by Paul Ham
Stuck in a trench beside the dead and dying, under incessant bombardment, Campbell’s nerves almost broke. He would never forget his ‘paralysing fear’. He closed his eyes: ‘I was conscious only of my own misery. I lost … all count of time. There was no past to remember or future to think about. Only the present. The present agony of waiting, waiting for the shell that was coming to destroy us, waiting to die …’ He could not move: ‘I had lost all power over my limbs … fear of that sort was horrible, debasing, abject.’88
The only man he told of this experience at the time was a soldier called Vernon, for whom he ‘felt an extraordinary affection’: ‘I wanted to have him always by my side. Together we had been down into the valley of the shadow, together we had climbed a little way out of it, a little way out of the pit. But we had nothing else to say to each other. We parted on the road, in the place where we had met, just eighteen hours earlier.’89
Campbell survived this debilitating fear, the cumulative effect of a sequence of horrifying events: the hundreds of dead faces in the shell holes; the shell-shocked ‘puppets of men’ who shuffled down the hill; and the incessant German bombardment. Millions of troops had or would share his experience, of the demoralising effect of concentrated shellfire, the fear of which he rationalised in later days as ‘another pain’ he had to endure but would never conquer.90
Haig’s bludgeoning was scheduled to resume on the 14th, but a heavy thunderstorm delayed it for two days, giving the commander-in-chief a chance to reply to Robertson. Haig’s letter, on 13 August, expressed with unusual clarity his belief, at that point, in how the war should be fought (the emphases are his): ‘[T]he only sound policy is for the government to support me whole-heartedly, and concentrate all possible resources here. And do it now, while there is time, instead of continuing to discuss other enterprises.’ If he received the men and matériel needed to keep his units up to strength, ‘we are convinced we can beat the enemy’. He based his confidence in victory on three ‘facts’: ‘the poor state of the German troops, high standard of efficiency of our own men, [and] power of artillery to dominate enemy’s guns …’91
The fresh attack (the Battle of Langemarck) began at 4.45 am on the 16th, across the whole front, in a virtual rerun of the plan of 31 July. The morning was mysteriously bright and sunny. And then, later that day, as if on cue, the skies opened. Had the very guns punctured the heavens, the troops joked? In the north, the British did well, advancing beyond Langemarck and claiming the village. The French divisions also captured their objectives – 1.2 miles of mud – thanks to weak German defences in their sector to the north of the Salient.
On the crucial Gheluvelt Plateau, however, the Germans still held firm. The British guns had not dominated here; nor were the Germans demoralised. Well-trained British troops, veterans of the Somme and Messines, bashed away at the ridgeline for twelve hours, gaining little ground. One brigade attacked with inadequate artillery protection and was virtually wiped out. Even before one division went over the top, it had suffered 2000 casualties to enemy shells and gas; it attacked anyway, with 330 instead of the normal 750 men per battalion.92
A tragedy befell the two Irish divisions – the 36th (Ulster), formerly the Ulster Volunteer Force, and the 16th (Irish), formerly John Redmond’s ‘Irish Brigade’ – in the attack on Zonnebeke Ridge. It was the second time the ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ divisions went into battle side by side, after their triumph at Messines. They attacked again with the same great camaraderie, but after a few hours both had virtually ‘ceased to exist as fighting formations’.93 A chaplain, the Jesuit Father William Doyle, spent all day on 16 August in no-man’s-land administering last rites, to soldiers of both faiths. He found one young soldier ‘lying on his back, his hands and face a mass of blue phosphorus flame smoking horribly in the darkness’.94 Doyle had earned the Military Cross at the Somme, and ‘many of the men believed him to be immortal’.95 He died a few days later, struck by a shell while comforting the wounded; three officers recommended him for a Victoria Cross but he received nothing: ‘the disqualification of being an Irishman, a Catholic and a Jesuit, proved insuperable,’ according to one witness.96
The heavy Irish losses marked a cruel end to one of the bravest commitments on the Western Front. Since entering the line, the Irish division had lost 7800 men, almost half their number; both divisions had suffered terribly on the Somme. Their latest sacrifice earned them little more than Gough’s scorn and an entry in Haig’s diary: ‘Gough was not pleased with the action of the Irish divisions,’ Haig wrote. ‘They seem to have gone forward but failed to keep what they had won … The men are Irish and apparently did not like the enemy’s shelling, so Gough said.’97
Gough, an avowed loyalist, deeply distrusted the Catholic division. A corps commander had told him (he later claimed) that the Catholics under his command were ‘no longer politically reliable’.98 Neither man produced any evidence. In truth, both Catholic and Protestant Irishmen were physically exhausted, their ranks heavily depleted: 200 Ulstermen had fallen dead or wounded in the first half-minute of the offensive, according to the historian Cyril Falls.99 The survivors of both units were soon relieved.
