by Max Hastings
Though Ypres and Sir Douglas Haig’s I Corps became the principal focus of German assaults, French and British troops further south in front of Armentières and behind La Bassée fought their own bitter battles throughout the last fortnight of October. GHQ was slow to comprehend the scale of the German effort, and still dispatched battalions into the line with orders to assume that they themselves would shortly be doing the attacking. They learned differently. ‘Everywhere we advance we find Germans in front of us,’ wrote Grenadier George Jeffreys. Wilfrid Abel-Smith fulminated on 22 October: ‘It is all rot saying we have nothing in front of us. There are heaps of Germans, and, as an army, they are very good, and their gunners are perfect … No doubt we will kill heaps of Germans but there are always heaps more …’
Many British soldiers’ clothing was in tatters after their travails since August. Some wore civilian trousers; veteran Welch Fusilier Frank Richards affected a knotted handkerchief in place of his long-lost service cap. He did not care: ‘we looked a ragtime lot, but in good spirits and ready for anything that turned up’. Just east of Fromelles, his unit unbuckled its entrenching tools: ‘Little did we think … that we were digging our future homes,’ Richards wrote. Two Indian divisions joined the right of the BEF’s line on 22 October. The reinforcement was desperately needed, and the first Indian soldier to win a VC was a Baluchi, Sepoy Khudadad Khan, who gained his medal manning a machine-gun in Hollebeke.
It was widely suggested, however, that the Indian corps was ill-suited to continental campaigning. Frank Richards, who had served for years in the subcontinent, wrote later with a ranker’s contempt: ‘native infantry were no good in France. Some writers in the papers wrote at the time that they couldn’t stand the cold weather; but the truth was that they suffered from cold feet, and a few enemy shells exploding around their trenches were enough to demoralize the majority.’ Indian cavalry corps commander Lt. Gen. Mike Rimington declared scornfully that his men were ‘only fit to feed pigs’. This was grossly unjust: Indian troops taught the rest of the BEF the art of patrolling. But there was a core of truth in the view that it was brutal, even in the British Empire’s hour of need, to expose mercenaries from the far side of the world to the appalling cultural shock of the struggle in Flanders.
The Germans attacked by night as well as by day, and many actions were fought out by the light of blazing buildings. One group approached the Grenadiers in darkness on 21 October, crying out almost believably, ‘We are the Coldstream!’ But the Grenadiers glimpsed spiked helmets silhouetted against the skyline, and shot them down mercilessly. An officer wrote: ‘it is too much like shooting a flock of sheep, poor things. They have discipline, and do what they are told, but their attacks at night in this wood developed into the poor devils wandering rather aimlessly about under our terrific rifle fire.’ Livestock roamed untended, and some men milked cows between bombardments. In one attack, the Germans drove cattle ahead of their troops: beasts and men were slaughtered together.
The war diary of 2nd Oxf & Bucks recorded on 22 October: ‘they came on in thick lines, and our firing was steady and the light sufficiently good to enable a fair aim to be taken’; the foremost Germans fell within twenty-five yards of the battalion’s positions. Though British shrapnel inflicted some damage, artillery ammunition was short on both sides: rifles and machine-guns were responsible for most of the killing. In one notorious assault at Langemarck, fifteen hundred young Germans were killed and six hundred prisoners taken. Human fortitude was tested to the limit by the tumult of Ypres. Extreme penalties, or at least the threat of them, were periodically invoked to hold men to their duty. Pte. Edward Tanner of the Wiltshires was shot by a firing squad on 29 October, having been apprehended behind the lines in civilian clothes. L/Sgt. William Walton deserted from the King’s Royal Rifle Corps near Ypres, and was duly executed on his recapture, after remaining on the run for several months. Lionel Tennyson threatened to shoot the next man of his who returned prematurely from a listening patrol in no man’s land. It was now that this last phrase – used in medieval times to describe a patch of unowned ground north of London’s city walls where executions were carried out – first entered soldiers’ vernacular, denoting the space between rival trenches, which might vary from fifty yards to two hundred according to the vagaries of the terrain.
