12

THE CRUELLEST MONTH

You cannot fight machine guns plus wire, with human bodies.

Sir Andrew Russell, commanding the New Zealand Division

… no pen or brush has yet achieved the picture of that Armageddon in which so many of our men perished

Philip Gibbs, war correspondent, October 1917

‘I am of opinion,’ Haig wrote on 28 September 1917, ‘that the enemy is tottering, and that a good vigorous blow might lead to decisive results.’¹ In such hopes, which he shared with Gough and Plumer at a conference that day, Haig brought forward the next attack from 6 October to 4 October, ordered up six infantry divisions and placed five cavalry divisions at Plumer’s disposal behind the Yser Canal. High in his mind, as ever, was the prospect of a breakthrough, even if it involved the slow grind of ‘bite and hold’. At a minimum, Passchendaele Ridge should be his by mid-October.

Spurring Haig’s desire for swift action was Charteris, in whose wilful distortion of the truth the former retained a blinkered faith. Haig’s intelligence chief now claimed that the Germans had ‘used up’ 48 divisions in the Flanders battles since 31 July, ‘while we have only had 23 in the line so far’. Haig’s generals tended not to share his faith in Charteris: ‘it comes from Charteris I fear!!’ Rawlinson lamented, a common reaction on discovering the source of the intelligence.² If the commander-in-chief ‘allowed himself’ to be deluded by Charteris,³ Haig’s decision to press on seemed, from one viewpoint, understandable: the soldiers’ spirits were high after the September victories, and the weather had been fine for weeks. The bite and hold tactics had triumphed at Polygon Wood: why should they not continue ‘working’ – i.e. grinding the enemy back – if the weather held? ‘In the air was the unmistakable feeling,’ wrote Bean, ‘… that the British leaders now had the game in hand and, if conditions remained favourable, might in a few more moves secure a victory which would have its influence on the issue of the war.’⁴

Reinforce success, Haig insisted at the commanders’ conference on 2 October. Don’t make the same mistake as the Germans, who, on 31 October 1914, during First Ypres, failed to finish off the exhausted British forces.⁵ The circumstances had been very different then, but Haig would not broach any dissent. He resolved to turn all his power on the Passchendaele offensive for as long as the weather held. He suspended parallel operations at Lens and on the Belgian coast, and postponed plans for an attack at Cambrai. At this point, his generals shared his determination to finish the job in Flanders: they believed they had found a way of cracking the enemy’s lines and only a change in the weather could prevent their destruction of the German forces in Belgium. As Rawlinson noted in his dairy, ‘If only the weather shall last … we shall do a very big thing.’⁶

Ah, the weather: the curse of High Command. The disobedient elements brawled in the commanders’ faces, confounding their mortal plans. Three rainless weeks had been a critical factor in the string of victories between 20 September and 3 October. The field of mud was now a dust bowl; shells skidded on landing, throwing up clods of dry earth. Yet the dry spell was about to break, according to ‘Meteor’, the British weatherman, Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Gold. ‘[A] miracle might save us from rain,’ he told the Second Army’s chief of staff in early October.⁷

Meanwhile, the German commanders, though alarmed by British advances, were far from demoralised or beaten. Ludendorff conceded the enemy had broken, for now, the system of flexible defence; the gruff old warrior now wrestled for an answer to Plumer’s slowly grinding steps. ‘Our defensive tactics had to be developed further, somehow or other,’ Ludendorff later growled. ‘[But] it was so infinitely difficult to agree on the right remedy.’⁸ He and his commanders settled on a radical reform: the Eingreif units would be brought up to the front lines, in the hope of shocking the British forces when or even before they attacked.

News of Russia’s complete collapse gave a further boost to German spirits, with the prospect of reinforcements from the east: 82 German divisions were stationed on the Russian front; 36 could be moved west within sixteen weeks of the redeployment order.

The British and Dominion armies resolved to carry on, hopeful the good weather would continue. They would attack Passchendaele Ridge in three steps: the first, to be called the Battle of Broodseinde, would start at dawn on 4 October 1917. The New Zealand and three Australian divisions were chosen to lead the attack, across a 2000-yard front, the arrowhead of Plumer’s Second Army spread between ‘Bitter Wood’ and the Ypres–Staden railway, a front of some 14,000 yards (see Map 5). Their objective was to seize Broodseinde Ridge, an arc of higher ground a few miles short of Passchendaele Ridge that the British had not held since 1915. The Germans lining it had a direct view onto the Salient, spread out beneath them like a life-size map. The Anzacs were to advance 1500 yards in the first bite, across an extremely concentrated battlefield.

And so, once more, the lorries, mule-drawn wagons and light tramlines dragged the giant British war machine forward. Once more, the heavy guns and great masses of men and matériel came up. Huge dumps of medical supplies, blankets and stretchers were established in the forward areas. Advanced dressing stations and gas treatment stations were set up where a suitable shelter could be found. Starting tapes were laid. All of this proceeded within range of German shellfire.

The four Antipodean divisions were fighting together for the first time, and they assembled in exuberant spirits. Tens of thousands of heavily laden Anzacs came up the dusty tracks from Ypres, along the Menin Road, past Hellfire Corner, through the Birr Cross Roads, past the rising, shell-torn ground of Bellewaerde Ridge towards the forward trenches and shell holes lining the jump-off point. ‘The track from Bellewaerde to Westhoek Ridge,’ remembered Ed Lynch, ‘is … just a narrow strip of corduroy laid down across miles of unending muck, pock-marked by thousands of watery shell holes. The whole road is bordered by dead mules and mud-splattered horses, smashed wagons and limbers and freshly killed men who have been tossed off the track to leave the corduroy open for the never-ending stream of traffic.’⁹

A light rain fell on the night of 3 October, and turned the roads and tracks a bit muddy. Heavier rain would make them impassable to the gun carriages, warned an artillery unit.¹⁰ The rain gathered strength and spat down around midnight, easing into a light drizzle in the early hours of the 4th. Just before dawn, low, dark clouds hid the full moon, portending something heavier. At 5.20 am, 40 minutes before zero, German flares illuminated the frontline Anzacs assembled in the mist below. The enemy shelled whatever they could see, killing or wounding about a seventh of I Anzac Corps before the battle began.¹¹

The British and Anzac artillery produced a weaker, less dense barrage than previously: fewer Australian guns were in action that morning than the one for every five yards of front officially claimed.¹² The quality of the barrage varied, however, according to the location and timing: Monash described II Anzac’s barrage as ‘excellent’.¹³

At zero hour, 6 am, the first wave of infantry swallowed their tot of rum, lit their cigarettes and moved off, aglow with confidence, anticipating another victory. When the barrage reached the German trenches, the first line of Anzacs burst through the wall of smoke mingling with the morning mist. They met little resistance. As at Polygon Wood, the German defenders who were not dead or wounded surrendered or fled. Many sat immobilised with fear. A German blockhouse yielded to a single Australian officer, who captured 31 prisoners; another gave up as soon as the attack began, abandoning three machine guns. The pattern was repeated.¹⁴

Then, as if from nowhere, the Eingreif counter-strike units – normally further back – crowded forward with bayonets fixed, following Ludendorff’s tactical reform. Ferocious hand-to-hand fighting ensued, in shell holes and around the pillboxes, several of which were set alight with phosphorus bombs. The leading Australian brigades swept on, silencing the enemy bunkers with Lewis guns and grenades. Monash’s Third Division overran stubborn German holdouts in the ruins of Zonnebeke, and soon reached the ‘valley’ beneath Gravenstafel Ridge, a mere dip in the plain before it rose to Passchendaele. A Tasmanian battalion captured the concrete blockhouses that still stand at Tyne Cot Cemetery, suffering 50 dead and 204 wounded; one soldier sprinted 100 metres over open ground and subdued a pillbox single-handedly.¹⁵ En route to their objectives, Australian patrols encountered an old trench the British had used in 1914–15, where the tattered remains of Tommy uniforms lay strewn.

