8

AUGUST 1917

The entire earth of Flanders rocked and seemed to be on fire. This was not just drumfire; it was as though Hell itself had slipped its bonds. What were the terrors of Verdun and the Somme compared to this grotesquely huge outpouring of raw power?

General Hermann von Kuhl, recalling 31 July 1917

British prisoners are saying – and this has never been heard before – that they wished that they had shot their own officers who were leading them into the slaughterhouse. They have had enough of this butchery!

Crown Prince Rupprecht, 16 August 1917

And now Gough’s infantry were moving into position. Throughout June and July, a quarter of a million men of the Fifth Army approached the central section of the 15-mile front, which ran from Diksmuide in the north to Westhoek and Hooge in the south. Thousands came marching through northern France, en route to Belgium. ‘A lovely moon was shining,’ recalled the medical officer Captain Harold Dearden, of the Grenadier Guards, ‘and the battalion looked like a great dusky caterpillar along the white road, the stretchers carried by the company stretcher bearers giving an added affect of horns along the creature’s back.’¹

Tens of thousands came up by light railway, open trolleys packed with men, waving their tin hats for the cameras and singing. A favourite was ‘Good Old Whiskey’: ‘Here’s to good old whiskey, mop it down / Here’s to good old whiskey, mop it down / Here’s to good old whiskey / It makes you feel so friskey [sic] …’ etc.² Others came by lorry, travelling by night with the headlights off, jolting through the flash of shells and the starburst of Very flares, towards the Ypres front. ‘It was just fumes and dust and smells all the time,’ recalled Driver L. G. Burton, ‘and sometimes there was gas too, sometimes incendiary shells. You could see them glowing red among the brick ends.’³

The march had moments of strange, earthly beauty, dashed by the sudden intrusion of war, noticed Captain Dearden. ‘The trench,’ he wrote in his diary near Elverdinghe, on 21 July, ‘was passing under some beautiful willows … and the sides of it were all sparkling in dewy grasses and flowers, while the duckboards stood out under your feet almost as if phosphorescent. I thought how lovely to smell the dampness of the grasses and put my hand to the elbow in them – they smelt of sulphur and gas only!’⁴

Gough’s Fifth Army comprised four corps; a corps contained three infantry divisions, each of 20,000 men, nearly twice as large as a German division. Flanking them were six divisions of the First French Army, to the north, and several divisions of Plumer’s Second Army to the south, incorporating the Anzacs. Lines of bell tents accommodated them in the forward areas, from where they would soon advance up the communication trenches to the fire trenches and jumping-off points at the front line. Behind the infantry, two cavalry divisions assembled – at Dickebusch, south-west of Ypres, and Elverdinghe, north-west of Ypres – ready to charge to the Passchendaele-Staden ridge once the infantry had broken through.

‘[N]o one has any idea when, if ever, we are going to pop the parapet,’ wrote the Australian colonel Alex Wilkinson to his younger sister, Sidney (‘Sid’) on 8 June. ‘If we do I shall be a certain starter … I should hate to be left behind. Nowadays we wear exactly the same clothes as the men when we attack. I don’t like the idea much but we have no choice. I far prefer to be dressed as a gentleman!’⁵

German artillery tried to spread panic in the British ranks throughout July, firing thousands of gas rounds. Gas gongs rang out somewhere in the British lines almost every night. The men slept with their masks always by their sides; the officers in their dugouts behind heavy gas curtains. On 12 July, the Germans used mustard gas for the first time. It incapacitated about 1200 troops that day, and many more later.⁶ Post-mortems of the lethal cases revealed severe internal ulceration of the throat and abdomen; the health of those who survived was often permanently impaired.⁷

Nobody saw the mustard gas coming, wrote Private Neville Hind:

[T]he poor fellows who were in the first attack … got excited, rushed about, snatched up their rifles – and each time they touched anything, were badly burned and blistered … The gas thereupon attacked eyes, nose, mouth, and throat. They breathed it, with disastrous internal results … I am not exaggerating when I say that … a great many battalions were left with only a remnant of their men.⁸

The effects of the new weapon shocked the field hospitals. ‘They cannot be bandaged or touched,’ said a British nurse working with mustard gas cases. ‘We cover them with a tent of propped-up sheets. Gas burns must be agonizing because usually the other cases do not complain, even with the worst wounds, but gas cases are invariably beyond endurance and they cannot help crying out.’⁹

Among those pouring into the British lines was nineteen-year-old Lieutenant Desmond Allhusen, the Old Etonian whom we last saw at Messines. Allhusen now commanded an ‘unlucky platoon for officers’, as his sergeant cheerfully informed him: his predecessor had gone mad. His regiment’s role in the coming offensive was to launch diversionary attacks, to make the enemy think the offensive was starting here, north of Messines. They served as lures, sitting ducks for enemy guns: ‘[E]very day we were treated to at least one barrage’.¹⁰

Allhusen led a working party up to the front line:

an endless toiling in the dark … always losing the man in front, or being lost by the man behind; everybody hurrying, trying to pass some special danger point before the inevitable shell came; then, the agonizing suspense when a flare went up and everybody stood motionless, cursing everybody else for moving, a long line of giant-like figures standing in absurd attitudes, the centre of a landscape as light as day; then, as the light died down, a sigh of relief and a hurrying forward again, men now cursing each other in whispers for making too much noise; worst of all perhaps the handing over of stores at some Company Headquarters, probably a well-known shell trap, sorting and counting things in the dark, signing receipts and hanging about … with the somewhat chilling knowledge that Germans were watching and listening somewhere in the darkness.¹¹

On the night of Saturday 16 June, Allhusen and his men reached the frontline trenches. The Germans were 300 yards away, across a turnip field overgrown with coarse grass. He shared a hole cut in the trench wall that he compared with ‘the once popular torture of putting people in a cage too small either to sit up or lie down in’. By night, the trenches came alive with patrolling, digging, setting wire, receiving deliveries, dispatching runners, preparing for the coming attack. By day, the men rested and did comparatively little. Both sides tended to greet the dawn with a ‘light’ bombardment of gas and heavy explosives, during which Allhusen and his platoon ‘sat in our gas masks watching our breakfast getting cold’.¹²

Three days later, he noticed ‘certain sinister preparations’: sappers had begun installing a long line of ‘dummy men’, realistic models of soldiers made of wood and canvas, which they laid face down, ready to be pulled up by a rear cord. The next day, these armies of manikins were sent into battle: they ‘rose’ and ‘advanced’ through smoke flares, drawing German retaliatory fire. Within minutes, just one dummy was left standing. While the ruse distracted the Germans, a brigade of real British riflemen attacked the enemy lines, ‘killed a lot of Germans’ and captured many prisoners.¹³

In July, Allhusen’s men were relieved – ‘food, drink and water to wash in, and beds were all waiting for us’ – pending their next rotation to the front. Within a few weeks, they would hear a lot about ‘Menin Road’, a name that sent ‘a nightmare throughout the whole army’. Soldiers returning from it ‘shivered when the Menin Road was mentioned’, Allhusen wrote, ‘and talked of it with a horror that I could not understand. I wondered vaguely what it was like.’¹⁴

For weeks, the batteries had been hauling up the guns, fixing the gun platforms into the spongy soil, firing off ranging rounds, and unloading thousands of cases of ammunition. There were 3000 guns, of all sizes – howitzers, 18-pounders and auxiliary weapons – the heaviest borne by truck or horse-drawn carriages. ‘Massed artillery was drawn together the like of which the history of warfare had never seen before,’ records a German historian. ‘Enormous piles of munitions were stacked up everywhere … The whole might of the British Empire was mustered in methodical preparation to enter into a battle the duration, extent and means of which followed new principles hitherto unheard-of.’¹⁵

One battery commander then approaching the front was Lieutenant Allfree, the country solicitor and father of four, who arrived at corps headquarters in Poperinghe, three miles west of Ypres, on 24 June with his twenty-man advance party. One Colonel Budgeon showed him his designated battery position, in woods just short of Woesten. The colonel insisted that the guns be half-buried in pits to conceal them, rather than set on platforms.¹⁶ Major Bell, Allfree’s commanding officer, objected that the guns would sink if it rained. Budgeon wouldn’t budge: the guns must be placed in pits.¹⁷

On 13 July, Allfree and his battery got their Movement Order, and were trucked to their billets in the village of Reninghelst, south of Poperinghe. Told to move his guns into position that night, he set off in a jeep, towing his gun carriage behind it, up the road out of Poperinghe. His lorries had already departed. Diverted by shellfire to Elverdinghe, he soon caught up with his trucks, which had stopped by the side of the road. The drivers were reluctant to continue: shelling up ahead had knocked out several vehicles and horse-drawn wagons. Allfree could hear the rounds exploding, but ‘I had to go on. So I spoke to each of the lorry drivers, and told them what they had to face …’ He ordered them ‘to get on with all speed, and not to stop for anybody or anything’.¹⁸ It was crucial to get the guns and supplies forward by daybreak, before the lorries became visible targets.

