Passchendaele

by Paul Ham

  Major Lincke, commander of a battalion in a Reserve Infantry Regiment, witnessed some of his companies lose 95 per cent of their strength before an Australian platoon captured him. Passed back through Anzac territory to an old German front line, Lincke beheld ‘what, for me, was the most gruesome sight of the war. Hanging from one of the four metre long vertical steel reinforcing rods by his legs was the corpse of a German soldier, headless and with his chest torn open. He must have been thrown there by a shell.’10 Something his interrogator, an Australian officer (and peacetime lawyer), told him he would never forget: the Germans could not possibly win the war because the ‘cannon fodder of the entire world is at our disposal’.

  The heavy rain before and during the Battle of Poelcappelle offered the German defenders a reprieve. Many assumed the enemy attacks would cease. On the contrary, they gazed down in stunned disbelief at the sight of thousands more British and Anzac soldiers slipping, stumbling and crawling towards them, unprotected by artillery. That the enemy had chosen to fight in such conditions seemed an act of wilful self-destruction. The Germans seized the advantage, as we’ve seen, and shot the Anzacs and British to a standstill in the bog below, or on the unbroken wires.

  ‘[T]he battalions managed to push the enemy back to Broodseinde,’ notes the German history. ‘This meant the English [sic] were hardly two thousand metres away from Passchendaele now.’11 And while ‘precious ground’ had fallen into Anzac and British hands, 9 October looked ‘like a good German success’: ‘Human and material losses had decreased considerably compared to 4th October.’12

  Despite the German victory at Poelcappelle, Rupprecht was alarmed at the enemy’s progress. The Fourth Army had suffered ‘very high wastage’, he confided in his diary on 10 October. His artillery had used up ‘twenty seven trainloads of ammunition’ in defence of their lines that month:

  It is really worrying that the fighting ability of our troops is reducing all the time and that all the means we have employed to attempt to counter the oppressive superiority of the enemy artillery have failed to have any effect … there remains nothing for it, but repeatedly to give ground in order to force our opponents to waste time as they move their artillery forward.13

  In this sense, the Germans were in the throes of a fighting withdrawal, holding each ridge until the last moment and then pulling back to the next. Their aim: to drag out and exhaust the British advance. The heavy rain fell at just the right time, and became the German saviour and Anzac destroyer.

  On 12 October, the Germans delighted in the failure of the British barrage: shells were misfired or fell short. One projectile strayed into a German trench latrine and exploded harmlessly, flinging the contents over a nearby platoon and its commander.

  Yet the German infantrymen’s nerves were near breaking point. From behind, they had little hope of relief or rations getting through. Many attempted to desert or ‘trickle back’ to the rear areas. These men were summarily shot under an unsparing interpretation of the military law issued by von Armin on 11 October. The German soldiers were thus sealed off for destruction: behind and ahead of them, they gazed down the barrel of a gun.

  Vizefeldwebel Zaske likened his grenadier regiment to a mob of animals, in conditions he reckoned the worst he had seen in three years of fighting:

  Yes, we were in the Carpathians and took part in the breakthrough in Galicia; we were there on the Somme, we have got to know the worst of the Eastern and Western Fronts, but here … words failed everyone. When we emerged from our holes, we looked like animals whose natural camouflage made them indistinguishable from the surrounding earth … Our grey uniforms were coated with mud and earth and it appeared as though every man was encased in terracotta from his helmet to the nails of his boots. Here we endured the uttermost limit of that which was humanly possible … 14

  By 20 October, German losses had far exceeded normal wastage. Most counter-attack divisions had lost more than half their rifle power (normally about 4000 men). Between 23 September and 9 October, for example, the 20th Infantry Division lost 257 dead, 878 wounded and 2588 missing (most presumed dead); in the seven days from 6 to 13 October, the 195th Infantry Division lost 94 officers and 3231 men, killed and wounded. The overall losses of the Ypres Group, the main German defensive shield in the Salient, comprising six divisions (three trench, three counter-attack), were about 30,000: 3851 dead, 15,202 wounded and 10,395 missing, according to German figures.15 Of particular concern were the disproportionally high casualties among commanders at platoon, company and battalion level: some regiments had lost virtually all their officers.16