The New Zealanders attacked the eastern slopes of Gravenstafel (‘Abraham Heights’) and the Gravenstafel spur itself, with similar, decisive results. With the help of a stronger barrage, they carried all before them up the wide, open slope. Dozens of enemy pillboxes were silenced and claimed.

At 8.10 am, having bitten hard, the Anzacs paused to hold their gains. Some were so confident they continued to give chase, pursuing the retreating Germans ‘over the hilltop’.¹⁶ Australian and New Zealand riflemen picked off the escaping enemy, who were ‘fleeing in all directions’. ‘It was always difficult to keep Australians from following an enemy who was on the run,’ Bean observed.¹⁷

The British were abreast of the action, on the Antipodean flanks. The Fifth and Second armies, aided by tanks that could advance in the drier conditions, similarly captured all their objectives and thousands of prisoners. This great patchwork of actions culminated in another emphatic Allied success. In places, the Germans put up stiff resistance: officers defended their bunkers with revolvers and grenades, often to the last man. Fierce fighting surged around a huge crater on the ridge. At one point, the British and Anzacs had advanced so far that the German heavy guns were compelled to fire over open sights.

During and prior to the attack, some soldiers relished shooting down the Germans as they ‘ran away from us’, according to one Australian soldier.¹⁸ So, too, did the British. ‘It was great fun shooting at Germans,’ Major Allhusen wrote to his mother. ‘We saw any number running about & it cheered the men up enormously.’¹⁹ By the end of it, he added, ‘I was more alive than most people – some absolutely collapsed. Young Trotter … was carried away this morning. Nothing seriously wrong with him. Simply collapsed. He was too young for this sort of show.’²⁰

Hand-to-hand combat, killing at a range of a few yards, mortified the more sensitive men. Nineteen-year-old Private Walter James Bradby shot dead three Germans as they fled a pillbox, two of whom, he later found to his distress, were younger than him. The memory would haunt Bradby for the rest of his life.²¹

By twelve minutes past nine, after three hours of battle, the Anzacs had secured most of Broodseinde Ridge and Abraham Heights, and routed the enemy in the area. German soldiers were continually seen bolting to the rear. Three hundred and fifty were found dead, many with bayonet wounds, within the first 500 yards of one brigade’s front.²²

For the first time in two years, the Allies enjoyed a view of the fields beyond the German lines. To the south-east, green pastures, copses and hedgerows spread out to the sky, and, when the shelling died and the smoke cleared, images of bucolic normality met their eyes: cows grazing, carts moving, smoke issuing from farmhouses. A few miles due east rose the ultimate objective of the battle: the ruins of the church in what remained of the village of Passchendaele, atop the highest ridge in the Salient. For now, they reversed the captured German trenches and awaited the final push, settling down to a breakfast of tea and black Bavarian bread.

Haig’s headquarters revelled in the third decisive victory in fifteen days. Wild hyperbole permeated all ranks. Broodseinde was the greatest Allied triumph since the Battle of the Marne (in 1914), declared Plumer. ‘[D]ivision again brilliantly victorious in greatest battle of war,’ Monash cabled Melbourne.²³ The Anzacs at Broodseinde had ‘never fought better’, Charles Bean concurred: ‘An overwhelming blow had been struck and both sides knew it.’²⁴ Bean shared Haig’s view that, ‘for the first time in years’, British and Dominion troops were poised to inflict a decisive victory on the Western Front.

‘We have been very busy recently killing Germans,’ Lieutenant Malcolm Kennedy wrote to this brother, the day after the battle. ‘Our Australians have done very well.’²⁵ The personal messenger of General Sir Alexander John Godley, commander of II Anzac Corps, recorded the euphoria in the corps headquarters. The Anzacs had done ‘far more’ than expected of them: ‘If only it keeps fine for a few more days Fritz will get the scare of his life but I’m afraid it will rain before long …’²⁶ Godley accepted without demur Haig’s view of the ‘demoralization not only of the [German] troops but of the enemy’s commanders and staff … The whole of the battlefield of our successive advances is covered with dead Huns.’²⁷ Monash similarly believed that the Germans were now ‘staggering’ and that ‘unless the weather balks me I shall capture P-village on 12th’.²⁸

The newspapers were reliably ecstatic, trumpeting Broodseinde as the most complete success achieved by the ‘British Army’ (with whom the Anzacs were habitually bundled) thus far on the Western Front. The Battle of Broodseinde was ‘The Turning Point of the War’, ‘Germany’s Biggest Defeat’ and New Zealand’s ‘Greatest and Most Glorious Day’.²⁹

Nine Victoria Crosses were awarded that day, for ‘most conspicuous bravery’. Sergeant Lewis McGee, for example, of the 3rd Australian Pioneer Battalion, had rushed a German machine gun armed only with his revolver;³⁰ Private Arthur Hutt, of the 1/7 Royal Warwickshire, having taken command of his platoon after all his officers were dead or wounded, led an attack on a pillbox, with the capture of 40–50 prisoners.³¹ Captain Clement Robertson, of the Queen’s attached Tank Corps, led his machines on foot across difficult terrain to their objectives.³² And Private Thomas Henry Sage, of the 37th Division, threw himself on a grenade dropped by a fallen, neighbouring soldier, saving the lives of many.³³

Only Lloyd George soured the mood, grumbling about illusory gains won at great cost. In part, he was right: Broodseinde was another mile-and-a-half bite, hardly the Marne (which had saved Paris). The accolades failed to recognise that the Germans still held part of the ridge and, ominously, were far from a spent force. Reinforcements were pouring into the second line, Flandern-II Stelling, which lay between Broodseinde and Passchendaele, and great numbers were assembling on the unseen eastern plain between Passchendaele and Roulers.

And Haig had sustained the usual, terrific casualties: some 20,000 officers and men had been killed or wounded that morning. Allied commanders were reluctant to describe these losses as ‘excessive’ in view of ‘the magnitude of the results’.³⁴ Yet the British and Dominion forces had suffered a casualty rate of around twenty to 25 per cent, with some units (such as 1 Auckland Battalion) losing almost half their men – for a gain of, at most, 1900 yards closer to Passchendaele Ridge. A body or body part could be found every twenty paces along the main front, ‘some frightfully mutilated, without legs, arms and heads and half covered in mud and slime’, wrote Australia’s official photographer, Captain Frank Hurley, who had followed the men into battle. The battlefield, he observed, ‘was littered with bits of men, our own and Boche, and literally drenched with blood’.³⁵ And this was a battle that had gone well, in which every thing had proceeded according to the plan.

