Passchendaele

by Paul Ham

  The fighting ceased at 8.15 pm. A silent night ensued. The men rose from their holes like ghosts. The capture of Polygon Wood was the most complete Allied victory after Messines. Again, it came at a huge cost: 15,375 men killed, wounded and missing, for the capture of 3.5 square miles; in other words, 4400 casualties per square mile, far worse than Menin Road.88

  Among the dead was Lieutenant Colonel Oswald Croshaw, a British officer serving with the Australians, whose chaplain called him ‘the bravest soldier, the most God-fearing christian, and the most perfect gentleman I have ever known’. ‘Gentlemen, your men before yourselves,’ Croshaw had told his officers before the attack. ‘God bless you lads, till we meet again.’ Unusually, he led from the front, until a German shell struck and killed him.89

  The number of Germans killed, wounded and missing that day is unclear, though likely to be fewer than the Allies’. A German history calculates total German losses between 11 and 30 September at 38,500, and the British/Anzac at 36,000.90 Allied losses were in fact higher. Yet, in the last days of September, German casualties had been so severe that fresh formations were rushed to Flanders to relieve the exhausted troops: such was the importance the German commanders placed on Passchendaele Ridge.

  Nine Victoria Crosses were earned that day, most of them posthumous. Among them was the Australian Private Patrick Bugden, 22, who led a small party to capture a machine gun and pillbox that were delaying the advance. He took several prisoners, and rescued five wounded men, under fire, dragging them to safety. Two days later, a sniper shot him. ‘He kept fighting until he was killed,’ notes the Australian War Memorial.91 Sergeant William Burman went forward alone, killed a German gunner and carried the gun to his objective, where he ‘used it with great effect’. Later, he outflanked enemy troops who were enfilading his battalion, killed six and captured two officers and 29 other ranks.92 Corporal Ernest Albert Egerton raced through heavy mist to silence a German dugout, killing three enemy troops, after which 29 surrendered, ‘relieving in less than 30 seconds an extremely difficult situation’. Second Lieutenant Hugh Colvin single-handedly entered and cleared several dugouts that were blocking his battalion’s advance, taking about 50 prisoners – an act that largely ensured the ‘complete success’ of the attack.93

  There were crimes of vengeance, as in all wars. When a burst of gunfire from a surrendered German pillbox wounded Captain F. L. Moore, a much-loved officer, his men surrounded the prisoners and would have exterminated the lot had Australian officers not intervened. In this murderous moment, uninvolved German soldiers were bayoneted. One Victorian grimly fixed his bayonet while his tearful prisoner sat pleading for mercy. ‘The Germans in this case,’ writes Bean, ‘were entirely innocent, but such incidents are inevitable in the heat of battle, and any blame for them lies with those who make wars, not with those who fight them.’94 Moore later died of his wounds.

  On 28 September, Robertson informed the War Cabinet of the string of victories. All the German counter-attacks had been repulsed and ‘our troops retained all the ground that they had captured’. He chose not to reveal that the September battles had gained 2750 yards at a cost of more than 36,000 casualties. Nor did he comment on the fact that the Belgian coast could not be won that year. Haig had known this since 23 September, when he cancelled the amphibious attack on the coast, a centrepiece of the plan to destroy the U-boat bases. From that point on, unknown to the soldiers, the Allies were fighting not to seize geographic objectives but to ‘attrit’ – to kill or wound as many of the enemy as possible.

  Lloyd George visited Haig’s headquarters in Montreuil-sur-Mer on the 26th, and dined with the field marshal. Haig took pains to show the prime minister his recent victories on a map. He was determined to buttress the case for continuing the offensive, even though both men knew the original goal of the Belgian coast had been abandoned.

