by Paul Ham
Lynch tried to apply this advice, to limit ‘the self-torture of a too lively and vivid imagination’: ‘If we could only be inoculated against thinking, how much more bearable this war would be.’2
An overactive imagination often instilled ‘dugout disease’, a crippling state of inertia, as Australian Lieutenant H. R. Williams recalled:
Put men out into holes in the ground where they could see the shells bursting around them and could hear plainly the rattle of machine guns, inure them to exposure of weather and battle, and they would fight whenever occasion arose. Take those same men and put them in a dugout … and let them stew in their fears for several days and they would soon get windy … In the midst of danger and death the man who will force himself to look the unpleasantness straight in the face will retain his courage, but he who tries to cover up his eyes will probably become a gibbering coward. Nothing in war is so cruel, so terrible, so ghastly, as shattered nerves working on the imagination.3
His superior officiers tended to think ‘Tommy Atkins’ could not imagine his situation, and his ignorance explained his astonishing durability. ‘[M]ost of them are not cursed with an imagination, and so don’t worry about what’s coming,’ one officer remarks in The Secret Battle.4 Such observations, common enough, said more about the ignorance of the upper echelons of Britain’s army than the average British soldier’s mental powers. The Tommy was no automaton: his sense of humour pricked the most pompous drivel, his subversive spirit rumbled in the wings of his orders. If he rarely challenged his superiors, or openly ‘reasoned why’, that was not through lack of imagination.
As the men waited for fresh orders, their daily discomforts persisted: the shrieking shells, the hideous scenes, the soft ‘give’ of rotting flesh underfoot, the cold, wet trenches and long, hot days. And when the guns were quiet and darkness fell, the smells remained, the ‘penetrating and filthy stench’, recalled Frank Hawkings, ‘which assailed our noses and filled the atmosphere, a combination of mildew, rotting vegetation and the stink which rises from the decomposing corpses of men and animals. This smell seems to be a permanent fixture in the firing line and there is no mistaking it.’5
Rats fat with the flesh of horses and the unburied dead scuttled along the little ‘dykes’ that separated the shell holes. At night, they loitered among the men, nibbling at their hair and feet. One captain awoke to find a fully grown rat ‘swinging from his nose’, with its teeth sunk in the cartilage.6 Shooting and bayoneting the vermin never seemed to deter them. They penetrated the deepest dugouts and even swam across the shell holes: ‘at night one could see the snouts of rats as they pushed their way across’, Stuart Dolden recalled. ‘We were filled with an instinctive hatred of them, because however one tried to put the thought out of one’s mind, one could not help feeling that they fed on the dead. We waged ceaseless war on them … they were easy prey because owing to their nauseating plumpness they were slow of foot.’7
The rats and lice, the disgusting condition of the trenches, the long hours of intimacy with death, wore down morale and induced a stupefied, eye-hanging exhaustion from which the adrenalin of battle offered a welcome respite: anything was better than shivering in a waterlogged hole.
But no hardship could dislodge the soldier’s craving for sleep. Lieutenant Carlos Paton (‘C. P.’) Blacker of the 2/Coldstream Guards (and future eugenicist), described the sensation:
If you leaned against the side of the trench for more than a short moment, your consciousness would insidiously and insensibly dissolve. Your brain seemed to melt and you slid down into the region of unstable mists. When you felt yourself in danger of slithering into this state, you welcomed a noise of war – a shell or a rifle bullet which roused you.8
Haig remained optimistic, and reconciled to the casualties of August. ‘[I]f we can keep up our effort, final victory may be won in December,’ he wrote on the 19th9 – suggesting, as one critical history observes, that he ‘was quite unaware of what had been occurring’.10 If his optimism seemed faintly macabre, even bizarre, in the circumstances, it was all of a piece with Haig’s iron refusal to let bad news corrode his will to win.
