by Paul Ham
German losses that August were about 50,000 (20,000 fewer than the Allies), and seventeen of thirty divisions were withdrawn, exhausted.128 That is not to suggest the Germans were deluded into scenting victory: 30,000 men had been killed or wounded in the artillery barrage, as Rupprecht warned the Kaiser. Their counter-attack reserves were depleted; their reserves thinning out; and adequate rations had failed to arrive.
Morale reached a new low, in both armies, at the end of August. The opening battles of Flanders had surpassed ‘the Hell of Verdun’, wrote von Kuhl, and signalled ‘the greatest martyrdom of the World War’. The German defenders had cowered for weeks in ‘water-filled craters … without shelter from weather, hungry and cold, abandoned without pause to overwhelming artillery fire’.129
Their appalling losses alarmed even Ludendorff, no stranger to battles of annihilation. ‘The fighting on the western front,’ he would write, ‘became more severe and costly than any the German Army had yet experienced. From July 31 till well into September was a period of tremendous anxiety [and] caused us very considerable losses in prisoners and stores and a heavy expenditure of reserves … In spite of all the concrete protection they seemed more or less powerless under the enormous weight of the enemy’s artillery. At some points they no longer displayed that firmness which I, in common with the local commanders, had hoped for. I myself was being put to a terrible strain. The state of affairs in the West appeared to prevent the execution of our plans elsewhere. Our wastage had been so high as to cause grave misgivings and exceeded all expectation.’130
Yet despite their commanders’ alarm, and Haig’s convictions to the contrary, the German soldiers were not close to breaking, reckoned Colonel Macleod, a Fifth Army officer, in mid-August. Indeed, the German ‘frontline hogs’ were proving astonishingly resilient. One Eingreif company commander said at this time:
If I live to be one hundred, the memories of the days [in Flanders] will never be extinguished. Here the true greatness of the defensive battle revealed itself in full. It requires enormous reserves of morale and courage to hold out in muddy shell holes for seven long days on end despite bad weather and ceaseless concentrated artillery fire. What each man in his lonely shell hole achieved deserves to be set down in letters of gold in the history of this war.131
If German morale held, British spirits appeared to be slipping. Many soldiers fathomed their darkest place thus far in the war. Many lost faith in the offensive. British captives were starting to express disillusionment. ‘British prisoners,’ Rupprecht wrote on 16 August, ‘are saying – and this has never been heard before – that they wished that they had shot their own officers who were leading them into the slaughterhouse. They have had enough of this butchery!’ A week later, fresh captives told their German interrogators how little faith they had in their officers; and captured officers blamed the failure on their commanders. None thought ‘there is any chance of defeating Germany without American assistance’.132
The wanton losses, the rain and mud, had dragged proud British units to their knees. ‘How could all these dashed hopes fail to dishearten us?’ wrote an officer of the London Rifle Brigade. ‘After seeing the pitiful remains of the battalion … something like disgust with the British tactics made itself felt.’133 Captain Yoxall was not the only officer to report ‘several cases of attempted desertion and some self-inflicted wounds’.134
A bitter joke began to circulate. Who, the Tommies wondered, would take rations up to the last man? A morbid fatalism took hold of some. It was no longer a case of ‘When I go on leave’ but rather ‘If I get out of this’. The Dominions, too, were underwater. The morale of the Australian 4th Division was at ‘its lowest ebb’135 even before Third Ypres, after their brutal encounters at Bullecourt and Messines. Many Anzacs were unable to withstand shellfire any longer, ‘due to the long and continuous strain they had been under’.136 If this was how they felt before August, one can only imagine their state of mind at the end of it.
Even Britain’s sanguine official historian was moved to write:
[T]he strain of fighting with indifferent success had overwrought and discouraged all ranks more than any other operation fought by British troops in the War … The memory of this August fighting, with its heavy showers, rain-filled craters and slippery mud, was so deeply impressed on the combatants … that it has remained the image and symbol of the whole battle.137
The possibility that conditions might get worse was simply inconceivable. Distressed the men surely were, but they had not yet reached the lower circles of Passchendaele. Through his reddening rage, Lloyd George saw only further, futile carnage.
