Passchendaele
Page 21
He came running back towards us like a spectre waving its arms, and shouting and yelling, ‘Mother! Mother! Mother!’ … [I] got hold of him and said, ‘Come on. Come on over here, till we see to you.’ But he was like a mad thing. He just shook me off and ran on yelling, ‘Mother! Mother!’ completely off his head. That was the last we saw of him.55
The Northamptonshire Regiment entered the tortuous terrain around the Bellewaerde Lake, which split them in two: ‘[T]he entire area was also covered in exploded trees, which were perfect hiding places for machine gun nests.’56 They captured the frontline trenches, where the severely demoralised enemy surrendered, but heavy German counter-attacks held them off the ‘blue line’, with heavy losses. They eventually prevailed, thanks to several acts of astonishing courage, notably that of Thomas Riversdale Colyer-Fergusson, a 21-year-old captain who led ten men in storming a trench, captured an entire company of German soldiers, and went on to seize two machine guns, killing 35 Germans with one of the guns. A little later, a sniper shot him. For ‘an amazing record of dash, gallantry and skill for which no reward can be too great having regard to the importance of the position won’, Colyer-Fergusson was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.57
The Notts & Derbyshire Regiment (The Sherwood Foresters) were to take the village of Westhoek, past the Bellewaerde Lake. ‘We weren’t so much running forward,’ said Lockey, ‘as scrambling on over fallen trees and shell-holes … the German field artillery was firing back, so there were shells exploding all around. The chap on my right had his head blown off, as neat as if it had been done with a chopper … My pal, Tom Altham, went down too, badly wounded, and Sergeant-Major Dunn got a shell to himself.’58
In German eyes, the ‘dark figures’ of the Tommies came at them in ceaseless waves, survivors recalled. When a man fell dead or wounded, another instantly filled the gap in the line.
Faced with annihilation by the oncoming infantry, many German soldiers tried to break back through the creeping barrage, and reform in the rear. In one such action, Fusilier Guard Musolf shouldered his wounded officer and carried him safely through the British artillery shield, earning an Iron Cross First Class for bravery.
Leutnant Wiemes and his men were not so lucky, finding themselves surrounded by a pack of ‘drunk British soldiers’ (for which there is no evidence) who ‘came at us with fixed bayonets’. Only the intervention of a British corporal who ‘leapt between us and his men’ ensured that ‘we were not cut down’.59 It seems they had witnessed the results of Campbell’s bayonet lessons rather than the effects of too much rum.
A Bavarian battalion was left stranded as battle swirled around them, with no means of communicating: they had no flares or signals; the runners couldn’t get through; the messenger dogs were dead or wounded; the telephone lines destroyed; and two of their four carrier pigeons incapacitated. In desperation, the commander laid out panels for aircraft to read: ‘There is a battalion command post here … Support is needed.’
The seizure of Pilckem Ridge denied the Germans an observation point over Ypres, in that section of the front – ominously, Gheluvelt retained that advantage. Yet Gough failed to consolidate his new possessions, to allow time for the guns to catch up with the men. Third Ypres was supposed to open with a series of incremental attacks, Haig had belatedly advised, ‘limited to the range of the mass of supporting artillery’,60 not a frantic rush beyond the limit of the guns into enemy-infested country. Instead, Gough wanted to accelerate, to take more territory. He ordered his armies to push on. This defied the wisdom of his own intelligence, who warned that the enemy’s ‘defence in depth’ would immeasurably stiffen the deeper the British advanced. It was a great, gaping trap.
Nor had the British penetrated the higher ground at Gheluvelt Plateau. Here, the Germans held on, and were yet to reveal their hidden strength, held well back on the plateau. Gough had decided not to concentrate his attack here, against Haig’s advice. His men were about to face the consequences. Gough well knew the enemy’s strength at Gheluvelt (Fifth Army intelligence had been thorough): three defensive lines, each 1500 yards deep, bristling with German troops, heavily supported by Eingreif in the rear, and all obscured behind the remains of three blasted forests on the western edge of the ridge, dubbed Shrewsbury Forest, Sanctuary Wood and Chateau Wood, ‘a wilderness of fallen tree trunks, shell holes and debris’, impassable to tanks.61 Well-hidden pillboxes clustered at vital points, such as the Lower Star Post and Clapham Junction, with clear views across the attacking terrain.