The Germans were more heavily battered. Many regiments had suffered their worst day of the year,³⁶ with some 35,000 casualties and, for some units, a very real sense of defeat; 5000 prisoners were taken (of whom the New Zealanders took 1159).³⁷ They presented a pitiful sight, many very young, in poor spirits, some crying, reinforcing Haig’s view that the enemy were on the brink of collapse. The official German history called 4 October the blackest day of the war (in a spate of black days).³⁸ It was ‘extraordinarily severe’, Ludendorff later confirmed, ‘and we came through it only with enormous loss’.³⁹ He conceded that his decision to move the Eingreif forward had failed.

Yet still the Germans were far from broken, if Ludendorff could be believed. Like Haig, he tended to cling to good news even as ghoulish evidence to the contrary congregated around him. Just two days later, on 6 October, he assured Rupprecht that the German Army would win the war by the end of the year so long as they held Flanders. Ludendorff even maintained that the U-boat offensive might save the day. This fantasy arose out of his refusal to accept that the Royal Navy–escorted convoys had already won the U-boat war.

Rupprecht drew a very different conclusion: after Broodseinde, he had nightmare visions of the rout of his entire army in Belgium. In early October, he even contemplated a general withdrawal from Flanders and the possible abandonment of the U-boat bases. He decided not to do so, for two reasons: the U-boats were still operational and many more were coming on-stream; and more importantly, it had started to rain again, a godsend to defenders on the higher ground. ‘Most gratifying,’ Rupprecht wrote, ‘rain: our most effective ally.’⁴⁰

The heavens denied Haig the miracle for which he prayed. The skies opened just after noon on 4 October, as Gold had forecast. On the 5th and 6th, the rain bucketed down; on the 7th, it fell in ‘drenching squalls’;⁴¹ on the 8th, a drying wind yielded to more torrential rain. Gold surrendered to his instruments: great storm clouds 1000 miles west of Ireland were bearing down on Europe at 40 miles an hour and the rest of the month looked hopeless. (The rain would not ease for weeks: 107 millimetres would fall that month, compared with 31 millimetres in the same period in 1914, 32 millimetres in 1915 and 69 millimetres in 1916. That October, there would be only five rainless days in Flanders.)

By the 8th, the swamp-like conditions of August had returned. Yet the fighting would continue, Haig decided, into the valley of Gravenstafel, just below Passchendaele Ridge, a low-lying area prone to heavy flooding. Haig persisted with his belief that a few sharp blows would deliver Passchendaele; the recent victories even revived his hopes of clearing the coast before winter.

Wishful thinking clouded reality like a cataract. In such appalling conditions, the exacting preparations that Plumer had hitherto insisted on – a ready supply of fresh troops and the availability of enough guns to create a dense barrage – were not adhered to. In the rain-swept days that followed the battle, Haig decided to press on, in what many now regard as the most disastrous decision of his career (see Chapter 17). Most of his corps and divisional generals ‘would have liked to stop the offensive’, Bean observed.⁴² Birdwood, commander of the Anzacs, advised Plumer ‘against any further advance’. ‘My men were weak and tired …’⁴³ Monash concurred, anticipating carnage. When Godley and even Plumer rejected Monash’s protests, the Australian commander bowed to the inevitable and organised an ambulance system ‘akin to a cab rank’ and 200 additional stretcher-bearers.⁴⁴

Few shared Haig’s assessment of the Germans as a near-spent force. Junior officers and ordinary soldiers, watching the battle-field revert to an ‘ocean of thick brown porridge’ in which ‘the wire entanglements had sunk into the mud’, grabbing at their submerged legs,⁴⁵ were astounded at the decision to fight on: surely this would lead to wanton slaughter, with little chance of success? ‘Now I fear that it must be a wash-out for the year – tough luck,’ noted one private.⁴⁶

Nor was there enough time to prepare – just two days – or to bring forward the available guns, as Haig’s commanders knew. And yet, if they doubted their chief’s wisdom, Plumer and Gough showed little inclination to challenge his orders. Their recent successes made Plumer uncharacteristically confident, and he and Harington ‘allowed themselves … to be seduced into rushing preparations’.⁴⁷ Gough – chastened by the memory of August – made plain his reluctance to attack in the wet, but put up little resistance once he knew Haig’s mind was decided. If both expressed reservations, even objections, at a meeting on 7 September (the occurrence of which is disputed⁴⁸) neither took a strong stand against their commander’s decision.

Exactly why Haig persisted has baffled military experts, historians and politicians for a century. Flush with confidence after the capture of Menin Road, Polygon Wood and Broodseinde, Haig could be forgiven, says Bean, for wondering, ‘What will be the result of three more in the next fortnight?’⁴⁹ If fine weather returned, Bean concludes, ‘was Haig’s strategic design beyond the chance of attainment’?⁵⁰ Nor were the alternatives appealing. Staying put and wallowing in the mud beneath Passchendaele for the winter was militarily untenable, and withdrawing to Pilckem Ridge, after so many losses, politically unacceptable. The latter would have brought the wrath of the politicians and the press onto Haig’s head. Balancing these arguments, Haig concluded that the only viable option was to attack and hold Passchendaele for the winter.

Countering his resolve was the great destroyer, the rain. An intelligence summary on 7 October described part of the valley the men would have to cross as ‘saturated ground. Quite impassable. Should be avoided by all troops at all times.’⁵¹ On the morning of the 9th, when the next battle, at Poelcappelle, was scheduled to begin, the field had been reduced to something worse than the porridge of August. Spread out before their eyes, for all to see, was a landscape pocked with depressions of unknown depth, each filled with a stinking brown liquid, set in a mash of mud, bodies and debris thrown up by thousands upon thousands of explosions that had busted the ancient drainage system and scalped the crust of the earth. Over this, the Anzacs and British were now ordered to attack.

What followed produced such scenes of human and animal misery as to render superlatives meaningless and the descriptive powers of historians inert. ‘[N]othing that has been written is more than the pale image of the abomination of those battle-fields,’ wrote the war correspondent Philip Gibbs, ‘no pen or brush has yet achieved the picture of that Armageddon in which so many of our men perished.’⁵² Yet, to have any understanding of what these men went through, we must at least try to imagine the ineffable, and their eyewitness accounts together provide the best indication.

Tim Harington, Plumer’s chief of staff, told war correspondents on the eve of the Battle of Poelcappelle – the second step in the assault on Passchendaele Ridge – that the high ground was dry as a bone. If true, which it wasn’t, surely Harington spoke to German, not British, advantage? Bean, then in his role as Australia’s official war correspondent, listened with dread to this recipe for a ‘classical tragedy’ in which the British commanders, in their eagerness to dismiss the Germans as a spent force, had overlooked the state of their own men.

‘I believe,’ Bean wrote, ‘the official attitude is that Passchendaele Ridge is so important that tomorrow’s attack is worth making whether it succeeds or fails. I suspect they are making a great bloody experiment …’ This ‘huge gamble’, he added, would rely wholly for its success on ‘German demoralisation’. Bean accused the generals of ‘playing with the morale of their troops’: ‘They don’t realise how … desperately hard it will be to fight down such opposition in the mud, rifles choked, [Lewis guns] out of action, men tired and slow …’ He plaintively concluded, ‘I thought the principle was to … “hit, hit, hit, whenever the weather is suitable”. If so, it is thrown over at the first temptation.’ With his usual prescience, Bean believed the commanders failed to see ‘how very strong our morale had to be to get through the last three fights’.⁵³ The coming battles would fail, he feared.

