WHEN Sir Douglas Haig made up his mind to attack in Flanders he did not know that the French Army was for the time being virtually down and out. When that fact came home to him he had to think again. He might now have to face practically the whole German force in instalments, with little French aid but for a small picked army which Pétain was putting under his command. On the other hand, he was certain that a big German offensive against the French would lead to disaster. On the basis of optimistic intelligence reports, he magnified a deterioration in the German Army into something far more serious than it was in fact. Though his plans—like his temperament—were less venturesome than Nivelle’s, he cherished the hope that ‘the fetters of trench warfare would be broken’.1 He would go on.
The campaign had been in his mind for eighteen months. Here he found strategic objectives missing in the Battles of the Somme and Arras. To root out the hornets’ nests of Ostend and Zeebrugge would of itself be a triumph. To drive the Germans off the Flemish coast would lay open a flank to further attacks. Unhappily, the terrain was unpromising. Inside the coast sand-dunes ran a belt of reclaimed marsh six to eight miles wide and criss-crossed with drainage ditches like a spider’s web. Further inland the ground improved, but the subterranean water level was still high. East of Ypres ran a narrow ridge which dominated the plain. The southern end, known as the Messines Ridge, could be taken in a separate operation, and Haig decided to capture this first.
He had been reproached for making two bites at the cherry, but he could hardly have mustered enough heavy artillery to do it all in one.2 He had made remarkable preparations against the Messines Ridge, British tunnelling companies, risking every hour a miserable death in the bowels of the earth from counter-mining, had driven nineteen shafts into the ridge and packed the chambers at the ends with gigantic charges. The Battle of Messines did put the enemy on the alert, but it is not the case, as Sir Hubert Gough believed, that the famous German forts were built between the two attacks, though a very few may have been.1
The Messines bombardment began intermittently on 21 May and was intensified from 2 June. Heavy and medium guns numbered 756, about one to twenty yards on a front of 8
miles, and guns of all natures 2,266. At 3.10 a.m. on 7 June the mines went up and a colossal barrage 700 yards deep crashed upon the defences. A blinding flash, a shuddering of the ground, a thunderous explosion, dense black smoke-clouds spreading far and wide, heralded the assault. A divisional commander watching from Kemmel Hill described the scene as a vision of hell.2 The noise was distinctly heard in England.
In semi-darkness, deepened by the smoke and a mantle of dust, nine divisions, including one Australian and the New Zealand, with three more in reserve, moved to the assault against five German divisions, with four in reserve. The defence was demoralized from the very start and many forward companies were already destroyed. Only after the crest was reached did any fighting beyond isolated combats take place. The struggle then became stiff and continued for a week, but all counter-attacks were smashed and all objectives taken. British losses, light in the first assault, were increased by overcrowding on the ridge. The fortress of the Messines Ridge had been captured by bringing up to date and vastly expanding the methods of siege warfare as practised by Marlborough. It was the right way to take such a fortress, but not the way to win a war unless the success were ruthlessly exploited.
Haig had first to get the Government’s leave to pass on to the greater offensive on the Ypres front. In London he found the War Cabinet not unnaturally alarmed at the prospect of the B.E.F. taking on the whole German array single-handed. It talked of waiting for the Americans. However, the First Sea Lord demanded an offensive. Jellicoe indeed alarmed Haig by what his visitor described as his pessimism. He said that if shipping losses continued on their present scale it would be impossible to maintain the war in 1918. Haig of course realized already that things were bad, but such language was new to him. ‘This was a bombshell’, he confided to his diary on 19 June.1 The War Cabinet finally gave Haig permission to undertake the Ypres offensive, but with the proviso that if losses proved disproportionate to results it would consider launching an offensive in Italy. It could attempt nothing really big farther afield because shipping would not run to it, whereas France and Italy were connected by two double railways.
Haig’s plan was ambitious. First he would capture the rest of the ridge. An advance along the coast, aided by a landing, would follow. Finally he would thrust towards the neutral Dutch frontier. The northern front up to the Belgian right flank had long been under the commander of the Second Army, the veteran Herbert Plumer, a steady, reliable, but not very enterprising man. Haig wanted more drive than Plumer was likely to give to the offensive. He therefore brought up from his right flank the commander of the Fifth Army and his staff and handed over the main business to him. Hubert Gough was forty-six, and it is doubtful whether—apart from royal princes, nursed by hand-picked staff officers—there was then another army commander as young. In their several ways both were good soldiers. The trouble was that Gough’s different ideas demanded revision of arrangements already made by Plumer, and that this caused delay. It is true that the French army under Anthoine also fell behind its programme—partly because, owing to Pétain’s pledge after the mutinies, so many men were on leave. It might have been possible, however, to launch a modified first attack without French aid. As it was, there was an interval of six weeks—of magnificent summer weather—between the close of the Battle of Messines and the day the infantry went ‘over the bags’ at Ypres. The interval was to be paid for.