9
THOSE WHO WALKED BESIDE YOU
My own darling Mother,
Death is no horror to me … I look forward to it though one would not be human if one did not shrink from the actual ordeal. Even the Master shrank for a moment in Gethsemane but he won the day … So farewell dear old Mum and AU REVOIR for if you get this letter I shall have passed into that other and more glorious sphere …
Reverend E. Victor Tanner, in a letter to be sent home in the event of his death
Who accompanied the soldier, in body or spirit, on his journey into this hell? Certainly not the generals or the politicians, many of whom were largely ignorant of the actual conditions at the front (Winston Churchill, who had commanded a battalion in Flanders in 1916, was an exception). Post-war generations have seized on images of blimpish generals luxuriating in chateaux ten to twenty miles behind the front, quaffing French red and sucking on cigars, while the men slogged away in the mud. The commanders never visited the trenches, it is claimed, and relied on battle reports and eyewitness accounts, many of which they dismissed as inaccurate or too alarming for circulation – for example, Charteris’s dismissal of the Tank Corps report.
In fairness, Haig and his staff familiarised themselves with the terrain, and moved GHQ to the forward areas before battle.1 Haig himself complained as early as November 1914 of the French generals’ refusal to ‘go forward to visit their troops … They rely too much on telegrams and written reports on regiments.’2 Plumer, Birdwood and Gough were well aware of the general conditions, as were the divisional commanders. Most officers, from brigadier down to second lieutenant, had seen or fought in the Salient. And Charteris, Haig’s intelligence chief, visited the front several times in 1917 and was well aware of the conditions. On 4 August, for example, he described the battlefield as ‘a sea of mud churned up by shell-fire’.3 With what degree of urgency he transmitted this to Haig is less clear.
The senior commanders could hardly be expected, in a total war, to lead from the front. Their responsibilities far exceeded those of today’s commanders. They measured their power in vast armies and weapons systems spread over hundreds of square miles, demanding a multitude of visits, dispatches and telephone calls per day. They beheld a battleground conforming to broad contours on huge coloured maps. They could not possibly have commanded all this by candlelight in a frontline dugout. Their gaze traversed horizons, far beyond the trench lines. Modern communications, chiefly the telephone, had transformed the role of commander into a kind of conductor (as Monash saw himself), who stood back to survey the big picture.
Nor were the generals always safe; their lives were more at risk during the First than in the Second World War. Prized sniper targets, many of them were easily identifiable by their red tabs, paunches and white moustaches. Of 1252 British generals in World War One, 78 were killed in action or died of wounds, and 146 were wounded or taken prisoner, according to a recent BBC report.4 They included General Tom Bridges, who would lose a leg at Passchendaele. The last thing on their minds was the thought that they would be condemned or satirised a century on for failing to rub their noses deep enough in the mud of Ypres.
The direction of the war, for better or worse, depended on keeping them alive. Haig’s headquarters was sensibly situated at Montreuil-sur-Mer, on the river Canche, near Étaples, a castle embedded in a hillside wi
thin a two-hour drive of Ypres and easy access to the Channel. He resided three miles south-west, in the Chateau de Beaurepaire, modest by French standards, and far less opulent than the Chateau de Querrieu, General Rawlinson’s sprawling billet on the Somme.
On the other hand, the defenders of High Command seem to have let the pendulum swing to the other extreme, almost as if the older men in the rear could not be expected to feel sympathy or concern for the men at the front. Part of the trouble was the generals’ experiential ignorance of the combat conditions. Modern battle was unrecognisable from the days of their youth. None had fought in a gas mask or inhaled poison gas; none had seen a heavily burdened soldier drown in a shell hole; none had attacked behind, or sat in the path of, a creeping barrage; none had thrown a modern grenade in anger or ridden a tank into battle. They were too old and too highly ranked to participate in combat. That hardly exonerated their failure to fully comprehend the reality of what they were asking their men to do. This chasm between the commanders’ and the soldiers’ battle experience began to sow resentment, especially between young officers who had lost most of their platoons or companies, and the generals who had ordered them to attempt a plainly impossible task.