The popular portrayal of the commander-in-chief as callous and out of touch – impassively stroking his moustache, opining on the weather and confiding in his chaplain while the civilised world tore itself apart – overlooks the enigmatic, many-faceted nature of Haig. He was a dedicated soldier who worked ceaselessly in search of a path to victory, a task that eluded every other commander on the Western Front. None had yet found a way to make a decisive breach in the German lines. Messines and Vimy were cracks. What distinguished Haig from the rest, rightly or wrongly, was his determination to act: actions were what counted for him, so long as they were offensive actions, the incessant battering of the enemy’s lines.
In his report to Cabinet on 21 August, he pronounced himself ‘well satisfied’ with the latest operations, ‘although the gain of ground would certainly have been more considerable but for the adverse weather conditions’. The Germans were being worn down, he insisted, and had suffered ‘heavy wastage’ (many years later, he would have the satisfaction of reading Ludendorff’s remarks that bore at least some of this out). Yet Haig’s optimism ran well ahead of events. He utterly misread the strength of the Russian Army, which most commanders had given up on. Indeed, ‘the great mass of Russian soldiers did not want to fight,’ Major General Sir Alfred Knox, the British military attaché in Russia, informed the War Cabinet on 7 September.11 Haig continued to express the hope that ‘very considerable results’ would soon accrue that would ‘greatly facilitate the clearing of the coast’.12
Alas, on 24 August, Haig received news of the failure of the third attempt to capture Gheluvelt Plateau. Even he could not wring something positive from the disaster, and resolved to inject fresh thinking and verve into his generalship. Gough’s reluctance to continue the offensive eased Haig’s task of relieving him. According to a story sourced to the telephonist at Fifth Army Headquarters, when Gough received the sealed envelope containing his fresh orders to attack, he scrawled ‘IMPOSSIBLE’ over the first page, ‘BLOODY IMPOSSIBLE’ on the second, and ‘BULLSHIT’ over the timetable, in thick blue pencil, and sent the pages straight back to Haig.13 Gough was sacked the next day.
On 25 August, Haig transferred the field command to Lieutenant General Plumer, handing responsibility for taking Gheluvelt and Passchendaele to the Second Army, incorporating the Anzacs. It was a blow for Gough, who kept slogging away into early September, with forlorn small-scale missions that achieved nothing, until Haig intervened. Complete control of the offensive now fell to his older, slower, fellow commander.
Even the harshest critics of British High Command concede that Plumer was not a donkey, a butcher or a bungler. Liddell Hart went so far as to call Plumer the closest thing to military genius in a war ‘singularly devoid’ of that quality.14 The red-faced little general with the drooping white moustache took centre stage at a time of serious disenchantment. He was the right man at the wrong time; the tragedy is that Haig failed to choose him first. Even Gough later claimed that Plumer should have commanded Third Ypres from the start, given the latter’s intimate knowledge of the terrain. That oversight may well have been Haig’s biggest mistake of the war, some claim, even though some of Plumer’s offensives would prove costlier than Gough’s.
Belatedly, then, Haig now turned to the champion of Messines. At the commanders’ conference on 25 August, Haig asked Plumer to prepare at once for a new attack, along a frontage of 6800 yards, between the Ypres–Comines Canal and the Ypres–Roulers Railway. Haig insisted that Plumer do what he had advised Gough to do: concentrate every effort on throwing the Germans off the high ground of Gheluvelt between Zonnebeke and Zandvoorde. This area included the most stubborn ‘Boche’ strongholds on the plateau: Inverness Copse (said to have changed hands nineteen times in August), Glencorse Wood, Nonne Bosschen and, beyond them, a patch of blasted stumps that aspired to the name of Polyg
on Wood. Plumer’s Second Army would spearhead this renewed onslaught over the same ground on which Gough had fought in August; the latter’s Fifth Army would play a supportive role on the northern (left) flank. The first phase of this onslaught would be remembered as the Battle of the Menin Road.
