5

THE BLOODY SALIENT

Of this man little was heard, possibly because he had a habit of going into places a thousand strong and coming out a remnant of a hundred and fifty or so. Dead men tell no tales of their own glory.

Sergeant Charles Arnold, on the British Tommy

You people stop … I can’t take anymore.

The voice of ‘Death’, on the cover of the German magazine Simplicissimus, 19 June 1917

On the map, the Salient resembled a half-oval of British-held territory that bulged into the German lines east of Ypres. In the minds of the men, it was the ‘bloody Salient’, a land of screaming shells and hissing gas, waterlogged trenches and scuttling rats. By 1917, it had earned its reputation as the most loathsome place on the Western Front.

The Salient swelled and shrivelled with the ebb and flow of battle, like a bladder under pressure from either side. The Allies had held it, in a bigger or smaller form, since the First Battle of Ypres, in October 1914, when the British and French pushed its eastern extremity as far as the plain beneath Passchendaele Ridge. By January 1917, the German forces had reclaimed the bladder to within a mile or two of Ypres, and clung to the horseshoe of ‘high’ ground that surrounded it on three sides, from Langemarck and Saint Julien north-east of the city, along the ridges of Pilckem and Gheluvelt (Geluveld) Plateau due east, to Messines Ridge and a string of hills to the south (see Map 1). Beyond this front line, the Germans occupied successive ridges fanning out from the city of Ypres, the most prominent of which were Broodseinde, Poelcappelle and Passchendaele.

In 1917, this land was unrecognisable from what it had been before the war, a region of gently rising pastures and farmlands interrupted by villages and forests. ‘[Y]ou could not see half a mile for woods,’ recalled Lieutenant Guy Chapman. When Ferdinand Foch arrived in Ypres in 1914, he looked out from the tower of the Cloth Hall over a sprinkling of white hamlets set in fields of tobacco and beetroot, interspersed with hedgerows and barns and heaps of manure, ‘a sea of green, with little white islands marking the location of the rich villages with their fine churches and graceful steeples’.² It was a land of monotonous rains and misty dawns, an atmosphere of ‘melancholic sadness melting almost imperceptibly into the grey waters of the North Sea’.³ The gently rising plains were broken here and there by small woods of ash, chestnut and oak, and by rows of poplars, set in heavy, blue Ypres clay. The terrain was criss-crossed by a network of little canals and creeks that drained the fields. Multitudes of poppy seeds would germinate during the ploughing season, dabbing the dark brown soil in little splashes of red paint. Shellfire had the same effect, bringing to the soldiers’ minds an image of the blood of the dead and wounded streaming up from the earth below.

By 1917, the scene was ‘as bare as a man’s hand’, Chapman recalled. ‘Were these puke acres ever growing fields of clover, beet or cabbage? Did a clear stream ever run through this squalmy glen?’ A ‘magnate’s estate’ of lawns and ornamental fountains was now ‘a quag of islands and stagnant pools over which foul gases hang’.⁴ A network of trench lines extended east and west of the front lines, interspersed with wire, human and horse remains, wreckage and shell craters. Two years of sporadic shellfire had reduced most of the chateaux, hunting lodges, stately homes, villages and churches to rubble. The stamp of hundreds of thousands of boots and the advance and withdrawal of heavy machinery, gun carriages, horse-drawn carts and truckloads of supplies had turned the land into a fortified labyrinth reaching back to the supply depots of Poperinghe (spelled Poperinge today) on the British side and Roulers on the German (see Map 1).

A few reminders of peace were still visible in mid-1917: ragged copses and hedgerows, a few broken farmhouses, remnants of villages and isolated clumps of forest whose names – Sanctuary Wood, Polygon Wood, Nonne Bosschen, Crest Farm – would soon lose their obscurity forever. The fragile drainage system still partly functioned; the little canals and ditches that had drawn off the surface water for centuries and rendered this former swamp cultivable were not yet completely destroyed.

Nowhere on the Western Front was trench life as miserable as here. Trench foot and other diseases were endemic, and rats were plentiful, bloated on the flesh of corpses. Winters were bone-rattlingly cold, usually around freezing and as low as –15C; summers were hot and wet and fly-blown. Water threatened both armies’ trench systems, from above and below. Rain fell with seasonal certainty here, in great, depressing sheets, drenching the trenches and dugouts. The shallow water table seeped through the soil and over the duckboards, limiting the trenches’ depth. The infantry had faced the same difficulties every year in Flanders. This year, however, would be far worse, the result of unprecedented shellfire and unusually heavy rain.

In such conditions, the construction of deep trenches had proved extremely difficult. In the wettest areas, the parapets were heightened with sandbags, to protect the soldiers’ heads. The Germans had been quick to realise the value of an above-ground defensive system, in the form of rows of concrete pillboxes. Throughout 1916 and early 1917, supplied by an old cement factory at Roulers, they had built up a defensive network of squat cement bunkers that housed shock troops – trained to inflict sudden, lightning attacks – and heavy machine guns. The pillboxes were carefully sited along the ridges, with interlocking fields of fire. Only a direct hit by the heaviest shell would seriously damage these squat excrescences of ferro-concrete. Advancing platoons would have to destroy most of them.

For centuries, the beautiful city of Ypres had been the urban heart of Flanders, the Flemish province in western Belgium. The city once rivalled Paris in wealth, as the home of Europe’s textile trade, and as a progressive religious centre. Cornelius Jansen, founder of Jansenism – scourge of the French Jesuits – was made Bishop of Ypres in 1636. It was no stranger to conquest, drawing a succession of marauding armies throughout its boisterous history, for religious, economic and strategic reasons. The Romans had attacked and occupied the ancient settlement. There followed the English, French, Spanish, Dutch and English again, in the march of power through time. The city provided troops for the uprising against the French occupying forces at the Battle of the Golden Spurs in 1302. In 1383, Henry le Despenser, the Bishop of Norwich, led an English army to occupy Ypres, as part of the ‘Norwich Crusades’. He remarked upon ‘a nice old town, with narrow, cobble-stoned streets and some fine buildings’ and then besieged it for four months until French relief arrived.⁵ During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Ypres fell under the sway of advancing and retreating armies: in 1678, the French Army conquered the city and the engineer Vauban installed a series of ramparts to deter further invaders (the very ramparts that protected the British dugouts and to this day buttress the edge of the moat). They didn’t stop the Spanish, who occupied Ypres in 1679. The Austrian Netherlands then wrested control from the Spanish in 1713, and held it until the Napoleonic Wars rid the low countries of the Habsburgs. The Belgian revolt against the Netherlands in 1830 bestowed freedom on the city as part of an independent Belgium.