  ‘The enemy is undoubtedly considerably shaken,’ Haig told the prime minister. ‘Our troops are elated and confident; those on the enemy’s side cannot but be depressed and we have good evidence of it. In the circumstances it is beyond question that our offensive must be pursued as long as possible …’ The enemy had suffered ‘considerable wastage’ and would most likely commence the new year with ‘500,000 to 600,000 reserves at his disposal’, of low fighting value. At the present rate of attrition, Haig delighted in informing the prime minister, ‘the enemy’s man power will be running out next May or June at the latest’.95

  Lloyd George was unconvinced. ‘I found there an atmosphere of unmistakable exaltation,’ he later wrote. ‘It was not put on. Haig was not an actor. He was radiant. He was quiet, there was no swagger …’ He added, with characteristic disdain:

  It naturally pleased Haig to have carefully chosen and nicely cooked little titbits of ‘intelligence’ about broken German divisions, heavy German casualties, and diminishing German morale served up to him every day and all day. He beamed satisfaction and confidence. His great plan was prospering. The whole atmosphere of this secluded little community reeked of that sycophantic optimism which is the curse of autocratic power in every form.96

  Lloyd George penned these venomous vignettes many years later. At the time, he listened and looked impressed, but his mind was far from Flanders. Haig’s plans ceased to engage his active interest, at a critical moment in the September battles, when a tactical victory looked feasible. The prime minister’s thoughts orbited Italy, and had done for weeks, spurred on by General Cadorna’s success on the Italian front on 26 August.

  During his visit, Lloyd George asked to see the German prisoners, of whom he’d heard poor reports. He was shown over a suitably bedraggled mob, corralled in cages. He thought them a ‘weedy lot … deplorably inferior to the manly samples I had seen in earlier stages of the War’, and noted the ‘good spirit’ of ‘our own army’.97

  11

  ODYSSEY OF THE WOUNDED

  [P]erhaps the most terrible thing of all was the laughter and tears of the shell-shocked cases. I found that hard to stand. Every effort to quiet them failed.

  Reverend Julian Bickersteth

  The poor gassed beggars kept grabbing at things and I saw one man grab at his own hand and smash his fingers out of joint. One man tore his mouth nearly back to his ear trying to pull the gas out of his throat.

  Private Edward Lynch

  The battles of August and September posed an unprecedented challenge to the stretcher parties: the sheer concentration of casualties, scattered across a moonscape of mud. Never before had the bearers encountered so many wounded inside a few square miles. There was about one stretcher case to every three walking-wounded; and for every man killed, three or four were wounded.1 Eight thousand more stretchers were sent for, and thousands had to be replenished when they broke up, were blown apart or lost. Relay teams were organised to carry men over terrain that was impossible for mule or cart.

  The wounded soldier’s journey home often began in a shallow shell crater in no-man’s-land, into which he had crawled or been blown. His first thoughts were ‘to save himself, if possible, from further harm’, wrote one medical officer. ‘If he is able, he will walk, crawl, or drag himself to the nearest position of comparative safety, and there wait to be picked up by the stretcher-bearers.’2 Many had spent the night in severe pain, and the appearance of a stretcher-bearer through the smoke and fire had a near miraculous effect. The bearers breathed hope into the soldiers’ spirits while tending to their mutilated bodies:

  What [the bearer] can do for the physical hurt is little: a bandage, an improvised splint, and perhaps a tourniquet are his only aids. But what he can do for the mind is incalculable. Even if he does not speak a word, with a pair of strong arms he can raise a man from hell to heaven in half an hour.3

  Not in all cases: Private Edward Lynch witnessed a stretcher party trying to carry away a young soldier who’d been buried alive in a collapsed dugout:

  They lay him on the stretcher and start off. He sits straight up and laughs hysterically
; louder and louder he laughs as he is borne away … we see the bearers trying to force him down on the stretcher again..44

  Others seemed to endure the horror of being buried alive, such as the case of a buried soldier who, on being exhumed, smiled, dusted himself down and asked whether the men had saved his cherished Primus stove.

