by Paul Ham
About the Book
Passchendaele epitomizes everything most terrible about the Western Front. This battle was fought from July to November 1917, during the worst year of the war for Allied morale: images of blackened tree stumps rising out of a field of mud, corpses of men and horses drowned in shell holes, fraught soldiers huddled in trenches awaiting the whistle.
The intervening century, the most violent in history, has not disarmed these pictures of their power to shock. At the very least they ask us, on the 100th anniversary of the battle, to try to understand what happened here. Yes, we commemorate the event. Yes, we adorn our breasts with poppies. But have we understood?
What happened at Passchendaele was pure attrition, a ‘wearing down’ war at its most concentrated and ferocious. Paul Ham’s Passchendaele: Requiem for Doomed Youth shows how men on both sides endured, with a very real awareness that they were being gradually, deliberately, wiped out.
Yet neither side broke. The British, Anzac and Canadian forces went over the top, again and again, to their likely doom. The Germans were ordered to sit in the path of this storm of steel. And if they fell in such combat, they became, as the commanders described them, casualties in the ‘normal wastage’.
The soldier’s family remembered him as the son, husband or brother before he had enlisted. By the end of 1917 he was a different creature: his experiences on the Western Front were simply beyond their powers of comprehension.
The book tells the story of ordinary men in the grip of a political and military power struggle that foreshadowed the destiny of the world for a century. Passchendaele lays down a powerful challenge to the idea of war as an inevitable expression of the human will, and examines the culpability of governments and military commanders in a tragedy that destroyed the best part of a generation.
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
List of Maps
Dedication
Introduction
1 Servants of Attrition
2 The Human Factor
3 Death by Water
4 Knights and Pawns
5 The Bloody Salient
6 The Mines of Messines
7 A Fatal Delay
8 August 1917
9 Those Who Walked Beside You
10 September 1917
11 Odyssey of the Wounded
12 The Cruellest Month
13 The Face of Fear
14 Passchendaele Ridge
15 The Burial of the Dead
16 From the Jaws of Defeat
17 What the Living Said
Epilogue Requiem for Doomed Youth
Appendix 1 Casualty Figures
Appendix 2 A Comparison of Manpower Between the British and Dominion Armies, 1917
Appendix 3 Lord Kitchener’s Special Instructions to (then) General Sir Douglas Haig, 28 December 1915
Appendix 4 Hierarchy of Combat Ranks: Britain (and Dominions), Germany and France
Appendix 5 Skeleton Order of Battle, Third Ypres
Appendix 6 Haig’s Case for the Flanders Offensive, Submitted to the War Cabinet 17 June 1917
Appendix 7 Siegfried Sassoon’s Letter of Protest Against the War and Extract from Commons Debate
Appendix 8 Statement of British and German Wastage in Flanders
Appendix 9 Debate on Allied Casualties and Decision Not to Publish Totals
Notes and References
Bibliography
Index of Searchable Terms
Picture Section
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright Notice
LIST OF MAPS
Western Front—Third Ypres
The Flanders Campaign—Final Sketch Plan
Messines: The End of the Battle, 14 June 1917
The Fifth Army Offensive, 31 July 1917
The Battle of Polygon Wood, 26 September 1917
The Battle of Broodseinde, 4 October 1917
The First Battle of Passchendaele, 12 October 1917
The Second Battle of Passchendaele, 26 October–10 November 1917
To Dad, Ollie and Ian
INTRODUCTION
THEY CLAIM A SMALL PLACE in our minds, a century on, in memorial services and on poppy days. ‘We are the dead,’ they announce in the poem ‘In Flanders Fields’, like regiments of ghosts whose spirit won’t rest.1 More than half a million of them lay dead, wounded or missing on those fields in 1917, mostly British, Australian, Canadian, Irish, New Zealanders and their German counterparts, a few of whose voices survive in letters and diaries. They tell of one of the bloodiest battles of the Great War – indeed, of any war – with fear and love, humour and pathos, and sometimes with a kind of urgency, as if conscious that theirs would be the only eyewitness accounts of ‘Passchendaele’.