In the early twentieth century, Ypres had the misfortune of finding itself of strategic value to the British/French and German armies. In 1914, it stood in the path of the Schlieffen Plan, the great wheeling offensive devised by Count Alfred von Schlieffen, according to which the German Army would conquer France in six weeks. In putting this improbable gamble into effect in August 1914, and despite pounding scores of Belgian towns to rubble, the Germans failed to capture the city during First Ypres in October of that year.

The British forced them back, in one of the most heroic actions of the war, and got as far as attempting an attack on Passchendaele Ridge, on 21 October. ‘Fighting was hard and came to bayonet work,’ Haig recorded in his diary.⁶ But Sir John French had over-extended his forces. The German counter-attack drove the Allies back to the Ypres line, where British, French and Belgian forces held the city – respectively sustaining 85,000, 58,000 and 21,500 casualties. The Germans, too, suffered tens of thousands of losses at the hands of Britain’s Old Contemptibles, notably at the battle of Langemarck, in which Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler participated. (He would return as Führer to lay wreaths on the mass graves of the German dead, whose sacrifice had become known in Germany as the ‘Massacre of the Innocents’, a reference to the high proportion of young men, just out of school, who died there.)

The Germans tried and failed to take the city at Second Ypres, in April 1915. This time, a resolute defence, led by Canadian and French forces, prevailed against waves of German shock troops and the first use of poison gas. The Canadian 3rd Brigade and the French Algerian 45th Colonial Division were the first to feel the agonising effects of chlorine gas, dispersed from canisters and carried on the wind. ‘The French troops,’ wrote Arthur Conan Doyle, then a 55-year-old infantryman, ‘staring over the top of the parapet at this curious screen which ensured them a temporary relief from fire, were observed to suddenly throw up their hands, to clutch at their throats and to fall to the ground in agonies of asphyxiation. Many lay where they had fallen, while their comrades, absolutely helpless against this diabolical agency, rushed madly out of the mephitic mist and made for the rear …’⁷ The masked German infantry burst out of the cloud and forced the Allies to withdraw to a new defensive line. By 1 May 1915, the Salient had collapsed to just two-and-a-half miles at its widest point, within easy enemy artillery range. The battles of Second Ypres cost the Allies a further 58,000 and the Germans 38,000, dead and wounded.

Thereafter, the British held the city, under the command of General Herbert Plumer. Two years later, the enemy were still hunkered down on the ridgelines and surrounding hills, in their newly constructed concrete pillboxes and elaborate trench systems, with a commanding view of the city and the Salient.

By 1917, the city was a smouldering ruin, the most bombed target on the Western Front. The spire of the cathedral and the tower of the Cloth Hall poked out of piles of slate and smashed brick, the detritus of two years of war. All seemed dead on the surface, yet underneath a hive of military activity buzzed. German shellfire had failed to dislodge the British dugouts, merely bouncing the rubble on the city’s ramparts, beneath which hundreds of soldiers maintained supplies and transmitted orders to the forward units.

The traffic of men and matériel continued to pour through the rubble of the market place, defying the shellfire, ‘streams of men, vehicles, motor lorries, horses, mules, and motors of every description, moving ponderously forward, at a snail’s pace, in either direction, hour after hour, all day and all night … a reek of petrol and smoke everywhere’.⁸ The witness was General John Monash, commander of the 3rd Australian Division, who saw a body of fighting troops pass, ‘tin-hatted and fully equipped, marching in file into the battle area’, followed by ‘perhaps a hundred motor lorries, all fully loaded with supplies; a limousine motor-car with some division staff officer …’, horse and mule-drawn vehicles, ambulance wagons, ‘a great 12-inch howitzer, dragged by two steam traction engines’, thousands more infantry, more trucks and machines, then ‘a long stream of Chinese coolies’, dispatch riders on motorbikes, horse-drawn artillery ‘clattering and jingling’, an anti-aircraft gun (‘Archie’), and a Royal Flying Corps truck carrying parts of aeroplanes to forward hangars … all this through the wreckage of a city under periodic shellfire.⁹

Why hold this ‘bump’ in the line, whose three sides made the defence of Ypres such a hellish trial? Why risk so many lives for a city of rubble and a stretch of apparently useless terrain? General Horace Smith-Dorrien was not the only commander to have suggested the Allies surrender the Salient and withdraw to a more defensible position, possibly behind the Ypres Canal, which ran north–south through the city (he was relieved of his command for his temerity). On the face of it, the Salient did not seem worth the candle. It demoralised both sides. ‘I always had a horror of the name … Flanders,’ wrote a German soldier after the 1914–15 battles. Most shared his feelings in 1917, prefiguring the Wehrmacht’s hatred of the Russian front in the Second World War. ‘Death’ appeared on the cover of the German magazine Simplicissimus on 19 June of that year, personified by a skeleton in a great coat sitting on a pile of corpses amid a field of bodies. Death has laid down his scythe and is holding his skull in his hands: ‘You people stop,’ the grim reaper weeps, ‘I can’t take anymore.’¹⁰ The ‘Bloody Salient’ inspired a similar revulsion in the British. The soldiers’ spirits lifted when they heard they were leaving this place; even the open valley of the Somme seemed preferable, to both privates and generals.

There were good reasons to hold the city and blister of terrain to the east. Ypres had stirring symbolic value as the last Belgian city before the Channel, a powerful reminder of the raison d’être for Britain’s entry into the war, as the liberator of Belgium. The press played up its importance. Stories of its heroic defence went down well back in Britain. Ypres also offered protection and underground supply caches unavailable elsewhere so far forward: its ancient ramparts proved surprisingly resilient to modern artillery, and thousands of British soldiers owed their lives to the sturdy construction of the casements beneath them.