  Food supplies and medical aid were failing to get through. By late October, the meagre German rations were barely able to sustain normal human life, far less soldiers involved in a fight to the last man. There was an epidemic of gastroenteritis. Ludendorff began to despair, according to his memoir:

  The world at large … did not see my anxiety, nor my deep sympathy with the sufferings of our troops in the West. My head was in the East and in Italy, my heart was on the Western Front. My will had to bring head and heart together.17

  On one point, he and his generals felt positive: the new British tanks had not proved ‘particularly dangerous’; nor did the men experience the horror of the machines, dubbed ‘tank fright’.18

  In the last week of October, the Canadians began their frightful assault on Passchendaele Ridge. At that point, Ludendorff realised that this was not a battle that could be ‘won’, in any conventional sense. At Flanders, he later wrote, ‘the horror of Verdun was surpassed. It was no longer life at all. It was mere unspeakable suffering.’19

  As hope on both sides drained away, the soldiers’ morale hit rock bottom. Scenes that earlier would have horrified or revolted them were now treated as commonplace. The sight of a soldier drowning in a shell hole was no longer shocking; it could not be helped. Nothing could be done, for example, for the British lad who got bogged to his knees, then the waist, when the combined effort of four men with rifles under his arms failed to release him. There were no footholds from which to dig or haul him out. Duty compelled the men to move up to the line; two days later, they returned along the same route and found ‘the wretched fellow … still there but only his head was now visible and he was raving mad’.20

  Their minds were numb, their senses sullen. The British and Anzac soldiers’ letters home did not bear out their actual mood. If a buoyant tone imbued their September correspondence, with few complaints of ‘war weariness’, according to surveys of uncensored (Green Envelope) letters, that was no surprise: September had been a dry month of victories. In any case, soldiers rarely poured out their misery or fear to their families, not wishing to disturb their loved ones; nor did they think their families would understand. A mixture of both inhibited the expression of the truth. A cheerful letter did not denote a cheerful man.

  The mood in the British, Anzac and German armies in late October more closely resembled John Buchan’s description of morale, in his history of 1917 written a year later: ‘For almost the first time in the campaign there was a sense of discouragement … Men felt they were being sacrificed blindly [and] that such sledgehammer tactics were too crude …’21 (he was referring here to the mood post-August). The observations of ‘Pompey’ Elliott, the fiery Australian brigade commander, of the young troops he led in late 1917 echoed Buchan: ‘They had not the same spirit at all … The difficulty once was to restrain their impatience for action. Now we find men clearing out to avoid going into the line at all.’22 Philip Gibbs similarly reported that the British Army had ‘lost its spirit of optimism and there was a deadly depression among many officers and men’.23 In a letter to his mother in late 1917, Wilfred Owen observed an expression on the faces of the men in the rear training grounds that was ‘not despair, or terror, for it was a blindfold look, and without expression, like a dead rabbit’s’.24

  The disciplinary figures added statistical fibre to these assessments: a record 2000 Commonwealth troops were
reported absent in France in December 1917, ten per cent of whom were Australian.25 Indeed, Australian morale fell sharpest if the rates of detention and courts martial were any guide. By the end of 1917, the number of Australian troops behind bars for disciplinary failure was six times that of the other Dominions combined, and eight times the British total.26 Australians were being court-martialled at the rate of 400 cases per month in October and November 1917, double the Canadian rate. If fighting ability and discipline had thus far found no correlation, by the end of October the Anzacs were utterly finished as a fighting force, at least until early 1918.

  The Germans had severe disciplinary issues of their own. ‘Out of two train loads of Prussian replacement troops from the east,’ Rupprecht noted in his diary, on 3 November, ‘ten per cent went absent without leave during the journey.’27 These men had not yet experienced Flanders. Perhaps they were reacting in anticipation of what awaited them, a last snatch of life while they had the chance. Their mood worsened on their arrival at Valenciennes, near the French border with Belgium, where many whistled and jeered at officers who were trying to control them. A sense of local mutiny was in the air, but no sign, yet, of a complete collapse in morale on the French or Russian scale.