Haig and Gough could not know the extent to which the German forces on Gheluvelt had survived the two-week bombardment. British artillery had failed to destroy the massed ranks of guns and men that lurked on the plains beyond the broken tree lines. This failure would have dire consequences. At first, however, the results seemed promising – too promising. In places, the Germans were luring the British towards the narrow defiles between the woods; elsewhere, they put up ferocious resistance, funnelling them into the gaps. The Worcestershire Regiment, for example, moved relatively easily, reached the blue line, captured or shot the few Germans they found in the trenches, and continued to the black line, eliminating en route a pillbox on the Menin Road. Far tougher resistance met the unfortunate 21st Brigade, whose troops won the ruins and ridge of Stirling Castle after a bloody ordeal up the slopes beneath well-placed machine-gun nests.
Could tanks break the Germans at Gheluvelt? They gave it a go, with devastating results. The huge, lugubrious machines rumbled down the Menin Road, in an attempt to destroy the giant pillbox at Clapham Junction. Their great tracked bodies made slow progress and were easy targets for German armour-piercing rounds. Of 48 tanks involved in this action, nineteen reached the front lines, and ‘all but one became casualties’.62 The rest were abandoned or hit by shells or anti-tank guns. A ‘tank graveyard’ of burned-out steel hulks lay strewn along the road for the duration of the war.
God and Nature intervened: God, in the form of a papal plea to halt the hostilities. The British victory the Lord had ordained had not persuaded the Catholic Church. On 1 August, Pope Benedict XV put forward a peace proposal.
‘To the Heads of the Belligerent Peoples’, he declared:
… Whoever has followed Our work during the three unhappy years which have just elapsed, has been able to recognize … Our resolution of absolute impartiality … We have never ceased to urge the belligerent peoples and Governments to become brothers once more … Shall, then, the civilized world be naught but a field of death? And shall Europe, so glorious and flourishing, rush, as though driven by universal madness, towards the abyss, and lend her hand to her own suicide?’63
Futile in bending the minds of the belligerent governments, who ignored it, the Vatican irritated Britain by singling out the naval blockade as an obstacle to peace; and angered Germany by offering them no spoils.
The London Times thundered that the Pope’s appeal was ‘pro-German’, ‘anti-Ally’ and ‘permeated with German ideas’.64 Ludendorff described the Pope’s actions as having ‘an evil influence on the conduct of the war’.65
Nature intervened, in the form of torrential rain. The rain had started spitting down at dawn, soon after the whistles blew. Other than a brief spell of sun at around 10 am, it rained for the rest of the day. The rain fell in heavy, sidelong sheets upon a field churned and cratered over two weeks of bombardment. The shelling had destroyed the fragile drainage system of creeks and canals that emptied the former marshes between Ypres and Passchendaele. The commanders on the spot saw at once that the undrained ground west of Passchendaele Ridge would soon turn into a brown soup, a man-made swamp. A human tragedy of staggering proportions was about to unfold in Flanders fields.
The little ‘beeks’ or streams that traversed the line of attack over-flowed their banks. The putrid liquid merged with the rainwater that filled the shell holes, until the natural and man-made boundaries between earth and water ceased to exist, and the drains and conduits sat gathering wate
r without beginning, direction or end. The Salient was slowly turning into a mud pan, pocked with thousands of shell craters of unknown depth that oozed brown slime. The attack began to seize up on this man-made bog. Soldiers scrambling over waterlogged craters couldn’t keep pace with the barrage, which started to thin out for lack of guns – leaving the men naked to German retaliation.
At 7 am Campbell’s gun battery arrived at the stream near Bellewaerde in pouring rain. They stopped, unable to advance further. His commanding officer joked whether headquarters ‘had got any boats. We could take the guns up by boats if they still want us to advance.’ He could ‘hardly wait’ for The Times, he added, to read about another great victory.66
Nor had the British gunners any clear idea where the furthermost men were, because most of the British telephone lines were cut, and the runners couldn’t get back in time. At Sanctuary Wood, an entire British division fell outside the barrage’s protective cover, leaving them severely disorientated and exposed to terrific fire. A whole brigade got lost, and entered Chateau Wood instead of Glencorse Wood, sustaining huge casualties.