  A unique kind of courage accompanied the stretcher-bearers’ deliberate, slow and methodical work. They were not infantrymen charged with adrenalin. No starburst in the hypothalamus drove them to commit these acts of recurrent courage. They simply set off into no-man’s-land again and again in search of the wounded, whom they bundled up and carried back, in and out of craters, along ridges, within sight of the enemy. Both sides often broke the unwritten rule not to fire on stretcher-bearers, whose work demonstrated ‘a peculiar and … unnatural quality; not the instinctive response of the courageous animal to attack, but an acquired and “conditioned” inhibition of the instinct to flight’.5

  An astonishing example of this selfless courage was Captain Noel Godfrey Chavasse, the English medical officer, doctor and former Olympic athlete who helped bring in the wounded during the opening battles of Third Ypres. His bravery earned him the accolade of being the only man in the Great War, and one of three of all time, to be awarded the Victoria Cross twice. He received the first in October 1916, for treating the wounded all day under heavy fire. The second, or Bar, he received ‘for most conspicuous bravery and devotion to duty’ when in action from 31 July to 2 August 1917,

  Though severely wounded … whilst carrying a wounded soldier to the Dressing Station, Capt. Chavasse refused to leave his post, and for two days not only continued to perform his duties, but in addition went out repeatedly under heavy fire to search for and attend to the wounded who were lying out.

  During these searches, hungry, worn with fatigue, and faint from blood loss, Chavasse ‘helped carry in a number of badly wounded men, over heavy and difficult ground’. Chavasse later died of his wounds.6

  The famous photo, by John Warwick Brooke, of a stretcher party wading knee-deep through slime carrying a wounded man epitomised the experience of thousands of bearers. It was utterly exhausting work. After a day of this, the bearer would fall to the ground, dripping with sweat, roll over and sleep ‘in his equipment in the adjacent mud’.7

  Private R. L. MacKay, temporarily attached to a bearer section, recalled that his party ‘could scarcely move one foot after the other’. He confessed that he would rather join the attack than carry out another body: ‘I hope to goodness it is my last – [I] prefer going over the top.’8

  The medical officers saw a dark dimension to the generals’ much-touted victories. The ‘great success’ at Polygon Wood, for example, was ‘not without disturbing features’, a medical officer wrote to his division’s deputy director. ‘As the morning wore on our casualties were mounting up, and stretcher-bearer after stretcher-bearer was shot down,’ said Private G. L. Davidson.9 The casualties in his unit, about 70, raised the question of who would bear the bearers: ‘If losses are severe during any further offensive it is likely that there will be a grave shortage of stretcher-bearers.’10

  For the severely wounded, the journey home was gruelling in the extreme. Many died of their wounds on the way (or weeks or months later). The experience of Lieutenant Arthur Edmett, of the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment, offers a shocking example: fresh back with his battalion after a long convalescence for a severe thigh wound, he joined the attack on the Menin Road on 21 September. Shot through the abdomen, he ‘lay for twelve hours without shelter or protection in the midst of a terrific barrage with shells bursting all around him’.11 He survived the journey home, by stretcher, lorry, train and ship, and endured three major operations in French and British hospitals. His heart failed on 16 March 1918, six months after his second wound. Or consider Private William Harkeness Evans, who, having survived wounds to the head and knee in 1916, found himself back at the front in time for Third Ypres. On 17 August 1917, he fell wounded in fourteen places, in his head, arms and legs. Hospitalised for months, he was discharged from the army on 20 December 1918. His body gave up in hospital, on 11 January 1919, a year and a half after his second wounding.12

  Junior officers’ average life expectancy was six weeks, and shorter during the great offensives of 1917. Consider Lieutenant Norman Collins, a nineteen-year-old subaltern in the 4th Seaforth Highlanders (51st Division), who survived an officer’s six-week ‘life’ span – on three occasions. He was wounded on the Somme in December 1916, after six weeks’ service; wounded a second time in May 1917, five weeks after returning to France; and wounded a third time in mid-July, at the start of Third Ypres, six weeks after returning to his unit. In all, Collins spent seventeen weeks at the front and fourteen months in hospital, giving him ‘a lifetime of pain that no disability pension could compensate for’.13 Yet he lived to the near miraculous age of 100, and died in 1998, truly the ‘last man standing’ of his unit, as he named his memoir.