  By late October, the average ‘frontline hog’ was in a state of ‘mental shock’, and going through the motions of war. Many had abandoned hope, epitomised by a wounded German prisoner who sat beside Gibbs in late October. ‘We are lost,’ the German told Gibbs. ‘My division is finished. My friends are all killed.’ When Gibbs asked the prisoner what his officers thought, the latter made a gesture of derision with a finger under his nose: ‘They think we are “kaput” too; they only look to the end of the war.’28 He was half-right: at that very moment, the German commanders were arguing over whether the German forces should be withdrawn altogether or reinforced in readiness for one last push, a massive counter-attack.

  Even in the worst of Passchendaele, the German commanders’ fixation on good order never deserted them, as this directive sent to officers in Group Wijtschate on 20 November demonstrated:

  Recently, the standard of saluting by officers … has left a great deal to be desired. It is a rarity to come across junior officers who consider it necessary to salute senior officers first. In many cases the salute itself is extremely sloppy. Some gentlemen do not consider it necessary to take their left hands out of their pockets … 29

  Amid the harbingers of doom were blazing exceptions, on both sides, of men who simply would never give in, whose characters relished combat, conquest, action. Such men experienced war as the sublimation of the spirit, the highest and most noble sacrifice. On the German side, the highly decorated future novelist Ernst Jünger was one such soldier; Adolf Hitler another. Both were wounded (Jünger several times; Hitler twice), both returned twice to Flanders, and both received the Iron Cross twice (First and Second Class). Jünger would also receive Pour le Mérite, the highest award to men of his rank.

  There the comparison ended: after the war, Jünger repeatedly refused to join or endorse the Nazi Party or put his name to any of their works, to Nazi fury. Near the end of Passchendaele, sitting in his billet in Lille on a leather armchair in front of an open fire, Jünger felt a different reality to his fellow soldier-author, Erich Maria Remarque, who would write of a sense of universal despair. Perhaps Jünger’s vision was more selfish, or self-interested, yet it was filled with the hope of life, to be relished and enjoyed. ‘We still couldn’t quite grasp,’ he wrote, ‘that for the time being we’d given death the slip, and we wanted to feel the possession of this new lease of life, by enjoying it in every way possible.’30

  That comfort was not possible for Remarque, for whom the war had smashed the filament of hope that sustained Jünger. For millions, Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front would become the last word on the horror of the Great War, a catastrophe the world would not ‘survive’, etched in the human soul, never to be erased.

  Perhaps Lloyd George should have the last word on the state of British morale. His memoir, for all its self-serving bombast, rises to the occasion on the question of why so many veterans of Passchendaele would break under the German onslaught of 1918:

  There can be no doubt that when [Third Ypres] came to an end, the fighting spirit of the troops that had passed through this prolonged horror was at its lowest. It was a calamity unforeseen by G.H.Q. that their frayed nerve was to be put to another test before they had been given time to recover. It was this Army [the Fifth] under the same General [Gough] that was doomed to bear the brunt of Ludendorff’s great coup on the Oise in March, 1918. No soldiers in that condition could have sustained such an onslaught. It is no reflection on their valour to say that they broke. So much for the claim of the apologists of Passchendaele that German morale alone had been impaired. As if British troops were not also flesh, blood and nerves!31

  In late October 1917, the flesh, blood and nerves of Canada came forward, to take over the leading role in the attack from the Anzacs. After studying what this meant, and what his men were being asked to do, General Sir Arthur Currie, the Canadian commander, decided it was impossible and was determined to refuse his orders.

  14

  PASSCHENDAELE RIDGE

  The positions already gained [at Passchendaele] fell short of what I had wanted to secure before the winter.