The rain benefited the Germans on the less wet, higher ground, at the very moment when von Lossberg’s counter-strike forces were moving up. A British forward observer spotted the first of them, at 11.30 am: ‘a vast amount of German infantry going along the Passchendaele Ridge’.67
They attacked soon after 2 pm. Thousands rushed forward to reoccupy trenches and pillboxes they had earlier lost. In a series of humiliating setbacks, the Eingreif bundled back whence they came some of Britain’s most famous regiments. Even the Guards that had forded the Steenbeek were forced to retire, blaming their failure on the weakness on their flanks.
Low-flying German aircraft relayed the new British positions to enemy batteries at Gheluvelt, who replied with a storm of well-aimed rounds. By late afternoon, the British forces astride the Saint Julien–Poelcappelle road, including the Black Watch and Hertfordshire Regiments, had been forced back to their second starting line. Saint Julien was lost (though regained two days later).68 The Hertfordshires were wiped out. One of their quartermasters, sent to deliver 600 rations to the regiment, found only the brigadier in a captured German pillbox that was ‘rocking like a boat in a rough sea’. ‘He just stood and looked at me,’ said the quartermaster. ‘After a while he said, “I’m sorry, Quarters, I’m afraid there isn’t any Hertfordshire Regiment.”’69
Chaos ensued. Nobody in the rear knew what was happening at the front, or where the front was. The rain steadily worsened. The telephones failed. German and British guns bombed their own sides. More Eingreif divisions appeared out of nowhere. British platoons scattered. The Germans were up to their knees in water, trying to retake the Steenbeek.
All down the front, the British were being forced back. The Lincolnshires and Irish Rifles lost the ground they’d gained that morning, and recaptured it by 5 pm. The Cameron Highlanders, short of ammunition, alone at the green line and facing a torrential counter-attack, had no choice other than to abandon the ground they’d won at such cost in the morning. By late afternoon, the British forces held a tenuous grip on a jagged new line, vulnerable to enemy artillery as long as Gheluvelt remained in German hands. Stragglers and the shell-shocked were found wandering the field, lost, demented, laughing or crying, and easy prey to the provost marshals who scoured the lines for deserters.
The afternoon rain turned into a torrential downpour, a prelude to the heaviest August precipitation in Flanders in decades.70 It rained almost an inch that day, more than had fallen in the previous 30. Darkness fell. It rained all night. The battle resumed the next morning in a downpour. The rains fell all day for the next four days. With nowhere to drain, the water overran the shell holes and formed putrid little lakes that obscured the corpses of men and horses. Duckboards were laid between shell holes, forcing the men to advance in single files.
Moving up the guns and supplies in these conditions challenged the toughest constitutions. It had to be done: if the artillery could not maintain contact with the advancing infantry, all was lost. Teams of horses were unable to haul the guns over mud. Limbers proved useless. A tug of war with the mud ensued, as artillerymen heaved their guns yard by yard. The hardy mule, a gas mask looped over its head, carried up rations and ammunition.
‘Liquid mud’ filled the craters, Yoxall wrote to his mother on 2 August. Four men had drowned, he had heard: ‘[T]hey must have been stuck in the mud, become exhausted, and fallen face forward.’71 That day, the Daily Mail reported scenes of men scarcely able to walk in full equipment, ‘much less dig’. ‘Every man was soaked through and was standing or sleeping in a marsh.’72
The heavy guns sank, as Lieutenant Allfree had feared, ‘very deep in the mud, and caused a great deal of trouble’.73 His men rammed bundles of faggots and brushwood behind the trails. The battery moved forward to the village of Boesinghe that night. Leading the advance party, Allfree came upon a horse harnessed to a French wagon ‘with its hind legs so deeply sunk in the mud, that it could not move’.74 The horse’s stomach was level with the ground, and the animal had to be dug out.