Such warnings had no truck with Haig, for whom the capture of Passchendaele was becoming something of an obsession, the fulfilment of which trampled over any obstacle: exhaustion, the lack of guns and even pouring rain …

Throughout the night of 8–9 October, one Anzac and two British divisions of Plumer’s Second Army staggered up to the 13,500-yard front, the tip of another vast arrow-shaped formation flanked by the rest of the Second Army, the Guards Division, as well as French units and Gough’s Fifth Army. Two cavalry divisions were within a day’s march of the front – such was Haig’s confidence of success. The question of how their horses would gallop across a swamp remained unanswered.

In the pouring rain, far fewer heavy guns could be assembled. The carriages sank in the quagmire. Mules were the only means of delivering ammunition: a one-hour journey now took between six and sixteen. ‘If the animals slipped off the planks,’ observed one historian, ‘they often sank out of sight.’⁵⁴ On arrival, each slimy shell had to be cleaned before use. Gun platforms made of beech slabs nailed onto a foundation of fascines and metal required two days’ work to construct. These, too, ‘began to sink into mud after a few rounds had been fired’.⁵⁵

And there was the question of Allied morale. Most British units were well below full strength. Many Australian brigades were severely depleted, their men exhausted from clearing tracks, hauling wagons and laying duckboards and telephone cables, ‘tasks which appeared physically impossible to perform, and which no other army would have faced’.⁵⁶ Hundreds had been evacuated with trench foot or severe bronchial complaints, the result of sleeping on wet blankets or straw. Several Australian battalions contained just 150 men, out of the usual 750 or so, and a handful of officers. Some had ‘temporarily deserted’ and faded to the rear. Bean witnessed soldiers coming back down Menin Road, pale and drawn, placing one foot in front of the other, robotically, ‘as I had not seen men do since the Somme winter’. They looked ‘like a dead man looks, and scarcely able to walk’.⁵⁷

The British, too, were battered and exhausted. An untested British division, the 66th, designated to spearhead the attack on one part of the front, lost hundreds of men en route to the starting line. The march, which should have taken 90 minutes, according to a diarist of the Lancashire Fusiliers, took eleven terrifying hours, as the heavily laden men were trying to cross a swamp under torrential rain and enemy shellfire. Duckboards over the water-filled holes collapsed or were shelled. Many drowned. The loathed staff officers were sent to goad the fitter troops forward to the starting tapes. One brigade arrived twenty minutes after zero hour (5.20 am), and were flung straight into battle.⁵⁸

‘It was an absolute nightmare,’ recalls Lieutenant P. King, of the East Lancashire Regiment, ‘… all the time the duckboards were being blown up and men being blown off the track or merely slipping off … we were loaded up like Christmas trees, so of course an explosion near by or just the slightest thing would knock a man off balance and he would go … right down into the muck.’⁵⁹

‘[O]ur barrage had started,’ recalled Private A. T. Shaw of the same regiment, ‘but we had not then arrived at the jumping off point. Heavy German shells were already falling amongst us and shrapnel was flying all over the place. There were shouts and screams and men falling all around. The attack that should have started never got off the ground.’⁶⁰

The opening barrage was thin and ineffectual, as many had feared. Shells burst in the mud, losing their power, fell short or veered off target; gun platforms sank with every shot. The barrage failed to break the German lines or destroy the belt of fresh wire in front of the enemy trenches. The German machine gunners fired on the enemy unhindered. ‘No previous attack organized by the Second Army in the war had such an unfavourable start,’ writes one historian.⁶¹

In spite of all this, the Anzac and British soldiers who had reached the starting tapes rose at the whistles and attacked. Some staggered or crawled or were even dragged into battle, exhausted, wet through and covered in mud.⁶² They advanced into lines of pillboxes crowded with machine guns that spat belts into the valley. Through all this, some British troops reached Passchendaele Ridge, and a patrol of British officers actually entered the ruins of the village, which they found deserted (as a result of Ludendorff moving the Eingreif to the rear again). The rain and German shellfire ended their audacity, and they withdrew. Thousands were left floundering below Passchendaele and Poelcappelle, easy targets for enemy machine gunners. Acts of searing bravery redeemed the failure; one action alone merited three Victoria Crosses.⁶³ Whole units disappeared: fourteen men out of an Australian raiding party of 85 returned unwounded; no traces of the rest were ever recovered.

The survivors fell back to the starting point, and scrambled for shelter. Some Australians dug in near the smashed Zonnebeke railroad, so exhausted and shell-shocked that Frank Hurley, lying near them, could not distinguish the living from the dead.⁶⁴ Bursting shells blew horse-drawn ambulance wagons off the track, hurling their damaged human cargo into the mire. Helplessly the bearers tried to gather up the wounded and right the wagons, under rain and shellfire. Acute demoralisation set in.

‘My Dearest Mother,’ wrote Alfred Leahy on 10 October (having been told he would be recommended for a Military Medal or high award), ‘You have no doubt read in the papers of this great battle … Men were falling all around me, and the dying, dead and wounded lying about the field was indescribable. I do not wish to go thro’ the same again or witness such shocking sights …’⁶⁵

Through the crowded aid posts and field hospitals padres roamed, to deliver last rites. ‘Even when a man was very badly wounded and unconscious,’ recalled Padre S. Hinchcliffe, of the Northumberland Fusiliers, ‘I always believed that you could penetrate right down through his consciousness.’ He bent down and whispered in their ears, ‘Put your trust in God.’⁶⁶

In the shambles that now passed for the front, the men spent the night in shallow shell holes, many in the ruins of Zonnebeke, awaiting relief. But the relieving troops could not get through the German fire. Allhusen’s company, part of a relief battalion, succeeded after an epic journey. His men approached the Menin Road on the night of 6 October, ‘hopelessly depressed and exaggeratedly cheerful in turns’, he wrote. They rested in the ruins of a village for three days, cold and wet. He likened the mood in the mess to that of ‘a condemned cell’.⁶⁷ Past Dead Mule Corner, the road met the duckboards. Further up the slope, at Sanctuary Corner, the shellfire worsened. One of his men received a ‘blighty’: ‘I have never seen anybody so pleased,’ Allhusen observed.

Moving along Menin Road that night left him with a memory of:

bursting shells, treading on dead men, frantic calls for stretcher-bearers long after the stretcher-bearers had gone, losing the way … everybody hurrying and swearing: then awful delays while the guide admitted that he was lost and made futile remarks such as ‘there ought to be a broken tank ’ere’ … all under heavy shelling with men being hit left and right.⁶⁸

His men found the unit they were supposed to relieve, a company of Bedfords, many of whom were huddled in a captured pillbox, ‘like ghosts, pale and wild-eyed, with long beards and coated in mud from head to foot’. Their present company commander (the first had been killed in the doorway to the pillbox) ‘talked incessantly in a light-headed way’.⁶⁹

Allhusen led his platoon to a trench filled with a foot and a half of water, ‘where they were to live’ amid men of strange regiments who were ‘wandering about lost and swearing’. It rained all night. In the morning, the sun shone. Allhusen surveyed ‘just the shapeless mess that remains when everything else has gone’. The mud rose ‘in squashy heaps out of pools and lakes of slimy liquid that were sometimes black, sometimes yellow … sometimes bright green – but never the colour that water ought to be’, he recalled. ‘Mixed with everything were stores, arms and equipment … and dead men. Sometimes these were in groups, sometimes single, while often there were only bits of them.’⁷⁰

This perceptive young lieutenant’s ‘strongest memory’ was ‘the hunted, haunted feeling which made men restless and sullen, wandering aimlessly about talking in disjointed monosyllables, and ultimately drove them mad’. The soldiers were always in a hurry, yet with nothing to do, as they waited to attack. They tried to improve the trenches – a hopeless task, ‘as every shovel full of mud thrown out slithered slowly back again’.⁷¹

Shortly they prepared to leave the support trenches and enter the front line. Two men went down with severe shell shock: one shook ‘like jelly’ and ‘couldn’t speak’; the other ‘became paralysed, and was not expected to live’. Allhusen, now second in charge of his company, reached the front to find his commander standing knee-deep in mud, his teeth chattering, and on the edge of going ‘out of his mind’. In the distance, the German gunners were shelling their own troops, provoking laughter among Allhusen’s men. Golden rain – the flare that was supposed to warn the gunners that their rounds were falling short – fell all day over the German lines as they blew themselves up.

