by Max Hastings
That day, Sunday, 1 November, George Jeffreys met Sir Thomas Capper, 7th Division’s commander. The major said, ‘I’m afraid your division has had a bad time, sir.’ The general answered, ‘Yes, so bad that there’s no division left, so that I’m a curiosity – a divisional commander without a division.’ Jeffreys, bemused, wrote: ‘He seemed to treat it almost as a joke.’ Capper’s formation had lost four-fifths of its strength in the three weeks since first it went into action. Attrition was almost equally fearsome throughout the BEF. Of Sir John French’s eighty-four infantry battalions, seventy-five now mustered fewer than three hundred men; eighteen were reduced to less than one hundred.
Foch, alarmed by the British C-in-C’s visible exhaustion and demoralisation, sent two French divisions, supported by Conneau’s cavalry, to take over part of Allenby’s line. Any reinforcement was welcome, but the French horsemen were still as unsuitably attired as when the war started. A British nursing sister watched them clatter and jangle forward: ‘serious-faced men … making a fine show in their bright uniforms and shining breastplates – it was a sad but wonderful sight’. Kitchener, conscious of allied dismay about Sir John French’s mental condition, at this time offered to replace him with Sir Ian Hamilton. However, Joffre and his generals – in many ways surprisingly – decided against precipitating such a leap into the unknown.
Along the rest of the allied line there was limited understanding of the gravity of the allied predicament in Belgium. Charles de Gaulle, back with his regiment in Champagne after his August wound had healed, wrote in his diary on 1 November: ‘The news from the north is still good. But how slowly it goes, upon my word! Sauternes and champagne for lunch. Very cheerful. Some guests. We drank to the offensive. The Germans could be heard singing in their trenches. Hymns, no doubt. What strange people!’
That same day, the Germans renewed their attacks around Ypres supported by heavy shellfire, much of it directed against positions held by the British cavalry. Bavarian volunteer Ludwig Engstler wrote to his family describing his own role: ‘I have headed this letter “All Souls Day”. My God, the words “All Souls” conceal a tremendous amount.’ He described breaking through to Wytschaete, where from every cellar and house British fire swept the German ranks. ‘There were too few of us. There were no officers in sight and we just had to pull back … It was a saddened platoon which turned its back on this place of death. “Are you still alive?” asked one of the few who remained.’ The allies eventually lost Wytschaete as well as Messines, and their line was again bulging dangerously inwards, but the Germans knew that decisive success still eluded them. Col. Klotz, a gunner, wrote after the 1 November fighting: ‘The enemy had everywhere been ejected from their positions, but at the cost of huge casualties on our side. There had been no breakthrough.’
Next day brought no lull. George Jeffreys wrote of meeting a night attack on 2 November: ‘We could see the Germans very close now (there was a slight moon): they were coming on very slowly and seemed to stagger back before our rifle fire, but always came on a few paces. With them was a drummer, who was beating his drum all the time and now, like the others, taking cover behind the trees. I never saw him fall and I believe our men didn’t shoot at him. The attack gradually died away before our fire, but they got too close to be pleasant.’ On 3 November a German corps commander issued an order of the day, noting that his men had captured some forty officers and 2,000 other ranks in three days: ‘It is clear that the British surrender if they are subjected to energetic attack. I direct, therefore, that attacks are to be pressed home with bugle calls and with the regimental bands playing. Regimental musicians who play during assaults will be awarded Iron Crosses.’ A German soldier described that day’s attempt to break the French line north of Langemarck: ‘The Frenchies were on high alert … during our first bounds forward we did not come under enemy fire … Then, all of a sudden, absolutely murderous fire was opened. The following morning we were relieved. At roll call it was brought home to us that this attack had torn great gaps in our ranks … The company was more or less wiped out.’
