by Max Hastings
All armies, and especially the British, were morbidly sensitive to the supposed dishonour of losing a position. In the three weeks of Ypres, their line bulged and bent repeatedly amid successive attacks and counter-attacks. Ground was won, lost and retaken, sometimes several times in successive days. There was savage close-quarter fighting in which men used swords, bayonets, clubbed rifles, pistols. As in most subsequent battles of the twentieth century, units under bombardment often abandoned their positions in varying degrees of disorder. It was asking too much of even brave and disciplined troops to remain in trenches under a storm of shrapnel and high explosive that was killing and maiming comrades all around them. If staying in a given place promised certain death, rational men moved somewhere else, to the dismay of their generals. Lost trenches had to be recaptured – or not, as the case might be – in counter-attacks launched sometimes within minutes, more often within an hour or two, by which time the Germans had probably sited their own Maxims in them.
Some battalions showed themselves exceptionally staunch, while others became notorious for the readiness with which they fled. On 21 October Alexander Johnston observed contemptuously of the 2nd South Lancs: ‘They really are an awful lot … one cannot rely on them for anything, and today is the 4th time during the War that they have bolted.’ On the 29th, amid heavy shelling he wrote: ‘It was rather sad to learn that a few of the 1st Wilts and a lot of the 2nd South Lancs were found a little later, very out of breath and with no equipment on … 2 miles back nearly. The shelling of course was unpleasant but did not last long and I’m afraid it shows what a state the nerves of the men have got into.’ The Bedfords, Northumberland Fusiliers and Cheshires were among other units deemed less than reliable.
Capt. Ernest Hamilton, an early chronicler of the BEF, wrote apologetically in the introduction to a book on the battle which he published in 1916: ‘It must be clearly understood that the mention from time to time of certain battalions as having been driven from their trenches does not in the smallest degree suggest inefficiency’ – a euphemism for cowardice – ‘on the part of such battalions. It is probable that every battalion in the British Force has at some time or another during the past twelve months been forced to abandon its trenches … owing to insupportable shellfire … It may happen that lost trenches may be retaken by a battalion which is inferior in all military essentials to the battalion that was driven out.’
British leadership was often poor above battalion level. Many men in the line were not merely frightened and exhausted, but also felt painfully isolated in their predicament. Alexander Johnston fumed: ‘I think it is just wicked the way certain members of the Brigade HQ never move out of the “dugout” all day for danger of meeting a stray bullet, and even duck and flinch when shells burst quite 200 yards away! while they send all sorts of messages that things have got to be done, and are sometimes rather ungenerous about poor fellows in front who are getting nearly all the hammering and all the discomfort. Even an occasional visit once every other day or so by someone in authority and just an occasional word of encouragement, I am sure would help these poor fellows to stick it out.’
Johnston added two days later: ‘I am sure the staff are not really in touch with the situation, and can have no true idea of the state of the men, nor do I think sufficient efforts are really made by the Brigadier to convince them or to open their eyes as to the true state of affairs. It cannot be their intention to break the men’s hearts as they are currently doing.’ This was an early manifestation of what would become a major issue of the war, once static warfare evolved. To exercise command effectively, senior officers needed to position themselves with their staffs at the hub of a network of telephone lines, necessarily some distance behind the front. But the price of doing so was to open a profound psychological as well as physical divide between their own circumstances and those of the men whom they commanded. Though some staff officers did not trouble to conceal their gratitude for escaping duty in the line, few generals were cowards. It was merely beyond their limited imagination to understand that soldiers undergoing such a sustained nightmare as that of Ypres needed human contact and emotional support such as some senior officers, prisoners of decades of stiff military social convention, were entirely unaccustomed to provide. What is remarkable is not how many British units broke at various moments of First Ypres, but how many held their ground.
