They Called it Passchendaele

by Lyn Macdonald

  Struggling back to the signallers, who were working under a ground-sheet in a shell-hole, to send back a signal for beams to shore up the trails of his guns, the Major found that his feet were sinking too.

  As early as 8.30 that morning, after the taking of the first objective, rumours of jubilation and success flew enthusiastically around the country behind the salient. They went from Regimental Headquarters to wagon lines, from wagon lines to estaminets and from the estaminets into the ear of almost every civilian between Brielen and Bailleul, including that of Pastor van Walleghem.

  31 July. Rumours speak of an advance of five miles. However, we are able very soon to conclude with certainty that the attack is successful. We hear that some horses have been brought in to take the guns further forward and at 9 am we see a procession of English cavalry coming from Westoutre, heading for the front. They pass for two hours on end, and we admire their beautiful horses and the lavish and good equipment.

  With jingling harness and shining accoutrements the cavalry regiments trotted towards the front. It was the crux of the Army Commanders’ plan that, as soon as the infantry had advanced, the cavalry would sweep through, galloping up on to the dry ground of the ridges which Haig had been misled by his Intelligence reports into thinking had a firm, sandy surface. Exactly the kind of ground which was ideal for cavalry campaigning. All things being equal, cavalry and infantry together would be on the Passchendaele Ridge in a week, or perhaps in eight days. It was unfortunate that all things were far from being equal.

  After the first heady hours of the morning when the news of successes and captured objectives had poured back to Fifth Army Headquarters, messages of a more disturbing nature began to trickle through, even before the weather deteriorated. For the army had come up against an unexpected obstacle which, in planning their strategy, the army staff had entirely failed to take into account, for the very good reason that they knew nothing about it.

  The fact was that, apart from a few strategically situated fortifications and machine-gun posts dotted about the German front lines, the Germans regarded their forward lines as mere outpost positions. Their real defences lay further back where, concealed by the folds of the first low ridges, they had built a fortress which they believed was impregnable. There were large shelters with walls and roofs many feet thick, so that the bulk of the troops could be withdrawn during a bombardment and emerge unscathed when the attack started. There were groups of strongpoints, from which twenty men manning machine-guns could spray lethal fire into the lines of the infantry approaching in open order. Sandbagged and camouflaged, hidden in woods and crouching close to the ground, the pillboxes were undetectable from the air. All round and between them were tiny dug-outs bunched just above the earth, almost invisible in the mud and shell-holes but big enough to house a machine-gun or a sniper.

  It was little wonder that the soldiers, as they advanced intent on their objective, rushed past them without noticing until they were caught in their fire. It was little wonder that the soldiers in the second wave were mown down by a blizzard of bullets almost as thick as that which had caught the vanguard unawares. It was little wonder, too, that the Lewis-gun teams setting up their guns on the rim of a shell-hole to answer the fire were hard put to see where it was coming from. After the initial capture of the first thinly-held German line, the infantry was shocked to discover that it was storming a citadel.

  On the Frezenberg Ridge, the Scots of the 15 th Division suffered the greatest deception, for their preparations and staff work had been of the most meticulous and they had every reason to believe that their task would be easily accomplished. A week previously, on two successive nights, they had mounted a raid on the enemy trenches. They called them ‘raids’, but they were actually battles in miniature, supported by heavy fire from the divisional artillery pounding the enemy front lines, and by a heavy concentration of machine-gun fire.

  Both operations were highly successful. The raiders had pinpointed potential trouble spots, and had even captured some enemy machine-guns together with their unfortunate crews. They had captured, moreover, several scores of German prisoners who had shown no reluctance at all to throw in the towel. Some prisoners had talked, so the redoubts beyond the first objective would come as no surprise. According to the prisoners, the trench systems linking them had been badly mauled by the bombardment and they were thinly held. But the 15 th Division did not know what lay behind the area the raiders had penetrated. They did not know about the forts at Beck House and Borry Farm.

