by Paul Ham
Bean explains this ‘fit’ with his usual acuity, boiling it down to a single, winning formula: Birdy saw the man, not the manner. He looked beyond accent, dress, rank, name, title, quality of boots, hair style – outward shows by which an English officer might instantly assess an English soldier – to the character of the man himself. He chatted with and moved among the Aussies and New Zealanders under his command. He had a rich sense of humour, goading them to write to their wives and sweethearts – ‘because if you don’t they will write to me’.24 He wore a big slouch hat, and loved to swim off Anzac Cove at Gallipoli, often within range of Turkish fire. Perhaps his most appealing features, in the eyes of the Australians, were his extreme, even foolhardy bravery – ‘only once was he known to “duck”’ – and his willingness to get out in the field.25 Birdwood cleaved to notions of honour, self-respect, loyalty and fairness, and vigorously opposed any action that degraded those ideals. This appealed straight to the Anzac heart at Gallipoli, where he commanded the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, and bravely led their evacuation of the beaches, ironically the greatest success of that doomed venture, from which the Anzacs emerged with honour intact.
If Birdwood was later criticised for not protesting enough against orders to enact the impossible, his men would never scorn to serve under him as they had Gough, whom they now accused of using them as ‘storm troops’.26 (With tearful eyes, Birdwood later explained to an Australian brigade how he had tried to dissuade Gough from the disastrous attack at Bullecourt.) Other generals deserved similar recognition – notably, at divisional level, the Australian Sir John Monash and the Canadian Sir Arthur Currie. Yet Plumer and Birdwood would play the critical role in the coming September offensives, and the way in which they inspired their men helped deliver a series of stunning victories.
Plumer decided, at first, to concentrate the main thrust along a 4000-yard front, handing 2800 yards to Gough’s men on the left flank to the north. The battle’s spearhead would emerge from a triangle whose axes, like a pair of open scissors, began at Ypres and diverged at Hellfire Corner, a fittingly named, perennially bombed point a mile east of the city. The northern blade ran along the Ypres–Roulers railway to touch the Gheluvelt Plateau at Broodseinde, and the southern blade ran along the Menin Road, to touch the plateau at Clapham Junction (see Map 5).27
On the ground, the grassy ramparts and dirty moat of Ypres’ eastern edge gave onto abandoned fields, covered in thickening clusters of craters and the occasional ruin. Further east, the names on the maps bore little relation to the scene on the ground: a few leafless, broken trunks remained of the forest that had surrounded Bellewaerde Chateau, itself a ruin, and the nearby lake ‘resembled some foul pool left in a hollow of an upheaved ocean bed’.28 Beyond, the terrain and its few identifiers had surrendered so completely to the machinery of war that the word ‘stream’ or ‘beek’ meant a stinking swamp of detritus and decomposition; a ‘village’, a graze of bricks and tiles flung amid unburied corpses (Hooge, for example, had been ‘completely erased’, the site marked by a cluster of mine craters and the original road untraceable);29 and a ‘wood’ or ‘copse’, snatches of beheaded saplings hanging like mutilated scarecrows over the dead countryside. Such was the state of Polygon Wood, a vital point on the Plateau and the ultimate goal of the offensive. Packed inside this Gheluvelt triangle were the usual German strongholds, the ubiquitous pillboxes lining the distant spurs, amid lines and lines of trenches rolling back to Passchendaele Ridge and beyond. All of it was ‘exceptionally important’ to the Germans, as Ludendorff later wrote, for observation and cover.30
Upon this blameless scrape of earth, Plumer now meant to visit a torrent of fire on a scale mankind had never inflicted on his fellow man, at the end of which all German soldiers caught inside the triangle should be dead, mutilated or incoherent. To this end, he ordered up an unprecedented number of heavy and medium guns. His astonishing demands were largely met, thanks to the efforts of the new minister of munitions, the precociously talented Winston Churchill, rehabilitated to the Cabinet after taking the fall for Gallipoli.
