They Called it Passchendaele

by Lyn Macdonald

  On the ground all around us it was simply carnage. Bits of bodies and knocked-out guns lying all over the place and in front of us were the bodies of about thirty German soldiers, all tossed about anyhow, who had probably been caught in the barrage of our guns as they tried to get away. There were some chaps in our lot who would do anything for souvenirs, so, while we were waiting for the barrage to lift, they got out of the trench and started searching these bodies for anything they could get. They were after watches and buttons and things like that, and they’d go through their pockets as well for wallets and money, cigars, even photographs. Anything they could say they took off a German.

  Well, these chaps were turning over the bodies, rifling them, not bothering about taking cover, when all of a sudden a shell came over. There was this tremendous explosion and the whole earth in front of us went up. We ducked down in the trench with mud and earth and debris showering down on top of us. When we got up, and looked at where our chaps had been, they’d got the full force of the explosion and there they were, lying there – dead Tommies and bits of Tommies lying all tangled up with the dead Germans. A couple survived, badly wounded, so someone crawled forward and pulled them back to wait for the stretcher-bearers.

  The barrage lifted and on we went, those that were left of us. Just charged straight ahead, clearing out the trenches and dug-outs as we went with bombs and Lewis guns and, of course, the rifle and bayonet. But as we got further into their lines there was more and more machine-gun fire, not just from their positions ahead of us but coming from outposts all round about. Of course, we more or less just had to go ahead for the next main objective and leave it to the people behind to clear them out, though we knocked out what we could, especially when they were holding us up. But the fellows coming up behind us had a really rough time. We got into our position on the Westhoek Ridge, took over some trenches and dug-outs, and another Division was supposed to pass through us and carry on the advance.

  While we were waiting, it began to rain. The battalion that was to pass through our line were the Royal Irish Rifles and when they reached us they were in a bad way. The majority were either knocked out or wounded by the German machine-guns. Three or four of them stumbled into our part of the trench and every one had bullet-wounds in the arms and legs. They were dragging along another boy, a young lad, only about eighteen. He’d been hit by an explosive bullet that passed straight through his right cheek and blew away the whole of the left cheek. It was a terrible sight. His tongue was sticking out through this great hole in his face. He kept calling for water. It ran out through the hole in his face as fast as we gave it to him.

  We couldn’t get the wounded away, not from that point, for there was nothing between us and the Germans. They were pasting us with shells and machine-gun fire and the rain kept pouring down. The trench began to fill up with water.

  In the same sector the tank Revenge and its crew were in action again. Going up to the attack, through Ypres and swinging right to go up the Menin Road, the boys were not entirely happy. The showers of the last few days had softened even the few patches of virgin territory that lay within the salient; and in the sector they were making for, where the notorious Hooge Ridge had been churned up by almost three years of continuous shelling, they knew that they would find conditions far from good.

  They were not the only ones who were worried. Major Fuller, Staff Intelligence Officer of the Tanks, on the basis of the information he had been able to piece together, had taken the trouble to prepare a map of the ground beyond the salient over which his tanks were expected to attack. Where he knew that the ground was likely to be too marshy for tanks to manoeuvre with any degree of safety and success, he had coloured the area blue. The extent of the blue patches, far in excess of the white, appalled even the map’s author. Nevertheless, he had sent it to Haig’s GHQ, so that the Commander-in-Chief could judge the conditions for himself. The map had been intercepted by Haig’s obdurate Chief of Intelligence, Brigadier-General Charteris, who promptly returned it with the well-known reply, ‘Pray, do not send any more of these ridiculous maps.’ He is also reported to have remarked to an aide, ‘I’m certainly not going to show this to the Commander-in-Chief. It would only depress him.’

  Now the tanks were on their way.

