by Paul Ham
huddled up close … in the last stages of exhaustion and fear. Fritz had been sniping them off all day, and had accounted for fifty seven … the dead and dying lay in piles. The wounded … groaned and moaned all over the place.86
The torrential rain prompted Gough, on the eve of the attack, to call Plumer and request a postponement. Plumer consulted his commanders and replied that the attack should proceed as planned. Both generals knew they would be sending men into battle with little or no artillery support – in other words, to certain death. Both knew that the few guns in place could not possibly destroy the German wire – a critical precondition for success, and a lesson so brutally learned on the Somme. None of this deflected Haig from his course. The Anzacs would again spearhead the offensive, this time ‘virtually without protection’, as Bean feared.87 Their orders were to capture Passchendaele village that afternoon.
To reach the new starting line – a melange of mud, water, corpses and detritus – the fresh Anzac brigades had to move in single file along a few miles of duckboards, before plunging into the morass. The journey took the entire night. These men had heard stories of the previous battle, of thousands crawling through mud into the attack. And the stories had a lethal effect on morale. A gunner who had fought at Poelcappelle witnessed one relieving battalion pass him, on 11 October, on their way to the front:
The reinforcements … shambled up past the guns with dragging steps and the expressions of men who knew they were going to certain death. No words of greeting … as they slouched along; in sullen silence they filed past one by one to the sacrifice.88
Many of these reinforcements got lost, fell into shell holes or were blown up on the way (such was the freedom with which the German gunners now operated). ‘Before 5 am we had lost men like rotten sheep,’ recalls Lieutenant G. M. Carson. ‘I nearly got blown to pieces scores of times. We went through a sheet of iron all night and in the morning it got worse … at times we were bogged up to our arm pits and it took anything from an hour upwards to get out. Lots were drowned in the mud and water.’89 Lieutenant Russell Harris found it ‘impossible to shut one’s ears’ to the cries of men drowning: ‘When silence came it was almost like a physical blow, engendering a feeling bordering on guilt.’90
The whistles blew at 5.25 am. If evidence for a miracle were needed, it lay here, in the sight of a fresh wave of Anzacs, rising once more under torrential rain. The barrage was a whisper of its usual strength and offered no protective screen. The batteries rustled up a few hundred shells, which burst harmlessly in the mud, or veered off target. The residue passed thinly over Passchendaele, too fast for soldiers moving along slippery duckboards; or it fell short, sending ‘friendly’ shells onto their heads.
Against all hope or expectation, some Australians and New Zealanders reached their first objective, the red line, 1200 yards ahead. Their second goal, the blue line, the starting point for the assault on Passchendaele, was a further half-mile on; and their final objective, the green line, 400 yards beyond the village. Bear in mind that these ‘lines’ were simply map references; the ground itself was all the same – a glutinous mass of mud and water on an upwardly curving plain.
Few got further than the red line. The belts of German wire were fully intact, as their commanders knew. Stuck in the open beneath the spur, without artillery protection, the men came under merciless German sniper and machine-gun fire, which spattered across the bog like a wave of hail. The entire Antipodean attack broke down in the swamps of the Ravebeek Valley. Thousands were shot standing knee-deep in mud, unable to move. Within hours, Australian casualties had reached 4500, dead and wounded. They included Captain Clarence Smith Jeffries, awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously, the last Australian to receive the decoration during Third Ypres, for leading the destruction of a machine gun that had blocked his unit’s path.91
The battalion sent to seize Passchendaele got as far as 600 yards from the village church, where they encountered the remains of the 66th Division, whom they had been sent to relieve. The survivors included two forlorn Tommies sitting in a shell hole, one with a broken arm, the other with trench feet. At first glance, these dazed men took the Aussies for Germans, and panicked. When they realised their error, they exclaimed with relief, ‘We knew the Australians would come. We prayed hard.’92 Further on, a twenty-man Australian patrol managed to scramble into Passchendaele village and touch the ruins of the church steeple. Finding neither friend nor foe, they withdrew.