In the last days of October a new German force was formed, for the explicit purpose of achieving a breakthrough south of the town. It comprised six divisions under Gen. Max von Fabeck. But when Army Group Fabeck, as it was dubbed, first advanced to attack on 30 October, its infantrymen were dismayed by the feebleness of the preparatory bombardment. Falkenhayn’s guns were running desperately short of ammunition. Elsewhere along the Western Front, artillery was rationed to two or three rounds a day, to divert shells to the Ypres sector; but still there were not enough to deliver a heavy bombardment. The assault troops started the operation weary, after making a series of night marches to reach the front. Hollebeke was their first objective, and a senior officer issued a stern warning about the high command’s high expectations: ‘During recent days, several promising opportunities have been wasted because entire corps have allowed themselves to be held up by vastly inferior forces … attacks are not being pressed home with the utter disregard for danger that each attack demands which aims at a decisive result.’
On the morning of the 30th, 2nd Royal Welch Fusiliers near Fromelles awoke to a breakfast of three biscuits apiece with a spoonful of jam, an issue of a tin of bully beef between four men, and a rum ration of a tablespoon and a half. Frank Richards’s company commander, whom the old soldier disliked but respected, walked the length of the trench with his sword in one hand, pistol in the other, repeating to each greatcoated section in turn on their firesteps that this would be a fight to the last man. The four hundred men of their sister battalion, 1st Royal Welch at Zandvoorde château, met the Germans with a storm of fire, and held up their advance until they were overrun, almost all killed or captured, around noon. The dismounted Household Cavalry in the neighbouring village were attacked after a ninety-minute preliminary barrage and driven back, leaving behind their dead, who included the Life Guards machine-gun officer, Lord Worsley. By mid-morning the Germans held the Zandvoorde ridge. A British battalion was lost attempting to retake the position; most of its men were taken prisoner, and only eighty-six survivors rallied at nightfall.
But the attackers had also suffered grievously, not only in the struggle for Zandvoorde, but also in assaults elsewhere. On the same day, the 30th, the Germans made another futile push against Langemarck, without benefit of artillery support. Under heavy fire, men of one unit watched in dismay as their only surviving officer, Lt. Zitzewitz, stood beside a tree peering at the British lines through a telescope. They implored him to take cover, but he ignored their warnings until a shell landed nearby and he collapsed: a splinter had made a small, fatal wound in his chest. When darkness came, the attack had made no significant progress. North of Langemarck an ‘officer deputy’ named Franke wrote that the worst part of nights in the line was being forced to listen to the hopeless cries of wounded men, invisible in beet fields in no man’s land: ‘German, over here!’, ‘Help me!’, ‘Medical Orderlies!’, ‘Help!’. The attackers sustained pressure on Langemarck during early November, using troops shifted from the coastal sector, where the floods blocked movement. They got nowhere.
Further south, at a meeting of German unit commanders on the evening of the 30th, the senior officer present announced that battalions would resume their assault next day. This caused one CO to interrupt forcefully, saying, ‘Excuse me, Herr Oberst. The word “battalion” has been mentioned. We in the centre no longer have a battalion. The men have been in battle now for forty-eight hours and they have had no sleep for three nights.’ He then outraged his superior officer by saying it was impossible to renew the assault. The colonel exploded: ‘Do you say impossible? There is no such
thing as impossible! We are all soldiers and must accept the risk of death!’ The high command was implacable. The attack must be renewed on 31 October.
Württemberger Paul Hub, one of the men at the centre of the salient near Gheluvelt, scribbled to his wife that day: ‘My dear Maria I feel so terrible I’d really rather not write to you … Every day spent here makes it clearer to me how beautiful home is – what a throng of feelings that word “home” brings out in me. I have lived through such horror recently, no words can describe it, the tragedy all around. Every day the fighting gets fiercer and there is still no end in sight. Our blood is flowing in torrents … All around me the most gruesome devastation. Dead and wounded soldiers, dead and dying animals, horse cadavers, burnt-out houses, churned-up fields, vehicles, clothes, weapons … I didn’t think war would be like this … There are only a few of us left to tackle the English.’