The Flemish town that bears this name seems unable, or unwilling, to carry the burden of what happened here. The local spirit is more inclined to look forward than back: there is no general monument here. The historical and emotional freight is probably too heavy for one small community, let alone a city or country. (The larger, neighbouring town of Zonnebeke hosts the new Passchendaele Museum.)
Officially they called it the Third Battle of Ypres, or ‘Third Ypres’. In fact, it was a series of immense clashes on the plains to the east of the mediaeval city of Ypres, between 31 July and 11 November 1917. The people and the press fastened instead on the village at the heart of these events, five miles north-east of Ypres: ‘Passchendaele’, a word evoking Easter and the Passion of Christ (from the Latin verb pati, to suffer). Here, the word suggests, lies more than a little Flemish community; here lies a dale of martyrdom, a soldiers’ Calvary, a land of tortured souls.
This is what ‘Passchendaele’ has come to mean in the civilian mind: an epic of pointless butchery that, even by the standards of the Great War, entered the realm of the infernal and monumentally futile. Soldiers, animals, artillery and pouring rain were thrown together in a maelstrom of steel and flesh in the name of a strategy that anticipated hundreds of thousands of casualties – and all for nothing.
Some military specialists disagree with this ‘popular’ view of Third Ypres, arguing that most of its battles were necessary, achieved some of their goals and were worth the cost. For these self-described ‘revisionists’, Passchendaele was part of a just and inevitable war against tyranny, and not another massacre in an avoidable tragedy that destroyed the best part of a generation (we shall address this endless controversy in Chapter 17).
We may be sure of one thing: the huge casualties were not some epic blunder; they were expected, they were planned for. To understand why is to understand the meaning of a total war of attrition. That effort may be more than the twenty-first-century mind can bear, living as we do in the super-sentimental West, where a body bag is treated as a political opportunity. Many of us approach the Great War not through primary historical records but through the lens of literature, films, photographs or the entertainments of Blackadder and Oh! What a Lovely War, cultural phenomena that soften, ridicule or set at one remove the truth. That is not to demean these interpretations. It is to say that the finest war literature, some of the funniest satire, and the work of cultural historians such as Paul Fussell, Jay Winter and Modris Eksteins, have transformed the perception of this tragedy into a kind of elevated cultural experience. It is almost as if art has become our reality of the Great War, and the Great War a reflection of art.2 To borrow the famous Platonic metaphor, that is to look at the War as a shadow thrown against the wall of a cave, the shadow of its true Form.
To open our minds to this tragedy, to understand what happened in Flanders in 1917, is to turn our eyes from the shadow and gaze at the Form. It means journeying int
o a different world, a kind of hell, no doubt, but also a realm in which people lived at extremes, captive to the emotions of hope, love, terror and hubris. The journey is hard and horrifying, and yet also profoundly moving. The following symphony of witnesses, gathered into a narrative, will tell us something of the truth of Passchendaele, and something of the political imperative that drove humanity to that terrible place. Stay the distance and we shall meet on the other side, with a deeper understanding of what human beings are capable of doing to their fellow creatures, and why. For only by reasoning why can we hope for a wiser, perhaps kinder, future. My conclusions, some of them novel, appear in Chapter 17; for now, we shall confine ourselves to the narrative.
1
SERVANTS OF ATTRITION
You are the War generation. You were born to fight this War, and it’s got to be won … So far as you are concerned as individuals it doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn whether you are killed or not. Most probably you will be killed, most of you.