Most importantly, there were sound strategic reasons for holding Ypres. Commanders on both sides saw the city as a useful jump-off point, from which the British could launch attacks on the vital German positions in Flanders, the supply route into France; and from which the Germans could try to break the British supply line on the French coast. Ypres was a mere 30 miles from the Channel port of Dunkirk, and 55 miles from Calais, between two and four times the range of the German heavy guns – almost thirteen miles, at their outer limit.¹¹

And possession of the city was a great morale booster. Its loss would have been a monumental psychological blow to the British, who had held it for so long. It was in Ypres, under the city’s ramparts, that the famous trench newspaper The Wipers Times was published. A fine example of British stoicism under fire, the newspaper offered an entertaining mix of satire, poetry, spoof columns and advertisements. Hence an ad for the Tunnel & Dug-Out Vacuum Cleaning Company: ‘Why Suffer from Trench Feet? … We guarantee a well-drained aired and Tunnel or Dug-Out …’¹² And the column ‘A Few More Military Terms Defined’: ‘DUDS: There are two kinds. A shell on impact failing to explode [and] the other kind, which often draws a big salary and explodes for no reason. These are plentiful away from the fighting area.’¹³

The trench lines had been transformed since 1914. On the British side, the desultory shell scrapes of the start of the war – the work of an army that believed it would be leaving by Christmas – were now solid A-framed trenches topped with sandbags and held together with revetments of woven wattle. The trenches ran in a zigzagged pattern to limit an enemy occupant’s field of fire into the zig (or zag). They were six feet deep and three and a half feet wide at the top, but their dimensions varied. Drainage sumps were dug under the duck-boards on the trench floors, but these failed to prevent the constant seepage and would prove useless in heavy rain.

The trenches had special functions. Fire trenches, the frontline fighting trenches, were fitted with firing slits in the parapet, periscopes every few yards and ‘fire steps’, platforms from which to aim and fire. The soldiers slept in ‘funkholes’ dug into the trenches’ sides. In the coming battles, the advancing British would have to ‘reverse’ German fire trenches moments after occupying them, to defend themselves from terrific counter-attacks.

Behind the fire trenches were the supervision and support trenches, fitted with larger bays for supplies. Behind these were rows and rows of reserve trench lines connected to the front, every hundred yards or so, by perpendicular communication trenches. The whole arrangement formed a single defensive network that extended several miles to the rear.

If he gazed through a periscope, or dared to look over the top, the British soldier saw features on the map that earlier units had ‘colonised’ with homely names – e.g. Glencorse Wood, Inverness Copse, Black Watch Corner, Tower Hamlets, Clapham Junction, Surbiton Villas, Maple Lodge or Leinster Farm – all of which were now in German hands. None of these were recognisable as topographical features, as the artillery officer Huntly Gordon recalled; they were just, ‘lines and lines of sandbags alternating with hedges of rusty barbed wire, brown earth and grey splintered tree trunks’.¹⁴

Such were the German front lines of what would soon become the most formidable defensive system on the Western Front, developed according to the new doctrine of ‘elastic defence’ or ‘defence in depth’. This was the brainchild of Major Max Bauer and Captain Hermann Geyer, authors of ‘Conduct of the Defensive Battle’, one of the most influential manuals on infantry defence.

Elastic defence worked like this: a small number of troops occupied the front lines, with orders to fall back under British artillery attack, drawing the enemy into their territory, whereupon well-trained reserves in the rear would counter-attack, swiftly falling on the exposed enemy and reclaiming the lost ground. The Germans made an improvised attempt at elastic defence at Arras, which succeeded, winning over the sceptical General Fritz von Lossberg, who would soon became its most powerful champion. ‘The fireman of the Western Front’ (as von Lossberg was known, thanks to his penchant for dealing with crises) arrived in Flanders in April 1917 with orders to build up an impenetrable defensive barrier in this critical theatre.

Throughout 1917, boatloads of British and Dominion troops arrived at the French ports, and their German counterparts at railheads in the western theatre, where the dreaded spectre of another Flanders ‘stunt’ rose in every soldier’s mind. On arrival in France, the British and Dominion soldiers found themselves in the ‘bullring’, one of the vast training camps that stretched from Le Havre to Étaples (‘Eat Apples’, as the Tommies called it), and from Calais to Boulogne: hectares of canvas tents and Nissen huts, officers’ messes, canteens, hospitals, lecture theatres and training areas. They stood in lines of thousands, waiting to be counted off into battalions and marched off to their regimental base (see Appendix 4 for the structure of the British and Dominion Armies in 1917).

Each battalion comprised four companies each of about 200 men; each company comprised four platoons each of about 50 men, the basic fighting unit.¹⁵ In 1917, as part of far-reaching reforms, each platoon would contain four sections, dedicated to specialist roles: one comprised riflemen (including sniper and forward scout); a second bombers, or grenade-throwers; a third ‘rifle-grenades’; and a fourth Lewis light machine gunners. These four highly agile infantry ‘teams’ formed a platoon ‘capable of waging its own little battle in miniature, using a variety of modern weapons’.¹⁶ The reforms would make a critical difference in the coming battles.

The British Army’s culture had changed dramatically too since the start of the war. By 1917, the rich identities of the old British regiments had lost their definition under a perpetual round of reinforcements who were, for the most part, conscripted men with little feeling for the grand traditions of the units to which they’d been posted. A Tommy might wind up as a Lancashire Fusilier, a Northampton, a Manchester, in the Duke of Wellingtons, or in any one of dozens of other ancient British regiments. While one can safely say the members of the famous Guards Division, the Royal Scots (the 1st of Foot) and the Queen’s Royal Surrey Regiment retained their historical identities, most of the rest were diffuse and blurred. New recruits found themselves with a body of strangers, marching, training and fighting. They formed close relationships with men in their sections and platoons, and gave little thought to anyone else – least of all higher command, who were so remote as to be invisible. They lived on laughter, mateship, Woodbines, bully beef, tea and jam. Their chief daily concerns were their comrades-in-arms and whether they’d live another day.