By nightfall on the 3rd, at the headquarters of Army Group Fabeck all hopes of a breakthrough had been abandoned. Its men had suffered 17,500 casualties in three days, and artillery ammunition was almost exhausted. Lt.-Col. Fritz von Lossberg, Fabeck’s chief of staff, wrote: ‘The events of 3 November demonstrated … that there was no way of forcing an operational success in Flanders.’ But he added that Falkenhayn and the Kaiser continued to resist recognition of this reality. Lossberg himself believed that the right course, in the light of failure on 1–3 November as during the preceding weeks, would have been to shut down major operations on the Western Front and divert forces to the East, where a decisive victory over the Russians might be attainable.
Conditions in both sides’ trenches were deteriorating rapidly, compounding the miseries inflicted by enemy action. Bernard Gordon-Lennox noted on 4 November: ‘It came on to rain just about nightfall and poured in torrents: altogether a most disagreeable ending to a most disagreeable day. Our trenches are all in the wet clay and marshy ground, which makes things even more disagreeable than they might be, but there is a certain amount of satisfaction in knowing things are equally if not more disagreeable for the Dutchmen.’ Gordon-Lennox added wearily: ‘I suppose one gets inured to seeing all one’s best friends taken away from one and can only think one is lucky enough to be here oneself – for the present.’ Sure enough, he himself was killed by a shell six days later.
Wilfrid Abel-Smith wrote: ‘When I think of poor Bernard’s utter weariness some days ago (I left him in his trench in the early morning, and wished I could take his place, he was so done) … I think of him now at peace, away from all this noise and misery, and though it must be terrible for her [Gordon-Lennox’s wife], poor thing, it can’t be bad for him, and must comfort her to know he can rest at last.’ Irreligious later generations are tempted to dismiss as empty clichés the phrases inscribed on stone in so many of the war’s cemeteries: ‘He has found eternal rest’; ‘He has gained eternal peace’. But such words had a profound meaning for a host of men who experienced the horrors of Flanders.
On 5 November, Falkenhayn orchestrated a new wave of almost suicidal onslaughts at the northern and southern ends of the Ypres salient, which continued with few intermissions through the week that followed. Men on both sides somehow endured them, chiefly because they found it unthinkable that such carnage and wretchedness could go on much longer. Lt. Richardson of the Royal Welch Fusiliers wrote: ‘I am getting awfully bored by the trenches and am feeling fearfully tired. I hope we won’t be in them much longer. I wish they would order an advance.’ For a few days, the British front was merely subjected to artillery harassing fire. Then on the 6th Falkenhayn’s infantry renewed their assaults on Klein Zillebeke, south-east of Ypres. Under the usual storm of defensive fire, some Germans cracked. A volunteer described how the unit he had just joined suddenly broke and ran under heavy fire near Gheluvelt: ‘Everyone flooded to the rear, bent over and pushing through the scrub for about two hundred metres … We thought it terrible that our first experience of battle was to turn our backs on the enemy.’ He described the days that followed as ‘hell on earth’, under constant fire with no medical support for the wounded.
But the allies had their own crises on the 6th. French troops and the Irish Guards – ‘very shaky even before today’, in the words of ‘Ma’ Jeffreys – also broke, leaving the British right flank in the air. The Household Cavalry found themselves galloping forward and dismounting to face the Germans amid a throng of fleeing Frenchmen. Maj. Hugh Dawnay, a staff officer, led the Life Guards in a bayonet charge: he himself was killed, but the line was saved. There was now scarcely a unit of the BEF at anything like full strength: 2nd Grenadiers, for instance, had lost at Ypres twenty officers and eight hundred other ranks; the Irish Guards were reduced to three officers and 150 men; 1st Coldstream were down to a hundred.
Haig was disgusted by what he de
emed the feeble performance of some units, recording in his diary on 7 November: ‘The Lincolns, Northumberland Fusiliers and the Bedfords leave their trenches on account of a little shellfire. Several pass Divisional Headquarters while I am there. I order [all] men to be tried by [court martial] who have funked in this way, and the [abandoned] trenches to be re-occupied at once.’ At a brigade headquarters, Alexander Johnston was as shocked and disgusted as the general: ‘Suddenly a great flood of men came pouring back on our HQ … most of them seemed to have even chucked their rifles away and many had not even their equipment on. They were full of the usual stories “we were ordered to retire” “everybody is retiring” “we have been sent back for ammunition” “the Germans are in the trenches” etc. etc. It makes one feel almost ill to see so many Englishmen being such cowards … I had to threaten to shoot some of the men before I could get them to go on … [We] were continually routing out men hiding in holes and corners.’