Sitting on the ridge and overlooking the British front, the Germans realized at once that a new attack was coming. They moved up reinforcements, thinning their front opposite the French. For the cause of the Entente it was a blessing, but a bad job for the British and Anthoine’s First French Army. The Germans had put into force the defensive system introduced in the Battle of Arras, with an outpost zone to cushion the shock, and behind it a deeper battle zone. They had sown the ground with little concrete forts, some containing several chambers and impervious to any shell up to a direct hit with an 8-in. Their counter-attack divisions were ready to strike in the dangerous period apt to occur when an attacker reached his objective but before he had consolidated it and repaired the confusion.
On 11 July the allies opened an air-offensive with five hundred British and two hundred French aircraft and after very heavy fighting to the end of the month gained a limited mastery. The bombardment started on the 18th, but owing to postponements the infantry did not move until the 31st. Gough attacked with nine divisions, Plumer on his right and the French on his left acting more or less as flank guards. The German Army Group commander wrote that day in his diary that he felt undisturbed because the Germans had never faced an attack with reserves so strong or who knew their job so thoroughly. The assault nevertheless began well, but hard counter-attacks robbed it of much of its gains, so that the maximum advance, on Gough’s left flank and Anthoine’s right, was about two miles. That evening heavy and persistent rain fell. It was heartbreaking. The ground absorbed the wet like a sponge but kept it close to the surface. The shell-holes, already close together though not yet lip to lip as they were to be later, filled with mud and water. Urgent though it was to maintain the pressure, there was nothing for it but to await better weather. The rain lessened, but the ground dried only to a small degree. Worse still, the second phase, the Battle of Langemarck, postponed to 16 August and undertaken in dry weather, was on balance a grievous failure. Very little ground was won and that only in the centre. From 15 August onwards the Canadian Corps fought a long and fierce diversionary action near Lens, which ended successfully. On the 20th the French signalized their progress to recovery by a victorious blow delivered by the Second Army under General Guillaumat on the Verdun front. These limited actions, however, caused the Germans only temporary anxiety because they were quickly recognized for what they were.
Once more the offensive came under political review. Once more Haig obtained leave to continue, though a minority in the Cabinet would have preferred to shift the main British effort to Italy. Haig now changed his mind about methods and leadership. He put the main job into the hands of Plumer, who took over from Gough the front facing the ridge where it widened into a plateau. Plumer decided on extreme deliberation. He would secure the ridge by three separate battles, with very limited objectives, colossal barrages, and divisional frontages narrowed to about a thousand yards, so that a large proportion of the infantry, sometimes two brigades out of the three, should be available to deal with the German counter-attack divisions. Between the three bounds there were to be pauses for the forward movement of artillery. Meanwhile intelligent and devoted work by the Royal Engineers, pioneers, and carrying parties kept supplies moving. Plank roads were constructed and hundreds of miles of ‘duck-boards’ were laid across the mire. The conditions were none the less taking on the aspect of a nightmare: casualty-clearing stations with helpless patients under shell fire by day and air bombing by night; horrible scenes in horse-lines and on the tracks.
Then, astonishingly, a good phase followed. The ground remained in a fearful state, but it dried; in fact Plumer’s first two battles, Menin Road Ridge and Polygon Wood, were won in dust-clouds. The third, Broodseinde, was triumphant but fought in showers which began on 3 October. The German command became rattled, first holding its counter-attack divisions forward to intervene quicker, then drawing them back again because their losses from artillery fire were so disastrous. The concrete forts were stormed, though at terrible cost. The Second Army was well up on the ridge.
But what was to follow? It was autumn now and the weather seemed to have broken for good. ‘Witterungsumschlag. Erfreulicherweise Regen, unser wirksamster Bundesgenosse’, wrote Crown Prince Rupprecht in relief on 12 October.1 He had been finding his troops growing unreliable and was preparing a withdrawal. Haig still wanted to secure the untaken part of the ridge at Passchendaele for his winter line. When he consulted Plumer and Gough they said they would prefer to stop but were prepared to go on. And so it was decided. He had long ago abandoned hope of an offensive on the coast. The Germans had in fact taken his little bridgehead over the Yser on 10 July.