Since 1915, nearly a million officers and men had passed through the tented colonies that stretched along the sand dunes of the French coast. British and Empire soldiers retained distinct memories of those training days, the last before battle. They spent weeks learning how to throw Mills bombs, use a bayonet, survive gas, fire Lewis guns and rifle-grenades, and defeat the enemy in hand-to-hand combat.

The point of bayonet drill was chiefly psychological, to produce a ‘lust for blood’ – according to the Officers’ Training Manual – and engender the killer instinct (the weapon would have limited use in battle).¹⁷ The bayonet’s chief proponent was the Gordon Highlander Lieutenant Colonel Ronald Campbell, whose lecture ‘The Spirit of the Bayonet’ his students would never forget. This ferocious sermon did the rounds of the bullring and thereafter appeared in much war literature, expressing Campbell’s obsession with the weapon and its correct use.¹⁸ There would be no mercy, he explained: ‘When a German holds up his hands and says: “Kamarad – I have a wife and seven children,” what do you do? Why, you stick him in the gut and tell him he won’t have any more!’¹⁹

The men received Campbell’s lessons with a mixture of revulsion, mirth and excitement. ‘We rushed, with raucous yells, and stabbed straw-stuffed bodies,’ Private Bernard Livermore recalled.²⁰ Robert Graves had vivid memories:

[T]he men had to make horrible grimaces and utter blood-curdling yells as they charged. The instructors’ faces were set in a permanent ghastly grin. ‘Hurt him, now!’ ‘In the belly! Tear his guts out!’ they would scream, as the men charged the dummies. ‘Now that upper swing at his privates with the butt. Ruin his chances for life! No more little Fritzes!’ … ²¹

Norman Collins was told to stick his bayonet into a skull, one or two of which were ‘lying about’, in order to experience how hard it is to remove a bayonet stuck into bone: only by planting your foot on the skull and pulling.²² Notwithstanding Campbell’s enthusiasm for the evisceration and castration of surrendering Germans, he made a persuasive point. ‘Get the bayonet into the hands of despondent troops,’ he later said, ‘and you can make them tigers within hours. I found nothing better to introduce recruits to the terrible conditions which awaited the poor devils up the line.’²³ On the other hand, as the officer and later historian Basil Liddell Hart witnessed, troops who took Campbell at his word and put on their ‘killing face’ to charge the enemy were often shot before they got close enough.²⁴ Officers were inured to these methods; their own training manual instructed them to foster a bloodthirsty spirit in their men, to encourage them to be ‘forever thinking of how to kill the enemy’.²⁵

Gas drill involved sitting in a gas chamber ‘filled with various kinds of poison gas’ with your box respirator on, recalled Lieutenant Allfree. The gas clouds were denser and more lethal in the chamber than on the battlefield. An instructor always sat with the men, Allfree recalled, because some were apt, on account of ‘a sense of suffocation’ caused by ‘nervousness’ or ‘a sort of hysteria’, to want to ‘pull their masks off’.²⁶ They’d all heard stories of the horror of gas, of phosgene and chlorine. One type, known to doctors as diphenylchloroarsine, was the only weapon used in the war in which ‘pain per se was the sole effective agent’.²⁷ Inhalation, even in a concentration of one part in 200 million of air, produced such agony as ‘to wholly disable’ the victim.²⁸ Since it could penetrate gas masks, the soldier in his confusion would tear off his mask, only to suffer a greater dose (the Germans nicknamed the gas the ‘maskbreaker’; both sides used it). Perhaps the cruellest stroke was that it did not kill you.

Injuries during training were frequent, and accidents often deadly. Graves recalled a sergeant of the Royal Irish Rifles advising a platoon on the use of the grenade: ‘He picked up a No. 1 percussive grenade and said: “Now lads, you’ve got to be careful here! Remember that if you touch anything while you’re swinging this chap, it’ll go off.” To illustrate the point, he rapped the grenade against the table edge. It killed him and the man next to him and wounded several others more or less severely.’²⁹

The officers’ insistence on petty discipline struck many soldiers, especially the better-educated conscripts, as self-serving or a waste of time. Allfree, for example, found himself ‘in a large dining hut with an elderly, white-haired Major … He gave us a sort of lecture – the gist of which … was the extreme importance of saluting senior officers. Some one had failed to salute him on passing by.’³⁰ The bullring inspired terror in sensitive men. Fearful, homesick or under-confident boys latched on to their officers or stronger men. ‘A quaint youth’ called ‘Soddy’ who shared Allfree’s tent ‘attached himself to me in a most friendly way, much as a lost dog might’.³¹

Private Neville Hind would never forget the load the men bore in full marching order, summoning a portrait reminiscent of Baldrick, the overburdened, mud-caked Tommy in the Blackadder series:

Army boots, socks, trousers, tunic, puttees, cap, pants, cardigan (if not in pack), shirt, belt, braces, pouches with ammunition, sandbags, rifle, bayonet in scabbard, entrenching tool and handle, water bottle, haversack, iron rations, day’s ration, valise (containing overcoat, change of under-clothing, extra socks, shaving tackle …), oil sheet, steel helmet, two gas helmets.

At the front, the soldier would abandon a lot of this, and take on ‘a good deal more’ in ammunition, Mills bombs, a club, wirecutters and perhaps an entrenching tool or spade.³² The officers carried a cane, a revolver and a few grenades.

These few weeks’ training ended with the ‘final assault course’ in full equipment, ‘a series of rushes from trench to trench’, observed Private Joseph Maclean, ‘the intervening space being strewn with barbed wire, high wire, shell holes etc, and they have fellows throwing huge fire cones at you all the time to represent bombs’.³³

Meanwhile, the gunners tested and ranged their guns. In Flanders, the devout Corporal Skirth was in the process of losing a stripe. He’d been told to range his guns on a distant target; the French maps had infuriated a visiting staff officer, who was unable to do the necessary calculations. Skirth easily converted the metric measurements and plotted the range of a target he thought a farm at first, but then realised it was a church.

‘Sir,’ Skirth addressed the staff officer, ‘I think there has been a mistake. The target you have ringed is a church.’

‘What the hell has that got to do with it?’ the staff officer retorted.

‘It’s the tower of a church. There must be a mistake … Only the Germans destroy churches.’

‘Are you a bloody conchie [conscientious objector]?’ said the officer.