A British staff officer to a meeting of subalterns, quoted in Richard Aldington’s autobiographical novel, Death of a Hero
A VISITOR TO PASSCHENDAELE today would struggle to imagine this small Flemish town as the object of a field marshal’s obsession and the pivot of the great Flanders Offensive of 1917. In the centre, a few clothes shops and a couple of cafes give onto a desolate square. By the kerb, curiously isolated, stands a bronze relief of the stages of the battle, sculpted by Dr Ross Bastiaan. Opposite stands the church, rebuilt since the war in red, yellow and white stones. British and German artillery destroyed the previous one, along with its cemetery, churning up the remains of the pre-war dead with the casualties of battle. The elaborate graves crowding the grounds post-date the armistice, on 11 November 1918, when the local people returned to reclaim the scab of bones and rubble that had been their home.
A closer look helps us to understand the town’s military relevance: Passchendaele sits on the highest (only about 200 feet above sea level) of a series of concentric ridges, arcs of slightly elevated ground that radiate east of Ypres like the terraces of an enormous, shallow stadium. The Passchendaele-Staden section of the ridge offered a good view and ‘jumping off’ point into German-held territory to the north-east: i.e. the village of Roulers (Roeselare), which served as a vital German supply base, and the plains of Flanders peeling away to the Belgian coast.
Passchendaele village had no strategic importance in its own right; the ridge was merely the first stage of a vast offensive that aimed to liberate Belgium, realising Britain’s original case for entering the war. The Flanders Offensive would be a distinctly Commonwealth campaign. In 1917, the exhausted and mutinous French Army were reduced to playing a defensive role on the Western Front; the Russians were in the throes of revolution; and the Americans had not yet arrived. So the British Army and their Australian, Canadian and New Zealand allies (with small French, South African and Belgian units in support) would confront the most powerful concentration of German troops on the Western Front, who were then being reinforced with fresh troops from the east. On British orders, they were to capture Passchendaele Ridge within weeks (see Map 1), seize Roulers and swing north to the Belgian coast, to fulfil one of the chief aims of the offensive: to destroy the German submarine bases at the ports of Ostend, Zeebrugge and others, whose U-boats were waging unlimited war on Allied shipping.
This would be the prelude to the total rout of the German forces in Belgium, a war-winning scenario dependent on a run of incredible victories, daunting in their ambition even with the help of brilliant command, fine weather and a lot of luck (none of which was forthcoming or guaranteed). The great French marshal Ferdinand Foch was not the only commander who had little faith in what he called a ‘duck’s march’ through the Flanders mud. As we shall see, there were other reasons why, between August and November 1917, the British and Dominion commanders drove their men beyond the edge of the humanly possible to capture the village of Passchendaele, and why the Germans were similarly driven to defend it.
The lessons of the immediate past might have counselled against the offensive. This would be Third Ypres. The First was a defensive battle fought in October and November 1914, in which the Franco-British forces just held the city, though at a huge cost in blood. The Second, from 22 April to 25 May 1915, ended in a stalemate, with Allied casualties of 87,000 against German casualties of 35,000. By the war’s end, there would be five battles of Ypres. With the exception of a single day in 1914, the British and their allies would never yield the once-beautiful mediaeval town of Ypres itself to the Germans. And not until October 1918, at the Fifth Battle of Ypres, would they remove the German forces from the edges of the city’s eastern hinterland, the ‘immortal salient’ – a blister of Allied-controlled territory that swelled up and subsided, but never burst, during four years of war. Hundreds of thousands would be killed or wounded defending or attacking the Ypres Salient; many more would live to remember marching past Ypres’ shell-cratered streets, past the ruins of the thirteenth-century Cloth Hall and cathedral, to the front. In time, defending ‘Wipers’, as the Tommies rejoiced in mispronouncing it, became a rite of passage more terrible than the Somme. The Germans, too, would remember this place with special loathing.
Prior to Third Ypres, at the start of 1917, Europe was exhausted, brutalised, locked in a conflict that had consumed the lives of millions. A young man might be forgiven for refusing to enlist in a war that had already killed two million out of nearly seven million total casualties on the Western Front, the rest wounded, missing or taken prisoner.1 The casualty lists at the end of 1916, after the Somme and Verdun, had shocked and then benumbed the British, French and German people. In many homes, the mounting losses, intractable trench lines and ghastliness of the wounds had engendered a kind of dazed acceptance of war as an unstoppable force beyond the human agency to control.