  As Orderly Runner to Acting-Captain Campbell of the 10/11th Battalion Highland Light Infantry, Bill Morgan saw more of the battle than most, for although he went over with the first wave – rifle and bayonet at the ready – until more permanent communications could be established, his job was to run back and forth between his Company and Battalion Headquarters to carry back the news of their progress.

  Private W. Morgan, No. 24819, 10/11th Btn., Highland Light Infantry

  We went over behind the creeping barrage and I went over with Sergeant McCormack on one side and Captain Campbell on the other. Sergeant McCormack was the greatest man on earth. He got everybody as calm and collected as you could get. He said to me, ‘Now come alongside me and try and keep that bunch of boys alongside you. You stick close to me, as close as you can and you’ll be all right.’

  Verlorenhoek was our first objective. It had been a village but it didn’t look like anything at all, just buildings practically levelled. We just walked across. Mind you, the din was terrible, and there were machine-guns in front of you, at the side of you and our own machine-guns on elevated sights at the back of you spattering bullets over your head. But we got to that line all right, with a bit of fighting, and the Jerries came out mostly with their hands up. We just swept over them. There was still a bit of barbed wire in front of the German lines and people tended to bunch up, but old McCormack was there all the time and he kept us going. ‘Now boys, keep in line. Don’t go past me. Keep in line.’ He was shouting all the time and looking back if anyone was straggling. ‘Come on now. What’s wrong? Keep up.’ He had a rare way with him. Didn’t seem to have a nerve in his body. He kept the whole thing going in our sector and all the officers left it to him. He was the best man, and they knew it.

  When we got up to the village it looked just like red brick ruins, but inside it was reinforced concrete and the machine-guns were spattering out of gaps in the walls. They were sweeping all along the front. Of course, a lot of the lads were getting it and dropping as we went. But we took the village. We took it between us, with a lot of the boys running up with bombs and the rest of us with rifles and bayonets. We went right through and on to the second objective.

  That was Frezenberg, maybe another thousand yards ahead. We were fighting all the way now, because they had machine-gun posts all over the place and I really started to use my rifle. If you were held up a minute, you just had to throw yourself down and shoot at whatever was shooting at you. By now the dead and the wounded were lying all about us, our boys and the Germans, and at the back of us there were stretcher-bearers running around. Every Company had its own stretcher-bearers so that they could get the boys back as quick as they could. But they couldn’t keep up with the wounded.

  When we got to Frezenberg the boys went with their bombs at these pillboxes and we went for the trenches. I saw a lot of the lads using the bayonet, but I didn’t have to use mine, though the place was packed with Germans in shell-holes and trenches. I got to the top of a trench and there was one Boche just in front, looking up at me. I can see him now. He had glasses on, and I pointed my rifle and bayonet at him and he just said, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no.’ And he put his hands up. ‘Right,’ I said, ‘right you are. Up this way.’ He looked just like a little clerk chap or maybe a schoolmaster and I knew perfectly well as soon as I looked at him that he was going to surrender. So even when he didn’t come up beside me immediately and turned round towards this thing like a dug-out at the side, I still di
dn’t fire at him. He shouted down this dug-out, ‘Kamarads. Kamarads.’ The next minute a whole bunch of them came out with their hands up. Luckily at this moment McCormack came along and I shouted to him, ‘Would you look at this lot I’ve got here!’ He just pointed at them to go back and ofFthey went, meek as lambs, which was a relief to me! Two of them could have done for me, never mind a dozen.

  Captain Campbell called me then to go back to Battalion Headquarters. He scribbled on a paper and gave it to me and he said, ‘Just tell them that we’re getting on fine, Morgan. If you happen to lose the message, tell them that we’re getting on fine. We’re over the first two lines.’