  Revenge’s objective was Surbiton Villas, just beyond Hooge Chateau in the open country on the other side of Chateau Wood. The ‘open’ country was the length of four fair-sized fields lying between Chateau Wood, behind the tanks in the direction of Ypres, and Glencorse Wood in front, in the direction of the attack. Half a mile away, on the left, Bill Lockey and the Sherwood Foresters were battling their way towards Westhoek Ridge. The tanks forged straight up the Menin Road in fine style past Hooge, past Chateau Wood, and arrived within sight of their objective some two hundred yards ahead of their infantry. Then they came to the bend in the road where the road bore off to the right. Now they were over the breast of Hooge Ridge, and ahead of them the ground sloped gently down to a hollow and rose again to where, at this point, Glencorse Wood lay behind the Westhoek Ridge. The scattered pillboxes of Surbiton Villas stood in the hollow half-way between the tanks and the bristling third-line German trenches that lay along the ridge in front of Glencorse. Revenge left the road and made for the objective in front of the infantry, a good two hundred yards behind. Almost immediately she was in trouble.

  Corporal A. E. Lee MM, No. 220132, A Btn., No. 3 Company, Tank Corps

  When we got to the furthest point of this little valley, one of our tracks broke through the soft ground and we went down into a deep hole. It was impossible to move the tank because she was lurched right over on to her side, one gun pointing to the earth and the other pointing to the sky. We were completely helpless. We didn’t even have our unditching beam because that had been shot away on the road up. Looking through the slits of the tank we could see the enemy, just about a hundred yards away, and they were getting out of their trenches, running out of dug-outs and massing for a counterattack. Well, our own infantry were more than twice that distance behind us, coming along in open order, and it was obvious that we would be overrun before they could get to us.

  I had no intention of staying in the tank like a snail in a shell until the enemy winkled us out. We had machine-guns which could be taken out and used independently, and we had with us an Irishman, Pat Brady, who had joined us as a replacement for ‘Connie’ Banner, who had gone sick. Brady had been an infantry machine-gunner, and he was the only chap in the crew who was used to working in the open, so I said to him, ‘How would you feel about getting out with me, get a machine-gun each and set them up and try to get these blighters as they come across? If we don’t do something, we’re done for this time.’ Pat was an Irishman and his reply was typically Irish. ‘Give me a drink of rum,’ he said, ‘and I’m with you!’

  We got out of the tank on the blind side away from the enemy, and the lads handed us the machine-guns and a box of ammunition each. Pat went to the right and I went to the left and we crawled diagonally, dragging the guns and ammunition, to shell-holes quite a bit away in front of the tank, because we could see that Revenge was going to be in the centre of the attack. They started coming towards us. We waited – and it seemed like hours – until the Germans were at point-blank range. Then we let them have it. They were probably expecting fire from the tank and instead they were caught in crossfire from hidden positions in front. They were absolutely demoralised and broken up. The infantry arrived and took the survivors prisoner and we were all pretty pleased with ourselves.

  Iron Rations came up just in time to join in the jubilations. We thought there was a chance that we might be able to get Revenge out so we tried to borrow Iron Rations’ unditching beam, but it was jammed on top of the tank. We just couldn’t budge it. I climbed up to try to free the beam and, while I was struggling with it, there was a direct hit on Iron Rations. The next I knew I was lying eight or nine yards away, completely unhurt. I staggered up and there was Iron Ratio
ns, a complete wreck. Everyone within yards was either dead or badly wounded. By some freak I’d been thrown offby the blast before the splinters had a chance to spread out. Somebody came to help me.

  It took me a few minutes to realise that it was Iron Rations that had gone and that these were all my own chums lying there. The sponson and guns had taken most of the impact and the blast had driven forward into the tank, and in that enclosed space everyone was killed. The infantry were working away trying to consolidate the position in case there was another counter-attack. Some of them helped us get Iron Rations’ unditching beam across (it had been blown off by the shell blast), and we managed to get Revenge out of her hole.

