They Called it Passchendaele

by Lyn Macdonald

  Faced with the knowledge of the coming offensive, but not knowing exactly when it would take place, there were only two things that the Germans could do. All around the salient they mounted raid after raid on the trenches, hoping to capture prisoners or papers which would reveal the vital information. Reconnaissance aeroplanes reported enormous concentrations of troops and equipment in the back areas. And, knowing that a missile dropped virtually anywhere was likely to hit some target which would impede the preparations, the Germans stepped up long-range shelling and sent every available bomber to blast anything and everything that moved between Ypres and the sea.

  Pastor van Walleghem was concerned with the sufferings of the civilians.

  12 July. Bailleul bombarded today, killing civilians. Also another painful accident happened tonight. German planes overhead from 21.30 to 22.30 dropping bombs at Ouderdom. The English guns shoot at them. Unfortunately, one of the English air shrapnel shells lands on the house of Artur Tahon, who now lives along the Abeele road just outside Reninghelst. The occupants were sitting round the table. The shrapnel shell pierced through the roof, through a chest full of clothing, through the ceiling, and then comes below and drills straight through the child sitting on its mother’s lap, slices off the mother’s right thigh and goes through the floor-boards, finishing up almost one yard underground. Small Albert Tahon, aged only eighteen months, is killed instantly. The mother, thirty-two years of age, is taken to Couthove and dies the next morning. I have never seen anything as sweet and at the same time painful as that poor little child. It was laughing heartily when its small body was pierced and death was so instantaneous that the poor little lamb’s facial expression never changed.

  Sister Mary Pollock at ‘Mendinghem’ recalls,

  Sister Mary Pollock, Theatre Sister, ‘Mendinghem’, No. 46 Casualty Clearing Station at Proven, Territorial Force Nursing Service

  We had a lot of refugees at that time and a lot of them wounded, and we quickly had to put up marquees for them because we couldn’t put them in with the wounded soldiers, but we had to care for them just the same. I remember the woman with the severed leg although they didn’t bring her to the hospital. She was taken to a little cottage a bit down from the station. There were French people still living there and they were relations of hers. The surgeon and I went down to see her and she was in agony, poor thing. He said, ‘Give her some morphia and keep watching her. We can’t move her, but you come down as often as you can.’ Of course I was as busy as I could be, but I did run down the hill a few times, really just waiting for her to pass out. She just passed away. It was the best thing she could have done, really, because gangrene would have set in.

  All the casualty clearing stations were as busy as they could be because on that same night, 12 July, the Germans attacked for the first time with mustard gas. ‘Mendinghem’ alone took in over a thousand cases over the next few days, for the effect of the gas was not necessarily immediate. It was a dark oily fluid which not only emitted noxious fumes but seeped into the earth and clung and hung in the crevices and furrows of the churned-up soil. Days later, soldiers who had crawled out to listening-posts beyond the front line, or who had thrown themselves into shell-holes for cover, would crawl out, their uniforms burnt through, their bodies covered with agonising blisters. Even quite far behind the righting line, to the ribald and callous amusement of their comrades, men squatting in convenient shell-holes suffered severe burning and even sloughing of the genitals. At No. 11 CCS at Godwaersveldt (a jaw-breaker which the troops preferred to call ‘Gert wears velvet’) there were casualties even among the girls who were nursing the gas victims.

  Staff Nurse C. Macfie, No. 11 Casualty Clearing Station, Godwaersveldt, Territorial Force Nursing Service

  I’d just arrived with another nurse from the south, because they needed as many staff as they could get with the big stunt coming, and it was just a couple of nights later that the mustard gas cases started to come in. It was terrible to see them. I was in the post-operative tent so I didn’t come in contact with them, but the nurses in the reception tent had a bad time. The poor boys were helpless and the nurses had to take off these uniforms, all soaked with gas, and do the best they could for the boys. Next day all the nurses had chest trouble and streaming eyes from the gassing. They were all yellow and dazed. Even their hair turned yellow and they were nearly as bad as the men, just from the fames from their clothing. And all the time, of course, the bombs were falling, night after night.