His driver proceeded carefully; the spokes on the wheel of the gun they towed had ‘jarred loose’. Already, they had been forced to leave another gun behind due to a mechanical fault. They soon reached the scene of the shelling ahead – ‘disembowelled horses and smashed up wagons and lorries and the smell of blood and high explosive’.¹⁹ There was so much traffic the German guns couldn’t miss striking a lorry if they got the range of the road right. Allfree drove around the mess. Two shells burst just behind and ahead of his vehicle. Then the gun carriage’s axle came loose on the pot-holed road, and he abandoned it. He arrived without any of his guns, which were brought up the next day. Such was the exhausting journey to his position of just one British artilleryman.

Allfree’s men set up the battery on the dead flat, soggy ground north of Ypres, near the ruins of the village of Boesinghe. Beside them, to the north, were the light-blue-uniformed French gunners, veterans of Verdun, with whom he and his men shared rations. Due east was the Steenbeek Canal, running north to south, the wettest section of the front, and beyond it ‘Bocheland’.²⁰ The battery hid their guns in a small copse behind a clearing that contained the officers’ mess, cookhouse, office and phone exchange. The officers slept in two huts erected under trees to the rear; the men tried to sleep in shallow dugouts near the battery, but nightly shelling forced them to move. Exhausted from lack of sleep, they were given the basement in the ruins of a nearby house.²¹

On 14 July, Allfree prepared for action. ‘The feature of this offensive we are about to engage in,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘is to be a most intense artillery bombardment of the Enemy’s trenches, wire and strong points for about a fortnight before the infantry attack.’²² The next day, he visited his forward OP in a bombed house in Boesinghe, a few hundred yards from the German front lines, ‘crouching and hurrying past the open gaps’.²³ Inside the ruin, he climbed a heap of bricks to the OP, a chamber of iron girders and concrete on the upper level, from where he raised a periscope covered in a sandbag slowly over the concrete wall: ‘Through the eyepiece … I now saw for the first time the face of the ridge on the other side of the canal … and systems of Boche trenches.’²⁴ He began to check off the features of the landscape against those on his map: the edge of a wood, a crossroads, the ruins of a farmhouse – yes, they were all there.

His telephonist, sitting below, received a call from the battery commander, who wanted to know if he could ‘range the battery on trench junction at [he read off the coordinates] … will you let him know if you can see it all right, Sir.’ Allfree found the reference and, using his protractor, measured off the degrees between it and the nearest features, the crossroads and the corner of the wood.

Five minutes later, they fired the first round on the target. It exploded slightly short and to the left. ‘45 minutes to the right and plus,’ Allfree instructed the telephonist, who relayed the message. The battery fired another round: ‘1 degree right and minus.’ After six to ten rounds, the guns were ranged accurately.²⁵

In the German camp, the Fourth Army in Flanders had swollen to 65.5 divisions by mid-July, 43.5 of which had arrived since Messines, supported by 600 aircraft and 1162 guns (550 heavies).²⁶ Commanded by General Friedrich Sixt von Armin it deployed four combat groups strung out between the North Sea and the River Lys: a Marine Corps, defending the line from the coast to Schorbakke; the Diksmuide Group, holding the line to the Staden-Ypres railway; the Ypres Group, with its right flank near Pilckem and left flank two miles due east of Ypres, embracing the villages of Langemarck, Poelcappelle, Zonnebeke and Passchendaele; and the Wijtschate group, with its left flank near the ruins of the Hooge Chateau, defending the line across the Menin Road passing Zillebeke to the east up to the canal bend near Hollebeke.

On the ground, tens of thousands of German soldiers lined the ridges of the Salient. Every day, they fired mustard gas and explosive rounds onto the British and Dominion positions on the ‘stage’ below, where the first waves lay in wait for the order to attack.

By now, Haig had lost any shred of surprise. In mid-June, ‘there was complete clarity on the German side that a major British offensive in Flanders was to be expected’, General Hermann von Kuhl, Rupprecht’s chief of staff, wrote. ‘What was completely uncertain, however, was when the offensive was due to begin.’ Clearly it was going to be something very big. For von Kuhl, it was obvious the British had imposed an operational pause in order to complete their preparations: ‘The signs that intensive and long lasting battles were ahead were clearly visible. The main effort would be in the Flanders [sic].’²⁷

The Germans waited and wondered when the blow would fall. Late July seemed likely: German patrols had reported the steady British build-up during the month – the arrival of tanks, guns and men, the construction of a new light railway – all pointing to an imminent attack. Ludendorff responded by authorising further reinforcements: eastern veterans and swiftly trained recruits were flung into the Albrecht Stellung, the front line of the German trench systems, or into the Eingreif divisions, held back in reserve (‘Eingreif’ literally meant an automatic application of extreme force – Gegenstoss – against any breach in the line, rather like plugging holes in a dyke.)²⁸

July drew on. The long anticipation sapped morale. By mid-month, both sides were impatient for battle, to end the deleterious play of the imagination on the spirit. Unleashed by inaction, the mind revelled in phantoms, summoning hideous visions of dying alone in a shell hole, toppling forward into mud. Action would expunge them.

The opening bombardment fell on the German lines in the early hours of 15 July – a week before Haig would receive Cabinet approval to proceed with Third Ypres. Britain’s massed artillery now revealed its terrific power: 752 heavy cannons, 324 4.5-inch howitzers and 1098 18-pounders unleashed the most powerful bombardment hitherto known to the history of war. For the next two weeks, they would fire 4.5 million projectiles onto the German trenches on the plains beneath Passchendaele Ridge, more than twice the number of rounds that had preceded the Somme.

In Allied eyes, the sight was one of preternatural beauty. ‘[T]he sky was heavy with black and very low lying clouds,’ Captain Harold Dearden wrote in his diary on the night of 19 July. ‘There was no moon, and every gun flash was thrown onto the clouds like a limelight in a theatre, the whole vault of the sky being ablaze with transient waves of fire – orange, red, yellow and violet … All along the front Verey [sic] lights danced, too, some white, some red, some blue, while from time to time a “golden rain” would bathe the whole area near it in a perfectly beautiful rose pink colour. The trees stood out jet black against the flaming sky, and the whole scene was one of simply appalling beauty.’²⁹

A hail of shellfire, ‘far worse than anything we had experienced on the Somme’ fell on the German lines, recalled Vizefeldwebel Wellhausen. ‘Shells, shrapnel balls and their pots rained down around our heads.’³⁰ The ‘softening up’ ranged across the German positions, shattering, cutting down, fragmenting every obstacle, every village, house, tree, human, animal caught within 2000–3000 yards of the British front. Blankets of British gas interspersed the hail of explosives, smothering the German soldiers’ movements and stifling the delivery of relief, rations and ammunition.

The air war roared to life during gaps in the shell storm. Dozens of low-flying British aircraft ‘circled our positions’, recalled Fusilier Guard Häbel:

Wherever an individual was seen, British airmen were on hand to direct the fire of their guns onto him. A sentry stood stock still, hidden by a groundsheet so that he could not be seen from the air in front of each dugout. Every few moments someone called to him to see if he was still alive … The British were trying to extinguish all signs of life.³¹

German reserve battalions staggered up in gas masks. Like the Australians at Messines, several were annihilated before they reached the front. On their arrival, they found only utter desolation: no wire, no machine guns, no grenades, and no signs of proper trenches. The sparsely defended line had virtually ceased to exist. The surviving platoons and sections were cut off. Many had abandoned their mashed trenches and lay in shell craters. One company (of 88 men) were ordered to defend a 300-yard section of trench. At such low density, that was impossible. These men were not expected to live. Their role was to confuse and hinder the attacking British infantry; the real battle would occur further back.