There is a well-told story of General Launcelot Kiggell, who visited the front after the awful month of August. As his chauffeur pulled up on the threshold of the battlefield, Kiggell gasped through tear-filled eyes. ‘Good God,’ he is reported to have said, ‘did we really send men to fight in that?’5 Haig’s haters have used the story to prove how out of touch the generals were; Haig’s defenders have discredited it. There is no record of Kiggell making the remark. That does not mean he did not say it (not everything a commander said was taken down or minuted, of course). The larger point, however, is that regardless of whether the conditions shocked Kiggell, they certainly should have bothered him – the implication being, if Haig and his corps commanders had been similarly aware of the extremity of the conditions, they might have paused to think harder about whether to persist.
A more credible high-level discussion about the state of the terrain proceeded between Colonel C. D. Baker-Carr and a group of British generals. Baker-Carr was trying to impress upon them an understanding of the front, of which he had had close experience. Afterward, Brigadier John Davidson drew Baker-Carr aside and reprimanded him for his effrontery.
Baker-Carr: You asked me how things really were and I told you frankly.
Davidson: But what you say is impossible.
Baker-Carr: It isn’t. Nobody has any idea of the conditions up there.
Davidson: But they can’t be as bad as you make out.
Baker-Carr: Have you been there yourself?
Davidson: No.
Baker-Carr: Has anyone at O.A. been there?
Davidson: No.
Baker-Carr: Well then, if you don’t believe me, it would be as well to send someone up to find out.6
Later, Baker-Carr would write, with disgust:
I am absolutely convinced that the department responsible for the staging of the Ypres offensive had not the remotest conception of the state of affairs … To anyone familiar with the terrain in Flanders it was almost inconceivable that this part of the line should have been selected. If a careful search had been made from the English Channel to Switzerland, no more unsuitable spot could have been discovered.7
The politicians were ignorant of the conditions in this battle of mud, to which they had sent so many thousands of young men. The matter was barely discussed. In the privacy of the War Cabinet, one might have expected to hear a full and frank debate about the terrible proceedings in Flanders. Instead, Third Ypres merited little comment at the top table. Conspicuous by its absence from the minutes between August and the end of the year was any serious discussion of the terrain, casualties and tactics over which the prime minister would later express so much vitriol, guilt and regret; and no examination of whether the offensive should be terminated, as the Cabinet had promised to do if it hit a snag. The War Policy Committee did not even meet that month, and would not reconvene until 24 September. Un-minuted, off-the-record discussions were held in committee rooms and corridors, and over telephones. But at the highest level of government, a curious silence reigned over Third Ypres, interrupted now and then by passing remarks on Haig’s latest lunge.
Certainly, the ministers were exceedingly busy. A queue of demands preyed on their time: the collapse of Russia, the oil supplies, manpower, the U-boat war. On the other hand, they often found themselves steeped in arcane debates that seemed, at best, a misplaced sense of their priorities and, at worst, a case of thoughtless indifference to the suffering of the troops. On 2 August, for example, the morning after the disastrous first day of Third Ypres, the Cabinet raised, as the first subject for discussion, whether to grant the King’s commission to Indian soldiers, hitherto denied an officer’s rank ‘owing to the unwillingness of the War Office to concede the principle of giving Indians command over Europeans’.8
The packed Cabinet heard every angle of this essentially racist policy. Conceding that thousands of Indian soldiers had given their lives for the Empire, the Cabinet nonetheless felt that no British, Anzac or Canadian soldier would serve under a ‘coloured’ officer. There would be ‘trouble’. An agenda item that should have been swiftly decided in the Indians’ favour, granting them the same rank as Anglo-Saxons, absorbed several hours and reached the wrong conclusion. The Flanders Offensive, the greatest land battle since the Somme, merited a single paragraph of comment that day, containing the line, ‘The British casualties up to noon yesterday were 25,000.’9 No sign there of Lloyd George steaming up about the methods of attrition he later claimed he had so vehemently opposed.