Next day, 3rd Division’s commander said ‘he could not get his men to charge to retake the old line of trenches’. The following week the colonel of the London Scottish sent a note to corps pleading that his unit ‘was not in a fit state to take the field – the men are thoroughly broken. What is urgently required for the Battalion is a period of rest behind the guns. Without the required rest it might be disastrous for the battalion.’ Haig commented caustically: ‘It struck me that the Colonel (Malcolm by name) wanted the rest more than his men.’ Barely a month earlier, this same George Malcolm had expressed alarm lest his unit might have arrived in Belgium too late to join in the war.
Haig’s remarks seem to modern generations cruelly unsympathetic about men driven to the limits of endurance by their experiences. But it is the business of generals to harden their hearts. If the allied line was to hold at Ypres, the casualties and sufferings must somehow be borne. There was no tactical alternative save dogged resistance; no room for charity towards the weak nor compassion for the afflicted. Haig himself had performed poorly during the retreat from Mons, and won no plaudits during the advance to the Aisne. But his peers profoundly admired his steely calm and resolution through the three weeks of Ypres, and they seem right to have done so. He was a man of his time in cool reserve, a Roman in his ability to preside over carnage without spoiling his lunch, if duty seemed to require this – as, for the next four years, he believed that it did. Few people found much to love in I Corps’ commander. But he displayed high competence at a time when many others, especially Sir John French, conspicuously lacked this. Without Haig, the British line at Ypres would probably have broken.
The Germans’ attacks were flagging now, their commanders thrashing and flailing. During an advance down the Menin road on the evening of 7 November, the regimental band of the 143rd Infantry played the ‘Yorckscher Marsch’ and ‘Deutschland über alles’. The operation was a disaster for the musicians: Oboist Waldmeyer was killed, Oboist Wilebinsky wounded along with Sergeant Barth. The latter hastily downed the contents of the bandmaster’s brandy flask before being taken to the rear. After that action, the band was ordered to surrender its instruments and take up new duties as stretcher-bearers. It was a symbolic moment.
As the German Grenadier Guards advanced towards their start line on the 9th, they saw by the roadside a senior officer in the uniform of the 1st Dragoon Guards, surrounded by his staff. It was Theobald Bethmann Hollweg: Germany’s Chancellor had come to witness in person the evolution of events he had contributed so much to bring about. He told the regiment’s colonel flatulently: ‘Herr Oberst, that is the way I have always wanted it: to be present at a time and place where I can really give the lads die letzte Ölung’ – ‘the old oil’ was an antique phrase, referring to the days when gladiators about to enter the arena were greased, to make it more difficult for their opponents to get a grip on them. But it did not escape the Chancellor’s listeners that the phrase also had a second meaning – as the death rite of the Lutheran Church. Bethmann witnessed no German triumph that day – only more dying.
Once again the fighting briefly slackened. Capt. Eben Pike, a British Grenadier, wrote on 9 November: ‘We hold on here like grim Death,’ and he himself was killed a few days later. Wilfrid Abel-Smith wrote: ‘I can’t bear seeing my friends go day after day, and when Eben was hit, my heart sank, but I must face the difficulties and hope for the best. If I didn’t put my trust in God, I couldn’t have held out as long as I have.’ Some men on both sides were despairing. On 9 November Lt. Baehreke of the German Grenadiers was interrogating a British prisoner when suddenly the hedge in front of them parted to reveal a Zouave who shouted in French, ‘Don’t shoot! I am the father of a large family with many children!’ He then grabbed and drained one of the Germans’ water-bottles, prompting an outburst of laughter that broke the tension. That same day Lt. von Schauroth, a regimental adjutant, wrote: ‘Reports from the front line indicated that an assault in the prevailing conditions offered no prospect of success. All attempts to convince higher authority of the hopelessness of a frontal assault through the morass of Flanders clay, in the face of complete lack of clarity regarding enemy, ground or even our own positions, failed totally … Hundreds of our finest men gave their lives for something which was completely hopeless.’