Desperate survivors sent up red and green flares, the signal for immediate protective fire. The Germans had too few guns to sustain an effective counter-bombardment. Instead, they directed harassing fire at British troop concentrations: bridges, supply sections, railway lines, billets and munitions depots. They fired 533,000 rounds during the week starting 13 July, and 870,000 the following week. British firepower was about four times that.³² The German gunners depended heavily on mustard gas, which brought them some ‘relief’: between 12 and 27 July, the British lost 13,284 dead, wounded and missing to enemy gas, artillery and aircraft attack.³³

Many survivors of the bombardment, on both sides, suffered shell shock and ‘windiness’ (sheer terror). ‘I have never seen anyone so hopelessly terrified,’ Dearden observed of one lad, just out from England, who sat in his trench ‘deathly pale’, sweating and breathing hard, while ‘his legs literally knocked together every time a shell came’. Dearden tried to reassure the youth, but resigned himself to the fact that ‘he’ll never do anything. He’s just the type to desert …’ Indeed, the company sergeant major expected it at any time, amusing himself by asking the lad whether he would prefer ‘to be shot by the Boche or be shot by the English’. This line of questioning had not, Dearden noticed, ‘steadied him any!’³⁴

On 25 July, Haig received a cable from Robertson on behalf of the War Cabinet, authorising the commander-in-chief to proceed with the offensive he had already started. ‘War Cabinet authorizes me to inform you,’ Robertson stated, ‘that having approved your plans … you may depend on their whole-hearted support; and that if and when they decide to reconsider the situation they will obtain your views before arriving at a decision as to cessation of operations.’³⁵ Haig replied that ‘even if my attacks do not gain ground … we ought still to persevere in attacking the Germans in France. Only by this means can we win.’³⁶ That would be his guiding principle for the rest of the campaign: keep attacking.

On the cusp of battle, the relationship between Haig and Lloyd George reached a new low – at the very moment when its healthy functioning was most needed. In a letter to Lord Derby, Haig drew a dark comparison between the government’s lacklustre, mean-spirited support offered him and the ‘whole-hearted, almost unthinking support given by our government to [Nivelle]’.³⁷

Haig’s bitterness was understandable, but his psychological disposition regrettable. His motives for action were turning dangerously personal. A garrulous political monkey sat in judgement on his shoulder, watching, waiting for him to fail. Haig would win this offensive and silence Lloyd George. How many young lives must be ruined or lost as a result of hasty decisions perverted into action by the smouldering hatred between two proud and wounded men?

In the days before the infantry charged, the guns fired virtually without pause. On 28 July, nineteen trainloads of rounds were unleashed on the German trenches and pillboxes. Dozens of British aircraft swooped on them. Soldiers lying in their trenches witnessed dogfights in the sky: bright red German aircraft came sweeping down to attack the British hornets that were strafing their positions. Notwithstanding a valiant effort from the Ypres Group’s fighters, who managed to shoot down twelve British planes that day, it was all in vain: British superiority in guns, rounds and aircraft soon forced the Germans to abandon a strip of territory a mile wide and half a mile deep, the token front line. ‘The first gap had been opened up,’ noted the German history.³⁸

In late July, British night patrols mounted a series of daring raids on the German lines, to gather some last intelligence on enemy positions. In one raid, 200 Highland Light Infantrymen captured 80 German prisoners and much information for very few losses (one killed, three missing and seventeen lightly wounded).³⁹

On the 29th, two days before zero, British gunners ratcheted up the torment to a level beyond words. Many German soldiers broke or deserted. The rate of self-inflicted wounds rose. Despite all this, the bulk of the German Army stayed in their places, in the path, they all knew, of their destruction.

Mighty interests deigned to smile on this hellish place, to thank the men on the eve of battle. That day, the Kaiser sent his commanders a telegram (forwarded via Hindenburg):

From the battlefields of Galicia … my thoughts turn, with a grateful heart, to the unforgettable deeds of the armies of the west; which, through their sacrificially tough endurance, are holding back the enemy … I am thinking especially of the courageous troops in Flanders, who have already been under artillery fire for weeks, unflinchingly awaiting the coming storm. You have my complete trust, together with that of the entire Fatherland, whose borders you are defending against enemies from all over the world. Gott mit uns!

On the eve of zero hour, the bombardment rose to a shrieking, crashing, whizzing pitch. Incendiary grenades, gas, smoke projectiles, heavy mortars, heavy explosives and shrapnel were flung at the German lines in what survivors would recall as ‘a hurricane from hell’.⁴⁰ It was ‘beyond anyone’s experience’, witnessed General von Kuhl:

The entire earth of Flanders rocked and seemed to be on fire. This was not just drumfire; it was as though Hell itself had slipped its bonds. What were the terrors of Verdun and the Somme compared to this grotesquely huge outpouring of raw power? The violent thunder of battle could be heard in the furthest corner of Belgium. It was as though the enemy was announcing to the world: Here we come and we are going to prevail! ⁴¹

Oberstleutnant Freiher von Forstner’s cement pillbox rocked like a boat at sea. For the regimental commander, 30 July was the worst night he had experienced, when the shelling rose to an intensity that was incomprehensible, unbearable.

Flying shrapnel chopped into anyone who dared venture outside. A medical officer issued opium to calm nerves. At one point, a dense cloud of gas enveloped the bunker, sending long fingers of vapour into the vault-like rooms. Lacking enough gas masks to go around, the men in the outer shelters collapsed and died. Well before the British infantry attacked, artillery and gas had already inflicted more than 30,000 German casualties.⁴²

The stunned survivors hoped and prayed for the enemy to advance; anything but this. The Eingreif counter-strike divisions were ‘drawn up to the front in the highest readiness for action’.⁴³ Many ardently wished for battle, to escape ‘the terrible effects of the barrage fire’.⁴⁴

Haig’s bombardment had wiped out the thinly defended German front but failed to destroy crucial points in von Lossberg’s defensive shield. Most of the German pillboxes (and their machine guns), as well as the artillery at Gheluvelt and the heavy guns beyond Passchendaele Ridge, remained intact: ‘in the crucial area of the Gheluvelt Plateau,’ conclude Prior and Wilson, ‘the preliminary bombardment failed comprehensively.’⁴⁵

Haig knew this. Between 19 and 30 July, Fifth Army intelligence reports repeatedly warned of ‘heavy fire’ issuing from enemy batteries along the Gheluvelt higher ground, where the German guns were protected and hidden.⁴⁶ Instead of heeding his field commanders’ accounts, Haig chose to believe the optimistic counsel of Lieutenant General Sir Noel Birch, artillery adviser at GHQ. British gunners had gained ‘the upper hand over the German artillery’, Birch claimed on 28 July, a point Haig underlined in his diary.⁴⁷ Plainly, they had not.

Past midnight, in the early hours of 31 July, the 3000 British guns fired as one, turning the whole front line between Boesinghe and the Lys into a ‘blazing and shrapnel-belching strip slowly being wrapped in artificial mist’.⁴⁸ At 3.50 am, their roar drowned the commander’s whistle. ‘It sounded like all the guns in the world,’ wrote Lieutenant Campbell, ‘as though the sky was falling … as though the world itself was breaking into pieces.’ Exploding British shells flashed across the eastern sky; in reply, helpless enemy SOS flares in red, green and yellow lit up the brawling world and showered earthward in ‘a beautiful golden rain’.⁴⁹

At that moment, in the German rear area, two leutnants, Höllwig and Boldt, were out riding. Boldt raised his hand and pointed to the western horizon, which seemed on fire. They heard a low rumble, like thunder. Boldt turned and said, ‘That is the start of the battle of Flanders, Höllwig.’⁵⁰ Moments later, the first British infantrymen stormed over the parapets. From the shaking lips of German runners and down the few connected telephone lines came the code word, Scharnhorst. The ground battle had begun.

In the British camp, Gough’s first wave of about 100,000 men slung on their equipment, tossed back their tot of rum, dragged on a Woodbine and urinated. Each man wore full battle dress, with bayonets fixed, and carried a sandbag of Mills bombs around his neck. Every second man had a spade or trenching tool ‘shoved down his back’. Every third man carried a pair of wirecutters. Their regiments hailed from the English shires, the Midlands and the North, the Scottish Highlands and the Welsh hills. They included Guardsmen, Regulars, Territorials and New Army men, with French, Australian and New Zealand troops in support. (See Order of Battle, Appendix 5.)