‘Incredible, as it is not time yet,’ noted Monash, in his headquarters beneath the Ypres ramparts. He had received the news at 10.28 am via the interrogation of a prisoner, and naturally assumed a large body of his men had taken Passchendaele. Reinforcing this belief was a message attached to a pigeon that flew in at noon, stating that an Australian battalion had reached the blue line. Firmer intelligence soon disabused the Australian commander, and by 4 pm the survivors had fallen back to their starting point, utterly exhausted.
Elsewhere, on the flanks to the north and south of Monash’s men, a similar story unfolded, of countless futile blows, too numerous to recount, ending with the termination of the offensive – a near repeat of Poelcappelle. Yet, of all the casualties of those terrible October days, the New Zealanders suffered a uniquely tragic and ghastly end. Thousands who had set out to attack Bellevue Spur were never seen again.
New Zealand’s sole division drew heavily on the youth of Auckland, Otago, Wellington and Canterbury, white and Maori, many of whom were fighting ‘for home town first and New Zealand second’, observed their historian Christopher Pugsley.93 They numbered 20,000 young men, of great skill and proven courage. On the Somme, they had fought in the front lines for 23 consecutive days, longer than any other division, fulfilling every task assigned them, at a cost of 7408 casualties. At Polygon Wood and Broodseinde, along with the Australians, they had inflicted emphatic defeats on the enemy. Haig greatly admired this Antipodean fist in his arsenal, which was why he used them in the van of the October attacks.
Alas, in a year of ‘black days’, 12 October 1917 would go down as the blackest in New Zealand’s military history. Their attack on Passchendaele Ridge broke one of the finest units on the Western Front. Even before the battle had begun, hopelessly bogged down, many New Zealanders found themselves caught between friendly fire from behind and German artillery in front. Their own guns fell short by about 200 yards, directly onto their heads. Dozens of Otago men and the commanding officer of the 1st Canterbury Battalion were cut to pieces, as they waited a hundred yards behind the starting tape.94
Private Leonard Hart of the Otago Battalion, among the few who survived the attack on Bellevue Spur, described what happened:
What was our dismay on reaching almost to the top of the ridge to find a long line of practically undamaged German concrete machine gun emplacements with barbed wire entanglements in front of them fully fifty yards deep … Dozens got hung up on the wire and shot down before their surviving comrades [sic] eyes. It was now broad daylight and what was left of us realised that the day was lost.95
A 25- to 50-yard gap in the wire lured others into a ‘lane of death’, with German machine guns waiting on either side.96 Others threw themselves onto the wire and wrestled to within a few yards of the German pillboxes. None got through – an impossible task. A regiment of the Black Watch, to the New Zealanders’ left, experienced the same bloody shambles, cut down where they stood in the mud, or hanging from the German wire.
The survivors withdrew and tried to dig in beneath the spur, a ‘ridiculous’ notion to the New Zealand Machine Gun Company, who found themselves sitting in water. ‘You can’t dig water!’ Private W. Smith observed.97 Seeing their plight, the Germans emerged arrogantly from their pillboxes and started shooting the men floundering in the bog below. The New Zealanders were reduced to a leaderless rabble, staggering around in the mud, expecting at any moment to be picked off. Most of the officers and sergeants were wiped out. ‘Everyone was scattered, wounded or dead,’
recalled Smith. ‘We had no idea what to do, for we had no NCOs, no officers, no orders.’ In their pathos, he and a friend ‘set off crawling towards Passchendaele’, then thought the better of it and spent the night in a shell hole in pouring rain.98
‘The stunt should never have been ordered under such conditions,’ wrote Corporal Harold Green of the New Zealand Rifle Brigade. ‘It was absolute murder.’99
‘You cannot fight machine guns plus wire, with human bodies,’ Sir Andrew Russell, commanding the New Zealand Division, later explained to the country’s Minister of Defence. ‘Without the wire to check them the men would’ve tackled machine guns despite their losses.’ In a painful, almost insulting statement of the obvious, he added, ‘As it was they tried heroically to tackle both. This was humanly impossible.’100 The wire and weather were not the only culprits: a Scottish deserter had forewarned the Germans the night before that the New Zealanders were going to attack. The enemy were very well prepared.