An Australian unit managed to relieve the East Lancashires that night, to the astonishment of Lieutenant P. King: ‘three tall figures’, one of whom was ‘actually smoking’, jumped into his shell hole. ‘Who the hell are you?’ King asked. To which one soldier replied, ‘Well, we’re the Aussies, chum, and we’ve come to relieve you.’ Delighted, King warned that he had no trenches, rations or ammunition, and could only offer a map. ‘Never mind about that,’ said the Australian. ‘Just fuck off.’⁷²

As the Australian reinforcements waited for dawn, they ate iron rations and drank cold tea. The cries of the wounded persisted all night. Every so often, a man fell into a crater and sank. ‘We heard screaming from another crater,’ recounts Sergeant T. Berry of The Rifle Brigade. Berry tried to create a chain of rifles to reach the man, now up to his neck:

He went down gradually. He kept begging us to shoot him. But we couldn’t shoot him. Who could shoot him? We stayed with him, watching him go down in the mud. And he died. He wasn’t the only one. There must have been thousands … ⁷³

The Allies gained none of their goals that day. Their ‘total repulse’ by the Germans produced a further 13,000 British and Anzac casualties, of whom 4000 were killed: this by a supposedly broken enemy. Charteris was forced to face reality, as he revealed in his diary entry on 10 October:

It was the saddest day of this year. We did fairly well but only fairly well … there is now no chance of complete success this year … there is no purpose in it now, so far as Flanders is concerned.⁷⁴

The only man who could have ended the hell in the Salient remained mysteriously silent. The prime minister had insisted on retaining the power to halt the offensive should circumstances dictate, as they did now. Many years later, Lloyd George would defend his inaction by claiming that Haig and GHQ had kept him in the dark about the progress of the campaign – a piece of fiction as bogus as the casualties were real. In fact, the events on the Western Front were well known to the War Policy Committee, through which Lloyd George had by now acquired near dictatorial powers.

Instead, in early October, with his Italian campaign failing, Lloyd George busied himself with a scheme for a new front line, this time in Turkey. The prime minister’s idea was to take Germany’s southern ally out of the war via the stick of an attack through Palestine and the carrot of generous terms to Constantinople. He raised the Turkish card at War Committee meetings on 3 and 11 October, with all the zeal of his Italian adventure. Three of his colleagues were in favour; Bonar Law feared another Gallipoli.

The matter of Third Ypres rarely intruded on these deliberations. On the few occasions they discussed it, the War Policy Committee tended to dismiss it as a foregone failure, unworthy of their attention. Haig had failed even to reach Passchendaele, after two months of bashing, complained the prime minister on 3 October. Curzon argued in fairness that the weather had hampered the offensive. Regardless, Lloyd George barked, there was little chance of Haig seizing Roulers or Klerken Ridge (beyond Passchendaele) that year.

By the 11th, the prime minister had persuaded himself that a winter Palestine/Turkey campaign ‘was the only operation to undertake’, notwithstanding the firm objections of Major General Arthur Lynden-Bell, former chief of staff in Egypt, who knew better. The terrible battle at Poelcappelle that had ended two days earlier excited little comment. The prime minister merely regretted that he’d taken ‘too sanguine a view of the Flanders offensive’ and promised to raise the matter with the War Cabinet in three weeks if Haig’s position had not improved: the nod, in other words, to continue the offensive until further notice.⁷⁵

If any moment should have justified the prime minister’s intervention, surely this was it. Every day, Lloyd George knew, thousands of men were being killed or wounded for little result. Yet neither he nor his committeemen saw fit to act. And again, the prime minister exhibited none of the thunderous moral energy with which he would later denounce the battle. The fact that the waging of the Flanders campaign was ultimately his to decide seemed not to impinge upon the committee’s discussions at the time, as Prior and Wilson’s devastating study concludes: ‘It would continue not another day if they denied it authorization’, yet the prime minister ‘failed to raise a finger to stop it’ when he had the chance.⁷⁶

The prime minister was, of course, answerable to the Conservatives in his Cabinet. And there were other reasons for his inertia (as we shall discuss in Chapter 17). For now, Lloyd George put himself in the rare position of listening. He summoned a panel of military experts on 11 October to examine the whole panoply of war-related issues that were causing ‘most anxiety in the War Cabinet’: the Russian collapse; the delayed French recovery; the abandonment of the Italian offensive; the exhaustion of the supply of British manpower; the endless delays of the Americans; and the U-boat war (the only bright spot being that September’s shipping losses had been ‘exceptionally low’).⁷⁷ Meanwhile, the rain poured down in Flanders and thousands of young men were on the move again, trudging to their doom.

Well aware that they would have weak, if any, artillery cover, Haig ordered his ragged armies up for another attack, which would be known as the First Battle of Passchendaele. They were given two days to prepare. The ensuing battles would thus rely on pure hope over hard experience. The commanders cast precedent aside, as if the lessons of Loos, the Somme, Gheluvelt and even the immediately preceding Poelcappelle, so profligate with soldiers’ lives, were worth nothing. Haig continued to persuade himself, and told French President Poincaré, that enemy morale was at rock bottom and the German soldiers lacked the ability to fight.⁷⁸ Even Plumer believed one more push might carry the day. Old Plum, hitherto a model of caution, now tended to set goals that were beyond the capacity of his army. As the British official historian concludes, the task allotted the Anzacs on 12 October was ‘beyond the power of any infantry with so little support’.⁷⁹

A powerful dissenting voice intruded on the eve of the next bite. Lieutenant General George Macdonogh, director of military intelligence at the War Office, argued that the Germans were far from defeated, and that fresh formations were arriving from the Russian front. Macdonogh’s sane intervention had no influence on Haig, who vented his feelings in his diary:

I can’t think why the War Office Intelligence Dept. gives such a wrong picture of the situation except that General Macdonogh (DMI) is a Roman Catholic and is (perhaps unconsciously) influenced by information which doubtless reaches him from tainted (i.e. catholic) sources.⁸⁰

A charitable reading would set aside this squalid sentiment as Haig’s personal prejudice, which had no place in a decision that would determine the outcome of a battle and the fate of thousands of men. Yet Haig’s dislike of Irish Catholics was a palpable force in his thinking, and went hand-in-hand with his dim view of those under his command. One of Haig’s apologists rather absurdly argues that the Pope’s ‘pro-German stance’ somehow justified Haig’s suspicions of Macdonogh’s intelligence.⁸¹ The Vatican’s August peace proposal had condemned the war in general; the Pope had not taken sides.