At 3.50 am, the creeping barrage began. A six-minute storm of steel – millions of shrapnel balls – burst over the German lines. It paused. The whistles blew. The leading infantrymen scrambled up the fire steps and poured across no-man’s-land, heading for the German lines, 300 yards away.

The barrage moved ahead of the men, at the pace of 100 yards every four minutes. None had experienced drumfire of this density. It stunned the attackers as much as the defenders, as Private W. Lockey of The Sherwood Foresters recalled: ‘It was an inferno. Just a solid line of fire and sparks and rockets lighting up the sky.’⁵¹ Within moments, one German commander witnessed the destruction or scattering of his entire company.

Heavy, low clouds obscured the seam of sunlight on the eastern horizon, and removed the hope of air support. For now, the attacking army navigated by compass. Ahead of them, a haunting, unnatural glow fell over the field. Red and green flares, the smoke of the barrage and the distant flash of guns lent a wonderland sensation to the scene: this was surreal, the stuff of dreams, not a battlefield. Long shadows loomed and coloured lights flickered through the curtain of fire, revealing the shapes of stumps, ridges and ruins. The British pressed on, a swarm of little khaki creatures, miniaturised among the craters over which they scrambled, up and down, in a frantic effort to keep pace with the inside arc of bursting bombs.

At first, the Allies advanced with minimal trouble: in the north, the six French divisions made great progress, moving quickly against light resistance. Little had been expected of these veterans of Nivelle’s disaster, on Gough’s far northern flank. They redeemed themselves, destroying most of the enemy’s concrete bunkers and advancing further than their allocated 2500 yards.

The Fifth Army encountered scant resistance – at first. Most of the frontline Germans who were not dead or wounded simply surrendered. By 4.40 am, Gough’s men had reached their first goals, advancing 800 yards ‘across shell-hole pitted Pilckem ridge’.⁵² They encountered a dazed and confused enemy. ‘[W]hat had once been the German front line … didn’t exist,’ W. Lockey recalled. ‘There was not a bit of wire, hardly a trench left, that hadn’t been blown to smithereens by our barrage.’⁵³

Well-trained platoons silenced the concrete bunkers with grenades, trench mortars and Lewis guns, concentrating fire through the loopholes or rear doors. They seized Hollebeke village and Pilckem Ridge, and reached their designated lines. In the south, the Anzacs captured German outposts west of the Lys and at La Basse-Ville. ‘Moppers up’ cleared the enemy trenches and pillboxes, and fresh troops came up to relieve the first wave. Their task: to carry the offensive baton to the next line, some 1000 yards ahead.

Seizing on gains at Pilckem Ridge, the Guards managed to lay rough bridges of wire matting over the Steenbeek, a marshy creek beyond the village. By 5.20 am, the Coldstream and Grenadier Guards had forded it behind a barrage of smoke canisters. Later, British forces made steady advances along a 3000-yard front, crossing the Steenbeek, and by 8 am had reached their designated coloured line and captured the village of Saint Julien. By 9.30 am, the Coldstream Guards had established outposts on the eastern bank of the creek, but the heavy German presence along the road to Langemarck dissuaded them from pressing on.

That sketch of the opening attack passes over the appalling scenes on the ground. The famous Highlander Division, the 51st, for example, were in the van of the attack. Crossing the Yser Canal, with the Gordons out in front and the Royal Scots close behind, they suffered few casualties until they reached ‘Minty’s Farm’, as Lieutenant J. Annan recounted:

[T]he shells started falling all around. We got a slashing there all right. As we were struggling up to it one of the boys got hit with a huge shell fragment. It sliced him right in two. He dropped his rifle and bayonet and threw his arms in the air, and the top part of his torso fell back to the ground. The unbelievable thing was that the legs and the kilt went on running, just like a chicken with its head chopped off! One of my boys – I think it was his special pal – went rushing after him.⁵⁴

Past Minty’s Farm, Annan saw, for the first time, a man going berserk:

He came running back towards us like a spectre waving its arms, and shouting and yelling, ‘Mother! Mother! Mother!’ … [I] got hold of him and said, ‘Come on. Come on over here, till we see to you.’ But he was like a mad thing. He just shook me off and ran on yelling, ‘Mother! Mother!’ completely off his head. That was the last we saw of him.⁵⁵

The Northamptonshire Regiment entered the tortuous terrain around the Bellewaerde Lake, which split them in two: ‘[T]he entire area was also covered in exploded trees, which were perfect hiding places for machine gun nests.’⁵⁶ They captured the frontline trenches, where the severely demoralised enemy surrendered, but heavy German counter-attacks held them off the ‘blue line’, with heavy losses. They eventually prevailed, thanks to several acts of astonishing courage, notably that of Thomas Riversdale Colyer-Fergusson, a 21-year-old captain who led ten men in storming a trench, captured an entire company of German soldiers, and went on to seize two machine guns, killing 35 Germans with one of the guns. A little later, a sniper shot him. For ‘an amazing record of dash, gallantry and skill for which no reward can be too great having regard to the importance of the position won’, Colyer-Fergusson was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.⁵⁷

The Notts & Derbyshire Regiment (The Sherwood Foresters) were to take the village of Westhoek, past the Bellewaerde Lake. ‘We weren’t so much running forward,’ said Lockey, ‘as scrambling on over fallen trees and shell-holes … the German field artillery was firing back, so there were shells exploding all around. The chap on my right had his head blown off, as neat as if it had been done with a chopper … My pal, Tom Altham, went down too, badly wounded, and Sergeant-Major Dunn got a shell to himself.’⁵⁸

In German eyes, the ‘dark figures’ of the Tommies came at them in ceaseless waves, survivors recalled. When a man fell dead or wounded, another instantly filled the gap in the line.

Faced with annihilation by the oncoming infantry, many German soldiers tried to break back through the creeping barrage, and reform in the rear. In one such action, Fusilier Guard Musolf shouldered his wounded officer and carried him safely through the British artillery shield, earning an Iron Cross First Class for bravery.

Leutnant Wiemes and his men were not so lucky, finding themselves surrounded by a pack of ‘drunk British soldiers’ (for which there is no evidence) who ‘came at us with fixed bayonets’. Only the intervention of a British corporal who ‘leapt between us and his men’ ensured that ‘we were not cut down’.⁵⁹ It seems they had witnessed the results of Campbell’s bayonet lessons rather than the effects of too much rum.

A Bavarian battalion was left stranded as battle swirled around them, with no means of communicating: they had no flares or signals; the runners couldn’t get through; the messenger dogs were dead or wounded; the telephone lines destroyed; and two of their four carrier pigeons incapacitated. In desperation, the commander laid out panels for aircraft to read: ‘There is a battalion command post here … Support is needed.’

The seizure of Pilckem Ridge denied the Germans an observation point over Ypres, in that section of the front – ominously, Gheluvelt retained that advantage. Yet Gough failed to consolidate his new possessions, to allow time for the guns to catch up with the men. Third Ypres was supposed to open with a series of incremental attacks, Haig had belatedly advised, ‘limited to the range of the mass of supporting artillery’,⁶⁰ not a frantic rush beyond the limit of the guns into enemy-infested country. Instead, Gough wanted to accelerate, to take more territory. He ordered his armies to push on. This defied the wisdom of his own intelligence, who warned that the enemy’s ‘defence in depth’ would immeasurably stiffen the deeper the British advanced. It was a great, gaping trap.

Nor had the British penetrated the higher ground at Gheluvelt Plateau. Here, the Germans held on, and were yet to reveal their hidden strength, held well back on the plateau. Gough had decided not to concentrate his attack here, against Haig’s advice. His men were about to face the consequences. Gough well knew the enemy’s strength at Gheluvelt (Fifth Army intelligence had been thorough): three defensive lines, each 1500 yards deep, bristling with German troops, heavily supported by Eingreif in the rear, and all obscured behind the remains of three blasted forests on the western edge of the ridge, dubbed Shrewsbury Forest, Sanctuary Wood and Chateau Wood, ‘a wilderness of fallen tree trunks, shell holes and debris’, impassable to tanks.⁶¹ Well-hidden pillboxes clustered at vital points, such as the Lower Star Post and Clapham Junction, with clear views across the attacking terrain.