The ‘English’, heavily outnumbered, felt that all the difficulties were on their side. But on 31 October the Germans endured another bitter struggle to secure limited objectives: this day, indeed, became one of the bloodiest and – for the British – most dangerous of the battle. Messines was a village with a church, a mill and a limehouse, customarily occupied by some 1,400 inhabitants, but now defended by the dismounted 9th Lancers and 11th Hussars. Having loopholed every house, they made the attackers suffer terribly for every yard gained. Fabeck’s men lacked sufficient firepower systematically to flatten the village and its occupants: most houses had to be stormed one by one. Nonetheless there were too few British troops in Messines to stem the tide. In one place, the Germans brought forward a field gun battery which shelled the British from a range of two hundred yards, driving some to surrender. Thereafter, gunner sergeant William Edgington wrote: ‘A perfect hurricane of bullets from 4 Maxims swept the opposite side of the street, added to which the glare of buildings that had been fired by German incendiary shells and also their fireballs made up a scene that was simply indescribable.’ Eventually the surviving defenders were obliged to fall back, conceding important higher ground to the Germans.
One of the units which joined the action on 31 October was the London Scottish, a smart Territorial battalion with a drill hall in Buckingham Gate, beside the Palace. Before reaching Ypres, the unit had spent six dreary weeks providing labour in the rear areas, partly because the BEF’s commanders doubted the fighting skills of ‘Terriers’. Now, in crisis, they were rushed forward in commandeered double-decker London buses – perhaps the very same that had carried them to their City offices a few months earlier. Arrived at corps headquarters, their colonel was told the unit would be getting 1st Coldstream’s transport. He asked, did not the Coldstream need this? No, they did not. They were almost all dead.
The battalion’s first action, at Wytschaete – ‘Whitesheet’, as the British dubbed the village – was a disaster. The men were issued with ammunition which did not fit their rifles, and executed a counter-attack on Messines Ridge at ghastly cost: 394 casualties including 190 dead. They clung on all day under fire, and when their left was turned launched a bayonet charge to try to clear the ground, though that task proved too much for them. L/Cpl. Edward Organ saw the London Scottish come back: ‘They weren’t an organized force at all … because they’d been cut to pieces. The Germans mowed them down.’ The action may have been wonderful in its courage, but the Territorials lacked the experience of war – and the serviceable weapons – to make much of their terrible initiation.
At Gheluvelt, the prevailing story of the day was of German pressure becoming irresistible: Rupprecht’s losses were appalling, but weight of numbers eventually buckled the British line. In one trench the attackers took two hundred prisoners, who were being marched to the rear when British shells began to fall upon them, wreaking havoc. By 12.30 the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, the Queen’s and the Loyal North Lancashires had been driven from Gheluvelt and some British 60-pounders had been captured. All the batteries in the area were obliged to pull back in desperate haste. ‘We got the guns out just as the enemy come over the hill in full view, and away we go,’ said gunner Charlie Burrows later. ‘How we get out of it is a mystery. Shells are bursting all over the place. My off-horse is wounded and nearly drops down with exhaustion but we go on – we have to – along the Menin road. I never expected to get out of that alive. We go back a mile and stop in a field. We lost an officer, 2 NCOs and one gunner and several drivers wounded.’ Six guns had to be abandoned. Gheluvelt fell.
The Oxfordshire Hussars, a Yeomanry unit to which Winston Churchill had lately belonged, had been acting as the C-in-C’s headquarters regiment, but now trotted thirty miles to Messines, dismounted after a long, wet overnight ride, and were immediately ordered into the line. ‘We had no idea what was going on,’ recalled Edward Organ, ‘but we could tell that things were pretty hot … You could see farms and houses burning, and shells falling around us. We were well down this ridge, sheltered you might say, but sometimes streams of bullets came zipping over our heads – like bees swarming. We were all nervous – well, frightened I suppose – and when you get frightened someone starts a song and you all yell it out … We were singing “Ragtime Cowboy Joe”, and I never hear it but I think of us lying there and those guns banging away … I never knew a day of noise like that first time.’