  The men were very good. In a way it must have been worse for them just lying there. The beds all had folding legs, and there were sandbags piled a foot or so up the sides of the ward tents. On a moonlit night the C O, Colonel Humphries, would come round and say, ‘All down on the floor tonight, we’re expecting Jerry over’, so we had to turn the legs in and lower the beds to get them down below the level of the sandbags, to save the soldiers getting shrapnel. I was terrified when the bombs were dropping. We were all terrified – patients and nurses – we were all shaking. I remember one night when I was on duty and these bombs were dropping all about, I said to the doctor, ‘Oh, I wish I didn’t shake so!’ And he just looked at me and said, ‘Oh, be quiet. We all shake.’

  The British bombardment began on 16 July. From Dixmude to Bail-leul, through miles of tented camps, men slumbering on groundsheets felt the earth vibrate beneath them. In the casualty clearing stations and in base hospitals miles from the line, surgical instruments in their steel trays began to tinkle gently, incessantly. A Tommy grasped Sister Macfie’s wrist as she bent over him to dress his wounds. ‘Listen, Sister. Do you hear it? It’s started.’

  Late that evening, after dark, Catherine Macfie went with two other nurses and an orderly to the nearby vantage-point of Mont des Cats. The salient was an arc of flame. All around, like sunlight dancing on water, the countryside flickered and rippled with flecks of fire, as the shells flashed and roared from the muzzles of more than 3,000 heavy guns. Beyond a patch of darkness, a straggle of fireflies in the distance marked the forward positions of the light artillery standing wheel-to-wheel behind the line. The old moon had died and the first slim crescent of the new was still three nights away, but the jagged ruins of Ypres were silhouetted – now red, now green, now starkly black – against an ever-changing backcloth of light. The SOS rockets rose and flared and died as the shells rained down on the German lines and defences beyond the salient. In the British trenches and in the German the front-line troops sweated and crouched in the quivering earth, hands pressed to their ears. Around them the air whipped and swirled as the storm of steel roared past on the wind.

  Sheltering in their concrete dug-outs the Germans were better off than the Tommies in their exposed trenches, for in response to the SOS signals from their front-line troops German shells were raining down on the British positions, and the screaming in the air was echoed by screams from the ground and cry after cry of ‘Stretcher-bearer!’ As the nurses, awed by their glimpse of the inferno in the salient, hurried down from Mont des Cats to prepare for the arrival of the first of the inevitable convoys of wounded, Lloyd George was presiding over a dinner party at 10 Downing Street.

  The guests were Lord Curzon, Lord Milner, General Smuts and Colonel Hankey, Secretary to the War Cabinet. It was an uneasy meeting, for the opening of the preliminary bombardment had taken the politicians by surprise. They had agreed, undoubtedly, that Sir Douglas Haig should continue preparations for the offensive. They had not fully realised that his preparations had gone quite so far. To all intents and purposes, the offensive had already started. Should it, could it, be stopped?

  All through dinner, and later over the port, the brandy and the fine cigars, the Cabinet went over the old ground and the old arguments. No one, least of all the Prime Minister, was happy about the offensive, but eventually a reluctant agreement was reached. It was decided that Sir Douglas Haig should be allowed to begin his offensive, ‘but not to allow it to degenerate into a drawn-out, indecisive battle of
the Somme type. If this happened, it was to be stopped and the plan for an attack on the Italian front would be tried.’*

  A meeting of the War Policy Committee was arranged for Wednesday, almost two days later. Not until then would the informal agreement, which had been reached over the dinner at Downing Street, be confirmed.