Haig and Gough could not know the extent to which the German forces on Gheluvelt had survived the two-week bombardment. British artillery had failed to destroy the massed ranks of guns and men that lurked on the plains beyond the broken tree lines. This failure would have dire consequences. At first, however, the results seemed promising – too promising. In places, the Germans were luring the British towards the narrow defiles between the woods; elsewhere, they put up ferocious resistance, funnelling them into the gaps. The Worcestershire Regiment, for example, moved relatively easily, reached the blue line, captured or shot the few Germans they found in the trenches, and continued to the black line, eliminating en route a pillbox on the Menin Road. Far tougher resistance met the unfortunate 21st Brigade, whose troops won the ruins and ridge of Stirling Castle after a bloody ordeal up the slopes beneath well-placed machine-gun nests.

Could tanks break the Germans at Gheluvelt? They gave it a go, with devastating results. The huge, lugubrious machines rumbled down the Menin Road, in an attempt to destroy the giant pillbox at Clapham Junction. Their great tracked bodies made slow progress and were easy targets for German armour-piercing rounds. Of 48 tanks involved in this action, nineteen reached the front lines, and ‘all but one became casualties’.⁶² The rest were abandoned or hit by shells or anti-tank guns. A ‘tank graveyard’ of burned-out steel hulks lay strewn along the road for the duration of the war.

God and Nature intervened: God, in the form of a papal plea to halt the hostilities. The British victory the Lord had ordained had not persuaded the Catholic Church. On 1 August, Pope Benedict XV put forward a peace proposal.

 

‘To the Heads of the Belligerent Peoples’, he declared:

… Whoever has followed Our work during the three unhappy years which have just elapsed, has been able to recognize … Our resolution of absolute impartiality … We have never ceased to urge the belligerent peoples and Governments to become brothers once more … Shall, then, the civilized world be naught but a field of death? And shall Europe, so glorious and flourishing, rush, as though driven by universal madness, towards the abyss, and lend her hand to her own suicide?’⁶³

Futile in bending the minds of the belligerent governments, who ignored it, the Vatican irritated Britain by singling out the naval blockade as an obstacle to peace; and angered Germany by offering them no spoils.

The London Times thundered that the Pope’s appeal was ‘pro-German’, ‘anti-Ally’ and ‘permeated with German ideas’.⁶⁴ Ludendorff described the Pope’s actions as having ‘an evil influence on the conduct of the war’.⁶⁵

Nature intervened, in the form of torrential rain. The rain had started spitting down at dawn, soon after the whistles blew. Other than a brief spell of sun at around 10 am, it rained for the rest of the day. The rain fell in heavy, sidelong sheets upon a field churned and cratered over two weeks of bombardment. The shelling had destroyed the fragile drainage system of creeks and canals that emptied the former marshes between Ypres and Passchendaele. The commanders on the spot saw at once that the undrained ground west of Passchendaele Ridge would soon turn into a brown soup, a man-made swamp. A human tragedy of staggering proportions was about to unfold in Flanders fields.

The little ‘beeks’ or streams that traversed the line of attack over-flowed their banks. The putrid liquid merged with the rainwater that filled the shell holes, until the natural and man-made boundaries between earth and water ceased to exist, and the drains and conduits sat gathering water without beginning, direction or end. The Salient was slowly turning into a mud pan, pocked with thousands of shell craters of unknown depth that oozed brown slime. The attack began to seize up on this man-made bog. Soldiers scrambling over waterlogged craters couldn’t keep pace with the barrage, which started to thin out for lack of guns – leaving the men naked to German retaliation.

At 7 am Campbell’s gun battery arrived at the stream near Bellewaerde in pouring rain. They stopped, unable to advance further. His commanding officer joked whether headquarters ‘had got any boats. We could take the guns up by boats if they still want us to advance.’ He could ‘hardly wait’ for The Times, he added, to read about another great victory.⁶⁶

Nor had the British gunners any clear idea where the furthermost men were, because most of the British telephone lines were cut, and the runners couldn’t get back in time. At Sanctuary Wood, an entire British division fell outside the barrage’s protective cover, leaving them severely disorientated and exposed to terrific fire. A whole brigade got lost, and entered Chateau Wood instead of Glencorse Wood, sustaining huge casualties.

The rain benefited the Germans on the less wet, higher ground, at the very moment when von Lossberg’s counter-strike forces were moving up. A British forward observer spotted the first of them, at 11.30 am: ‘a vast amount of German infantry going along the Passchendaele Ridge’.⁶⁷

They attacked soon after 2 pm. Thousands rushed forward to reoccupy trenches and pillboxes they had earlier lost. In a series of humiliating setbacks, the Eingreif bundled back whence they came some of Britain’s most famous regiments. Even the Guards that had forded the Steenbeek were forced to retire, blaming their failure on the weakness on their flanks.

Low-flying German aircraft relayed the new British positions to enemy batteries at Gheluvelt, who replied with a storm of well-aimed rounds. By late afternoon, the British forces astride the Saint Julien–Poelcappelle road, including the Black Watch and Hertfordshire Regiments, had been forced back to their second starting line. Saint Julien was lost (though regained two days later).⁶⁸ The Hertfordshires were wiped out. One of their quartermasters, sent to deliver 600 rations to the regiment, found only the brigadier in a captured German pillbox that was ‘rocking like a boat in a rough sea’. ‘He just stood and looked at me,’ said the quartermaster. ‘After a while he said, “I’m sorry, Quarters, I’m afraid there isn’t any Hertfordshire Regiment.”’⁶⁹

Chaos ensued. Nobody in the rear knew what was happening at the front, or where the front was. The rain steadily worsened. The telephones failed. German and British guns bombed their own sides. More Eingreif divisions appeared out of nowhere. British platoons scattered. The Germans were up to their knees in water, trying to retake the Steenbeek.

All down the front, the British were being forced back. The Lincolnshires and Irish Rifles lost the ground they’d gained that morning, and recaptured it by 5 pm. The Cameron Highlanders, short of ammunition, alone at the green line and facing a torrential counter-attack, had no choice other than to abandon the ground they’d won at such cost in the morning. By late afternoon, the British forces held a tenuous grip on a jagged new line, vulnerable to enemy artillery as long as Gheluvelt remained in German hands. Stragglers and the shell-shocked were found wandering the field, lost, demented, laughing or crying, and easy prey to the provost marshals who scoured the lines for deserters.

The afternoon rain turned into a torrential downpour, a prelude to the heaviest August precipitation in Flanders in decades.⁷⁰ It rained almost an inch that day, more than had fallen in the previous 30. Darkness fell. It rained all night. The battle resumed the next morning in a downpour. The rains fell all day for the next four days. With nowhere to drain, the water overran the shell holes and formed putrid little lakes that obscured the corpses of men and horses. Duckboards were laid between shell holes, forcing the men to advance in single files.

Moving up the guns and supplies in these conditions challenged the toughest constitutions. It had to be done: if the artillery could not maintain contact with the advancing infantry, all was lost. Teams of horses were unable to haul the guns over mud. Limbers proved useless. A tug of war with the mud ensued, as artillerymen heaved their guns yard by yard. The hardy mule, a gas mask looped over its head, carried up rations and ammunition.

‘Liquid mud’ filled the craters, Yoxall wrote to his mother on 2 August. Four men had drowned, he had heard: ‘[T]hey must have been stuck in the mud, become exhausted, and fallen face forward.’⁷¹ That day, the Daily Mail reported scenes of men scarcely able to walk in full equipment, ‘much less dig’. ‘Every man was soaked through and was standing or sleeping in a marsh.’⁷²

The heavy guns sank, as Lieutenant Allfree had feared, ‘very deep in the mud, and caused a great deal of trouble’.⁷³ His men rammed bundles of faggots and brushwood behind the trails. The battery moved forward to the village of Boesinghe that night. Leading the advance party, Allfree came upon a horse harnessed to a French wagon ‘with its hind legs so deeply sunk in the mud, that it could not move’.⁷⁴ The horse’s stomach was level with the ground, and the animal had to be dug out.