Plumer wisely aimed for modest results, and said so, making his achievements look greater than they actually were (Nivelle’s and Gough’s error was to promise much more than they delivered). He led by example, and inspired great loyalty in his staff officers. He and his chief-of-staff, Major General Tim Harington, worked like the cogs of a well-made timepiece, an indispensable element in the Second Army’s success. An emotional, affectionate man, Plumer felt an affinity with the soldier’s lot and intense loyalty to his staff. He would fall into ‘tearful incoherence’ when farewelling them (before he left for Italy, later that year). He enjoyed a fatherly place in the hearts of the men, who nicknamed him ‘Daddy’ and ‘Old Plum’.15
Plumer requested three weeks to prepare; he applied the same meticulous planning as for Messines. He introduced ‘an intensive system of training such as we had never known’, remarked Anthony Eden, the future prime minister, then a young adjutant.16 Plumer insisted on applying the gradual tactics he had advanced from the start: a succession of sharp blows with clearly defined goals, in jumps of no more than 1500 yards a day, focusing all his forces on the Gheluvelt Plateau. They would advance in four stages, or ‘bites’, with a six-day pause (‘hold’) between each.
First advanced by General Rawlinson, and applied successfully at Vimy Ridge and Messines, the concept of ‘bite and hold’ would now take central importance and undergo detailed modifications. In its basic form, as Rawlinson had explained, the attacking troops seized a piece of the enemy’s front, held it against counter-attacks while the guns were brought forward. They would then bite off another chunk of terrain, hold on, wait for the guns, and so on – until they broke through. In this way, the infantry would always stay inside the protective barrage, sealing them off from German counter-attacks. Plumer transformed this rough concept of bite and hold into a meticulously configured plan, mathematically tuned to ensure the precise synchronisation of men and guns. For him, it was the only way to defeat von Lossberg’s system of flexible defence.
Here is how the advanced form of bite and hold worked from the German perspective, as described by the German official history of Flanders:
Take a section of the enemy front twenty kilometres wide and three kilometres deep, batter it for fourteen days with a few thousand guns of all calibres, cover it in a few hundred thousands of gas shells, turn everything completely upside down, until nothing could possibly be still moving as far as is humanly possible – then occupy it by way of ten waves [of infantry] supported by machine guns, tanks and planes proceeding in sequence one after the other and protected by a fiery dome. Then advance the artillery through the shell hole area and prevent the enemy from taking any effective counteraction by continuous barrage fire and unceasing individual attacks. After ten days, you take another section twenty kilometres wide and some kilometres deep and repeat the same calculation. And repeat it until you have reached your goal.17
Indeed, Plumer’s war would be slow and exhausting, across extremely difficult, cratered terrain. And God help them if it rained – a scenario every British and Dominion commander dreaded and every German welcomed. Plumer, a devout Christian, prayed for fine weather in the weeks before the attack. Whatever the outcome, there would be no more talk of reaching Roulers or the Belgian coast before the end of the year. Even the capture of Passchendaele Ridge would involve weeks if not months of bitter fighting, Haig knew. His best hope was to take the village before winter, and hold it until the fighting resumed in the spring of 1918. To that task he now set his mind.
World events were closing in on Flanders, denying Haig any hope of support from Russia and offering little from France. Russia’s armies were ‘fast disintegrating’: July’s Kerensky Offensive had failed, and the spirit of revolution proliferated in the Russian ranks. Thousands were deserting. Lenin’s calls for insurrection were curdling into reality, easing pressure on the German units along the Eastern Front, many of whom were now packing up and heading west. In France, Pétain’s armies were not expected to resume full strength until early 1918, even though six divisions were already serving in Flanders and many more were recovering. The Americans were delayed, and not due to arrive until mid-1918.
The British and the Dominions thus remained the only forces capable of offensive action. This might have counselled restraint, even a defensive war. Instead, Haig felt the imperative to attack, and attack again, even though the original goal, the Belgian coast, could not be reached. Few supported him, or pressed him to persist. The French generals, notably Foch, were against the Flanders Offensive; or, like Pétain, they went along with it because it bought more time for their forces to recover. Haig’s own commanders, notably Gough, had advised against continuing in the conditions. And the prime minister and War Policy Committee were, of course, consistently opposed (even if they failed to act). According to the latest statement to this effect, issued on 20 July, ‘on no account’ should Flanders degenerate into ‘protracted, costly and indecisive operations’ like the Somme.18 Results should be frequently reviewed and the offensive terminated if the casualties were too high or unjustifiable. But nobody in government had closely reviewed the results, and, in a manifest failure of political leadership, the Cabinet did nothing. Government inertia, rather than any overt support, gave Haig and Robertson the nod to keep bashing away.