  Just as we’d finished I saw movement out in front like a hand waving, and there in a shell-hole was this little bloke. He was a Bavarian sergeant and he was wounded. Not a bad wound, mind you. Just a machine-gun bullet in the leg! And I knew where he’d got that from. So, as either Pat Brady or myself was responsible, I helped him back to the tank. He’d very sensibly taken cover in a shell-hole until everything had quietened down. I carried him back to the tank and bandaged his wound. I had some chocolate in my pocket, so I gave him that and we had a good old chat in schoolboy French. He was a nice little bloke. He told me his name was Jeff Werner and that he lived at 25 Artilleriestrasse, Munich. In fact, he gave me a photograph of himself and wrote his name and address on the back. ‘After the war,’ he said, ‘after the war, you come and see me. You write, eh?’ I wrote my address on a piece of paper and he tucked it into his wallet. We didn’t hand him over to stretcher-bearers, for things were still a bit lively and, it was ridiculous, but we almost felt by then that he was one of us! We took him back in the tank and dropped him off at a field dressing-station, shaking hands as if we’d all been to a party. Then we went on down the Menin Road, and back to base. We were finished for the day.*

  At about the same time, on the other side of the Menin Road, Walter Lugg was beginning to think that he was finished for good. As an artillery signaller he had gone across with a Brigade of the 18th Division, and things had gone badly wrong. The four woods, Chateau and Sanctuary, Glencorse and Inverness, could be described as lying in the four quarters of a roughly drawn square, divided diagonally from top left to bottom right by the Menin Road. It was the 30th Division which led the attack, and they were ordered to proceed diagonally upwards, on a front that would take the four battalions of their 21st Brigade through the wood around Herenthage Chateau (known to them as Stirling Castle) and on through the lower part of Inverness Copse. Travelling in the same direction on their left, the four battalions of the 90th Brigade would cross the Menin Road at Clapham Junction and then fight their way across the open ground near Surbiton Villas to attack Glencorse. When it was captured, the 90th Brigade was to stop.

  There had been thoughts of putting in a fresher division to make the attack in this vital sector, for the 30th Division was battle-weary and depleted by heavy losses, but it was decided that it was too late to effect the exchange. Instead, a Brigade (the 53rd of the 18th Division) was set behind the 90th, and as soon as word was sent back that Glencorse had been gained and consolidated, it would sweep through the captured ground and carry the advance on to Polygon Wood, paving the way to Zonnebeke and Passchendaele itself.

  The commanders who had conceived this plan might have thought twice about it had they realised the full force of the opposition that lay ahead, for the woods were not ‘woods’ in any sense of the word. Three years of shelling had long ago destroyed most of the trees, and they lay across the sodden, pitted earth in an almost impassable tangle of twisted roots and mangled branches. But it was here, camouflaged among the few splintered thickets of barkless stumps that still stood miraculously vertical, that the Germans had concentrated their most formidable defences and manned them with crack Eingriffen troops of a very different calibre from their garrisons in the front line. Glencorse and Inverness were no longer woods. They were fortresses. They were also man-traps, waiting with steel jaws agape, ready to snap. But it was the 53rd Brigade of the 18th Division which walked straight into the trap, for a battalion of the 90th Brigade, sent ahead to blaze the trail, made a fatal mistake. They went to the wrong wood.

  It took the 90th Brigade well over an hour of bitter fighting to break through the first German line running through the eastern edge of Sanctuary Wood. It was still barely dawn. The situation was chaotic, and in the confusion one battalion of the 90th (the one nearest the Menin Road) lost direction and strayed to the north. The wood they went to was Chateau Wood, which had fallen to the 8th Division in the first hour of the attack.

  When the message was flashed back that ‘Glencorse’ had been taken, the waiting brigade of the 18th Division plunged forward through Sanctuary Wood into what, in reality, was a gap in the line. A mere four battalions of men were making straight for the untouched bastion of the Germans’ second line of defence, and they didn’t have a hope in hell.

  By nine o’clock Divisional Headquarters had made sense of the situation, realised that a mistake had been made, and tried to recall the men. But by nine o’clock the men were already in the trap. The German shells had begun to rain down as soon as they cleared Sanctuary Wood, and now, as they battled forward over the Menin Road, they were caught by machine-guns firing in enfilade from the northern tip of Inverness Copse, which like Glencorse Wood was still firmly in German hands.