In any case, as it happened, Macdonogh had not received tainted intelligence, and Haig had a responsibility to examine it: the Germans defending Passchendaele Ridge along the Flandern II-Stellungen were indeed gathering in strength. Macdonogh drew on the bigger picture, the situation in Russia and elsewhere in France, whereas Haig at this time tended to rely on his soldier’s instincts and Charteris’s wishful thinking. Obviously the Germans were heavily mauled – Haig was ‘not totally wrong’, writes Sheffield⁸² – but they were far from defeated.

In the event, Haig ignored Macdonogh. He would continue bashing away with every man he could get hold of. If his geographical goal was Bellevue Spur, his actual goal was to kill or wound as many Germans as possible. Bellevue Spur juts out of Passchendaele Ridge above the Ravebeek Valley, through which flows the Ravebeek ‘stream’, now 50 yards wide and waist-deep. Surrounding it were hectares of thick brown stew. Few guns could be marshalled through this mess – not nearly enough to raise a barrage. ‘Horses were useless in such mud so the guns had to be inched forward by manpower,’ wrote one New Zealand gunner, ‘pulled out of the muddy water in one shellhole to slide forward into another.’⁸³ Their carriages sank, their wheels buckled, their axles broke. The few guns that reached their intended positions had no firm ground on which to absorb the recoil shock, and sank deeper with every shot.⁸⁴ Topographers, too, with their heavy plane-tables and tripods on their backs, and trig observers with their theodolites, on whom the gunners relied to locate vital grid references such as Passchendaele church, faced a near-impossible task through the Flanders mud.⁸⁵ The pack mules took seventeen hours to deliver the ammunition: every time a mule got stuck, the eight rounds strapped to its back had to be removed and cleaned, and the animal dragged clear of the mud and reloaded, until it happened again.

A severe problem arose the day before the offensive: the 66th Division had failed to hold its section of front, in the Ravebeek Valley. An Australian officer went forward to find out why. He found scenes of despair. ‘Never have I seen men so broken and demoralised,’ he wrote. The Tommies were:

huddled up close … in the last stages of exhaustion and fear. Fritz had been sniping them off all day, and had accounted for fifty seven … the dead and dying lay in piles. The wounded … groaned and moaned all over the place.⁸⁶

The torrential rain prompted Gough, on the eve of the attack, to call Plumer and request a postponement. Plumer consulted his commanders and replied that the attack should proceed as planned. Both generals knew they would be sending men into battle with little or no artillery support – in other words, to certain death. Both knew that the few guns in place could not possibly destroy the German wire – a critical precondition for success, and a lesson so brutally learned on the Somme. None of this deflected Haig from his course. The Anzacs would again spearhead the offensive, this time ‘virtually without protection’, as Bean feared.⁸⁷ Their orders were to capture Passchendaele village that afternoon.

To reach the new starting line – a melange of mud, water, corpses and detritus – the fresh Anzac brigades had to move in single file along a few miles of duckboards, before plunging into the morass. The journey took the entire night. These men had heard stories of the previous battle, of thousands crawling through mud into the attack. And the stories had a lethal effect on morale. A gunner who had fought at Poelcappelle witnessed one relieving battalion pass him, on 11 October, on their way to the front:

The reinforcements … shambled up past the guns with dragging steps and the expressions of men who knew they were going to certain death. No words of greeting … as they slouched along; in sullen silence they filed past one by one to the sacrifice.⁸⁸

Many of these reinforcements got lost, fell into shell holes or were blown up on the way (such was the freedom with which the German gunners now operated). ‘Before 5 am we had lost men like rotten sheep,’ recalls Lieutenant G. M. Carson. ‘I nearly got blown to pieces scores of times. We went through a sheet of iron all night and in the morning it got worse … at times we were bogged up to our arm pits and it took anything from an hour upwards to get out. Lots were drowned in the mud and water.’⁸⁹ Lieutenant Russell Harris found it ‘impossible to shut one’s ears’ to the cries of men drowning: ‘When silence came it was almost like a physical blow, engendering a feeling bordering on guilt.’⁹⁰

The whistles blew at 5.25 am. If evidence for a miracle were needed, it lay here, in the sight of a fresh wave of Anzacs, rising once more under torrential rain. The barrage was a whisper of its usual strength and offered no protective screen. The batteries rustled up a few hundred shells, which burst harmlessly in the mud, or veered off target. The residue passed thinly over Passchendaele, too fast for soldiers moving along slippery duckboards; or it fell short, sending ‘friendly’ shells onto their heads.

Against all hope or expectation, some Australians and New Zealanders reached their first objective, the red line, 1200 yards ahead. Their second goal, the blue line, the starting point for the assault on Passchendaele, was a further half-mile on; and their final objective, the green line, 400 yards beyond the village. Bear in mind that these ‘lines’ were simply map references; the ground itself was all the same – a glutinous mass of mud and water on an upwardly curving plain.

Few got further than the red line. The belts of German wire were fully intact, as their commanders knew. Stuck in the open beneath the spur, without artillery protection, the men came under merciless German sniper and machine-gun fire, which spattered across the bog like a wave of hail. The entire Antipodean attack broke down in the swamps of the Ravebeek Valley. Thousands were shot standing knee-deep in mud, unable to move. Within hours, Australian casualties had reached 4500, dead and wounded. They included Captain Clarence Smith Jeffries, awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously, the last Australian to receive the decoration during Third Ypres, for leading the destruction of a machine gun that had blocked his unit’s path.⁹¹

The battalion sent to seize Passchendaele got as far as 600 yards from the village church, where they encountered the remains of the 66th Division, whom they had been sent to relieve. The survivors included two forlorn Tommies sitting in a shell hole, one with a broken arm, the other with trench feet. At first glance, these dazed men took the Aussies for Germans, and panicked. When they realised their error, they exclaimed with relief, ‘We knew the Australians would come. We prayed hard.’⁹² Further on, a twenty-man Australian patrol managed to scramble into Passchendaele village and touch the ruins of the church steeple. Finding neither friend nor foe, they withdrew.

‘Incredible, as it is not time yet,’ noted Monash, in his headquarters beneath the Ypres ramparts. He had received the news at 10.28 am via the interrogation of a prisoner, and naturally assumed a large body of his men had taken Passchendaele. Reinforcing this belief was a message attached to a pigeon that flew in at noon, stating that an Australian battalion had reached the blue line. Firmer intelligence soon disabused the Australian commander, and by 4 pm the survivors had fallen back to their starting point, utterly exhausted.

Elsewhere, on the flanks to the north and south of Monash’s men, a similar story unfolded, of countless futile blows, too numerous to recount, ending with the termination of the offensive – a near repeat of Poelcappelle. Yet, of all the casualties of those terrible October days, the New Zealanders suffered a uniquely tragic and ghastly end. Thousands who had set out to attack Bellevue Spur were never seen again.