  Back across the battlefield. Back through the clouds of cordite, the crashing explosions, the sniper fire, the crackling machine-guns. Dodging the shell-holes, sidestepping the bodies of wounded and dead, detouring to avoid the hottest spots where the succeeding waves were still mopping up and flushing the enemy out – even back at the first objective, where machine-guns and snipers were still firing from hidden hollows in the tumbled earth.

  Bill Morgan could move, sure-footed and easily, across the slopes and summits of every hill around Balmoral, for his father was head gillie on the Invercauld estate, and Bill had been stalking the deer and travelling the hills for almost as long as he could remember. He knew the art of concealment, he could leap burns and stay steady on scree and heathered bog, knowing instinctively where to place his feet with their ground-gripping gillie’s tread. It was a help – in spite of the thundering, crashing, all-pervading noise that numbed concentration. Bill Morgan sang, to shut it out. He sang ‘Dark Lochnager’ at the top of his voice. He roared it out, over and over again. He could hardly hear the sound of his own voice, but he could hear the song in his head. It took him well over an hour to get back to Battalion Headquarters, and almost two hours to return.

  Private W. Morgan, No. 24819, 10/11th Btn., Highland Light Infantry

  By the time I got back, the battalion was away up towards the next objective. As I went on, over the place I’d left them, over the ground where I knew they must have crossed to get to the third line, there was nothing but dead bodies lying all around. There were shells exploding everywhere and bullets flying around as if the devil himself was at the guns, and when I got up to the front there was this terrible fighting. I could see troops in front of me crawling and jumping up and crawling again and dodging into shell-holes. Away ahead, it was all smoke and explosions and bullets flying out of Lewis guns like streams of fire all around these buildings they were attacking. I couldn’t see anybody belonging to my lot at all.

  Eventually I managed to make my way forward a bit and I found Sergeant McCormack with Lieutenant Burns. We were really held up at this place but the bombers were at it, attacking it from the flanks. There were boys there with buckets of bombs, and one lad in particular I saw crawl up to the wall and reach up and chuck bombs in at the window of the gun emplacement. They were all going at it, hammer and tongs. They were still going at it when it started to rain. They were still going at it an hour later, and by that time we were practically up to our knees in water. Lieutenant Burns said to me, ‘You’d better get a message back, Morgan, and let them know what’s happening. We must have reinforcements.’

  We were standing in this wet shell-hole and he was just handing me the message when the machine-gun bullet got him. He fell right over on to me and we both went right down into the water. I managed to pull him a bit up the side of this crater and laid him down and knelt down beside him. His eyes were open and he looked straight up at me and he said, ‘I’m all right, Mum.’ And then he died. He was younger than me. I was twenty. Sergeant McCormack crawled across, and looked at him. Then he looked at me. ‘Get back with the message, Morgan,’ he said.

  This time, although Battalion Headquarters had moved up into a captured German pillbox in their old front line, it took Morgan even longer to reach it. By the time he did, the 15th Scottish, with a superhuman effort, had managed to take the complex of formidable strongpoints strung around Borry Farm and Beck House and had even pushed patrols beyond them in preparation for the taking of the next objective. But the Germans were massing for a counter-attack. The ground that Morgan had to traverse on the way back was already turning into liquid mud. The bodies of the dead soldiers, were scattered, sodden, where they had fallen on the ground, and although as a private and a humble orderly runner Morgan was no tactician, it was perfectly obvious to him, as he struggled forward towards the fighting, that his Division was in trouble, for he was being fired at from behind. The fact was that the flanks of the 15 th Division were in the air, because, on either side of them, neither the 55th nor the 8th had quite managed to keep up with their advance.

  Chapter 11

  But it was only where their sector met the sector of the 15th that the 8th Division was making slow progress. The battalions in the middle were forging on. They were attacking, directly in front of Ypres, from the old front-line trenches on the lower slopes of the Hooge Ridge, flanked by Railway Wood on one side and the Menin Road on the other. The German trenches were only a hundred yards away at the top of the ridge. Between the two lines the ground was pitted and cratered not just with shell-holes but with mine craters as well, for miners on both sides had been active here in the earlier days of the war. Hooge was a strongpoint, hody contested, for it was the very tip of the salient, the furthest point of penetration. On top of the ridge the German trenches ran through what had been the pleasant property of a country gendeman.