  Gunner W. Lugg MM, C Bty., 53rd Brigade, 18th Division, Royal Field Artillery

  I remember thinking that if we survived, it would be a miracle. We were all over the placejust taking shelter where we could. I was with Signaller Forsdick, a boy from Battersea who had been carrying a drum of cable with me, and after a while we realised that we’d been separated from our officer and the rest of the party. The Germans must have been very near by because we could hear the rifle bullets whizzing by, and all of a sudden Forsdick fell down. He’d been hit by a bullet fired from our rear. I carried him across to a shell-hole where there was a bit of cover and took off his tunic. The bullet had gone through just below his left shoulder-blade and come out under his collar-bone. Oh, he looked bad, very bad. He started spitting blood and his face was grey. I tried to console him by saying, ‘Take it easy, old son. You’ll be all right.’ I eased his braces off his shoulder, and tried to staunch the blood a bit and tie an emergency field-dressing over the wound.

  There was no point in carrying on. We hadn’t a clue where we were, or where the rest of the party was, even if they had survived, so I decided to try to get him back. When the firing eased off momentarily I helped him up and managed to walk him a few yards. It’s extraordinary the trivial things that stick in your mind. I remember vividly that with each step he took, blood oozed out on to the loose loop of his braces and fell drop by drop on to his trousers. From where we were I could see the forward dressing-station about a quarter of a mile to the rear, but I knew it was going to be a long job getting him back. Poor ‘Dick’, as we called him, couldn’t speak beyond a whisper, and he kept hanging on to me for grim death as if I was his only link with this world. In a way I suppose I was. I just kept on telling him that he would be all right.

  We managed to make progress, a few yards at a time. We’d shelter for a bit in a shell-hole, and then if the shelling seemed to be easing up we’d crawl into the next one and wait there for a bit, then try and get to the next one a yard or two away. After a couple of hours (and we’d only gone thirty or forty yards in that time) we got into a shell-hole and there was a youngster in it, crying. He was obviously in a state of terrible shock, he flung himself on us and threw his arms round my neck, shouting for his mother. I don’t mind admitting that I was as windy as hell myself, but I said to him, ‘All right, all right. Stay with us and we’ll get you back.’ He calmed down a bit, but we lost him later. We were trying to get on, but he didn’t want to move once he’d found a hole in the ground.

  We made it back. It took us ten hours to cover that quarter mile to the dressi
ng-station, and when we got there we were absolutely drenched to the skin and thick with mud. Dick couldn’t even whisper any more. When I got him into the aid-post dug-out he just squeezed my hand as if to say goodbye. I don’t know how he made it, but I was happy that he did. He got back to Blighty. So did my brother-in-law. He was hit in Sanctuary Wood on 31 July. He must have been lying in one of the shell-holes we passed, because he had his right leg shattered and couldn’t move at all. He lay in tha shell-hole all night with water up to his neck, managing to keep conscious, otherwise he would have drowned. They got him out eventually, but he lost his leg. He was nineteen years old.

  The rain teemed down mercilessly on the battlefield. By six o’clock the soldiers were standing up to their knees in mud and water in shell-holes and trenches; by eight o’clock, in places, they were waist-deep in a morass. The stretcher-bearers, in spite of the shells exploding all around, in spite of the steadily worsening ground, had worked manfully and performed miracles, but as the rain fell and the earth turned to liquid they were sinking knee-deep at every step. In normal conditions, even under fire, two men could carry a casualty from the line to the dressing-station. Now it took four, even six, men to haul a stretcher case to safety, and a journey of as little as two hundred yards could take two hours of struggle through the lashing rain and the sucking mud. When darkness fell – and it fell early on that wet and glowering evening – the first-aid men had to give up. There was no possibility of getting the wounded away. There they must lie, among the dead, sheltering as best they could from the bone-chilling rain, and hoping, if they were not beyond hope, for rescue in the morning.

  As dusk fell dankly round the streaming eaves of La Louvie Chateau ten miles behind the battle, an orderly drew the curtains and lit the pressure-lamps in the room where the gloomy Corps Commanders had been summoned to confer with General Gough. Gough came hurrying in with his Chief-of-StafF, Neill Malcolm. ‘Good evening, gentlemen. What a perfect bloody curse this rain is!’