Under Churchill’s dispensation, Plumer would receive a further 1295 guns (575 medium and heavy, and 720 field guns and howitzers)31 – 350 fewer than he ordered but more than double the number allocated to Gough to attack the same stretch of front on 31 July. This time, the British guns would fire 1.65 million of three million available rounds into a smaller area, over just seven days, amounting to a shell density of about three to four times the density of 31 July, and almost double the concentration (a ratio of one gun to every 11.8 yards of front, against the previous one to eighteen yards).32
The heaviest (9.2-inch, 12-inch and 15-inch howitzers) would target the blockhouses. They began firing at the end of August, and built to a crescendo over the following three weeks. An improved fuse system ensured that each shell burst the moment the nose hit the ground, minimising the ‘cratering’ effect and maximising the destruction.33 If that were not enough, Plumer planned to blanket the enemy batteries in gas, and intersperse the barrage with machine-gun fire (I Anzac, for example, would deploy eleven machine-gun companies, equipped with 174 guns). The ultimate aim of this conflagration was the destruction or disabling of every soldier, pillbox, machine-gun position, wire belt, OP and telephone exchange in the path of the attack.
In short, the Allies were about to witness, and the Germans to feel, the most concentrated bombardment ever wrought in warfare, a veritable wall of flame and steel hurled at the strongest point of the enemy lines on the Western Front. And while it prescribed hell on earth for Crown Prince Rupprecht’s men lining the Gheluvelt Plateau, it aimed to preserve British and Anzac lives.
The three-week delay deceived the Germans into thinking Third Ypres was over. ‘The Flanders fight seems actually to have ended,’ Rupprecht wrote in his diary on 12 September. ‘We can consider pulling out several divisions.’ His chief of staff, General von Kuhl, agreed, though he found it hard to believe the ‘stubborn English’ had given up.34 British prisoners attested to the ‘fact’, however, claiming that an offensive further south was planned. The sporadic sound of the heavy guns had not, yet, portended anything unusual – bombardments were common – and the strange lull bred dreams of an armistice.
The rain stopped. The sunlight and the drying ground, the return of familiar sounds – birdsong, the neigh of horses, or just the novelty of calm – dared many soldiers to hope for a reprieve.
The Germans were deceiving themselves. Plumer packed every ounce of energy and action into those few weeks. Within the next seventeen days, 156 trainloads carrying 54,572 tons of matériel arrived at the railheads, all of which had to be trucked, entrained, dragged or carried on mule-back to the front.35 Light tramways were hastily reconstructed and roads rebuilt out of wooden planks. Shell holes were filled in and stamped down; gun emplacements firmly laid; telephone lines unrolled and buried; rations and medical supplies prepared and brought forward – all of which proceeded within range of German shellfire. Miles of duckboards were laid, latticing the drying plain, connecting little islands and ridges of high ground in the hardening mud. The men trained all day, rehearsing new platoon tactics, pillbox flanking manoeuvres and how to coordinate their advance with the creeping barrage, worked out to mathematical certainty.
Overhead, 26 squadrons of the Royal Flying Corps buzzed about the skies, mostly on reconnaissance missions to locate and photograph German targets, or on strafing raids of the enemy’s reserve lines and railheads. The mosquito-like whine of the British planes was easily distinguishable from the phut-putting beat of the twin-engine German aircraft. Daily, they engaged in great aerial duels, the ‘flying circuses’ of the sky that produced the ‘aces’ of legend. Among the British: Rhys Davids, James McCudden, Mick Mannock and Billy Bishop. And the Germans: Werner Voss, Hermann Goering and, the greatest of them all, the ‘Red Baron’, Captain Manfred von Richthofen. Rhys Davids achieved the most lethal – and reckless – reputation of the Britis
h, notching up more than twenty ‘kills’, including the shooting down of Voss.36 Daily the infantry, lying back in their trenches, witnessed the aerial theatrics of these agile little aircraft, spinning, diving and chasing each other, the loser hurtling to earth in flames and exploding in a pall of smoke.37
The weather answered Plumer’s prayers and shone on his deliberations, teasing him with hopes of a dry month. His commanders were similarly buoyant. Two weeks before ‘zero’ – dawn, on 20 September – the ‘softening up’ intensified, and soon reached a level of unparalleled destructive power.
The first waves moved up on the nights of 18 and 19 September: 65,000 men of eighteen assault brigades, armed to the teeth, advanced quietly along a four-mile line of trenches and shell holes.
Zero was fixed for 5.40 am. A light drizzle turned to rain around 11 pm, and Gough advised Plumer to delay the offensive. Plumer consulted ‘Meteor’, Ernest Gold, for the weather report: fair in the immediate future, and the ground ‘go-able’, he said. The rain ceased after midnight. The stars were visible. The attack would proceed.