Allfree found the ruined village in ‘a ghastly state! … Everything was wet, dirty and miserable.’ After two days of fighting, ‘the Hun … had been pushed back to beyond the ridge on the other side of the canal’, and now Red Cross men, wagons, ambulances and guardsmen thronged the cleared street. ‘Stretcher parties were bearing in wounded from the shelled, desolate mud swamps,’ he recalled. Many ‘had been lying out there since yesterday in the rain and half-buried in mud’. A stretcher party usually took six hours to bring in a single wounded man, he calculated, and then went straight back out ‘to recover another poor fellow’.⁷⁵

On 6 August, Allfree went out with a fellow officer and five telephonists to fix the broken telephone line between the battery and the new OP:

It was the first time I had been across the Canal into that desolate, muddy, shell-strafed area … It would have been impossible to find one square yard without a shell hole … How on Earth [sic] the Infantry had advanced over such country is beyond my comprehension. But they had done so … ⁷⁶

Shellfire had cut the wire in five places. They joined up each break and bound it with insulation tape.

The dreadful state of the terrain alarmed the Tank Corps, whose machines had not experienced such conditions. A tank intelligence officer, Major Fuller, drew up maps showing the flooded areas, in blue, deemed impassable to tanks. He had it sent to Haig’s office. Charteris intercepted and returned the map with a curt note containing the now infamous phrase: ‘Send us no more of these ridiculous maps.’⁷⁷ Haig’s intelligence chief was said to have remarked to an aide, ‘I’m certainly not going to show this to the commander-in-chief. It would only depress him.’⁷⁸

Haig had dreaded the weather turning against him, but he had not anticipated an inch and a half in the first four days (and five inches for the month, almost double the average).⁷⁹ Yet his marked facility for finding a dram of good news in a barrel-load of bad kept his spirits up: to advance ‘a bit’, even in this deluge, he wrote, ‘was all to the good’.⁸⁰ ‘A bit’, as it proved, was all they could manage. On 4 August, Haig called off the attack; it would resume on the 10th, after the fields had a chance to dry.

In the lull, Haig received a gloomy cable from Robertson, reporting on the Anglo-French-Italian conference that had taken place in London on 7–8 August. Lloyd George and the Italian Government were ‘anxious to get heavy artillery out of us, and even divisions’, Robertson wrote, in time for a fresh offensive on the Isonzo, scheduled for 15 September. To his chagrin, the British Government ‘showed that they attached no importance to the great and serious operations now taking place on the West [sic] Front …’ He summed up the meeting as ‘the usual waste of time’.⁸¹

In fact, Lloyd George had said much worse, according to a letter to Haig from Robertson’s deputy. The prime minister had told the entire conference that he had ‘no confidence’ in the British general staff or their plans, and that ‘he had known all along that this latest offensive [in Flanders] was doomed to failure’. The prime minister added that ‘he’d backed the wrong horse. We ought instead to have reinforced the Italians.’⁸² For now, Robertson persuaded the War Cabinet to adhere to Haig’s Flanders Offensive, a gesture of loyalty that Haig would fail to repay.

The 10th was another miserably wet day. Two British divisions (the 18th and 25th) dragged themselves forward beneath a downpour that drenched what little had dried. Great pools of stinking mud greeted them. In a triumph of will, the 25th Division captured Westhoek village, the only success of the day; the 18th stormed Glencorse Wood and struggled in vain to clear Inverness Copse. The attack stalled, after German guns and Eingreif units had inflicted 2200 British casualties. General Sir Ivor Maxse’s 18th Division were ‘bundled back’ to the starting line, ‘a rare defeat for the justly renowned division which … had been unbeatable on the Somme’.⁸³ Haig misinterpreted the result as ‘most satisfactory’: ‘our guns killed vast numbers of the enemy when forming up for counter-attacks. Six of these were attempted but all failed.’⁸⁴

The 10th was a shocking day for Lieutenant Patrick Campbell. Taking his turn as forward observation officer, he reached his destination, Bank Farm, a captured pillbox just across the Steenbeek, where the setting sun shone through Ypres ‘in the saucer below us’, like the ruins of an ancient city.⁸⁵

A line of shell-shocked men came down the slope towards him: ‘They didn’t seem to be walking properly, they looked as though they were walking in their sleep.’ A colonel addressed them, but they filed past without saluting or noticing him.⁸⁶

To escape German shelling, Campbell sat with his men in a trench lined with a concrete wall. The wounded kept coming in, but there was no room for all of them. The hopeless cases were left outside: ‘They were a long time dying … Their crying rose to a scream as they heard the sound of [a round] coming, then fell away to a moan after the shell had burst.’⁸⁷

Stuck in a trench beside the dead and dying, under incessant bombardment, Campbell’s nerves almost broke. He would never forget his ‘paralysing fear’. He closed his eyes: ‘I was conscious only of my own misery. I lost … all count of time. There was no past to remember or future to think about. Only the present. The present agony of waiting, waiting for the shell that was coming to destroy us, waiting to die …’ He could not move: ‘I had lost all power over my limbs … fear of that sort was horrible, debasing, abject.’⁸⁸

The only man he told of this experience at the time was a soldier called Vernon, for whom he ‘felt an extraordinary affection’: ‘I wanted to have him always by my side. Together we had been down into the valley of the shadow, together we had climbed a little way out of it, a little way out of the pit. But we had nothing else to say to each other. We parted on the road, in the place where we had met, just eighteen hours earlier.’⁸⁹

Campbell survived this debilitating fear, the cumulative effect of a sequence of horrifying events: the hundreds of dead faces in the shell holes; the shell-shocked ‘puppets of men’ who shuffled down the hill; and the incessant German bombardment. Millions of troops had or would share his experience, of the demoralising effect of concentrated shellfire, the fear of which he rationalised in later days as ‘another pain’ he had to endure but would never conquer.⁹⁰

Haig’s bludgeoning was scheduled to resume on the 14th, but a heavy thunderstorm delayed it for two days, giving the commander-in-chief a chance to reply to Robertson. Haig’s letter, on 13 August, expressed with unusual clarity his belief, at that point, in how the war should be fought (the emphases are his): ‘[T]he only sound policy is for the government to support me whole-heartedly, and concentrate all possible resources here. And do it now, while there is time, instead of continuing to discuss other enterprises.’ If he received the men and matériel needed to keep his units up to strength, ‘we are convinced we can beat the enemy’. He based his confidence in victory on three ‘facts’: ‘the poor state of the German troops, high standard of efficiency of our own men, [and] power of artillery to dominate enemy’s guns …’⁹¹

The fresh attack (the Battle of Langemarck) began at 4.45 am on the 16th, across the whole front, in a virtual rerun of the plan of 31 July. The morning was mysteriously bright and sunny. And then, later that day, as if on cue, the skies opened. Had the very guns punctured the heavens, the troops joked? In the north, the British did well, advancing beyond Langemarck and claiming the village. The French divisions also captured their objectives – 1.2 miles of mud – thanks to weak German defences in their sector to the north of the Salient.

On the crucial Gheluvelt Plateau, however, the Germans still held firm. The British guns had not dominated here; nor were the Germans demoralised. Well-trained British troops, veterans of the Somme and Messines, bashed away at the ridgeline for twelve hours, gaining little ground. One brigade attacked with inadequate artillery protection and was virtually wiped out. Even before one division went over the top, it had suffered 2000 casualties to enemy shells and gas; it attacked anyway, with 330 instead of the normal 750 men per battalion.⁹²

A tragedy befell the two Irish divisions – the 36th (Ulster), formerly the Ulster Volunteer Force, and the 16th (Irish), formerly John Redmond’s ‘Irish Brigade’ – in the attack on Zonnebeke Ridge. It was the second time the ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ divisions went into battle side by side, after their triumph at Messines. They attacked again with the same great camaraderie, but after a few hours both had virtually ‘ceased to exist as fighting formations’.⁹³ A chaplain, the Jesuit Father William Doyle, spent all day on 16 August in no-man’s-land administering last rites, to soldiers of both faiths. He found one young soldier ‘lying on his back, his hands and face a mass of blue phosphorus flame smoking horribly in the darkness’.⁹⁴ Doyle had earned the Military Cross at the Somme, and ‘many of the men believed him to be immortal’.⁹⁵ He died a few days later, struck by a shell while comforting the wounded; three officers recommended him for a Victoria Cross but he received nothing: ‘the disqualification of being an Irishman, a Catholic and a Jesuit, proved insuperable,’ according to one witness.⁹⁶

The heavy Irish losses marked a cruel end to one of the bravest commitments on the Western Front. Since entering the line, the Irish division had lost 7800 men, almost half their number; both divisions had suffered terribly on the Somme. Their latest sacrifice earned them little more than Gough’s scorn and an entry in Haig’s diary: ‘Gough was not pleased with the action of the Irish divisions,’ Haig wrote. ‘They seem to have gone forward but failed to keep what they had won … The men are Irish and apparently did not like the enemy’s shelling, so Gough said.’⁹⁷

Gough, an avowed loyalist, deeply distrusted the Catholic division. A corps commander had told him (he later claimed) that the Catholics under his command were ‘no longer politically reliable’.⁹⁸ Neither man produced any evidence. In truth, both Catholic and Protestant Irishmen were physically exhausted, their ranks heavily depleted: 200 Ulstermen had fallen dead or wounded in the first half-minute of the offensive, according to the historian Cyril Falls.⁹⁹ The survivors of both units were soon relieved.

