Passchendaele

by Paul Ham

  On the map, the Salient resembled a half-oval of British-held territory that bulged into the German lines east of Ypres. In the minds of the men, it was the ‘bloody Salient’, a land of screaming shells and hissing gas, waterlogged trenches and scuttling rats. By 1917, it had earned its reputation as the most loathsome place on the Western Front.

  The Salient swelled and shrivelled with the ebb and flow of battle, like a bladder under pressure from either side. The Allies had held it, in a bigger or smaller form, since the First Battle of Ypres, in October 1914, when the British and French pushed its eastern extremity as far as the plain beneath Passchendaele Ridge. By January 1917, the German forces had reclaimed the bladder to within a mile or two of Ypres, and clung to the horseshoe of ‘high’ ground that surrounded it on three sides, from Langemarck and Saint Julien north-east of the city, along the ridges of Pilckem and Gheluvelt (Geluveld) Plateau due east, to Messines Ridge and a string of hills to the south (see Map 1). Beyond this front line, the Germans occupied successive ridges fanning out from the city of Ypres, the most prominent of which were Broodseinde, Poelcappelle and Passchendaele.

  In 1917, this land was unrecognisable from what it had been before the war, a region of gently rising pastures and farmlands interrupted by villages and forests. ‘[Y]ou could not see half a mile for woods,’ recalled Lieutenant Guy Chapman. When Ferdinand Foch arrived in Ypres in 1914, he looked out from the tower of the Cloth Hall over a sprinkling of white hamlets set in fields of tobacco and beetroot, interspersed with hedgerows and barns and heaps of manure, ‘a sea of green, with little white islands marking the location of the rich villages with their fine churches and graceful steeples’.2 It was a land of monotonous rains and misty dawns, an atmosphere of ‘melancholic sadness melting almost imperceptibly into the grey waters of the North Sea’.3 The gently rising plains were broken here and there by small woods of ash, chestnut and oak, and by rows of poplars, set in heavy, blue Ypres clay. The terrain was criss-crossed by a network of little canals and creeks that drained the fields. Multitudes of poppy seeds would germinate during the ploughing season, dabbing the dark brown soil in little splashes of red paint. Shellfire had the same effect, bringing to the soldiers’ minds an image of the blood of the dead and wounded streaming up from the earth below.

  By 1917, the scene was ‘as bare as a man’s hand’, Chapman recalled. ‘Were these puke acres ever growing fields of clover, beet or cabbage? Did a clear stream ever run through this squalmy glen?’ A ‘magnate’s estate’ of lawns and ornamental fountains was now ‘a quag of islands and stagnant pools over which foul gases hang’.4 A network of trench lines extended east and west of the front lines, interspersed with wire, human and horse remains, wreckage and shell craters. Two years of sporadic shellfire had reduced most of the chateaux, hunting lodges, stately homes, villages and churches to rubble. The stamp of hundreds of thousands of boots and the advance and withdrawal of heavy machinery, gun carriages, horse-drawn carts and truckloads of supplies had turned the land into a fortified labyrinth reaching back to the supply depots of Poperinghe (spelled Poperinge today) on the British side and Roulers on the German (see Map 1).

  A few reminders of peace were still visible in mid-1917: ragged copses and hedgerows, a few broken farmhouses, remnants of villages and isolated clumps of forest whose names – Sanctuary Wood, Polygon Wood, Nonne Bosschen, Crest Farm – would soon lose their obscurity forever. The fragile drainage system still partly functioned; the little canals and ditches that had drawn off the surface water for centuries and rendered this former swamp cultivable were not yet completely destroyed.

  Nowhere on the Western Front was trench life as miserable as here. Trench foot and other diseases were endemic, and rats were plentiful, bloated on the flesh of corpses. Winters were bone-rattlingly cold, usually around freezing and as low as –15C; summers were hot and wet and fly-blown. Water threatened both armies’ trench systems, from above and below. Rain fell with seasonal certainty here, in great, depressing sheets, drenching the trenches and dugouts. The shallow water table seeped through the soil and over the duckboards, limiting the trenches’ depth. The infantry had faced the same difficulties every year in Flanders. This year, however, would be far worse, the result of unprecedented shellfire and unusually heavy rain.