Unsure of the state of the terrain at this time, and thus the consequences of his orders, Haig continued to press Gough to send more demoralised men into battle: the 53rd Brigade of the 8th Division, for example, whose commander, General Higginson, had vigorously protested four times that his men were ‘not fresh enough to carry out an attack’ (‘not fresh’ being a euphemism for utterly spent). Pitched against well-intact German positions, his men soon found themselves being bombed by both German and British artillery. The attack failed.
The London Territorials elected to charge through to their final objectives rather than hold their positions until relief arrived. Their aggressive spirit pleased Gough, until he saw the result: an entire battalion vanished in a blaze of German guns. Most of the Royal Fusiliers and London Rifle Brigade ‘pressed boldly through Glencorse Wood and on into Polygon Wood and were, quite simply, never seen again’. A company of the 8th Middlesex similarly ‘just disappeared’ into the maw of the Eingreif.100 The rest were thrust back to the start line, with the enemy in hot pursuit. So serious and chaotic was the situation, writes McNab, that British shells were brought down just in front of the original start line, to hold off the Germans, even though many British troops were still forward.101 Such were the results of attacking without artillery protection – a lesson learned at the Somme, Loos and other battles, and forgotten or ignored here.
The Battle of Langemarck ended in a bloody fiasco. Gough’s army had gained 1500 yards of swamp in the north, fragments of bog in the centre and nothing at Gheluvelt in the south, for the cost, thus far, of 15,000 dead, wounded and missing. Haig cast this debacle as ‘most successful’ in the north and centre, while conceding ‘only moderate’ gains on the right flank at Gheluvelt. Nonetheless, ‘many Germans had been killed’.102
That afternoon, before the extent of the failure had been revealed, Robertson’s staff car swept into Haig’s headquarters at Chateau de Beaurepaire in Montreuil, bearing unusually upbeat news: the prime minister had relayed a friendly message of confidence in his commander. Haig brushed this off with a curt thank you and told Robertson to relay to Lloyd George the army’s core demands: ‘what I want is tangible support. Men, guns, aeroplanes. It is ridiculous to talk about supporting me “wholeheartedly” when men, guns, rails, etc. are going in quantities to Egypt for the Palestine expedition; [and] guns to the Italians …’103
The disaster at Gheluvelt soon reached GHQ. Haig blamed the failure on sheer haste, ‘due to commanders being in too great a hurry!!!’ Three more days of bombardment would have destroyed the enemy’s guns and concrete defences, he claimed.104 He had argued for haste prior to the attack, however, making the complaint self-incriminating. As Prior and Wilson assert, Haig had failed ‘to act on his insight and assert his authority’.105
A truthful pictu
re seemed unable to penetrate the thickets of manipulated intelligence (Charteris’s dubious dispatches), scapegoating (Gough’s ‘Irish card’) and self-deceit (Lieutenant-General Claud Jacob’s mistaken assertion that II Corps had captured important ground at Gheluvelt). On four occasions, Charteris visited the front, and noted the dreadful conditions; but he consistently underrated the German defences.
Gough continued bizarrely to blame his men (not only the Irish ones), and even suggested that officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs) who had failed to hold their captured ground be court-martialled for dereliction of duty. Frontline soldiers were being relieved too soon, he added, a practice that must stop to avoid a troop shortage. He did not clarify when the men should be relieved.