‘I don’t know,’ Skirth mumbled. ‘Perhaps I am. I don’t think –’

‘Listen Corporal,’ the officer interrupted, ‘what you think has nothing to do with it. I shall report your insolence to your Commanding Officer … Hand me those figures.’

Later, Skirth was able to confirm that no shell had landed within 250 yards of the church: ‘My calculations must have been very inaccurate.’³⁴

The archetypal British soldier, ‘Private Tommy Atkins’, was the ‘British working man in uniform’.³⁵ He tended to do as he was told, without complaint. Like all soldiers, he grumbled and joked his way through the war. Tommy was the ‘clodhopper from Suffolk, or Devon, or Durham – the man who obeyed orders and stuck it out …’³⁶ He volunteered in huge numbers and went to war with a doggedness of spirit that astonished his officers, some of whom unkindly (and wrongly, as we shall see) attributed the British soldiers’ resilience to the triumph of ignorance over reality, the failure to imagine the consequences of his actions.

There he stands, in photos, smiling through the gaps in his yellow teeth, sitting in a trench or on a truck. Tommy Atkins probably sports a moustache, as decreed by the King’s Regulations: ‘The chin and the lip will be shaved, but not the upper lip. Whiskers, if worn, will be of moderate length.’³⁷ He wears a 1902 Pattern Service Dress of khaki tunic and trousers, with puttees (Urdu for ‘bandages’) wound from the ankle to the calf, which prevent him from snagging his trousers on wire but can induce frostbite if they freeze. On his head, during combat, is his Mk I ‘battle bowler’, the broad-rimmed steel helmet, covered in stretched hessian. A first-aid kit, or shell dressing, is sewn inside his tunic, containing bandages, iodine and safety pins. From his webbing and waist belt hang a water bottle, entrenching tool, bayonet, ammunition pouches, and grenades; in his haversack, he probably keeps the ‘unexpired’ portion of the day’s ration, his gas cape, and a spare pair of socks.³⁸ On his feet are a pair of ‘B5’ ammunition boots, in strong, rough leather with metal-studded soles. A greatcoat or sleeveless goatskin jerkin protects him from the cold, and a rubberised gas cape from gas and rain. At the sound of the ‘gas gong’, he’ll sling on a small box respirator, connected by a tube to a full-face waterproof gas mask.

The Empire troops are similarly equipped and attired, with a few national exceptions, such as the Australians’ kangaroo-hide webbing and slouch hats. The Scots go into battle in kilts camouflaged with khaki skirts, which were essential for clans of bright tartan such as the distinctive red of the Cameron Highlanders and the Royal Stewart.

Theories abound to explain the British soldier’s unerring sense of duty. ‘To the war writers and their middle class readers,’ observed Corelli Barnett, the English historian, ‘it was this squalor of trench life that constituted not the least … unpleasant aspect of the Great War. Yet nearly a third of the British nation lived their entire lives in the slums, contemporary descriptions of which remarkably echo those of the living conditions of the trenches … Many of the rank-and-file were in fact better off in the trenches than at home.’³⁹ Barnett suggests the pleasure Tommy Atkins derived from the relative comfort of a water-filled shell hole over a Tyneside slum explained his cheerful stoicism. This reeks of the sort of middle-class condescension Barnett otherwise scorns; it also ignores the breakdown in morale across all units, regardless of class, in the closing months of 1917. They were all men, made of flesh and blood, in the end.

While the small Anzac and Canadian units gained a reputation for inordinate courage in a series of set-piece battles, the Tommies’ performance appeared less consistent, chiefly because there were so many of them: they were everywhere and did everything, and their units varied in quality. They were the war in Flanders, in the sense that they far outnumbered the Dominion forces, and their casualties were greater (see Appendix 2). At his best, Tommy Atkins was capable of astonishing courage and endurance, as he showed at Loos and First Ypres. The English foot soldier and his Scottish, Welsh and Irish versions stayed the distance where the Russian, French, Austrian and ultimately the German armies would give up. His morale never broke – though it would come very close at Passchendaele.

‘Of this man little was heard,’ writes Sergeant Charles Arnold (himself a quintessential Tommy), ‘possibly because he had a habit of going into places a thousand strong and coming out a remnant of a hundred and fifty or so. Dead men tell no tales of their own glory.’⁴⁰ The Tommies essentially won the war, reckons Arnold, with some justification: ‘He won it by sheer dogged pluck.’

A reputation for invincibility grew up around the Dominion forces, much of it deserved. The Canadian Corps drew on a string of unbroken victories, at Vimy, Arleux, Fresnoy, Avion and Hill 70, and a series of brutal facts: they had withstood the first use of gas in war, in 1915; fought (with a regiment from Newfoundland, then not part of Canada) alongside the British and Anzacs on the Somme in 1916, with 24,700 losses;⁴¹ and driven the Germans off Vimy Ridge in April 1917, sealing their renown as the first army to crack the German lines on the Western Front. In 1918, they would cap these triumphs with a brazen stand at Amiens, without which the tide of war might not have turned so soon against Ludendorff’s Spring Offensive.

A similar legend sprang up around the Anzacs, the insubordinate diggers who had boldly gone wherever their British commanders had ordered them: Gallipoli, the Somme and now Flanders. There were tangible reasons for the extraordinary offensive spirit of the Dominion armies: they were very well led, in the main, under the exceptional British generals Plumer, Birdwood and Byng and the far-sighted ‘colonial’ commanders, Monash and Currie; they swiftly embraced new tactics, technology and weapons; their officers planned every battle down to the smallest detail; and they trained damn hard. The better units in the British Army shared all these attributes, of course, and excelled in similar circumstances.