New Zealand’s sole division drew heavily on the youth of Auckland, Otago, Wellington and Canterbury, white and Maori, many of whom were fighting ‘for home town first and New Zealand second’, observed their historian Christopher Pugsley.⁹³ They numbered 20,000 young men, of great skill and proven courage. On the Somme, they had fought in the front lines for 23 consecutive days, longer than any other division, fulfilling every task assigned them, at a cost of 7408 casualties. At Polygon Wood and Broodseinde, along with the Australians, they had inflicted emphatic defeats on the enemy. Haig greatly admired this Antipodean fist in his arsenal, which was why he used them in the van of the October attacks.

Alas, in a year of ‘black days’, 12 October 1917 would go down as the blackest in New Zealand’s military history. Their attack on Passchendaele Ridge broke one of the finest units on the Western Front. Even before the battle had begun, hopelessly bogged down, many New Zealanders found themselves caught between friendly fire from behind and German artillery in front. Their own guns fell short by about 200 yards, directly onto their heads. Dozens of Otago men and the commanding officer of the 1st Canterbury Battalion were cut to pieces, as they waited a hundred yards behind the starting tape.⁹⁴

Private Leonard Hart of the Otago Battalion, among the few who survived the attack on Bellevue Spur, described what happened:

What was our dismay on reaching almost to the top of the ridge to find a long line of practically undamaged German concrete machine gun emplacements with barbed wire entanglements in front of them fully fifty yards deep … Dozens got hung up on the wire and shot down before their surviving comrades [sic] eyes. It was now broad daylight and what was left of us realised that the day was lost.⁹⁵

A 25- to 50-yard gap in the wire lured others into a ‘lane of death’, with German machine guns waiting on either side.⁹⁶ Others threw themselves onto the wire and wrestled to within a few yards of the German pillboxes. None got through – an impossible task. A regiment of the Black Watch, to the New Zealanders’ left, experienced the same bloody shambles, cut down where they stood in the mud, or hanging from the German wire.

The survivors withdrew and tried to dig in beneath the spur, a ‘ridiculous’ notion to the New Zealand Machine Gun Company, who found themselves sitting in water. ‘You can’t dig water!’ Private W. Smith observed.⁹⁷ Seeing their plight, the Germans emerged arrogantly from their pillboxes and started shooting the men floundering in the bog below. The New Zealanders were reduced to a leaderless rabble, staggering around in the mud, expecting at any moment to be picked off. Most of the officers and sergeants were wiped out. ‘Everyone was scattered, wounded or dead,’ recalled Smith. ‘We had no idea what to do, for we had no NCOs, no officers, no orders.’ In their pathos, he and a friend ‘set off crawling towards Passchendaele’, then thought the better of it and spent the night in a shell hole in pouring rain.⁹⁸

‘The stunt should never have been ordered under such conditions,’ wrote Corporal Harold Green of the New Zealand Rifle Brigade. ‘It was absolute murder.’⁹⁹

‘You cannot fight machine guns plus wire, with human bodies,’ Sir Andrew Russell, commanding the New Zealand Division, later explained to the country’s Minister of Defence. ‘Without the wire to check them the men would’ve tackled machine guns despite their losses.’ In a painful, almost insulting statement of the obvious, he added, ‘As it was they tried heroically to tackle both. This was humanly impossible.’¹⁰⁰ The wire and weather were not the only culprits: a Scottish deserter had forewarned the Germans the night before that the New Zealanders were going to attack. The enemy were very well prepared.

Russell’s acceptance of the blame deflected it from a more fitting source: Lieutenant General John Godley, the aloof English officer who commanded the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (as well as II Anzac Corps), of whom Birdwood charitably wrote, ‘he does not seem able to command the affections of officers or men’.¹⁰¹ Less politely, a New Zealand historian concluded that the soldiers ‘hated’ Godley.¹⁰²

As reports of the disaster came in, Russell realised that Godley had no idea of the conditions at the front or where the front was. Nor, in fairness, had any commander at divisional level and above: all the telephone lines were cut; the runners, if they survived, took hours to deliver messages; the messenger dogs had taken heavy casualties; and the pigeons couldn’t fly.

Godley would have none of these excuses. He had promised Haig that he would deliver Passchendaele, whatever the cost. Indeed, the seizure of the village and the ridge had become a near obsession, for both men. By the time the sun had risen on the attack, 117 New Zealand officers and 3179 men had been killed or wounded – a huge loss for so small a country – many hundreds of whom were found dead on the German wires. ‘They had poured out their blood like water,’ wrote Colonel Stewart. ‘The bodies of 40 officers and 600 men lay in swathes about the wire and along Gravenstafel road.’¹⁰³

Godley put a Haig-like gloss on the result: it had been ‘a very good day’s work’, and a ‘big success’, he informed the New Zealand Minister of Defence on 16 October. He wrote in a similar vein to the assistant private secretary of King George V, claiming that his forces had cleared the way for the Canadians to take Passchendaele ‘without undue difficulty’.¹⁰⁴ Godley added that the casualties were ‘not unduly heavy’ (in fact, they were a morale-cracking 60 per cent for the Anzacs in general, and 85 per cent in several New Zealand units). Buckingham Palace wrote back to say how delighted King George and Queen Mary – of the House of Windsor now, having changed their name from the German original, the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha – were to hear the news.¹⁰⁵

Godley quoted with pride a German officer, taken prisoner, who ‘exclaimed in astonishment that no troops in the world would have attempted an offensive’ over such ground.¹⁰⁶ Indeed, no troops should have, and it was Godley’s failure that they did, concluded the New Zealand historian. Thus ended the first defeat of the New Zealanders on the Western Front, in a battle in which, as Bean observed, ‘No infantry in the world could have succeeded.’¹⁰⁷

The medical teams fell upon a field more densely packed with bodies and body parts than any in their experience, heavier than the battles of August and September. The Third Australian Division had lost more than 35 men for every yard of front taken.¹⁰⁸ The 9th and 10th Brigades were virtually wiped out: the 9th went over with 79 officers and 1939 men, and returned with nineteen officers and 631 men; of the 10th’s 64 officers and 1800 men, 23 and 767 respectively survived the battle unscathed.¹⁰⁹ The rest were killed, wounded, missing (presumed dead) or taken prisoner.

The mobile wounded had crawled into pillboxes or shell holes to escape German snipers. Many drowned, were blown up or expired slowly, by gas gangrene or blood loss, while awaiting stretcher-bearers, who sometimes took days to reach them. Some 500 New Zealand stretcher cases lay at a casualty clearance station near Waterloo Farm. Exposed to the hail and driving rain, they began sinking into the mud, ‘just dying there where they’d been dumped off’.¹¹⁰ His efforts to extract them left Brigadier General ‘Bill’ Braithwaite, a hard-driving brigade commander, who had witnessed the virtual destruction of his beloved regiment, a broken man. Having pleaded three times for assistance for the last 75 cases, he begged Russell, ‘I am powerless to do more personally. As a last extremity I appeal to you personally.’¹¹¹ Alas, most of them drowned or succumbed to gas gangrene.