  In such conditions, the construction of deep trenches had proved extremely difficult. In the wettest areas, the parapets were heightened with sandbags, to protect the soldiers’ heads. The Germans had been quick to realise the value of an above-ground defensive system, in the form of rows of concrete pillboxes. Throughout 1916 and early 1917, supplied by an old cement factory at Roulers, they had built up a defensive network of squat cement bunkers that housed shock troops – trained to inflict sudden, lightning attacks – and heavy machine guns. The pillboxes were carefully sited along the ridges, with interlocking fields of fire. Only a direct hit by the heaviest shell would seriously damage these squat excrescences of ferro-concrete. Advancing platoons would have to destroy most of them.

  For centuries, the beautiful city of Ypres had been the urban heart of Flanders, the Flemish province in western Belgium. The city once rivalled Paris in wealth, as the home of Europe’s textile trade, and as a progressive religious centre. Cornelius Jansen, founder of Jansenism – scourge of the French Jesuits – was made Bishop of Ypres in 1636. It was no stranger to conquest, drawing a succession of marauding armies throughout its boisterous history, for religious, economic and strategic reasons. The Romans had attacked and occupied the ancient settlement. There followed the English, French, Spanish, Dutch and English again, in the march of power through time. The city provided troops for the uprising against the French occupying forces at the Battle of the Golden Spurs in 1302. In 1383, Henry le Despenser, the Bishop of Norwich, led an English army to occupy Ypres, as part of the ‘Norwich Crusades’. He remarked upon ‘a nice old town, with narrow, cobble-stoned streets and some fine buildings’ and then besieged it for four months until French relief arrived.5 During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Ypres fell under the sway of advancing and retreating armies: in 1678, the French Army conquered the city and the engineer Vauban installed a series of ramparts to deter further invaders (the very ramparts that protected the British dugouts and to this day buttress the edge of the moat). They didn’t stop the Spanish, who occupied Ypres in 1679. The Austrian Netherlands then wrested control from the Spanish in 1713, and held it until the Napoleonic Wars rid the low countries of the Habsburgs. The Belgian revolt against the Netherlands in 1830 bestowed freedom on the city as part of an independent Belgium.

  In the early twentieth century, Ypres had the misfortune of finding itself of strategic value to the British/French and German armies. In 1914, it stood in the path of the Schlieffen Plan, the great wheeling offensive devised by Count Alfred von Schlieffen, according to which the German Army would conquer France in six weeks. In putting this improbable gamble into effect in August 1914, and despite pounding scores of Belgian towns to rubble, the Germans failed to capture the city during First Ypres in October of that year.

  The British forced them back, in one of the most heroic actions of the war, and got as far as attempting an attack on Passchendaele Ridge, on 21 October. ‘Fighting was hard and came to bayonet work,’ Haig recorded in his diary.6 But Sir John French had over-extended his forces. The German counter-attack drove the Allies back to the Ypres line, where British, French and Belgian forces held the city – respectively sustaining 85,000, 58,000 and 21,500 casualties. The Germans, too, suffered tens of thousands of losses at the hands of Britain’s Old Contemptibles, notably at the battle of Langemarck, in which Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler participated. (He would return as Führer to lay wreaths on the mass graves of the German dead, whose sacrifice had become known in Germany as the ‘Massacre of the Innocents’, a reference to the high proportion of young men, just out of school, who died there.)

  The Germans tried and failed to take the city at Second Ypres, in April 1915.
This time, a resolute defence, led by Canadian and French forces, prevailed against waves of German shock troops and the first use of poison gas. The Canadian 3rd Brigade and the French Algerian 45th Colonial Division were the first to feel the agonising effects of chlorine gas, dispersed from canisters and carried on the wind. ‘The French troops,’ wrote Arthur Conan Doyle, then a 55-year-old infantryman, ‘staring over the top of the parapet at this curious screen which ensured them a temporary relief from fire, were observed to suddenly throw up their hands, to clutch at their throats and to fall to the ground in agonies of asphyxiation. Many lay where they had fallen, while their comrades, absolutely helpless against this diabolical agency, rushed madly out of the mephitic mist and made for the rear …’7 The masked German infantry burst out of the cloud and forced the Allies to withdraw to a new defensive line. By 1 May 1915, the Salient had collapsed to just two-and-a-half miles at its widest point, within easy enemy artillery range. The battles of Second Ypres cost the Allies a further 58,000 and the Germans 38,000, dead and wounded.