Something more, however, lay behind the Dominions’ irrepressible, near-reckless aggression, their willingness to slog it out beyond the limits of what their commanders thought possible. One explanation is that the officers and men in the Dominion armies enjoyed a far better relationship than their British counterparts. The Anzacs and Canucks were comparatively free of the burden of ‘class’ that cascaded down the British ranks and landed with a crushing thud on the head of the ordinary Tommy, who rarely spoke his mind to his superiors. The Australian, New Zealand, Canadian and South African forces were a rough-hewn lot among whom the officers and men tended to speak with the same thick accents and think within similar frames of reference. They understood each other’s worlds. Friendships between officers and men were more ‘equal’ in the Dominion than in the British ranks, creating a special kind of loyalty. Irreverent and unruly the colonial armies may have been – Richard Aldington was amazed to find that the Canadians ‘never salute’ – but their performance on the battlefield gave the lie to the idea that soldiers would only fight under a punitive regime ruled by the fear of one’s superiors or the threat of execution for cowardice.

Psychologically, the Dominions drew strength from the fact that they were small foreign armies, rugged outsiders sent to assist the Mother Country in her hour of need. They were determined to prove themselves in the eyes of the world. The Canadian Corps, uniquely among the Dominions, was a national formation (the Australians would not be organised into a national corps until 1 November 1917), and this imbued the men with a powerful sense of patriotic unity, acutely aware that they were carrying the honour of Canada in their kitbags. By any measure, they had lived up to that expectation. ‘With such men,’ a captured German battalion commander told his interrogator, he would ‘go anywhere and do anything’.⁴² It was of a piece with the respect that the Germans paid all the Dominion armies, whom they tended to regard as their most lethal and resilient foes.

While under the ultimate control of the British command structure, the Dominion armies had their own regimental headquarters and a very different culture. The commanders of the Australian, New Zealand and Canadian forces had begun the war as amateurs, and were promoted for their exceptional gifts and personalities – and willingness to learn. As Haig observed after inspecting the Anzacs in 1916, ‘They are undoubtedly a fine body of men, but their officers and leaders as a whole have a good deal to learn …’⁴³

On 14 May 1917, three of those men, George, Theo and Keith Seabrook, left England for France. ‘Well me Nipper,’ they wrote to their little brother, ‘In a very short time we all will be in the Fray smacking the Germans right & left.’⁴⁴ At Étaples, the three brothers were posted to the same company in a battalion that had lost 340 men, a third of its strength, during the battle of Bullecourt. Like hundreds of thousands of reinforcements, the Seabrooks filled dead men’s shoes. They stayed for a month at a village near Arras, where they trained and relaxed, playing soccer, cricket and boxing.⁴⁵ Word passed around that ‘this type of training was intended as preparation for operations … north-east of Ypres’.⁴⁶ Soon enough, after a final rehearsal for a large-scale attack on German trenches, they were ordered to travel to the front in Flanders. In high spirits, the battalion ‘marched away from Clairmarais Forest and its beautiful surroundings’ and, ‘with the band playing the rousing quick-step El Abanico’, the Seabrooks headed for the Ypres Salient.⁴⁷

The German soldier on the Western Front, whom the Allies generally referred to as Fritz, Boche or the Hun, was either a young recruit of seventeen to twenty years; a veteran of the Eastern Front, deployed west as Russia teetered; or one of the dwindling number of hardened Prussian professionals. Fritz was certainly a ‘valued commodity’, given the shortage of manpower in the Reich.⁴⁸

He wore a field-grey tunic of thick wool, trousers of coarse grey cloth, a traditional waterproof satchel and, for shock troops, an assault pack, carrying essential gear. His cloth-covered ‘Stalhelm’, the new chromium-nickel helmet, offered all-round protection of the head, and was a great improvement on the leather, spiked Pickelhaube, which officers still wore behind the lines. His calf-length greatcoat was probably the warmest of the war. Sentries, ‘static infantry’ and some machine gunners wore steel-plated body armour over their chest and abdomen.⁴⁹ From the German soldier’s waist belt and webbing hung his bayonet, water bottle, mess tin, breadbag and ammunition pouches. From his neck dangled a gas mask made of sheepskin, to preserve the Reich’s rubber resources.⁵⁰

The new German recruit was poorly trained at this stage of the war; typically he received one to three months in German bases and two weeks in Flanders before being rushed into battle. His rifle skills were no match for the British and Anzacs. Yet he had machine guns in abundance, lines of pillboxes, and perhaps the best engineering, medical and logistical support in the field. He sorely lacked enough artillery and shells, but he had been ordered to defend, not to attack, so the shortage was less important. He was likely of Württemberg or Bavarian origin, as most of those forming the three armies of the Kronprinz Rupprecht (Crown Prince Rupert) von Bayern Army Group on the Flanders front were. The start of the influx of battle-hardened veterans from the Russian front raised his spirits and forged a do-or-die mentality that persisted well into 1918. In short, Fritz was far from ‘worn down’, no matter how often Haig and Charteris insisted that the Somme and the Aisne had exhausted him.

A few basic comforts lay between an army in high spirits and one in the doldrums. The lack of food, warm clothes and cigarettes struck down morale more forcefully than fear or exhaustion. The British and Dominion troops lived off the same dreary rations of bully beef (from boeuf bouilli, on which Napoleon’s armies marched), biscuits, bread, jam and tea, the staple of the British Army for more than 50 years. In the trenches, the men typically ate canned, cold rations, and perhaps a dixie of hot food brought up from horse-drawn cookers in the rear. They also carried ‘iron rations’ in their rucksacks – to be eaten in emergencies – consisting of tins of bully beef and biscuits. The Germans survived largely on sausage, sauerkraut and black or rye bread.

British dieticians set 4193 calories a day as ample for frontline troops; their German equivalents received just 4083 (well short of the best fed army in Europe, Americans, who would receive 4714).⁵¹ Soldiers’ families supplemented this meagre diet with dispatches of fruitcake, tinned fish and meat, cheeses, biscuits, chocolates, sausage and, of course, the ubiquitous cigarettes. Most men on the Western Front spent their waking hours longing for a smoke: the cheap Woodbine for the Tommies and Players and Goldflake for the officers.