At this point, common sense (if not ordinary compassion) might have intruded and suggested the blindingly obvious: that thousands of soldiers’ lives were being wasted; that the methods were not working; and that it was time to adopt different tactics or call off a battle that had literally bogged down. In a moment of clarity, Gough saw this: ‘tactical success was not possible’ in such conditions, he told Haig on 16 August, and he urged his commander to abandon the attack.106 Haig decided to press on.
A rare tank breakthrough on the 20th along the St Julien–Poelcappelle road, which was firm enough to bear their weight, encouraged Haig to resume the battle two days later. One last push, he reckoned, should do the trick. The tanks destroyed a few pockets of German resistance, clearing the area for the British infantry. The machines were unserviceable elsewhere, sinking whenever they left the few tracts of solid ground. And relief was at hand, in the form of the inexperienced 61st Division, who came up to fill the gap left by the broken Ulstermen. They joined a series of smaller, no less lethal, attacks on the 22nd, which persisted throughout the day, with heavy casualties for the capture of Inverness Copse.
With dreary inevitably, the rain pelted down on 23 August, and it wouldn’t let up for another four days. The relieving soldiers had to advance in single file along the duckboards laid between the craters. Anyone who slipped into a shell hole risked drowning, borne down by the total weight of his pack and battle dress (60–70 pounds). An unknown number, probably several thousand, perished this way, because it was extremely difficult to drag a heavily burdened soldier out of the sucking slime. Among them was Lieutenant Colonel Edgar Mobbs DSO, 35, of Northampton, whose battalion called themselves Mobbs Own, such was the immense popularity of this former English rugby international. As he lay sinking in a shell hole with a wound to the neck, Mobbs managed to send a runner back with details of his position. The runner never reached his destination, and Mobbs’s body was never recovered.107
The long files of men were easy targets. Many were shot off the duckboards and bled to death as they drowned. Would-be rescuers could find no traction, or trees from which to attach ropes, to drag them out. None would forget the sound of a man drowning slowly in mud, ‘a terrible kind of gurgling noise [of] … the wounded, lying there sinking, and this liquid mud burying them alive, running over their faces and into their mouth and nose’.108
Scenes of drowning horses were similarly horrifying. Unaware of what was happening to them, the poor creatures bucked and jerked about in the grip of the mud. Most were shot before they drowned – a mercy not extended to drowning men.
The German horses, foaming with fear at the approach of the barrage, reared up and often slipped and fell into shell holes. One officer, unable to shoot his beloved horse, saw ‘a spray of mud’ where the poor animal ‘was still fighting and losing the battle against suffocation’.109 In time, the rigid corpses of men and horses protruded from the swamps, and ‘inside them, oblivious to the din of battle, the rats were at their disgusting work’.110
A pathetic symbol of the effects of the weather was a carrier pigeon, with an important message attached to its leg, so wet and caked in mud ‘it just flapped into the air and then came straight down again’, as noted by a member of the Yorkshire company to whom the pigeon belonged. To the soldiers’ horror, the bird then started ‘walking towards the German line’, 100 yards away, bearing its secret message. So they shot it.111
Haig had been alert to the possibility of a wet month, but he could not have expected the wettest August in Flanders in 75 years. Five times as much rain fell that month as in the same period in 1915 and 1916.112 Not since Marlborough’s 1707 Flanders campaign against the French had soldiers fought in such conditions near Ypres in August. Marlborough had himself written, 200 years before, that he ‘could scarcely stir out of his quarters, the dirt being up to the horses’ bellies, which is very extraordinary this month’; and when he was able to advance, many of his soldiers perished in the sloughs along the roadsides.113
Haig’s own report echoed Marlborough’s experience:
The low-lying, clayey soil, torn by shells and sodden with rain, turned to a succession of vast muddy pools. The valleys of the choked and overflowing streams were speedily transformed into long stretches of bog, impassable except by a few well-defined tracks, which became marks for the enemy’s artillery. To leave these tracks was to risk death by drowning … In these conditions operations of any magnitude became impossible … 114
Haig’s post-war critics claim that he should have expected and prepared for this. Their case hinges on Charteris’s gross exaggeration in his memoir that the clouds in Flanders opened in August ‘with the regularity of the Indian monsoon’. (Charteris then contradicted this, claiming that 1917 was the wettest August in Flanders in 30 years.)115 Haig haters would insist, years later, that the British commander had ‘made a reckless gamble … on the chance of a rainless autumn’ (Lloyd George); that he was well aware of the likelihood of a deluge (Liddell Hart and Leon Wolff); or that his offensive ‘relied on a drought of Ethiopian proportions to ensure success’ (Gerard de Groot).116 None of these criticisms was fair.
