
“That’s right. And Passchendaele church, the infantry’s objective, is nearer seven thousand yards.”
“Had you not forward positions prepared?”
“Well, would we be here if we had? I ask you!”
“I am asking you,” replied ‘Spectre’ West, smoothly. “Why did you not get forward?”
“Can’t you see for yourself?”
“Yes, that is what I am here for.”
Hairless, coagulated heaps lay around. Roughcast with mud, the horses lay where they had fallen, having lost the will to live.
“Here’s the major!”
>
“Good morning,” said ‘Spectre’ West. “I am from G.H.Q. How are you managing about ammunition supplies?”
The subaltern stared in amazement. A staff officer from G.H.Q.! Ye gods, what had he said?
“Well, it took our chaps fifteen hours to get here last night from the waggon lines, sir. We lost nine mules on the way. Some sank out of sight. We have to wash the shells in water before we can attempt to use them. I’m only at half strength, and working double shifts, anyway, or was, without reliefs. You can see the quality of our hotel accommodation.” He pointed with his staff at a heap of straw floating inside a baby elephant shelter. “But that came up too. I mustn’t forget that.” He indicated a civilian hip-bath perforated by shrapnel. “That, sir, is a luxury. It is not a bath. It is intended for a bed. I understand there is to be a further issue of Beds, Bathtub, Officers for use of, One.”
‘Spectre’ West threw back his cape, in order to pull out his Field Message Book 153. With pride Phillip saw the gunner’s face unstiffen as he saw the seven wound stripes above the black hand, and the ribands of D.S.O. and M.C., each with a silver rosette.
Holding the book in the crook of his left arm, ‘Spectre’ West made some notes. “I’ll do what I can, but I am an observer only,” he said.
“Thank you, sir. Are you going to cross the Steenbeek?”
“I must get over somehow. I want to get into Passchendaele if I can manage it.”
“Well, the best of luck to you! I’ll show you the way.”
It was 10 a.m., and the rain had ceased.
The three went back along the cocoanut mat, which had been laid from the teak track and gave some sort of foundation under the knee-high slop of mud.
Love and the Loveless Page 34