  It was well after midnight when the guests left. Outside, the evening bustle of the streets had long since faded to a murmur. It was a moonless night, so no Zeppelins would come to disturb the peace of sleeping Londoners. However, through the still air of the warm summer night, it was just possible to hear a faint drumming, like thunder in the far distance. It was the sound of the guns, 120 miles away at the front in Flanders. Exploding in their thousands on the land beyond the salient, each salvo meticulously aimed at a different grid on the closely-drawn artillery maps,the shells were systematically pulverising the earth into a tormented moonscape of hillocks and craters. Over this terrain the infantry would have to advance.

  The role of the short-range field artillery just behind the front was to protect and support the infantry, but many of the batteries now moving into position behind the line were adding their voices to the bombardment. Major Rory Macleod, who had just arrived in the salient, was given command of C.241, a battery situated just north of Brigade Headquarters at the Reigersburg Chateau, a quarter of a mile or so behind the canal bank. On 20 July he wrote to his parents:

  As you know, I have taken over a new battery. It is not really the best time for taking one over, as life will be too strenuous to keep an eye on it at first. Every night the battery has to fire 600 rounds on the roads and tracks probably used by the enemy. To give the remainder of the battery some rest I put this on to a different section each night. By day the battery carries out various bombardment tasks with other batteries.

  I have a fairly comfortable dug-out myself, with a little room where I can put things. My hours are fairly regular. On account of generally being up most of the night, owing to gas, I get up and have breakfast about nine. After that I generally walk round the position, and see how they are getting on with the work, and supervise it. In the afternoon I generally go to the OP and stay there till the evening. Then I always have a good deal of office work and correspondence to deal with, besides issuing orders, making out reports, etc.

  The weather today has been fine but very muggy. I was quite tired after my walk this morning. It looked like rain two or three times during the day, but none fell.

  The walk to the observation post was exhausting at the best of times, for it was situated more than a mile away at Hilltop Farm on the other side of the canal and the journey over rough ground was heavy going. Hilltop Farm was no longer a farm, but a complex of tunnels and dugouts on the breast of an almost imperceptible rise beyond the canal. Immediately in front of it ran the front-line trenches, and the observation post itself was in a trench. In the flat-lands of the salient it was not always easy to find a suitable vantage-point near enough the front line from which the targets and ranges could be accurately pin-pointed. With some ingenuity, the French had solved the problem.

  Out of the trench grew a tree, which had long since been shattered by shelling. Nevertheless, an obstinate remnant of its barkless trunk still stood ten feet high. One dark night the French engineers had cut it down, dug out its remaining roots and erected an exact replica made of steel. The entrance was in the trench itself. Inside, a ladder led up to the narrow ledge on which the artillery officer sat cramped and hunched, hour upon weary hour, with his binoculars trained on enemy territory, which was visible through a narrow slit in the side of the ‘tree trunk’. The firing pattern, the ranges and targets, had been arranged before he left the battery, and two telephonists, squatting in the trench below, relayed his corrections back to the guns.

  It was the first time Rory Macleod had ever made use of such an observation post, and when he climbed into it he had a nasty feeling that it was also going to be his last. As he squeezed himself on to the narrow ledge in front of the observation slit, the tree suddenly lurched and took a distinct tilt to starboard. If any sharp-eyed German observer had happened to be looking at the ‘tree’ it would have been only a matter of moments before they opened up on it. But luck was on Major Macleod’s side and it stayed with him on the journey back.

  Major R. Macleod DSO, MC, C. 241 Battery, Royal Field Artillery

  An eleven-inch shell burst about four yards away. Fortunately it was in water (it burst in the canal as we were crossing it coming back from the OP). Luckily it only soaked us. It was a very heavy shell and it threw up a column of water of a hundred feet at least. The Germans were shelling the canal area night and day. They knew from their observations that we had bridges across the canal. Of course, they knew that the offensive was coming and they knew too that in that part of the sector, north of Ypres, we’d have to get vast numbers of troops and materials across the canal before we could attack. So they kept pasting it, especially at night. Every morning I had to cross it to get to my OP, and every morning it was a shambles of broken wagons and dead horses and bodies lying all over the place. Their guns knew just where the bridges were because of movement on the tracks that approached them. But there were two causeways across the canal and another camouflaged causeway which we hoped the Germans wouldn’t spot. It was covered with nets with sheets over them to look like the water below, and we were absolutely forbidden to use it or the camouflaged road that ran up to it until the night of the attack.