  Haig to the War Cabinet, mid-November 1917

  Now it was Canada’s turn. Like a marathon relay runner snatching the torch from his ailing teammate, the Canadian Corps – four divisions of rough-hewn Canucks – moved up to attempt to finish the job the British and Anzacs had begun: to capture Passchendaele.

  Their commander’s ‘concern for saving lives and avoiding senseless operations were among his most endearing leadership qualities,’ wrote one observer.1 In this observation lay the essence of General Sir Arthur Currie, whose cheerful pragmatism and careful planning had not only saved lives but also won battles. He communicated such qualities in his gruff, homespun way. For example, during the Somme he wrote in his pamphlet ‘Lessons Learned’, ‘The infantry should be taught to follow the artillery barrage as a horse will follow a nosebag filled with corn … It is far better to lose a few of our men from our own artillery fire than to sacrifice hundreds by hostile machine-gun fire.’2

  Before the war, Currie had been a real estate agent and a territorial officer in British Columbia. He managed to disgrace himself in both roles. Facing bankruptcy after a soured property speculation, he made up the losses by extracting C$11,000 (C$224,000 today) from the regimental fund that had been set aside for new uniforms. Sailing for Europe as a brigade commander, the now Colonel Currie – he had impressed powerful people – felt a mixture of guilt and fear, guilt over the theft and fear of discovery: ‘It was the first thought that struck me when I woke in the morning, and the last thought in my mind when I turned in at night.’3 The thought prevailed, and he repaid the debt in September 1917 with funds borrowed from wealthy subordinates. Currie’s physique was even more prepossessing than his business dealings: aged just 41 in 1917, he presented a pear-shaped figure to the world, six feet four inches tall, weighing 250 pounds, prematurely jowled, saggy-bottomed and pot-bellied.4

  His personality and brainpower overcame these physical defects. His startling common sense, quick mind, loyalty to his men, sincerity of intent (if not always of action) and sheer companionability marked him out as a leader. People warmed to and respected this ‘good-natured, cheerful, imperturbable’ soldier, observed a British officer attached to the Canadian headquarters.5 As often happens, the school head prefect, prize-winner or ‘good’ man rarely rises to the occasion in extremis, to lead the charge. More often, it is the rogue, the outlier, the unexpected man, the thinker on his feet, who seizes the nettle. Currie was such a man.

  The most exacting and least forgiving measure of the quality of a commander was his soldiers’ opinion of him. By this, Currie was a great success. He received and repaid the intense loyalty
of his men. He excelled at Vimy Ridge as a divisional commander, and at Hill 70 in August 1917 as a lieutenant general in command of the Canadian Corps, in which capacity he made very clear to his British masters how and where his men would be used. Currie felt every casualty.

  Currie took charge of the Canadian Corps after their sensational victory at Vimy Ridge, where General Julian Byng had led them with great authority. He stamped his character on the unit at once, winning their admiration by angrily refusing to serve under the Fifth Army, whose commander, Gough, he regarded as profligate and incompetent.6 Haig’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Kiggell, recommended that Currie’s men serve instead with Plumer’s Second Army, because ‘the Canadians do not work kindly’ with Gough.7

  Perhaps that was a mixed blessing now, with Currie under instructions to relieve the Anzacs and take Passchendaele Ridge. On 13 October, the Canadian general was asked to submit plans for the capture of Passchendaele at once. Unlike many generals, Currie made it his duty to visit the front, to see the conditions into which he was being ordered to send his men. He took one look at the great expanse of watery bog, rising gently to the distant ridgeline, itself rimmed with German pillboxes, and told Plumer to cancel the operation. He strongly protested against using Canadian troops as another battering ram in a battle that, he felt, had run out of steam and amounted to the futile pursuit of a worthless point on a map. ‘Our casualties will be high,’ he told Plumer, ‘at least 16,000 men … and we have to know if the success would justify the sacrifices.’8

  Nor were his officers or men willing to die in what many saw as a suicide mission. ‘Every Canadian hated to go to Passchendaele,’ Currie wrote after the war. ‘I carried my protest to the extreme limit … I pointed out what I believed the casualties were bound to be, and was ordered to go and make the attack.’9