  The small estate was bounded by the Bellewarde Ridge rising gently, almost at right angles, from the low ridge of Hooge. In the hollow where the slopes met was a lake, surrounded by ornamental shrubs and trees. A wide tree-studded paddock swept from the lake to the chateau with its high windows, steep gabled roofs, marvellously wrought balconies and the terrace flanked by stone urns. Beyond the broad gravelled drive that swept round to the entrance on the Menin Road stood the stables, the kitchen garden, the pleasure gardens, and to the east was a small private wood. Such was Hooge in the parish of Zillebeke in 1914 when Baron de Vinck and his family had hurriedly vacated it when the first shells began to fall unpleasandy near.

  Now, Hooge, in the very fulcrum of the line of the salient, hotly fought over, constandy bombarded for the past two years, had totally ceased to exist. The trees in the wood and round the lake had been reduced to leafless shattered stumps. Beyond the site of the stables, two vast mine-craters, which could have easily accommodated two battalions of soldiers, glowered from the bare earth. As for the chateau, the stables, the outbuildings, not a single mound of rubble, not one stone, not one brick remained to show that they had ever existed. Only a dozen or so camouflaged pillboxes and strongpoints were scattered across the cratered, gas-soaked bog – long since swept clean of all vegetation – that stretched from the lake to the Menin Road where it breasted the rise. Hooge was in the forefront of the German defences. On 31 July it was the first objective of the 8th Division, straight ahead of them as they attacked.

  W. Lockey, No. 71938, 1st Btn., Notts & Derbyshire Regiment (The Sherwood Foresters)

  It was a terrible sight, really awe-inspiring, to see the barrage playing on the German front lines before we went over. It was an inferno. Just a solid line of fire and sparks and rockets lighting up the sky. When the barrage began to lift we went over like one man towards what had once been the German front line. It didn’t exist. There was not a bit of wire, hardly a trench left, that hadn’t been blown to smithereens by our barrage. We were moving uphill over the Hooge Ridge to skirt the Bellewarde Lake, and then we were supposed to cross the Bellewarde Ridge and make for Westhoek, which was our objective.

  We weren’t so much running forward as scrambling on over fallen trees and shell-holes, and although our own barrage was going in front of us the German field artillery was firing back, so there were shells exploding all around. The chap on my right had his head blown off, as neat as if it had been done with a chopper. I saw
his trunk stumbling on for two or three paces and then collapsing in a heap. My pal, Tom Altham, went down too, badly wounded, and Sergeant-Major Dunn got a shell all to himself. The noise and the din were unbelievable, but apart from the shelling and a bit of machine-gun fire we met very little opposition until we were going up the Bellewarde Ridge. Then a fellow on my left was hit in the leg by a bullet that had come from the rear. When we turned round we saw two Germans with their heads sticking out of a hole, up went our rifles, but, to our amazement, the Jerries didn’t stand their ground. They threw down their arms and ran towards our lines with their hands up.

  On the top of the ridge we came to a big dug-out, deep in the earth. Some of the boys shouted down, but there was no reply. Just to make sure, they chucked a Mills bomb down and the Jerries replied to that all right! Out they came, those of them that could still move, and there were about forty filing out one after the other with their hands up. We left an escort with them and pushed on. In fact, we pushed on so fast that we reached our first objective about half an hour before the scheduled time and even went past it. Our officers had to signal us back because we were getting into our own gunfire, which was supposed to be falling in front of us in this creeping barrage. Now we were deeper into the German lines, even beyond their second line, so there were bits of trenches and dug-outs, not too badly shattered. We got into a bit of a trench that we’d just cleared of Jerries and saw the smoke and explosions.