Each side’s accounts of hardship, misery, terror, despair and sacrifice marched in step during the successive clashes at Ypres. It was a delusion shared by almost every man that the BEF alone confronted the enemy’s might. Something of the same feeling reached back to Britain. Churchill wrote of his own deep gloom in those weeks: ‘the sense of grappling with and being overpowered by a monster of appalling and apparently inexhaustible strength on land … oppressed my mind’. In November there was a new invasion scare at home, which briefly infected Kitchener and Churchill, and reinforced their illusions about the limitless resources at the Kaiser’s disposal.
It was true that the British sector in Flanders was the focus of a huge effort by Falkenhayn, but the French suffered plentiful tribulations of their own, and made a critical contribution to holding the line. German interrogators reported French prisoners complaining about the allegedly poor showing of their British neighbours, in a fashion that mirrored their allies’ ruderies about themselves. South of the BEF’s frontage, Foch’s men counter-attacked again and again, maintaining pressure on the enemy. Sgt. Paul Cocho, thirty-five-year-old owner of a Breton grocery shop and the father of four young children, went into action for the first time in Flanders, and was stunned by the experience: ‘I did not imagine that war would be like this … I have seen in our regiment so much chaos and so little proper leadership; I have seen wounded poorly cared for … For the first two days we had to make do with small pieces of dried bread as food, though we were hardly hungry amid so much profoundly emotional experience. We had wine to drink at first because some resourceful chaps went and pillaged the cellars of wrecked houses, then later we had only cold coffee.’ Cocho described his experiences as a prolonged nightmare, from which he was awakened only by being evacuated sick at the end of November.
On 23 October French infantry launched a desperate attempt to retake Passchendaele. Among the foremost of the attackers was their commander, Gen. Moussy, who urged them on, saying, ‘Allons, allons, mes enfants. En avant! En avant!’ His men replied, ‘Bien, mon général!’ But ever more often in the face of the enemy’s fire they dropped back to seek cover, and the advance lost momentum. Moussy tried a joke: ‘Il faut absolument arriver a Passchendaele ce soir, ou pas de souper, pas de souper!’ Whether or not the survivors got supper, the French failed to get Passchendaele. The British felt that Moussy himself behaved more like a company commander than a general, but more than a few of their own leaders emulated him. Whatever claims were made about ‘château generalship’ later in the war, at First Ypres senior officers on both sides exposed themselves freely, and perished in proportion.
A contest in pain and sacrifice was unfolding. German soldier Paul Hub wrote home on 23 October: ‘Maria, this sort of war is so unspeakably miserable. If only you saw a line of stretcher-bearers with their burdens, you’d know what I mean. I haven’t had a chance to shoot at all yet. We have to deal with an unseen enemy.’ Blast cost Hub the permanent loss of his hearing, and many of his comrades suffered worse fates. After being badly shot in the chest north of Ypres, a German NCO named Knauth wrote later that he was surprised to find himself thinking with relief, ‘Well, you will be spending Christmas at home.’ And still Falkenhayn’s offensive, and his men’s sufferings, continued. Sgt. Gustav Sack described his unit’s meagre rations in a letter to his wife Paula, written near Péronne on 26 October. At 7 a.m. they drank coffee or tea, indistinguishable from each other in texture. Late at night they received field-kitchen soup and ration bread. Instead of a continuous trench, men occupied foxholes in which they slept on straw. As for the war, ‘everything is quite, quite different and more insane than you could suppose possible �
�� You don’t see anything, although the wicked enemy’ – this was his heavy humour – ‘is only 3–400m away, but you hear plenty.’ He added in another letter: ‘I am freezing! Tonight I am on outpost duty from seven to seven – the moon high, cotton-wool clouds, nice sunrise, partridges everywhere, everything very picturesque – but cold, cold, cold and hungry!’