At the insistence of German commanders, on 10 November a doomed attack took place in the French sector. Next day, there was another big push against the British: two brigades of the Prussian Guard were launched down both sides of the Menin road towards Ypres. In the dim light of early morning, the defenders were almost disbelieving at the spectacle of dense formations of enemy once more approaching in numbers which suggested that Prince Rupprecht’s strength was inexhaustible. Through the hours of strife that followed, the Germans pushed forward again and again, piercing the defences in several places. One British soldier scribbled tersely in his diary: ‘Everybody in a panic, running away and leaving rifles equip[ment] and everything.’ Once again the front was restored by counter-attacks: the Oxf & Bucks, who had played a prominent part in the September fighting at Cour de Soupir, won a critical little victory at Nonne Bosschen Wood. Among the fatal casualties that day was the Guards Brigade commander Charles FitzClarence, who by common consent had been one of the heroes of the defence. On the other side, on 11 November one German Guards regiment suffered eight hundred casualties, including seven officers killed. The attackers were stopped less than three miles from Ypres.
Cpl. William Holbrook of the Royal Fusiliers described black-comic experiences while his platoon was pinned down for some hours in no man’s land. A German officer suddenly crawled out of the bushes and said in perfect English, ‘I am wounded.’ Holbrook’s subaltern responded irritably, ‘You shouldn’t make these bloody attacks, then you wouldn’t get wounded!’ which earned a laugh from the Fusiliers. But the British lieutenant was killed by a stray bullet minutes later, and his men found themselves leaderless as well as lost. Holbrook cut a shrapnel ball out of the knee of a mate, who then crawled away in search of safety. He himself was sitting in a shell crater in failing light when he heard a nearby twig break, and saw a German’s head appear. The man was groaning, and badly wounded, murmuring ‘Wasser, Wasser!’ Holbrook gave him a drink from his bottle, and was appalled to see the water instantly ooze from the man’s side, mingled with blood. Then the German held up three fingers and said wretchedly, ‘Kleine Kinder’ – ‘Small children’ – before expiring in the early hours of the morning. Holbrook exploited the remaining darkness to make good an escape to the British line.
That night, the medieval Cloth Hall of Ypres burned. Quartermaster-Sergeant Gordon Fisher, a Territorial of the Hertfordshires fresh to the war, was being driven by bus towards the battlefield. He gazed in awe upon the darkness broken by brilliant illuminations and thought, ‘Doesn’t it look pretty! Just like fireworks.’ Only slowly did he grasp the horror of the spectacle he was witnessing. Thirty-one-year-old machine-gunner Lt. John Dimmer was that rare creature, an officer who had risen from the ranks. At
Ypres on 12 November his Vickers was firing on the advancing Prussian Guard when it jammed on a sodden ammunition belt. Dimmer repaired the gun with an adjustable spanner, and resumed firing. An enemy bullet hit his jaw, and the gun jammed again. While remedying the stoppage he was shot again, this time in the right shoulder, and received three shrapnel fragments in the same place. He nonetheless continued firing until, when the nearest Germans were fifty yards away, they turned and ran. Dimmer was hit again in the face and almost blinded by his own blood, but he lived to receive a VC. He later also won a Military Cross, only to be killed commanding a battalion in January 1918, three months after getting married. At Ypres, by many such local actions as his did the dwindling units of the BEF cling to their positions.
On the British left, the French fought their own terrific battle to hold the line between Zonnebeke and Bixschoote. Langemarck remained under incessant pressure. That day of 12 November, one of the war’s most notorious official bulletins appeared in many of Germany’s towns and cities, reporting that ‘west of Langemarck young regiments, singing “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles”, attacked the entrenched line of the English position and took it’. In reality the allies held the line in that sector. Elsewhere on the British front, if there was indeed some singing, by nightfall the attackers had little to celebrate: yet again, they had failed to break through.