As August dragged on, the Cabinet had many other things on their minds. On 11 August, they devoted hours to the wording of a personal letter against Labour leader Arthur Henderson, who had had the temerity to propose an international conference on settling the war. Ministers were determined to find ways of keeping Britain in the fight, yet they barely discussed the fighting. The Cabinet briefly reviewed operations and debated alternative strategies, but the progress of the campaign, by which Lloyd George later claimed to have been so horrified, was rarely examined. On 17 August, at the peak of the nightmare in Flanders that month, a single paragraph in the minutes concluded, ‘The weather on the Western Front was bad.’10
Yet by any measure – body count, failure to advance, German resistance – the first month of Third Ypres had been an unmitigated disaster and warranted serious Cabinet attention. The Battle of Pilckem Ridge formed a template for the whole month, as Prior and Wilson attest: ‘The most that could follow from what had been achieved was a succession of similar operations, carried out spasmodically as guns could be brought forward.’11 The guns could not be brought forward through mud in pouring rain; troops who outpaced (or fell behind) the creeping barrage were slaughtered. Haig would soon act on his disappointment, and replace Gough’s wasteful methods with Plumer’s ‘bite and hold’ tactics. That lesson, however, had involved a month of avoidable carnage.
August’s failures acquire a Nivellean dimension when stacked against the grandeur of Haig’s ambitions, because whatever advantage a few ridges in a drenched corner of Flanders yielded, it fell well short of the master plan he had so confidently presented to the War Cabinet. In that scenario, Passchendaele was supposed to have been in his hands by now.
Lloyd George had given an undertaking to halt the offensive if it failed to progress. Instead, he sat on his hands and watched. Often, he failed to attend Cabinet meetings, preferring to stay at the estates of powerful friends. He tuned in when the Italian alternative captivated him. On 27 August, for example, he telegraphed the Cabinet, urging the immediate transfer of guns to Italy. Robertson struck this down as disastrous for morale and an admission of defeat on the Western Front.12
The press, as so often in wartime, underplayed or misreported the truth. But censorship could not incubate the British, Domin
ion and German people for long. Rumours of dozy generals sending thousands to needless deaths, of men wading into battle through fields of mud, of men sitting in shell holes waiting to die, filtered home. The slaughter met with incomprehension and anger, fuelled by the anti-war left, the fledgling British Labour and German Social Democratic parties.
Senior politicians were losing faith in the war, as news of Third Ypres reached home. Some came around to Lord Lansdowne’s view that the case for continuing was not worth the sacrifice. Even the Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law succumbed to a bout of defeatism, confiding in the prime minister that he felt the great Flanders Offensive doomed. ‘[I]n speaking to Robertson yesterday,’ he wrote on 18 September, ‘I said to him that I had absolutely lost all hope of anything coming of Haig’s offensive and though he did not say so in so many words, I understand that he took the same view … It is evident, therefore, that the time must soon come when we will have to decide whether or not this offensive is to be allowed to go on …’13
Yet the war would go on. Parliament and the press would not tolerate a negotiated or, as the War Cabinet saw it, a ‘dishonourable’ peace. The German regime was of the same mind. Nothing less than unconditional surrender would satisfy the belligerents, implying the reduction of Europe’s greatest civilisations to insensate husks. Until that was achieved, it was treasonable or socialist to question the point of the war.
When Lloyd George snapped, in an impromptu speech, ‘we shall just win’, a radical journal had the gall to reply, ‘Win What?’14 Nobody had a clear answer, because the war aims had shifted beyond those invoked when the Entente Powers declared war: to punish German aggression, liberate Belgium, reclaim Alsace-Lorraine, avenge an archduke’s murder. Now, they were fighting for vague or open-ended goals, of a very different magnitude: pure vengeance, and to defend their regimes, empires and economic systems – within which less than one per cent of the people controlled or owned the capital of Europe15 – from both the enemy without and the enemy within.