Every British soldier now knew that the cessation of an enemy artillery bombardment signalled the onset of an infantry assault. Capt. Henry Dillon wrote to his parents of meeting a night attack on 24 October: ‘A great grey mass of humanity was charging, running for all God would let them straight on to us not 50 yards off – about as far as the summer-house to the coach-house … As I fired my rifle the rest all went off almost simultaneously. One saw the great mass of Germans quiver. In reality some fell, some fell over them, and others came on. I have never shot so much in such a short time … My right hand is one huge bruise from banging the bolt up and down … The firing died down and out of the darkness a great moan came. People with their arms and legs off trying to crawl away; others who could not move gasping out their last moments with the cold night wind biting into their broken bodies and the lurid red glare of a farmhouse showing up clumps of grey devils killed by the men on my left further down. A weird, awful scene; some of them would raise themselves on one arm or crawl a little distance.’
Dillon was one of few men on either side who had sufficient emotion to spare to give a thought to those remote masters of mankind who had unleashed the slaughter: ‘Well, I suppose if there is a God, Emperor Bill will have to come to book some day. When one thinks of the misery of those wounded and later on wives, mothers and friends, and to think that this great battle where there may have been half a million on either side is only on a front of about 25 miles, and that this sort of thing is now going on on a front of nearly 400. To think that this man could have saved it all!’
The British were not defending a continuous line; there were wide gaps where the Germans were able to infiltrate and gain ground, just as they had done on a much smaller scale at Mons. This was still predominantly a battalion battlefield, where many units fought independently. Most went into action already depleted by losses on the Aisne, reduced from a thousand men to six hundred or less. By November, their numbers would shrink far more grievously. Much of the British artillery was sited behind the line, on lower ground, and thus handicapped by the fact that its officers could not see the Germans over the skyline, and the guns were anyway very short of shells. More seriously, the BEF had little barbed wire. The keys to effective defence in twentieth-century warfare were obstacles covered by fire. Here, there were few obstacles, and thus the principal impediments to attackers were bullets or shells, and never enough of either.
The British christened a large plantation of Scots pine just north of the Menin road Polygon Wood, because of its shape on the map. In its midst, unexpectedly, was a Belgian cavalry riding school, where some exuberant young British officers put their horses over the jumps even as shells fell nearby. On 24 October it became the scene of a long, bitter series of dispersed actions, in which groups of men in tens, twenties, fifties fought Germans as and when they met them. Some British troops who kept firing until the enemy overran their positions then made the mistake of throwing down their arms and raising their hands, only to be bayoneted, not unreasonably. Amid such a slaughter, why should surrenders have been accepted on demand?
But the German assault now lost momentum, and the British strove to use the breathing space to retake lost ground. The 2nd Worcesters had just been pulled back out of the line for rest. ‘Every man … was exhausted and unshaven,’ said one of them, Pte. John Cole, ‘and we were relieved to get back into reserve. But … we’d only just arrived when the words came that we were urgently needed to stop another German attack … We were absolutely fed up to the teeth.’ The Worcesters’ commanding officer was thirty-six-year-old Maj. Edward Hankey, who had taken over when his colonel was promoted. Now, Hankey led the battalion in a series of bayonet charges to regain Polygon Wood. These cost heavy losses in desperate scrums, but saved the British line. That night a Royal Engineer wrote: ‘what awful sights in the wood! The dead are lying in groups everywhere. Our brigade had charged through here three times during the day.’ One German unit lost 70 per cent of its fighting strength among the pines. The regiment that had led the enemy assault was reduced from fifty-seven officers and 2,629 men at dawn to six officers and 748 men at nightfall. There was plenty of bloodshed elsewhere also: on 20–21 October the Germans suffered huge losses further south, around Ploegstreet Wood.