  Sapper W. Mathieson, No. 50048, 96th Company, Royal Engineers, 20th Division

  We built these roads. By the middle of July we’d been at it for weeks because as soon as the infantry went forward they had to get the guns up to cover them. We built the road of beech slabs, gorgeous beech slabs three inches thick, and we had hundreds of tons of them. We were always short of concrete but we were never short of timber. We laid three slabs long-ways and then two cross-ways and then we covered them with metal. Of course, it all had to be done at night and all the materials cleared and the work camouflaged before daylight. We could only go as far as the canal bank. As soon as the attack started, we were to cross just behind the infantry and start pushing the road up further on the other side, so they could haul up the guns and supplies. There were three companies of Royal Engineers attached to every division in the sector and we were all doing that, at it every night as soon as darkness fell, and knocking off just before dawn the next day – and of course we had hundreds of parties from the infantry to help us.

  ‘The Army’s flowing with milk and honey,’ groused the weary working parties, envious of the tradesmen’s pay, ‘We do the work, the REs get the money.’

  Driver L. G. Burton, No. 113755, 40th Division, Motor Transport, Army Service Corps

  If the attack was going to work at all we had to get big loads of supplies right up to the front line before the offensive. I was with a motor lorry ammunition column and our job was to get the stuff up. We took up everything – shells, rifle ammunition, Mills hand-grenades, mortar-bombs, duckboards, narrow-gauge railway-line sections, wood, and loads of large gas or liquid-fire cylinders. Day and night we worked from dumps to depots and depots to dumps near the front fighting line. We used to go through Ypres at night with no lights on our lorries, of course, as the road was under enemy observation from the various hills around. But there would be plenty of Very lights from the fronts going up and down continuously all around us, the flashes from our own guns and Howitzers in the ruins, and enemy shells bursting among the wrecked houses and roads. It was just fumes and dust and smells all the time, and sometimes there was gas too,sometimes incendiary shells. You could see them glowing red among the brick-ends.

  It was so important to get the ammunition and supplies up that we were taking chances and running the lorries right up to Hellfire Corner, on the other side of Ypres on the Menin Road. I’d been the last to set off and when I got to Hellfire Corner it was chaos. A salvo of shells had landed in among the convoy. The l
orries were scattered all over the place and even those that hadn’t been directly hit had run off the roadway, in among all the bricks and debris, and the drivers were sheltering in the ruins. I got out and walked down the road to find our sergeant in charge.

  We decided to try to get the lorries back on the road facing home, which meant that we had to start up the engines by hand and manoeuvre them round in among the shambles on three-point turns. The shells were simply thundering down, but somehow or other we managed to get any lorries that hadn’t been knocked out back on to the road, lined up facing Ypres. We’d just thrown the stuff off them anyhow and left it for the carrying parties to get to the dumps. The road was littered with bodies and debris and shell-holes all over the place. However, at last we were ready to go, lined up, and my lorry having been the last to get there, I was the first in the convoy going back, with the sergeant sitting beside me.

  Just as we were about to try to get out of it, some soldiers ran up and banged on the door. They’d found one of our drivers very badly wounded and they were carrying him to the roadside, so they shouted for us to wait a minute while they put him on the lorry. The sergeant had the wind up and yelled back at them that we couldn’t wait, we had to get out of it quick. I just gave him a look and jumped out of the cab. After all that, I couldn’t drive away and leave one of our boys wounded, laid out at the roadside. I dropped our tailboard and got the men to lift our man into the lorry, leaving the back down, and they shouted to me that there was an aid-post just down the road on the left in the ruins of an old convent.