‘The brightest moment’ of the British soldier’s day was his tot of rum at dawn, without which his ‘resistance weakened’.⁵² The double rum ration in his coffee before he went into battle was thought to help forge a fighting spirit. Rum ‘saved thousands of lives’, claimed Colonel Walter Nicholson. ‘It is an urgent devil to the Highlander … a solace to the East Anglian countryman before the fight.’⁵³

The British infantryman carried a .303 short-magazine Lee Enfield rifle (SMLE), which proved more accurate over long ranges than the German 7.92-millimetre Mauser Gewehr, and had a ten-round magazine against the German five-round. Both were effective sniper’s rifles at ranges of 1000 yards. Bayonets were standard, but rarely used in combat, inflicting only 0.32 per cent of combat wounds (see above).⁵⁴

The attacking infantrymen carried an array of clubs, knives, knuckledusters and even sharpened spades for use in hand-to-hand fighting. The most effective weapon for ‘clearing’ trenches or pillboxes was the hand grenade, of which a huge range were developed, including the first firebomb, known as P-bombs or phosphorus bombs, and the British Mills bomb, the most reliable, first used in the British Armies in 1917. Only the officers were issued with revolvers: the heavy-recoil British Webley or the reliable German Luger.

Machine guns were the most lethal firearms, capable of scything through waves of advancing troops and dropping lines of horses. Light machine guns such as the Lewis gun (strictly speaking, a large automatic rifle) were standard in every British platoon in 1917, and fired off a 47-round drum magazine. The Lewis’s mobility and power made it the ideal weapon for attacking pillboxes. Heavy belt-fed machine guns could fire up to 600 rounds per minute: three men operating a British Vickers or German MG08 machine gun could inflict as many casualties as a platoon of riflemen.⁵⁵ ‘Serried ranks of infantry could be chopped down in a single traverse,’ writes the historian Chris McNab, ‘and an infantry squad bunched together could be dispatched in seconds.’⁵⁶ In action, the Vickers ‘felt like a living animal’ in the hands of the operator, ‘as the blowback of gas from the previous round discharging drew in the next’.⁵⁷

The big guns were the war-winning weapons. Artillery had thus far caused 70 per cent of casualties on the Western Front, and would inflict a higher percentage in Flanders. Never had so much steel fallen on human flesh. Heavy explosive shells tore bodies in half and decapitated men who a moment ago had been chatting or filling a pipe. A soldier who took a direct hit was blown to pieces, showering his comrades with his blood and entrails. Shrapnel shells, bursting overhead, scattered tiny balls, like shot, that cut down advancing platoons. Those whose bodies survived a bombardment often lost their self-control, reduced to ‘nervous cases’, though surprisingly few fled or went mad – such was the pressure not to break.

There were dozens of kinds of cannon, ranging from small trench mortars to heavy guns. The Stokes mortar, developed by Wilfred Stokes, could send 25 bombs per minute in a high, near-vertical arc into the enemy trenches; a quick adjustment in the angle extended the range up to 800 yards. The Germans had earlier developed the hated ‘minenwerfers’ (‘minnies’, the Tommies called them), whose fat, sluggish rounds could smash open trenches.

The medium field artillery covered a great assortment of guns of various power and sizes. Two prolific models were the Royal Field Artillery’s Ordnance QF (Quick Firing) 18-pounder, and the German 7.7-centimetre Feldkanone. Both had a range of about 9000–10,000 yards, and their ubiquity meant they dominated the battlefield. Throughout 1917, on the Western Front, the British QF shot 38 million shells out of an available 42 million manufactured.⁵⁸

The heaviest guns and howitzers pumped shell after shell onto the enemy lines in an unbearable, deafening continuum. These monsters were capable of cracking open pillboxes and ‘delivering localized earthquakes’ at ranges of up to 15,000 yards.⁵⁹ One of the most powerful British heavy guns was the Ordnance BL 60-pounder, capable of firing two 60-pound shells (5 inches in diameter) per minute. Larger, road- or rail-mounted howitzers could fire 9.2-inch or even 12-inch shells, destroying especially stubborn targets such as bunkers, buildings or fortifications. Germany’s Krupp guns – notably ‘Big Bertha’, in 1914 the largest cannon ever fired – had smashed open Belgium’s forts and alerted everyone to the fact that heavy artillery would decide who won the war.

The scale of this onslaught beggars the imagination. By April 1917, the Royal Artillery fielded about 2300 heavy guns on the Western Front, firing about five million rounds in the second quarter of the year (compared with 706,222 in the same period in 1916).⁶⁰ Between July and November 1917, the Royal Artillery would expend two to three million shells per week, a total of about 33 million during Third Ypres, two-thirds of which were fired into the Salient.

The Germans were outnumbered in artillery by three to one, and in shells by six to one.⁶¹ Being on the defensive, however, they could afford to sit and wait, and pack their firepower into devastating counter-battery attacks, which, if well timed and aimed, could cut down the enemy as they left their trenches (as happened to many British troops on the first day of the Somme). The Germans also happened to have a threefold advantage in gas shells with which to terrorise attacking troops. No army had yet faced the impact of such concentrated shellfire in so small an area, and the density of the barrages is what would make the coming battle a uniquely terrifying experience.

The British invested great hopes of cracking open the enemy lines in two new weapons, whose destructive potential would not be realised until the Second World War: tanks and aircraft. Primitive tanks had been available since the Somme, and were now hailed as a war-winning weapon. Yet the soft Flanders soil, soon to turn to liquid mud, would quickly end their effective use in 1917, with the exception of a few dry weeks.

Aircraft flew incessantly overhead, on thousands of sorties, mostly combat and photoreconnaissance missions. They would play a critical role in Third Ypres. This was the era of the Royal Flying Corps’ Sopwith Camel, the famous biplane that would shoot down 1294 enemy aircraft – more than any other Allied fighter – and whose crews used to joke that sorties offered them a choice between a wooden cross, a Red Cross and a Victoria Cross;⁶² and the Fokker Eindecker, the best known German aircraft, whose dominance would end in 1917, as well as the Albatros series, famously flown by Manfred von Richthofen, the ‘Red Baron’ and ‘ace of aces’, credited with shooting down 80 enemy planes.