  Thereafter, the British held the city, under the command of General Herbert Plumer. Two years later, the enemy were still hunkered down on the ridgelines and surrounding hills, in their newly constructed concrete pillboxes and elaborate trench systems, with a commanding view of the city and the Salient.

  By 1917, the city was a smouldering ruin, the most bombed target on the Western Front. The spire of the cathedral and the tower of the Cloth Hall poked out of piles of slate and smashed brick, the detritus of two years of war. All seemed dead on the surface, yet underneath a hive of military activity buzzed. German shellfire had failed to dislodge the British dugouts, merely bouncing the rubble on the city’s ramparts, beneath which hundreds of soldiers maintained supplies and transmitted orders to the forward units.

  The traffic of men and matériel continued to pour through the rubble of the market place, defying the shellfire, ‘streams of men, vehicles, motor lorries, horses, mules, and motors of every description, moving ponderously forward, at a snail’s pace, in either direction, hour after hour, all day and all night … a reek of petrol and smoke everywhere’.8 The witness was General John Monash, commander of the 3rd Australian Division, who saw a body of fighting troops pass, ‘tin-hatted and fully equipped, marching in file into the battle area’, followed by ‘perhaps a hundred motor lorries, all fully loaded with supplies; a limousine motor-car with some division staff officer …’, horse and mule-drawn vehicles, ambulance wagons, ‘a great 12-inch howitzer, dragged by two steam traction engines’, thousands more infantry, more trucks and machines, then ‘a long stream of Chinese coolies’, dispatch riders on motorbikes, horse-drawn artillery ‘clattering and jingling’, an anti-aircraft gun (‘Archie’), and a Royal Flying Corps truck carrying parts of aeroplanes to forward hangars … all this through the wreckage of a city under periodic shellfire.9

  Why hold this ‘bump’ in the line, whose three sides made the defence of Ypres such a hellish trial? Why risk so many lives for a city of rubble and a stretch of apparently useless terrain? General Horace Smith-Dorrien was not the only commander to have suggested the Allies surrender the Salient and withdraw to a more defensible position, possibly behind the Ypres Canal, which ran north–south through the city (he was relieved of his command for his temerity). On the face of it, the Salient did not seem worth the candle. It demoralised both sides. ‘I always had a horror of the name … Flanders,’ wrote a German soldier after the 1914–15 battles. Most shared his feelings in 1917, prefiguring the Wehrmacht’s hatred of the Russian front in the Second World War. ‘Death’ appeared on the cover of the German magazine Simplicissimus on 19 June of that year, personified by a skeleton in a great coat sitting on a pile of corpses amid a field of bodies. Death has laid down his scythe and is holding his skull in his hands: ‘You people stop,’ the grim reaper weeps, ‘I can’t take anymore.’10 The ‘Bloody Salient’ inspired a similar revulsion in the British. The soldiers’ spirits lifted when they heard they were leaving this place; even the open valley of the Somme seemed preferable, to both privates and generals.

  There were good reasons to hold the city and blister of terrain to the east. Ypres had stirring symbolic value as the last Belgian city before the Channel, a powerful reminder of the raison d’être for Britain’s entry into the war, as the liberator of Belgium. The press played up its importance. Stories of its heroic defence went down well back in Britain. Ypres also offered protection and underground supply caches unavailable elsewhere so far forward: its ancient ramparts proved surprisingly resilient to modern artillery, and thousands of British soldiers owed their lives to the sturdy construction of the casements beneath them.

  Most importantly, there were sound strategic reasons for holding Ypres. Commanders on both sides saw the city as a useful jump-off point, from which the British could launch attacks on the vital German positions in Flanders, the supply route into France; and from which the Germans could try to break the British supply line on the French coast. Ypres was a mere 30 miles from the Channel port of Dunkirk, and 55 miles from Calais, between two and four times the range of the German heavy guns – almost thirteen miles, at their outer limit.11

  And possession of the city was a great morale booster. Its loss would have been a monumental psychological blow to the British, who had held it for so long. It was in Ypres, under the city’s ramparts, that the famous trench newspaper The Wipers Times was published. A fine example of British stoicism under fire, the newspaper offered an entertaining mix of satire, poetry, spoof columns and advertisements. Hence an ad for the Tunnel & Dug-Out Vacuum Cleaning Company: ‘Why Suffer from Trench Feet? … We guarantee a well-drained aired and Tunnel or Dug-Out …’12 And the column ‘A Few More Military Terms Defined’: ‘DUDS: There are two kinds. A shell on impact failing to explode [and] the other kind, which often draws a big salary and explodes for no reason. These are plentiful away from the fighting area.’13