Unsure of the state of the terrain at this time, and thus the consequences of his orders, Haig continued to press Gough to send more demoralised men into battle: the 53rd Brigade of the 8th Division, for example, whose commander, General Higginson, had vigorously protested four times that his men were ‘not fresh enough to carry out an attack’ (‘not fresh’ being a euphemism for utterly spent). Pitched against well-intact German positions, his men soon found themselves being bombed by both German and British artillery. The attack failed.

The London Territorials elected to charge through to their final objectives rather than hold their positions until relief arrived. Their aggressive spirit pleased Gough, until he saw the result: an entire battalion vanished in a blaze of German guns. Most of the Royal Fusiliers and London Rifle Brigade ‘pressed boldly through Glencorse Wood and on into Polygon Wood and were, quite simply, never seen again’. A company of the 8th Middlesex similarly ‘just disappeared’ into the maw of the Eingreif.¹⁰⁰ The rest were thrust back to the start line, with the enemy in hot pursuit. So serious and chaotic was the situation, writes McNab, that British shells were brought down just in front of the original start line, to hold off the Germans, even though many British troops were still forward.¹⁰¹ Such were the results of attacking without artillery protection – a lesson learned at the Somme, Loos and other battles, and forgotten or ignored here.

The Battle of Langemarck ended in a bloody fiasco. Gough’s army had gained 1500 yards of swamp in the north, fragments of bog in the centre and nothing at Gheluvelt in the south, for the cost, thus far, of 15,000 dead, wounded and missing. Haig cast this debacle as ‘most successful’ in the north and centre, while conceding ‘only moderate’ gains on the right flank at Gheluvelt. Nonetheless, ‘many Germans had been killed’.¹⁰²

That afternoon, before the extent of the failure had been revealed, Robertson’s staff car swept into Haig’s headquarters at Chateau de Beaurepaire in Montreuil, bearing unusually upbeat news: the prime minister had relayed a friendly message of confidence in his commander. Haig brushed this off with a curt thank you and told Robertson to relay to Lloyd George the army’s core demands: ‘what I want is tangible support. Men, guns, aeroplanes. It is ridiculous to talk about supporting me “wholeheartedly” when men, guns, rails, etc. are going in quantities to Egypt for the Palestine expedition; [and] guns to the Italians …’¹⁰³

The disaster at Gheluvelt soon reached GHQ. Haig blamed the failure on sheer haste, ‘due to commanders being in too great a hurry!!!’ Three more days of bombardment would have destroyed the enemy’s guns and concrete defences, he claimed.¹⁰⁴ He had argued for haste prior to the attack, however, making the complaint self-incriminating. As Prior and Wilson assert, Haig had failed ‘to act on his insight and assert his authority’.¹⁰⁵

A truthful picture seemed unable to penetrate the thickets of manipulated intelligence (Charteris’s dubious dispatches), scapegoating (Gough’s ‘Irish card’) and self-deceit (Lieutenant-General Claud Jacob’s mistaken assertion that II Corps had captured important ground at Gheluvelt). On four occasions, Charteris visited the front, and noted the dreadful conditions; but he consistently underrated the German defences.

Gough continued bizarrely to blame his men (not only the Irish ones), and even suggested that officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs) who had failed to hold their captured ground be court-martialled for dereliction of duty. Frontline soldiers were being relieved too soon, he added, a practice that must stop to avoid a troop shortage. He did not clarify when the men should be relieved.

At this point, common sense (if not ordinary compassion) might have intruded and suggested the blindingly obvious: that thousands of soldiers’ lives were being wasted; that the methods were not working; and that it was time to adopt different tactics or call off a battle that had literally bogged down. In a moment of clarity, Gough saw this: ‘tactical success was not possible’ in such conditions, he told Haig on 16 August, and he urged his commander to abandon the attack.¹⁰⁶ Haig decided to press on.

A rare tank breakthrough on the 20th along the St Julien–Poelcappelle road, which was firm enough to bear their weight, encouraged Haig to resume the battle two days later. One last push, he reckoned, should do the trick. The tanks destroyed a few pockets of German resistance, clearing the area for the British infantry. The machines were unserviceable elsewhere, sinking whenever they left the few tracts of solid ground. And relief was at hand, in the form of the inexperienced 61st Division, who came up to fill the gap left by the broken Ulstermen. They joined a series of smaller, no less lethal, attacks on the 22nd, which persisted throughout the day, with heavy casualties for the capture of Inverness Copse.

With dreary inevitably, the rain pelted down on 23 August, and it wouldn’t let up for another four days. The relieving soldiers had to advance in single file along the duckboards laid between the craters. Anyone who slipped into a shell hole risked drowning, borne down by the total weight of his pack and battle dress (60–70 pounds). An unknown number, probably several thousand, perished this way, because it was extremely difficult to drag a heavily burdened soldier out of the sucking slime. Among them was Lieutenant Colonel Edgar Mobbs DSO, 35, of Northampton, whose battalion called themselves Mobbs Own, such was the immense popularity of this former English rugby international. As he lay sinking in a shell hole with a wound to the neck, Mobbs managed to send a runner back with details of his position. The runner never reached his destination, and Mobbs’s body was never recovered.¹⁰⁷

The long files of men were easy targets. Many were shot off the duckboards and bled to death as they drowned. Would-be rescuers could find no traction, or trees from which to attach ropes, to drag them out. None would forget the sound of a man drowning slowly in mud, ‘a terrible kind of gurgling noise [of] … the wounded, lying there sinking, and this liquid mud burying them alive, running over their faces and into their mouth and nose’.¹⁰⁸

Scenes of drowning horses were similarly horrifying. Unaware of what was happening to them, the poor creatures bucked and jerked about in the grip of the mud. Most were shot before they drowned – a mercy not extended to drowning men.

The German horses, foaming with fear at the approach of the barrage, reared up and often slipped and fell into shell holes. One officer, unable to shoot his beloved horse, saw ‘a spray of mud’ where the poor animal ‘was still fighting and losing the battle against suffocation’.¹⁰⁹ In time, the rigid corpses of men and horses protruded from the swamps, and ‘inside them, oblivious to the din of battle, the rats were at their disgusting work’.¹¹⁰

A pathetic symbol of the effects of the weather was a carrier pigeon, with an important message attached to its leg, so wet and caked in mud ‘it just flapped into the air and then came straight down again’, as noted by a member of the Yorkshire company to whom the pigeon belonged. To the soldiers’ horror, the bird then started ‘walking towards the German line’, 100 yards away, bearing its secret message. So they shot it.¹¹¹

Haig had been alert to the possibility of a wet month, but he could not have expected the wettest August in Flanders in 75 years. Five times as much rain fell that month as in the same period in 1915 and 1916.¹¹² Not since Marlborough’s 1707 Flanders campaign against the French had soldiers fought in such conditions near Ypres in August. Marlborough had himself written, 200 years before, that he ‘could scarcely stir out of his quarters, the dirt being up to the horses’ bellies, which is very extraordinary this month’; and when he was able to advance, many of his soldiers perished in the sloughs along the roadsides.¹¹³

Haig’s own report echoed Marlborough’s experience:

The low-lying, clayey soil, torn by shells and sodden with rain, turned to a succession of vast muddy pools. The valleys of the choked and overflowing streams were speedily transformed into long stretches of bog, impassable except by a few well-defined tracks, which became marks for the enemy’s artillery. To leave these tracks was to risk death by drowning … In these conditions operations of any magnitude became impossible … ¹¹⁴

Haig’s post-war critics claim that he should have expected and prepared for this. Their case hinges on Charteris’s gross exaggeration in his memoir that the clouds in Flanders opened in August ‘with the regularity of the Indian monsoon’. (Charteris then contradicted this, claiming that 1917 was the wettest August in Flanders in 30 years.)¹¹⁵ Haig haters would insist, years later, that the British commander had ‘made a reckless gamble … on the chance of a rainless autumn’ (Lloyd George); that he was well aware of the likelihood of a deluge (Liddell Hart and Leon Wolff); or that his offensive ‘relied on a drought of Ethiopian proportions to ensure success’ (Gerard de Groot).¹¹⁶ None of these criticisms was fair.