Then, on 4 September, the thorn in Haig’s side made its presence felt: Lloyd George summoned his commander-in-chief to a meeting of the War Cabinet in London. The prime minister was deeply disturbed. A military strategist he may not have been, but Lloyd George could read a map. August, he noticed, had produced little or no gains for a great many dead and wounded, amid rumours of unspeakable conditions that had shocked the home front.
To his alarm, Haig found himself being assailed by the ghost of an old idea he had thought long dead: moving the attack to the Italian front and fighting a defensive, ‘waiting’ war in the west. Lloyd George disinterred the plan with a fresh proposal: that Haig transfer 100 heavy guns to the Italian front, to assist General Cadorna’s attack on the Austrians.19 The guns were desperately needed, the prime minister said, to reinforce Italian gains made at the eleventh battle of the Isonzo, on the 17th. In the meantime, Haig’s armies should fight a defensive war alongside the French: ‘husband resources during the remainder of 1917’ and ‘embark only on minor operations’ until the French Army recovered and the Americans arrived.20
Haig was contemptuous of the plan: to withdraw a single man or gun from Flanders – or the Western Front at large – would be most unsound policy.21 If the Germans knew the Allies were going to sit and wait, he reasoned, the enemy would attack in great strength – a course that might prove ‘disastrous’. A mere six German divisions had defeated the Kerensky Offensive back in July, he argued (and within a few weeks they would break the Russian lines at Riga).
Nor were the French forces ready for offensive action, he claimed: enervated, gloomy and despondent, the French Army, according to Pétain, fielded not a man on whom he could rely between Switzerland and the British flank. Prone to exaggeration, Pétain (‘trop negatif, trop timide,’ Joffre called him) could be expected cynically to buy time for France at the cost of British lives. Haig took Pétain’s diagnosis on face value in his case against his prime minister. ‘From September on, Haig used the argument of French weakness up to the hilt,’ argues the historian Leon Wolff.22
Haig prevailed, and a majority of the Cabinet cautiously approved the continuation of the Flanders Offensive. The prime minister retained the option of shutting it down should it fail to ‘progress’ to the government’s satisfaction. Haig’s only concession was that he would talk to Pétain about the transfer of guns to Italy. The Cabinet asked him to consider send
ing 50 medium-calibre guns; in the event, he sent a single heavy.
Meanwhile, to Haig’s alarm, the flow of recruits was drying up. Volunteers had disappeared and just 8000 British men had been drafted to arrive in France through September, according to Robertson’s dispatch to GHQ on 17 August. Those numbers would barely replace normal wastage, at present casualty rates. At the commanders’ conference on the 21st, Haig warned that, by the end of October, the British Army would be 100,000 below ‘establishment’, i.e. the prescribed level of men per unit (then 52 divisions of twelve battalions each, or 605,280 men).23 Somehow, more men had to be found.
On 29 August, Plumer submitted his plan for the capture of Gheluvelt Plateau. It would involve four steps, with a break of six days between each to allow time to bring up the guns and supplies. The Australians and New Zealanders would spearhead the offensive. The I Anzac Corps and Second Army’s X Corps would lead, with II Anzac Corps in reserve. At the heart of these vast formations, the restructured 40-man platoon would fulfil the pivotal combat role. As at Messines, every man was trained in a specific job (rifleman, grenade thrower, Lewis gunner, etc.) and integrated into the whole. And if the front line buckled under the blows of the Eingreif, the reserve Anzacs would be ready to counter-attack the counter-attackers.
Leading the Anzacs was a British general of formidable character. At 52, General William Riddell Birdwood – ‘Birdy’ – was the youngest of the field commanders. Privately educated, a Sandhurst man, the son of a colonial administrator in India, Birdwood seemed anything but the right man to lead a bunch of unruly colonials. But he was held in surprising affection among the Australians and New Zealanders, and Charles Bean described him as ‘one of the greatest leaders of men possessed by the British army during the war’.