Pilots tended to come from the privileged classes, young men who saw themselves as part of a rare elite, superior to the troglodyte world in the trenches below. The Germans were initially the better pilots: 70 of their aircraft shot down 300 British planes in ‘Bloody April’ 1917, killing or wounding 200 men. The balance would be levelled during Third Ypres, largely due to the reckless courage of pilots such as Old Etonian Lieutenant Arthur Rhys Davids DSO, MC (with bar), who seemed to think the whole thing a daring game. Rhys Davids, who had loathed his brief stint in the army – ‘My darling Ma,’ he wrote home, ‘everyone is so common and so sordid’ – could not contain his delight on being selected by the 56th Squadron, Royal Flying Corps: ‘Gee! ain’t I bucked? Just think Mums: I shall be with my friends Muspratt and Potts; we have for flight commanders two of the best fighting pilots in the RFC …’⁶³

Flying aces like Rhys Davids and von Richthofen tended to speak of ‘bagging’ an enemy plane and racking up ‘kills’. The pilots’ chief weapon was the cockpit-mounted machine gun, with which they engaged each other in spectacular duels in the sky. British aircraft were also used to identify their troops’ locations during battle, relying on klaxon horns or white flares to mark the soldiers’ forward-most lines, and were critical as artillery spotters, guiding the guns to their targets from the air.

Communication between headquarters and the front lines was otherwise limited to telephone lines – whose wires were always being cut – runners, carrier pigeons and even semaphore flags, a relic of the nineteenth century. The bulky, primitive wirelesses were of little use on the battlefield; no radios or helicopters were yet available, of course. ‘The era of the First World War stands as the only period in history in which high commanders were mute,’ concludes one historian.⁶⁴ Junior officers, leading their men into the attack, revolvers at the ready, were responsible for relaying orders and making decisions under fire; many were killed or wounded before they could do so. The average life expectancy of a lieutenant on the Western Front, hitherto no more than a few months, would soon be measured in weeks.

The great challenge facing the generals was how best to deploy such destructive firepower. Being almost always on the attack in 1916 and 1917, the Allies were preoccupied with trying to find a way of using their superior firepower to break the German lines. Deep trenches, dugouts and bunkers protected the enemy from the biggest projectiles. Only the infantry could destroy the enemy in detail, yet how could they advance across exposed terrain? The Somme and other battles had taught the generals that only a barrage of great density and destructive power could shield the infantry as they advanced, break up the enemy wire, and keep the German counter-attack divisions at bay.

The artillery barrage had come a long way since 1914. Back then, the static barrage hammered away at a single target, such as a trench line or pillbox. The more advanced ‘box’ barrage bracketed a position on several sides, with the aim of protecting the British infantry in the boxed-off area from counter-attacks. Yet these barrages failed to achieve their aims, as shockingly demonstrated at the Somme.

The new concept of the ‘creeping barrage’ aimed to shield the advancing infantry behind a slow-moving wall of exploding shells. It was used to stunning success at Vimy Ridge, in April. To produce a moving barrage, the medium and heavy gunners fired together in carefully controlled belts, which moved forward in precisely timed increments or ‘lifts’. This diabolical configuration would advance like a slow-moving wall of steel, chopping up everything in its path, throwing up geysers of soil, pocking the field in craters. No soldier would ever forget the sound of its approach, in which the mass of exploding shells merged into a constant din dubbed ‘drumfire’.

To succeed, the creeping barrage required exact calculation, taking in the density of fire, rate of extension of fire, and positions of friendly infantry and enemy. The gunners would launch as many as eight successive belts of shell, carefully timed to lift in increments of perhaps 50 yards a minute. The infantry would advance behind this protective curtain to the edge of the enemy trenches, charge out of its smoky embrace and kill or capture the stunned survivors, most of whom would be stupefied with shock.

If the barrage advanced too quickly, or lacked the density to destroy entrenched enemy positions, the defending Germans would be able to recover and shoot down the attacking troops stranded in the open – as happened to the British Army on the Somme. Or, the barrage might prove too dense and slow, churning up the battlefield and rendering it impassable to troops, horses and gun carriages, especially if accompanied by torrential rain.

No battle had been fought in such conditions, or with such firepower, forcing many hard questions on the British and Anzac commanders: how would they bring up the artillery fast enough to resume the barrage once the infantry had captured their objectives? How would they aim and fire guns in muddy, unstable soil? How would the vital sound-rangers (who used pairs of microphones to pick up and fix on targets) and topographers (who carried their maps and tripods up to the front) operate in such conditions? And how would that new species of soldier, apparently impervious to fear, the forward observation officer, perform in a treeless wasteland? What if it rained and bogged down the advance? Preoccupying the German soldier were questions of how long he could withstand successive waves of shellfire followed by waves of infantry. All these questions, and many others, had no easy answers: both sides were learning how to fight the war as they went.

And both sides were now on the march, or travelling in lorries or light rail, moving through northern France towards Flanders. Great lines of men coursed through the French and Belgian countrysides. Throughout the night, in the distance, the forward soldiers heard the distant crump of the guns and saw flares burst and illuminate the sky, sweeping to earth in red, green and white sparks. The pipers were playing at the head of the Scottish regiments, as the men sang and waved their hats for photojournalists.

Here came Lieutenant Patrick Campbell, the anxious young officer who itched to prove himself in action, but for whom the low boom of guns sounded ‘terrifying … more sinister than anything I had ever imagined’: ‘If there had been someone with me that I loved I could have endured it. But there was no one … to endure fear and loneliness together was more than I could bear … what hope for me was there when I was up in the middle of it? And what would happen to me if I failed?’⁶⁵

Campbell reached Flanders in June, on a clear summer’s night. All the countryside was lit up in silver starbursts:

I saw the flat plain, the low willows bordering the dykes, the taller poplars … then the beautiful light went out, and it was so dark for a moment that I could not see the ears of the horse I was riding. I made friends with the stars overheard, I had no other friends. They encouraged me, they seemed to talk to me.⁶⁶

A few nights later, his platoon tried and failed to take ten wagon-loads of stones, for road-building, up to the front; shellfire forced them back, among the sound of larks and scenes of Flemish farmers:

That was the strange thing about the war in Flanders, so short a distance separated peace from war. You could go up from the world of ordinary men and women, cattle and green fields, up into the very mouth of destruction, and back again to the same clean sights and smells and quiet noises, all in the space of a short summer night.⁶⁷

In their headquarters, the commanders fixed their minds on their maps. Contours marked the high ground at Messines Ridge, barely 150 feet above sea level, which the Germans had held since 1915: this they must capture first.