In the pre-dawn hours, the troops moved up to the jumping-off tapes – in some places, a mere 150 yards from the enemy OPs. By 4.30 am, most units were in place: thousands of men grounded in trenches and shell holes, ready to rise at the sound of the whistle. Some spilled into no-man’s-land, so congested were the lines. German guns were busy firing throughout this advance, killing or wounding at least half the officers of one Australian battalion before they reached the front.
The German ranks heard rumours of an imminent attack, and nervously fired bright-coloured flares into the night to try to locate the enemy spreading out on the plain below them. The capture that morning of an Australian officer in possession of the battle plan confirmed their fears, and a blast of German ‘annihilation fire’ tore into the British front at 5.36 am, four minutes before zero. It caused confusion and light casualties. At any rate, the German wireless warnings were too late: Plumer’s creeping artillery barrage had begun.
The barrage was like a mechanical hurricane, of a density ‘beyond all precedent’, flailing the earth and air with heavy explosive, smoke and shrapnel in a 1000-yard band divided into five belts, each 200 yards wide, lifting in 100-yard increments every four minutes (later slowing to 100 yards every six minutes). Behind this protective curtain, tens of thousands of troops, relieved to be in action at last, a cigarette on the lips of every man,38 rose ‘like spectres out of the mist’ and made for the German front.39 The conditions were very different from those Gough’s men had encountered a month ago: the barrage was far denser; the limit of the advance half as far; and the battlefield dry and hardened by the September sun.
September started badly in the German lines. An epidemic of gastro-intestinal illnesses had depleted the reserves: ‘The cause,’ noted a report on their fighting ability, had been ‘wet conditions in the craters and dugouts and the stink of rotting corpses which is poisoning the air. Despite clearance of the area many corpses must be concealed in the mud and water-filled craters.’40 Virtually every man in one regiment suffered from illness.
Fresh Bavarian units began arriving on 10 September to relieve the exhausted Württembergers in the frontline shell holes, who dissolved into the night, happy to be released at last. And now, as the British bombardment increased the Bavarians climbed into the craters. They got no sleep. Their immediate job was to link the craters with ‘crawl trenches’. They started digging, swapping their guns for their trenching tools. They had no barbed wire to their front, the troops noticed, with mounting despair. They felt as though they had been abandoned. And, in a sense, they were right.
In the hours before dawn on the 20th, the British guns crashed down on the German lines with ‘ludicrous violence’. The survivors were numb with shock: ‘utter chaos’ … ‘dead and wounded lay everywhere’ … a ‘hell of steel splinters’, as a few survivors later recalled. Some went raving mad, reported one eyewitness. When a direct hit killed fourteen of his comrades, all of whom died instantly, ‘with hardly a murmur’, a signalman standing nearby ‘went off his head’: ‘We had to restrain him, binding him tightly, because he had been rushing around, lashing out and foaming at the mouth.’41
As the sun rose, members of a German machine-gun company then coming up the line passed through the ruins of Zonnebeke. They witnessed ‘nothing but death’: ‘Rotting, stinking horses were sprawled all over the roads and wagons simply drove over them.’ They arrived at the ‘Red House’, a ruin in a massive crater field not far from the front, and ‘sat in silence’, wondering when they would receive a direct hit. ‘[M]y men stared glassily into the middle distance, their cigarettes smouldering,’ wrote Reserve Leutnant Kotthoff. ‘We were surrounded by crashes, explosions and an unbelievable racket as though we were in the midst of Hell.’42
The German forward command posts telephoned for flares, to help guide in their own artillery. But the shelling had mutilated the phone lines. Instead, runners raced to and fro with orders, and message dogs and pigeons were dispatched. Few lived to deliver their messages. The men huddled like animals, locked together in terror in their craters. ‘Normal command’ ceased to exist. The barrage levelled all rank. In Passchendaele village, a soldier witnessed heavy rounds exploding around a large crucifix – ‘Christ covered in filth’ – exposed through the gaping roof of the church.43
At last, the Germans saw in the distance the approach of waves of Anzac and British troops, their hunched forms visible through the gaps in the smoke-shell and the dawn mist. Two Anzac divisions formed the arrowhead, and their esprit de corps was at its height. The rest of the infantry came forward fast on their heels, to escape the German shells, which fell harmlessly behind them. The fact that German gunners were still in operation was an astonishing testament to their resilience.