Russell’s acceptance of the blame deflected it from a more fitting source: Lieutenant General John Godley, the aloof English officer who commanded the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (as well as II Anzac Corps), of whom Birdwood charitably wrote, ‘he does not seem able to command the affections of officers or men’.101 Less politely, a New Zealand historian concluded that the soldiers ‘hated’ Godley.102
As reports of the disaster came in, Russell realised that Godley had no idea of the conditions at the front or where the front was. Nor, in fairness, had any commander at divisional level and above: all the telephone lines were cut; the runners, if they survived, took hours to deliver messages; the messenger dogs had taken heavy casualties; and the pigeons couldn’t fly.
Godley would have none of these excuses. He had promised Haig that he would deliver Passchendaele, whatever the cost. Indeed, the seizure of the village and the ridge had become a near obsession, for both men. By the time the sun had risen on the attack, 117 New Zealand officers and 3179 men had been killed or wounded – a huge loss for so small a country – many hundreds of whom were found dead on the German wires. ‘They had poured out their blood like water,’ wrote Colonel Stewart. ‘The bodies of 40 officers and 600 men lay in swathes about the wire and along Gravenstafel road.’103
Godley put a Haig-like gloss on the result: it had been ‘a very good day’s work’, and a ‘big success’, he informed the New Zealand Minister of Defence on 16 October. He wrote in a similar vein to the assistant private secretary of King George V, claiming that his forces had cleared the way for the Canadians to take Passchendaele ‘without undue difficulty’.104 Godley added that the casualties were ‘not unduly heavy’ (in fact, they were a morale-cracking 60 per cent for the Anzacs in general, and 85 per cent in several New Zealand units). Buckingham Palace wrote back to say how delighted King George and Queen Mary – of the House of Windsor now, having changed their name from the German original, the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha – were to hear the news.105
Godley quoted with pride a German officer, taken prisoner, who ‘exclaimed in astonishment that no troops in the world would have attempted an offensive’ over such ground.106 Indeed, no troops should have, and it was Godley’s failure that they did, concluded the New Zealand historian. Thus ended the first defeat of the New Zealanders on the Western Front, in a battle in which, as Bean observed, ‘No infantry in the world could have succeeded.’107
The medical teams fell upon a field more densely packed with bodies and body parts than any in their experience, heavier than the battles of August and September. The Third Australian Division had lost more than 35 men for every yard of front taken.108 The 9th and 10th Brigades were virtually wiped out: the 9th went over with 79 officers and 1939 men, and returned with nineteen officers and 631 men; of the 10th’s 64 officers and 1800 men, 23 and 767 respectively survived the battle unscathed.109 The rest were killed, wounded, missing (presumed dead) or taken prisoner.
The mobile wounded had crawled into pillboxes or shell holes to escape German snipers. Many drowned, were blown up or expired slowly, by gas gangrene or blood loss, while awaiting stretcher-bearers, who sometimes took days to reach them. Some 500 New Zealand stretcher cases lay at a casualty clearance station near Waterloo Farm. Exposed to the hail and driving rain, they began sinking into the mud, ‘just dying there where they’d been dumped off’.110 His efforts to extract them left Brigadier General ‘Bill’ Braithwaite, a hard-driving brigade commander, who had witnessed the virtual destruction of his beloved regiment, a broken man. Having pleaded three times for assistance for the last 75 cases, he begged Russell, ‘I am powerless to do more personally. As a last extremity I appeal to you personally.’111 Alas, most of them drowned or succumbed to gas gangrene.