The man whose job it really was to predict the weather also misjudged it. Haig’s weatherman, Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Gold, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and an outstanding meteorologist, had reckoned on ‘bright [i.e. clear] weather’ for early August. He recanted as the clouds drew in, but gave Haig no cause to expect a biblical deluge. In fact, August was usually the drier summer month, and October the wettest of the year, according to the evidence of 30 prior summers.117 Gold’s forecasts for September and October were less inaccurate, encouraging Haig to hope that he ‘had no reason to anticipate an abnormally wet October’.118 What all these arguments miss, however, is the effect of even normal rainfall on a battlefield covered in shell holes that lacked a working drainage system.
More attacks went forward on 24 August, under more rain. This time, the infantry would have no effective barrage because the artillerymen could not get their guns up in time. In scenes reminiscent of the Somme, Gough pressed ahead, as ordered, though he knew it was ‘impossible’ for his men to advance.119 He hoped sheer numbers might defeat the Germans but he underestimated the resilience of von Lossberg’s defensive shield. The attack degenerated into another slog through mud: thousands were left flailing about, shot up, bombed, dismembered and slaughtered beneath the commanding heights of an unreachable foe. Inverness Copse was lost, and Haig lost confidence in Gough. If this was the point at which Haig gave up on the Fifth Army, it was also the point at which many Fifth Army officers gave up on Haig.
By the end of August, the British and Dominion forces had lost 70,000 men (3424 officers and 64,586 other ranks),120 of whom 31,850 had been killed, wounded or lost in the first three days, according to Edmonds’ figures (officially, at the Battle of Pilckem Ridge, 31 July–2 August). Of the 22 divisions involved, fourteen were withdrawn, deemed unfit to continue.121 Some units got the brunt of it, such as the Irish and Hertfordshires. The 8th Division suffered 3160 officers and men killed, wounded or missing during their failure to capture the high ground around the ruins of Stirling Castle.122
Thirteen Victoria Crosses were awarded during the month’s fig
hting: three went to the 51st (Highland) Division of Seaforths, Argyll & Sutherlands, Gordons and the Black Watch; two to the Guards; and two to Welsh regiments.123
Haig and Gough satisfied themselves that the casualties fell well within their expected range. The opening days had been ‘highly satisfactory’, Haig wrote to the War Cabinet on 4 August, ‘and the losses slight for so great a battle’.124 Previous offensives had set the norm for what constituted ‘slight’. By this macabre calculus, the 31,850 casualties of the first three days were ‘moderate’, notes the official historian (conceding, nonetheless, that they were ‘in themselves severe’).125 Edmonds’ litmus test for ‘moderate’, however, was the first day of the Somme, when Haig lost 57,000 men for a gain of 3.5 square miles.
Haig wrongly believed that the Germans had lost as many men, if not more. The battle had ‘pinned down’ 37 German divisions, he claimed, exhausting many of them, and it had concentrated 70 per cent of German artillery fire that might have been spent on the Russians or French. By that measure, some historians have judged the first month of Third Ypres a success.126 In territorial terms, the Allies had gained eighteen square miles and the high ground at Pilckem Ridge.
The Germans saw the battle very differently. They claimed a series of great victories. At the end of the first day, Rupprecht praised his men for thwarting the British attack. He took particular comfort from the fact that his commanders had scarcely drawn on the battle reserves of Group Wijtschate. His infantry held on for the rest of the month, thanks to their astonishing defensive system and the weather. ‘Yesterday’s attacks,’ Rupprecht wrote on 28 August, ‘were utterly defeated.’127