The man whose job it really was to predict the weather also misjudged it. Haig’s weatherman, Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Gold, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and an outstanding meteorologist, had reckoned on ‘bright [i.e. clear] weather’ for early August. He recanted as the clouds drew in, but gave Haig no cause to expect a biblical deluge. In fact, August was usually the drier summer month, and October the wettest of the year, according to the evidence of 30 prior summers.¹¹⁷ Gold’s forecasts for September and October were less inaccurate, encouraging Haig to hope that he ‘had no reason to anticipate an abnormally wet October’.¹¹⁸ What all these arguments miss, however, is the effect of even normal rainfall on a battlefield covered in shell holes that lacked a working drainage system.

More attacks went forward on 24 August, under more rain. This time, the infantry would have no effective barrage because the artillerymen could not get their guns up in time. In scenes reminiscent of the Somme, Gough pressed ahead, as ordered, though he knew it was ‘impossible’ for his men to advance.¹¹⁹ He hoped sheer numbers might defeat the Germans but he underestimated the resilience of von Lossberg’s defensive shield. The attack degenerated into another slog through mud: thousands were left flailing about, shot up, bombed, dismembered and slaughtered beneath the commanding heights of an unreachable foe. Inverness Copse was lost, and Haig lost confidence in Gough. If this was the point at which Haig gave up on the Fifth Army, it was also the point at which many Fifth Army officers gave up on Haig.

By the end of August, the British and Dominion forces had lost 70,000 men (3424 officers and 64,586 other ranks),¹²⁰ of whom 31,850 had been killed, wounded or lost in the first three days, according to Edmonds’ figures (officially, at the Battle of Pilckem Ridge, 31 July–2 August). Of the 22 divisions involved, fourteen were withdrawn, deemed unfit to continue.¹²¹ Some units got the brunt of it, such as the Irish and Hertfordshires. The 8th Division suffered 3160 officers and men killed, wounded or missing during their failure to capture the high ground around the ruins of Stirling Castle.¹²²

Thirteen Victoria Crosses were awarded during the month’s fighting: three went to the 51st (Highland) Division of Seaforths, Argyll & Sutherlands, Gordons and the Black Watch; two to the Guards; and two to Welsh regiments.¹²³

Haig and Gough satisfied themselves that the casualties fell well within their expected range. The opening days had been ‘highly satisfactory’, Haig wrote to the War Cabinet on 4 August, ‘and the losses slight for so great a battle’.¹²⁴ Previous offensives had set the norm for what constituted ‘slight’. By this macabre calculus, the 31,850 casualties of the first three days were ‘moderate’, notes the official historian (conceding, nonetheless, that they were ‘in themselves severe’).¹²⁵ Edmonds’ litmus test for ‘moderate’, however, was the first day of the Somme, when Haig lost 57,000 men for a gain of 3.5 square miles.

Haig wrongly believed that the Germans had lost as many men, if not more. The battle had ‘pinned down’ 37 German divisions, he claimed, exhausting many of them, and it had concentrated 70 per cent of German artillery fire that might have been spent on the Russians or French. By that measure, some historians have judged the first month of Third Ypres a success.¹²⁶ In territorial terms, the Allies had gained eighteen square miles and the high ground at Pilckem Ridge.

The Germans saw the battle very differently. They claimed a series of great victories. At the end of the first day, Rupprecht praised his men for thwarting the British attack. He took particular comfort from the fact that his commanders had scarcely drawn on the battle reserves of Group Wijtschate. His infantry held on for the rest of the month, thanks to their astonishing defensive system and the weather. ‘Yesterday’s attacks,’ Rupprecht wrote on 28 August, ‘were utterly defeated.’¹²⁷

German losses that August were about 50,000 (20,000 fewer than the Allies), and seventeen of thirty divisions were withdrawn, exhausted.¹²⁸ That is not to suggest the Germans were deluded into scenting victory: 30,000 men had been killed or wounded in the artillery barrage, as Rupprecht warned the Kaiser. Their counter-attack reserves were depleted; their reserves thinning out; and adequate rations had failed to arrive.

Morale reached a new low, in both armies, at the end of August. The opening battles of Flanders had surpassed ‘the Hell of Verdun’, wrote von Kuhl, and signalled ‘the greatest martyrdom of the World War’. The German defenders had cowered for weeks in ‘water-filled craters … without shelter from weather, hungry and cold, abandoned without pause to overwhelming artillery fire’.¹²⁹

Their appalling losses alarmed even Ludendorff, no stranger to battles of annihilation. ‘The fighting on the western front,’ he would write, ‘became more severe and costly than any the German Army had yet experienced. From July 31 till well into September was a period of tremendous anxiety [and] caused us very considerable losses in prisoners and stores and a heavy expenditure of reserves … In spite of all the concrete protection they seemed more or less powerless under the enormous weight of the enemy’s artillery. At some points they no longer displayed that firmness which I, in common with the local commanders, had hoped for. I myself was being put to a terrible strain. The state of affairs in the West appeared to prevent the execution of our plans elsewhere. Our wastage had been so high as to cause grave misgivings and exceeded all expectation.’¹³⁰

Yet despite their commanders’ alarm, and Haig’s convictions to the contrary, the German soldiers were not close to breaking, reckoned Colonel Macleod, a Fifth Army officer, in mid-August. Indeed, the German ‘frontline hogs’ were proving astonishingly resilient. One Eingreif company commander said at this time:

If I live to be one hundred, the memories of the days [in Flanders] will never be extinguished. Here the true greatness of the defensive battle revealed itself in full. It requires enormous reserves of morale and courage to hold out in muddy shell holes for seven long days on end despite bad weather and ceaseless concentrated artillery fire. What each man in his lonely shell hole achieved deserves to be set down in letters of gold in the history of this war.¹³¹

If German morale held, British spirits appeared to be slipping. Many soldiers fathomed their darkest place thus far in the war. Many lost faith in the offensive. British captives were starting to express disillusionment. ‘British prisoners,’ Rupprecht wrote on 16 August, ‘are saying – and this has never been heard before – that they wished that they had shot their own officers who were leading them into the slaughterhouse. They have had enough of this butchery!’ A week later, fresh captives told their German interrogators how little faith they had in their officers; and captured officers blamed the failure on their commanders. None thought ‘there is any chance of defeating Germany without American assistance’.¹³²

The wanton losses, the rain and mud, had dragged proud British units to their knees. ‘How could all these dashed hopes fail to dishearten us?’ wrote an officer of the London Rifle Brigade. ‘After seeing the pitiful remains of the battalion … something like disgust with the British tactics made itself felt.’¹³³ Captain Yoxall was not the only officer to report ‘several cases of attempted desertion and some self-inflicted wounds’.¹³⁴

A bitter joke began to circulate. Who, the Tommies wondered, would take rations up to the last man? A morbid fatalism took hold of some. It was no longer a case of ‘When I go on leave’ but rather ‘If I get out of this’. The Dominions, too, were underwater. The morale of the Australian 4th Division was at ‘its lowest ebb’¹³⁵ even before Third Ypres, after their brutal encounters at Bullecourt and Messines. Many Anzacs were unable to withstand shellfire any longer, ‘due to the long and continuous strain they had been under’.¹³⁶ If this was how they felt before August, one can only imagine their state of mind at the end of it.

Even Britain’s sanguine official historian was moved to write:

[T]he strain of fighting with indifferent success had overwrought and discouraged all ranks more than any other operation fought by British troops in the War … The memory of this August fighting, with its heavy showers, rain-filled craters and slippery mud, was so deeply impressed on the combatants … that it has remained the image and symbol of the whole battle.¹³⁷

The possibility that conditions might get worse was simply inconceivable. Distressed the men surely were, but they had not yet reached the lower circles of Passchendaele. Through his reddening rage, Lloyd George saw only further, futile carnage.