‘A note of failure’ was how the official medical record summed up the bearers’ performance in early October, ‘at times almost of despair’ at their inability to reach the wounded.112 Eschewing the use of stretchers, the powerful Maori relay teams were even seen carrying wounded men in their arms and over their shoulders, as if they were children.113 The bearers’ saving grace was the restraint shown by German snipers and machine gunners, most of whom refrained from firing on the six-man stretcher parties. Some Germans, amazed at what they had witnessed, even sympathised with the Anzacs and Tommies, pointing out where the wounded men lay, engendering, noted one British infantryman, ‘a respect for the Hun I never had before’.114
Thousands of walking wounded hobbled back along the broken duckboards. A long line passed Private Edward Lynch:
walking, staggering, lurching, limping back. Men with blood-stained bandages and men with none. Men carrying smashed arms, others painfully limping on shattered legs. Laughing men and shivering men. Men with calm, quiet faces and fellows with jumping blood-shot eyes above strangely lined pain-racked and tortured faces. Men walking back as if there’s nothing left to harm them and others who flinch and jump and throw themselves into shell holes at every shell burst and at each whistle of a passing bullet … 115
Lynch was himself piggybacked from the field with a broken foot, and stretcher-borne into a long tent under ‘dazzling lights’, where ‘the sight of a bed with snowy sheets seems to fly one into another world’. It seemed wrong, he thought, that such ‘starched cleanliness’ should ‘hover so close to the mud and filth that is me’.116 As he entered the operating theatre, he passed a bucket full of arms, hands and feet being carried out.117 Emptying them was a daily chore.
The withdrawal was as perilous as the advance. Allhusen’s men were relieved on the night of 16 October, and cheerfully began the long march back along the ‘Menin Road handicap’. En route, enemy shells blew his platoon apart. What remained was ‘something like the mediaeval idea of hell; pitch dark, except in the evil flashes of bursting shells; screams, groans and sobs; men writhing in the mud, men trying to walk and falling down again …’118
Discipline and self-respect ebbed away with every step towards safety, Allhusen recalled. The pace quickened ‘into a stumbling run … a crowd of broken men, running for their lives’. Many were ‘driven on mechanically by the terror which their minds were no longer able to resist’.119 Half of Allhusen’s platoon reached the lorries waiting at Shrapnel Corner, drawn by the promise of hot cocoa and rum, of which he drank half a bottle. ‘We sat and wept copiously …’120
After a hot bath, Allhusen slipped into a pair of silk pyjamas and slept: ‘Heaven can hardly be expected to come up to that standard.’ He dreamed of ‘a wonderful garden’ that seemed more than a dream; rather, ‘some sort of effort of the subconscious mind to sweep out the horrors of the war and get back to sanity’. Others woke up screaming, terrified of falling asleep again. His battalion had lost about 200 men, dead, sick or wounded, including all four company commanders. Allhusen had replaced the one who had ‘gone mad’.121
One lucky survivor of the mid-October battles was Captain George ‘Alex’ Birnie, an Australian medical officer whom a German sniper decided not to spare. Birnie had recei
ved a blighty. On the 26th, he lay in a hospital bed in London, writing a letter about his extraordinary experiences to his parents. It evokes the reality of the First Battle of Passchendaele, through a medical officer’s eyes:
My Dear Mother and Father,
Here I am once more in England in peace and comfort with a bullet hole through my neck. If it had been an inch closer in I would now be lying on the bloody Passchendale [sic] Ridge with many hundreds of our good fellows who went West on that day – but you see it didn’t so let me try and give you an account of how 750 men went over the top and 50 came back.
His job had been to establish a medical aid post in the forward areas. After a five-mile march to the front, he located his commanding officer, Major Roderick Bell-Irving, in a hole under a piece of galvanised iron. They were 300 yards from the Germans, who were ‘looking down on us’. Bell-Irving ordered Birnie to advance behind the infantry and set up an aid post in a pillbox out beyond no-man’s-land.
At zero hour, 5.25 am, Birnie witnessed his battalion rise ‘with a great cheer’ and charge, 200 yards ahead of him. It was ‘the most terrible thing I have ever seen for you could see them fall, see them blown high into the air and still pressing on, taking cover where possible, and then a bayonet rush again’.
Shortly he grabbed a Red Cross flag and, running through geysers of mud and exploding shells, led four men towards the pillbox. One received a bullet through the heart. In that instant, Birnie told his parents, ‘the most deadly fear got hold of me … the sort of thing that almost paralyses you’.