On the 25th, Capt. Ottmar Rutz watched heavy artillery wreak havoc among British Guards battalions at Kruiseke, south-east of Ypres: ‘The effect was shocking; they could not withstand it. They leapt up out of their trenches with our machine-guns taking them in their sights. Now was the moment of revenge!’ Rutz reported the enemy throwing away weapons even before his own infantrymen launched their assault. The Germans sprang down into British trenches and took many prisoners among defenders who had hung on through the barrage. Alexander Johnston recorded that day: ‘The reason the Germans got into the 2nd Irish Rifles’ trenches is that the men were so tired they were all asleep.’ By the day’s end, that battalion had only four officers left alive. Counter-attacks during the night failed to restore the line. Next morning, more British troops abandoned their positions, which were promptly seized by dismounted German cavalrymen, many still wearing their spurs. The victors fell eagerly upon captured stores and especially cigarettes.
Throughout history, armies had been accustomed to fight battles that most often lasted a single day, occasionally two or three, but thereafter petered out. Now, however, the allies and Germans explored a terrible new universe of continuous engagement. They accustomed themselves to killing and being killed for weeks on end, with no more than a few hours’ interruption. The bombastic CO of the Gordon Highlanders urged his men to ensure that each accounted for forty Germans before New Year’s Day. When the regiment’s Sgt. Arthur Robinson was dying of wounds on 24 October, he apologised for having failed to fulfil his quota.
Some who perished were teenagers in their first hours of battle; others were veterans. Among those who fell on the 26th was Pte. William Macpherson. A Leith man, he had served three years with the Royal Scots in South Africa, then a further eight as a Hampshire policeman before re-enlisting in the Scots Guards. The record describes him as ‘husband of Alice Macpherson, of 19 Windsor Road, Boscombe, Bournemouth’. Lt. John Brooke of the Gordons, thirty years old and a former Sandhurst sword of honour winner, won a VC before his death in the second of two attacks on German positions south-east of Ypres on the 29th. That day’s fighting around Gheluvelt reduced 1st Grenadiers to four officers and a hundred men.
The last days of October witnessed some of the most ferocious German attacks, and the most desperate British resistance. On Monday the 26th Douglas Haig wrote in his diary: ‘By 4 p.m. the bulk of the 7th Division had retired from the salient. Most units in disorder … I rode out about 3 p.m. to see what was going on, and was astounded at the terror-stricken men coming back. Still, there were some units in the division which stuck to their trenches.’ On the 29th, seven German divisions were committed to the attacks on Ypres. One officer, Capt. Obermann, had spent much of the previous night crawling across no man’s land, reconnoitring British positions on the Menin road. During an advance through fog early on the following morning, he was mortally wounded by machine-gun fire from a Scottish unit. Obermann died in the arms of his adjutant, becoming his battalion’s second commander to die in Flanders. One of Obermann’s corporals eventually led a dash to silence the British machine-gun, which was manned by a tough old veteran who kept shooting until the attackers overran his position and killed him. Thereafter the Germans, many of them volunteers from Munich, reported British troops abandoning their positions and running for the rear, where they encountered their dismayed corps commander. Haig deplored the fash
ion in which some units had been posted on forward slopes, in full view of the enemy, and paid the price.
But the day became a dreadful experience for the Germans also. Sun slowly dispersed the fog as they pushed forward, enabling British gunners to get a clear sight of them. One attacking officer’s eye was caught by farm ponds glistening in the brilliant light. He watched a succession of poplar trees totter and then collapse under shellfire: the natural beauties of the countryside were being progressively obliterated. As the defenders’ bombardment intensified, many Germans sought cover. A Prussian officer demanded crossly, ‘Why aren’t the Bavarians getting forward? Why are they lying down out there?’ Reluctantly, the attackers rose and moved forward again, into renewed fire. ‘Off we went,’ wrote a German officer later, ‘but where to? For most of those involved it was to their deaths … only five men of my platoon are still alive … The British had dug themselves in well in a tobacco field on top of a broad hill and they fought desperately.’ German artillery repeatedly fired short, causing casualties in their own ranks. It is striking to notice that on both the Eastern and Western Fronts, German gunnery was often careless, causing heavy ‘friendly fire’ losses. That day of the 29th one Bavarian regiment lost 349 men killed, with numbers of wounded in proportion.