  The trench lines had been transformed since 1914. On the British side, the desultory shell scrapes of the start of the war – the work of an army that believed it would be leaving by Christmas – were now solid A-framed trenches topped with sandbags and held together with revetments of woven wattle. The trenches ran in a zigzagged pattern to limit an enemy occupant’s field of fire into the zig (or zag). They were six feet deep and three and a half feet wide at the top, but their dimensions varied. Drainage sumps were dug under the duck-boards on the trench floors, but these failed to prevent the constant seepage and would prove useless in heavy rain.

  The trenches had special functions. Fire trenches, the frontline fighting trenches, were fitted with firing slits in the parapet, periscopes every few yards and ‘fire steps’, platforms from which to aim and fire. The soldiers slept in ‘funkholes’ dug into the trenches’ sides. In the coming battles, the advancing British would have to ‘reverse’ German fire trenches moments after occupying them, to defend themselves from terrific counter-attacks.

  Behind the fire trenches were the supervision and support trenches, fitted with larger bays for supplies. Behind these were rows and rows of reserve trench lines connected to the front, every hundred yards or so, by perpendicular communication trenches. The whole arrangement formed a single defensive network that extended several miles to the rear.

  If he gazed through a periscope, or dared to look over the top, the British soldier saw features on the map that earlier units had ‘colonised’ with homely names – e.g. Glencorse Wood, Inverness Copse, Black Watch Corner, Tower Hamlets, Clapham Junction, Surbiton Villas, Maple Lodge or Leinster Farm – all of which were now in German hands. None of these were recognisable as topographical features, as the artillery officer Huntly Gordon recalled; they were just, ‘lines and lines of sandbags alternating with hedges of rusty barbed wire, brown earth and grey splintered tree trunks’.14

  Such were the German front lines of what would soon become the most formidable defensive system on the Western Front, developed according to th
e new doctrine of ‘elastic defence’ or ‘defence in depth’. This was the brainchild of Major Max Bauer and Captain Hermann Geyer, authors of ‘Conduct of the Defensive Battle’, one of the most influential manuals on infantry defence.

  Elastic defence worked like this: a small number of troops occupied the front lines, with orders to fall back under British artillery attack, drawing the enemy into their territory, whereupon well-trained reserves in the rear would counter-attack, swiftly falling on the exposed enemy and reclaiming the lost ground. The Germans made an improvised attempt at elastic defence at Arras, which succeeded, winning over the sceptical General Fritz von Lossberg, who would soon became its most powerful champion. ‘The fireman of the Western Front’ (as von Lossberg was known, thanks to his penchant for dealing with crises) arrived in Flanders in April 1917 with orders to build up an impenetrable defensive barrier in this critical theatre.

  Throughout 1917, boatloads of British and Dominion troops arrived at the French ports, and their German counterparts at railheads in the western theatre, where the dreaded spectre of another Flanders ‘stunt’ rose in every soldier’s mind. On arrival in France, the British and Dominion soldiers found themselves in the ‘bullring’, one of the vast training camps that stretched from Le Havre to Étaples (‘Eat Apples’, as the Tommies called it), and from Calais to Boulogne: hectares of canvas tents and Nissen huts, officers’ messes, canteens, hospitals, lecture theatres and training areas. They stood in lines of thousands, waiting to be counted off into battalions and marched off to their regimental base (see Appendix 4 for the structure of the British and Dominion Armies in 1917).

  Each battalion comprised four companies each of about 200 men; each company comprised four platoons each of about 50 men, the basic fighting unit.15 In 1917, as part of far-reaching reforms, each platoon would contain four sections, dedicated to specialist roles: one comprised riflemen (including sniper and forward scout); a second bombers, or grenade-throwers; a third ‘rifle-grenades’; and a fourth Lewis light machine gunners. These four highly agile infantry ‘teams’ formed a platoon ‘capable of waging its own little battle in miniature, using a variety of modern weapons’.16 The reforms would make a critical difference in the coming battles.