These last phases have ever since moulded opinion on Third Ypres. Few talk of that just concluded or have ever heard of it. Even the name of the last of all, ‘Passchendaele’, is generally but erroneously applied to the whole offensive. Grim it was indeed. The battlefield had now the appearance of the moon through a telescope. A number of men were drowned in the water or smothered in the mud. The moral and physical strain tried men to the uttermost and carried many beyond breaking-point. The Australians had played a magnificent part in Plumer’s three bounds and continued to do so. The turn of the Canadians came at Passchendaele, with which their country will always connect them. The approach to the remains of the little town had to be made along two causeways between bogs and streams. The first attack on 26 October made small progress, but on 6 November Passchendaele was taken. On the 10th the footing on the ridge was broadened. Then Haig stopped the offensive. He had another all but ready to touch off.
British losses from 31 July to 10 November numbered about 240,000. This represented a terrible toll, though seven-twelfths of that of the Somme, which lasted three weeks longer. Anthoine’s French Army, with a minute role and the heaviest artillery support ever yet assembled—nearly double that of Nivelle relatively to infantry—returned the astoundingly low figure of 8,525.1 The losses of the Germans, who put in many more divisions than the British and French combined, may be estimated at 240,000, including 37,000 prisoners.
Just before the last phase in Flanders, on 23 October, Pétain launched his second attack, with Maistre’s Tenth Army. It was another brief operation, prepared with infinite care and supported by an enormous artillery concentration. Its physical object was to secure a better position on the Chemin des Dames, where a ragged front, difficult and costly to hold, was the legacy of the Nivelle offensive. All went like clock-work: the perfect offensive. But the Battle of Malmaison was morally a follow-up to that of Verdun, nine weeks earlier. It was an experiment which the Commander-in-Chief trusted would prove to be a tonic.2 From that point of view also it was successful. The advance which secured the fort of Malmaison and the failure of the only big counter-attack on 29 October led to a German withdrawal on a wide front. About twelve thousand prisoners were taken. Ludendorff for a moment expected another French offensive, but Pétain was feeling his way and was satisfied with what he had got.
It was idle to speculate what would have happened if the precious fine weather had not been allowed to slip away in Flanders; all that can be said with confidence is that the results would have been better and the losses smaller. Haig could not have begun the offensive in the spring and at the same time have carried out his attack at Arras as demanded by Nivelle. It is doubtful whether he could have refused to undertake the Arras offensive. The War Cabinet would probably have forbidden him to do so. However, for reasons which have been given, he allowed a long time to elapse between the Messines and Ypres offensives.
The weather in August and still more in late October and early November is the chief factor in the horrible reputation which hangs about Third Ypres. The second is a belief that the offensive was mere blind bashing. This is not the case. Tactics were seldom more skilful. The gunners caught on to the German methods of counter-attack and with the co-operation of the R.F.C. so plastered all hidden ground that on several occasions German divisions were either pinned down or were so depleted and exhausted when they got within striking distance that they failed utterly. In many cases the infantry tackled the forts—‘pillboxes’, as they called them—with skill, working round them under cover of Lewis-gun fire and then killing the defenders at close quarters with rifles and grenades. However, even with good tactics, the human body is lucky to prevail over ferro-concrete, and many brilliant attacks failed, with nothing to show but a few corpses sprawled about the strong points.
It is hoped that the foregoing brief account will make it clear that popular verdicts on this battle, and on the British Commander-in-Chief’s conduct of it, are too much simplified. The subject is one calling for constant qualifications. This applies particularly to his decision to continue the battle after the weather had broken. Most of the hostile judgements have come from those ignorant of the atmosphere on the German side. At the start the Germans often outfought the British. Towards the end the British could count on winning if they could get to close quarters. And it was largely the churning of the ground into a morass by their own artillery that held them up.
Those who saw it will never forget that battlefield in the wet: as far as the eye could see, a vision of brown mud and water, with a mixture of both spouting to extraordinary heights when heavy shells exploded in the ground; patient men trudging along the ‘duck-boards’, bent a little forward by the loads on their backs; equally patient horses and mules plodding and slipping under the weight on their pack-saddles. It called for nerve and endurance, which were not wanting.