Allfree found the ruined village in ‘a ghastly state! … Everything was wet, dirty and miserable.’ After two days of fighting, ‘the Hun … had been pushed back to beyond the ridge on the other side of the canal’, and now Red Cross men, wagons, ambulances and guardsmen thronged the cleared street. ‘Stretcher parties were bearing in wounded from the shelled, desolate mud swamps,’ he recalled. Many ‘had been lying out there since yesterday in the rain and half-buried in mud’. A stretcher party usually took six hours to bring in a single wounded man, he calculated, and then went straight back out ‘to recover another poor fellow’.75
On 6 August, Allfree went out with a fellow officer and five telephonists to fix the broken telephone line between the battery and the new OP:
It was the first time I had been across the Canal into that desolate, muddy, shell-strafed area … It would have been impossible to find one square yard without a shell hole … How on Earth [sic] the Infantry had advanced over such country is beyond my comprehension. But they had done so … 76
Shellfire had cut the wire in five places. They joined up each break and bound it with insulation tape.
The dreadful state of the terrain alarmed the Tank Corps, whose machines had not experienced such conditions. A tank intelligence officer, Major Fuller, drew up maps showing the flooded areas, in blue, deemed impassable to tanks. He had it sent to Haig’s office. Charteris intercepted and returned the map with a curt note containing the now infamous phrase: ‘Send us no more of these ridiculous maps.’77 Haig’s intelligence chief was said to have remarked to an aide, ‘I’m certainly not going to show this to the commander-in-chief. It would only depress him.’78
Haig had dreaded the weather turning against him, but he had not anticipated an inch and a half in the first four days (and five inches for the month, almost double the average).79 Yet his marked facility for finding a dram of good news in a barrel-load of bad kept his spirits up: to advance ‘a bit’, even in this deluge, he wrote, ‘was all to the good’.80 ‘A bit’, as it proved, was all they could manage. On 4 August, Haig called off the attack; it would resume on the 10th, after the fields had a chance to dry.
In the lull, Haig received a gloomy cable from Robertson, reporting on the Anglo-French-Italian conference that had taken place in London on 7–8 August. Lloyd George and the Italian Government were ‘anxious to get heavy artillery out of us, and even divisions’, Robertson wrote, in time for a fresh offensive on the Isonzo, scheduled for 15 September. To his chagrin, the British Government ‘showed that they attached no importance to the great and serious operations now taking place on the West [sic] Front …’ He summed up the meeting as ‘the usual waste of time’.81
In fact, Lloyd George had said much worse, according to a letter to Haig from Robertson’s deputy. The prime minister had told the entire conference that he had ‘no confidence’ in the
British general staff or their plans, and that ‘he had known all along that this latest offensive [in Flanders] was doomed to failure’. The prime minister added that ‘he’d backed the wrong horse. We ought instead to have reinforced the Italians.’82 For now, Robertson persuaded the War Cabinet to adhere to Haig’s Flanders Offensive, a gesture of loyalty that Haig would fail to repay.
The 10th was another miserably wet day. Two British divisions (the 18th and 25th) dragged themselves forward beneath a downpour that drenched what little had dried. Great pools of stinking mud greeted them. In a triumph of will, the 25th Division captured Westhoek village, the only success of the day; the 18th stormed Glencorse Wood and struggled in vain to clear Inverness Copse. The attack stalled, after German guns and Eingreif units had inflicted 2200 British casualties. General Sir Ivor Maxse’s 18th Division were ‘bundled back’ to the starting line, ‘a rare defeat for the justly renowned division which … had been unbeatable on the Somme’.83 Haig misinterpreted the result as ‘most satisfactory’: ‘our guns killed vast numbers of the enemy when forming up for counter-attacks. Six of these were attempted but all failed.’84
The 10th was a shocking day for Lieutenant Patrick Campbell. Taking his turn as forward observation officer, he reached his destination, Bank Farm, a captured pillbox just across the Steenbeek, where the setting sun shone through Ypres ‘in the saucer below us’, like the ruins of an ancient city.85
A line of shell-shocked men came down the slope towards him: ‘They didn’t seem to be walking properly, they looked as though they were walking in their sleep.’ A colonel addressed them, but they filed past without saluting or noticing him.86
To escape German shelling, Campbell sat with his men in a trench lined with a concrete wall. The wounded kept coming in, but there was no room for all of them. The hopeless cases were left outside: ‘They were a long time dying … Their crying rose to a scream as they heard the sound of [a round] coming, then fell away to a moan after the shell had burst.’87