‘You knew the horrors of war,’ recalled Norman Collins, a young subaltern on his way to Flanders in 1917. ‘We knew that 60,000 men had become casualties on July 1st [1916]. We went not thinking we’d come out of it, we didn’t think we’d live.’2
The mood of foreboding that marked 1917 was a far cry from the exuberance at the outbreak, in August 1914, when the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), a band of 150,000 professionals whom the Kaiser had scorned as a ‘contemptible little army’ (hence their nickname, the ‘Old Contemptibles’), sailed for France. At the time, they were the best-trained soldiers and finest marksmen in the world. By 1917, with the exception of a few diehards, they were dead, wounded, exhausted or retired. They had not gone easily: in August 1914, this force held the line at Mons until forced to join the great French retreat towards Paris. In September that year, they had plugged a critical gap in the French lines at the Marne and helped, in an important symbolic way, to drive the Germans back to the Aisne and confound the Prussian Schlieffen Plan to conquer France within six weeks. In October 1914, vastly outnumbered, the Old Contemptibles held Ypres against waves of young German recruits, sustaining 58,000 casualties. And in April 1915, they marched to their doom at Loos, in one of the worst defeats in British military history.
The unspeakable scenes at Loos might have shelved forever the idea that huge frontal attacks could break the German lines. What happened at Loos revealed a breed of man, the British Tommy, whose courage, unquestioning sense of duty and fear of failure persuaded him to march head-on into enemy machine guns. A German witness, the historian of the 26th Infantry Regiment, famously described the result:
Never had the machine guns had such straightforward work to do … with barrels burning hot and swimming in oil, they traversed to and fro along the [British] ranks unceasingly; one machine gun alone fired 12,500 rounds that afternoon. The effect was devastating. The enemy could be seen literally falling in hundreds, but they continued their march in good order and without interruption. The extended lines of men began to get confused by this terrific punishment, but they went doggedly on, some even reaching the wire enta
nglement in front of the reserve line … Confronted by this impenetrable obstacle, the survivors turned and began to retire.3
Field Marshal Sir John French, the BEF’s serially inept commander, and the then lieutenant general Sir Douglas Haig were jointly responsible for this debacle.4 Sir John bore the brunt of the blame, for failing to send up reserves in time to hold the British gains, exposing his forward troops to devastating German counter-attacks. The toll was 59,247 British soldiers killed, wounded or missing, including three major generals and the only son of the poet Rudyard Kipling, whose death would inspire the poem ‘My Boy Jack’ (‘“Have you news of my boy Jack?” / Not this tide. / “When d’you think that he’ll come back?” / Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.’). Many soldiers inhaled British poison gas, blown back onto their trenches when the wind changed, killing or incapacitating them. Sir John was sacked, and he returned to Britain to command the Home Forces, a bitter and resentful man. Haig replaced him.
News from the wider war offered little respite in that dismal year. In the Dardanelles Campaign (April 1915–January 1916), the Allies hoped to carve a third front against the Germans, from the south. To do so, they would conquer the Turks and combine with the Russians from the east and the French from the west to crush Germany and Austria-Hungary in a three-way vice. Winston Churchill’s brainchild was a disaster: nearly half a million British, French, Turkish and Commonwealth soldiers were killed or wounded over six months of futile carnage. The Australians and New Zealanders would henceforth romanticise Gallipoli as a ‘nation-forming’ sacrifice. Their decent intent is understandable, but their annual commemorations amount to a rite of denial of what Gallipoli actually meant: the useless occupation of a few Turkish beaches that achieved nothing other than a flourish of pointless heroics and the dispatch of grief into hundreds of thousands of homes. The Allies spent the rest of 1915 nursing their wounded, regrouping, launching sporadic trench raids and training the vast intake of new recruits.