The Anzac arrowhead advanced in thousands of little groups of seven to eight men known as ‘worm columns’, filing along the duck-boards, scrambling in and out of the craters, creeping beneath the ridgelines.44 Each man carried a waterproof sheet, 220 extra rounds, two rifle-grenades, four empty sandbags, an extra ration, an iron ration and two full water bottles, as well as his usual kit.45
They emerged from the smoke with bayonets fixed and hand grenades raised. The first Germans they encountered were broken. ‘For us it was all over,’ recalled Unteroffizier Ludwig Schmidt. ‘It was a matter of hands up, drop equipment and throw away ammunition.’ Schmidt claimed that some British (or Anzacs) had been ‘drunk’; he was struck in the groin with a rifle butt for keeping bullets in his pockets. A comrade was shot in the back while making his way to the rear.
When they saw the outline of a pillbox through the smoke, every Anzac in the vicinity concentrated on it, flanking and disabling it with Lewis guns or grenades. As the pillboxes burned, great palls of black smoke rose over the battlefield.
At the Albrecht lines, the attacking troops found Germans sitting, dazed and demoralised beside their unfired machine guns, surrounded by the dead and dying. Many were eager to surrender, and greeted the arrival of the Anzacs and Tommies with a flutter of white handkerchiefs and streaming bandages.
A string of German bunkers fell to Plumer’s men: the British 23rd Division captured the infuriatingly resistant Inverness Copse, overcoming fierce pockets of German resistance. The 1st Australian Division walked into Glencorse Wood virtually unopposed. The enemy amounted to a knot of machine guns, which were swiftly silenced.
By 7.45 am, two hours after zero, the Anzac and British forces had captured Nonne Bosschen (Nun’s Wood), a wasteland of mud-filled craters, and the western fringe of Polygon Wood. Shocked German garrisons spilled out of their concrete shelters, with their hands raised: ‘at least nine machine guns were captured unfired, together with the crews, listless alongside them’.46 The 2nd Australian Division had equal success in the Hanebeek swamp, where the Germans gave up after perfunctory resistance. Several drowning men had to be dragged out of the mud. The Australians gain
ed the far slope, the Anzac House spur, and captured the huge pillbox, a vital observation point. The surviving Germans ran away.
The Seabrook brothers were there. They entrained for Flanders in September, and reached Dikkebus, south-west of Ypres, on the 13th. All three were in the same unit: the 17th Battalion of the 5th Brigade, 2nd Australian Division. On the morning of the 20th, the battalion faced an extremely difficult task: to pierce the Wilhelm Stellung between Westhoek and Garter Point, just north of Polygon Wood, and capture the green line. Every man wore a piece of green cloth on the back of his helmet to designate his goal. The huge, well-defended pillbox ‘Anzac’ lay in their path.47
‘Troops left at midnight for the firing line,’ Tom Bowman, a friend of Keith Seabrook’s, wrote in his diary that morning. ‘Keith very pale and anxious … final handshake very spontaneous and affectionate.’48 They moved up in drizzle, ‘in single file along the slippery duck-board tracks laid over the uptorn country-side, towards the Menin Road’.49
Bowman never saw Keith alive again. A few days later, he heard that en route to the front, a mile beyond Hellfire Corner, fragments of a phosphorus shell had seriously wounded the young lieutenant and killed or wounded eight of his men.50 ‘[W]e were in single file walking along the duckboard,’ said a witness. ‘[Keith] was marching first of the platoon.’51 Corporal James Abbey later told the Red Cross that he had personally dressed Keith’s wounds, ‘but they were of such a nature that I do not think it advisable to let his people know what they were’.52 Stretcher-bearers bore the wounded man to a dressing station, and thence to a casualty clearing station near Poperinghe. His skull had been fractured in several places. It was Keith’s first day in the line.
Brothers George and Theo marched on with the battalion, passing through Glencorse Wood. At 3.30 am, they made their last preparations for the attack. Whether they had seen their younger brother’s body is unknown, but ‘surely they must have heard that Keith was seriously wounded and was being transported to a dressing station’.53