The Worcesters had saved the British line with their counter-attack a week earlier. The same battered battalion was now once again summoned to restore the centre at Gheluvelt. They were fed stew and a rum ration, then at 2 p.m. set off from their billets for the start line, burdened with cotton bandoliers of extra ammunition. One of their officers noted that as they trudged forward, they encountered a stream of men from other units making for the rear. Haig later described to King George V the ‘crowds of fugitives who came back down the Menin road … having thrown [away] everything they could, including their rifles and packs, in order to escape, with a look of absolute terror on their faces, such as I have never before seen on any human being’s face’. Some groups of British soldiers waved flags and reversed rifles, then approached enemy positions hands in the air – and were fortunate enough to have their surrenders accepted.
Against this tide, the old county regiment charged under heavy artillery fire, gained a thousand yards and reached Gheluvelt château, where they found a handful of South Wales Borderers still holding out. Maj. Hankey blew his hunting horn triumphantly. The Worcesters chased some lingering Germans away through the shrubbery, dug in, and thereafter repelled every assault with rifle fire. But the generals in the rear only learned of Hankey’s success after a grim period of suspense in which they feared the worst. Sir John French agreed with Haig that it was likely the BEF would be obliged to fall back west of Ypres, abandoning the town. The corps commander at one stage rode forward to see for himself the state of the battlefield, and was appalled by the chaos he encountered, the broken units in flight. His staff noticed him tugging at his moustache, an unfailing indication that his customary imperturbability was under stress. The C-in-C later described that afternoon as the BEF’s worst crisis of the war, and he may well have been right.
Further south, Allenby’s dismounted cavalry clung on, but beyond them the French were suffering even heavier losses than the British. At 2.30 Haig was informed by 1st Division’s commander that his formation was ‘broken’: one of its battalions, the Queen’s, had lost 624 men and was reduced to a strength of thirty-two, mostly cooks and transport personnel. The 7th Division was in equally desperate straits. Soon after that conversation, shells falling on 1st Division’s headquarters at Hooge killed or wounded its commander and most of his staff. Sir John French succumbed to despair, and was just leaving Haig’s headquarters when an ADC ran out with news that the Worcesters had retrieved the position. At 3 p.m. Brigadier Charles FitzClarence reported, ‘My line holds.’ By nightfall it was plain that the Germans had been stopped.
The Worcesters had won a breathing space, which enabled 7th Division to rally its stragglers and fugitives
and redeploy. The battalion had advanced 370 strong, and lost a quarter of its strength that day. For years, a local memorial to the dead listed those who fell ‘fighting gloriously against a murderous enemy’; in more temperate modern times, the wording on the stone has been changed to read ‘fighting gloriously against a determined enemy’. The Germans were less impressed by the Worcesters’ action than were the British, being satisfied that they continued to hold Gheluvelt village. But they had been denied the absolute breakthrough they sought and the British grievously feared. The Germans considered that vigorous counter-attacks by French troops further south were the critical factor in frustrating their advance on 31 October. This is debatable. It is seldom that a single unit alters the course of an army’s battle, but the Worcesters may have done so at Ypres. What is for sure is that on that day Foch achieved a moral ascendancy over Falkenhayn, whose will cracked, with decisive consequences for German fortunes.
The British spent the ensuing night alternately digging and repelling new German attacks, including an assault on the London Scottish: ‘they made no attempt to rush us’, in the words of Private Herbert de Hamel, ‘they advanced at a steady walk, falling as they came. Flashes spat out along their line. There was no sound – no shouts or cries, only the crackling of rifle shots. The bullets were cutting through the hedge in front of us and slapped into the bank behind us and all the while as we tried to fire back, our new rifles jammed and stuck, it might be after one shot or after five … But after a while there were no more Germans walking towards us.’ The battalion attempted a charge across ground lit by the flames from burning buildings, but was driven back. Paul Maze, a liaison officer, described an encounter with survivors next morning: ‘His kilt in rags, looking utterly exhausted, a sergeant of the London Scottish was forming up his men who stood like sailors being photographed on a shore within sight of their wreck.’ One of the casualties was a City shipping clerk, Pte. Ronald Colman, a Territorial since 1909, who was hit in the ankle by shrapnel and lamed, probably saving his life by removing him from the war. His wound did not prevent him from later becoming a Hollywood star, as also, by a remarkable fluke, did his comrades in the same regiment Basil Rathbone, Herbert Marshall and Claude Rains.