  To extract these and thousands of others, the bearers formed relay teams, each of which covered a distance of 500–800 yards. They were passed through a succession of aid posts and dressing stations, situated in concrete dugouts or under corrugated iron ‘elephant’ cupolas. Severe cases were treated in fifteen casualty clearing stations, which had expanded by 1917 to a size that ‘staggered all precedent and expectation’,14 treating lachrymatory gas cases, head injuries, abdominal and severe chest wounds, compound fractures of the thigh and not-yet-diagnosed nervous cases (i.e. ‘shell-shocked’ – see below).

  The wounded were accommodated in 1300 marquees (ten patients per tent) and sixty huts (twenty per hut), giving a total capacity of 14,200 casualties in ‘normal’ circumstances and 20,000 in an emergency. Total casualties at the end of the first two days of Third Ypres were 23,000, so the facilities were instantly pressed to the limit.15 From the clearing stations, those with ‘Blighty’ wounds – which warranted rest and/or hospitalisation at home – were entrained to base hospitals in northern France, and then by hospital ship back to Britain. The German wounded who couldn’t walk were similarly borne home, but theirs was a less jarring experience because the Germans were not attacking over a plain of mud and shell craters. Like their Allied counterparts, the German medical teams performed phenomenal feats on the Western Front, each month treating about 175,000 wounded at field hospitals, 66,600 at evacuation hospitals and 86,300 at base hospitals, most of whom suffered battle wounds caused by artillery and shrapnel. Of Germany’s 25,000 doctors, about 70 per cent worked in war-related facilities.16

  Doctors and nurses worked with ceaseless dedication in ghastly circumstances. During the worst periods, the British casualty stations and their German equivalents resembled charnel houses, the air heavy with the cries of the wounded and the smell of death, the floor a slick of blood and gore, the scenes heart-rending. ‘I often wondered,’ said Nurse Vera Brittain, a VAD, in August 1917, ‘how we were able to drink tea and eat cake in the operating theatre, in the foetid stench, with the thermometer about 96 degrees in the shade and the saturated dressings, and yet more gruesome human remains heaped on the floor.’17 The conditions were primitive. Remy Siding clearing station was erected in a field of shell holes, on grass, which became mud, recalled Sister J. Calder: ‘Matron fell into a shell-hole one night … She’d been in it an hour and she’d just managed to prevent herself from being drowned …’18

  The great battles of 1917 presented doctors with an array of medical conditions on an unprecedented scale: gaping flesh and head wounds, trench fever, trench foot, wound shock and shell shock. They offered an ‘unrivalled opportunity’, wrote one, to ‘try-out’ methods which ‘experiment had shown worthy of further exploitation …’19

  Nothing could prepare them for the kinds of wounds the new howitzers inflicted on human flesh. Norman Collins, blown up and then buried alive, regained consciousness in a field dressing station where all around him, under the corrugated iron, lay ‘chaps
with … their brains practically hanging out’.20 Later, in a French hospital, he saw more of the ‘real’ wounded: soldiers who had been disembowelled, scalped or castrated, and others with ghastly facial wounds.21

  The hospitals were crowded with the chronic cases and the psychologically ruined. ‘Kill me! Kill me!’ was a familiar scream from a man who had just heard he’d never see, hear or make love again.22 Day and night, Collins heard men, ‘who were probably dying’, cry out for their mothers. The dedication of the nurses, many the daughters of aristocratic families, made a deep impression on him: ‘it must have been a great change to go and have to empty bedchambers as their first job in the morning’.23

  The sheer scale of the medical challenge catalysed reforms and improvements, and great strides were made in hygiene and methodology. The Great War brought forth sterilised gauze, rubber gloves, mobile laboratories, intravenous saline solutions, blood transfusions, hypodermic syringes and lighter X-ray machines;24 as well as huge advances in anaesthetics, wound disinfection, amputation, the setting of fractures, and plastic surgery.25 Much of this came into use for the first time during Third Ypres. The hideous deformities to the face and body called on new skin-grafting techniques pioneered by the young exponents of plastic surgery. The clients of today’s vanity industry might pause to thank the surgeons of the Great War the next time they buy a nip and tuck.