‘A note of failure’ was how the official medical record summed up the bearers’ performance in early October, ‘at times almost of despair’ at their inability to reach the wounded.¹¹² Eschewing the use of stretchers, the powerful Maori relay teams were even seen carrying wounded men in their arms and over their shoulders, as if they were children.¹¹³ The bearers’ saving grace was the restraint shown by German snipers and machine gunners, most of whom refrained from firing on the six-man stretcher parties. Some Germans, amazed at what they had witnessed, even sympathised with the Anzacs and Tommies, pointing out where the wounded men lay, engendering, noted one British infantryman, ‘a respect for the Hun I never had before’.¹¹⁴

Thousands of walking wounded hobbled back along the broken duckboards. A long line passed Private Edward Lynch:

walking, staggering, lurching, limping back. Men with blood-stained bandages and men with none. Men carrying smashed arms, others painfully limping on shattered legs. Laughing men and shivering men. Men with calm, quiet faces and fellows with jumping blood-shot eyes above strangely lined pain-racked and tortured faces. Men walking back as if there’s nothing left to harm them and others who flinch and jump and throw themselves into shell holes at every shell burst and at each whistle of a passing bullet … ¹¹⁵

Lynch was himself piggybacked from the field with a broken foot, and stretcher-borne into a long tent under ‘dazzling lights’, where ‘the sight of a bed with snowy sheets seems to fly one into another world’. It seemed wrong, he thought, that such ‘starched cleanliness’ should ‘hover so close to the mud and filth that is me’.¹¹⁶ As he entered the operating theatre, he passed a bucket full of arms, hands and feet being carried out.¹¹⁷ Emptying them was a daily chore.

The withdrawal was as perilous as the advance. Allhusen’s men were relieved on the night of 16 October, and cheerfully began the long march back along the ‘Menin Road handicap’. En route, enemy shells blew his platoon apart. What remained was ‘something like the mediaeval idea of hell; pitch dark, except in the evil flashes of bursting shells; screams, groans and sobs; men writhing in the mud, men trying to walk and falling down again …’¹¹⁸

Discipline and self-respect ebbed away with every step towards safety, Allhusen recalled. The pace quickened ‘into a stumbling run … a crowd of broken men, running for their lives’. Many were ‘driven on mechanically by the terror which their minds were no longer able to resist’.¹¹⁹ Half of Allhusen’s platoon reached the lorries waiting at Shrapnel Corner, drawn by the promise of hot cocoa and rum, of which he drank half a bottle. ‘We sat and wept copiously …’¹²⁰

After a hot bath, Allhusen slipped into a pair of silk pyjamas and slept: ‘Heaven can hardly be expected to come up to that standard.’ He dreamed of ‘a wonderful garden’ that seemed more than a dream; rather, ‘some sort of effort of the subconscious mind to sweep out the horrors of the war and get back to sanity’. Others woke up screaming, terrified of falling asleep again. His battalion had lost about 200 men, dead, sick or wounded, including all four company commanders. Allhusen had replaced the one who had ‘gone mad’.¹²¹

One lucky survivor of the mid-October battles was Captain George ‘Alex’ Birnie, an Australian medical officer whom a German sniper decided not to spare. Birnie had received a blighty. On the 26th, he lay in a hospital bed in London, writing a letter about his extraordinary experiences to his parents. It evokes the reality of the First Battle of Passchendaele, through a medical officer’s eyes:

My Dear Mother and Father,

Here I am once more in England in peace and comfort with a bullet hole through my neck. If it had been an inch closer in I would now be lying on the bloody Passchendale [sic] Ridge with many hundreds of our good fellows who went West on that day – but you see it didn’t so let me try and give you an account of how 750 men went over the top and 50 came back.

His job had been to establish a medical aid post in the forward areas. After a five-mile march to the front, he located his commanding officer, Major Roderick Bell-Irving, in a hole under a piece of galvanised iron. They were 300 yards from the Germans, who were ‘looking down on us’. Bell-Irving ordered Birnie to advance behind the infantry and set up an aid post in a pillbox out beyond no-man’s-land.

At zero hour, 5.25 am, Birnie witnessed his battalion rise ‘with a great cheer’ and charge, 200 yards ahead of him. It was ‘the most terrible thing I have ever seen for you could see them fall, see them blown high into the air and still pressing on, taking cover where possible, and then a bayonet rush again’.

Shortly he grabbed a Red Cross flag and, running through geysers of mud and exploding shells, led four men towards the pillbox. One received a bullet through the heart. In that instant, Birnie told his parents, ‘the most deadly fear got hold of me … the sort of thing that almost paralyses you’.

The thin barrage, he realised, had started beyond the German machine guns, freeing them to mow down the Australians, whose officers and NCOs had been killed within minutes. He found the dead ‘lying in heaps; it was the worst slaughter I have ever seen’. There was nobody left to lead the men.

At the entrance to the pillbox, Birnie found himself face-to-face with ‘seven Huns’. He waved his Red Cross flag. To his amazement, none of them fired. His three surviving stretcher-bearers met him there. Unable to carry anyone out, Birnie and his few men moved about the battlefield, dressing wounds, administering morphine, sitting with the dying. ‘It was heartbreaking work,’ he wrote, during which the Germans held their fire.

Then Birnie felt something hot shoot through his lower neck: ‘a sniper bagged me’. He fell into a shell hole. One of his men shouted, ‘Are you dead, Sir? Are you dead? God help those b----rs if they’ve killed you.’

Birnie crawled back to the shell hole that served as Bell-Irving’s headquarters, dressed his wound, swallowed a dram of whisky and returned to work, moving around the battlefield, an act for which he was later awarded the Military Cross:

To those in great pain and no chance of living, I gave enough morphia to put them out peacefully and it was pitiful to hear their thanks with white faces twisted into a smile, ‘Thanks Doc – I’m not afraid but this damn pain gets you down’, or a message to someone at home they would never see again.¹²²

Just 48 of 750 men in his battalion had survived the battle, unwounded, he told his parents. His entire unit had ceased to exist.

The First Battle of Passchendaele had failed utterly: 13,000–15,000 British and Empire troops had been killed or wounded in a few hours, for no territorial gain and fewer German casualties.¹²³ German machine gunners had fired with impunity in scenes as depressing as the first day of the Somme. The demoralised enemy of Haig’s imagination had proved themselves astonishingly resilient, and Macdonogh’s intelligence had been borne out.

Touring the battlefield with Godley three days later, Sergeant Wilson wrote:

I won’t forget my experience today if I live for a thousand years … The Somme was pretty bad I’ll admit but this is worse. I have never seen such destruction. It is hard to imagine that 4 years ago peaceful people tilled this same soil and that it was one of the most prosperous districts in Europe. Now, as I saw it today, well its [sic] simply an awful nightmare, a hideous reeking swamp seething with living (and dead) beings. A place that stamps itself on one’s mind and memory like a red hot iron.¹²⁴

Platoon and company commanders wept with rage at the virtual obliteration of their units. Battalion and brigade commanders were shaken to the core at what they saw as futile bloodletting. Such carnage could not be allowed to persist. Plumer and Gough were now against continuing with the battle. In late October, Plumer’s staff met at his headquarters in Cassel and decided that Third Ypres should be abandoned.

Yet no senior soldier, or politician, openly called on Haig to terminate the offensive: the field marshal’s indomitable will seems to have overawed his commanders. Haig decided, on 13 October, that the battle would continue if and when the weather improved. Four fresh Canadian divisions under the command of Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Currie were ordered up to relieve the exhausted Anzacs, utterly broken after weeks of spearheading the offensives.

Haig’s decision to persist amounted to ‘one of the lowest points in the British exercise of command’ during Third Ypres, concluded Prior and Wilson.¹²⁵ If so, Haig clearly did not share this assessment of his powers. Exceeding his own standards of unwitting understatement, he confided in his wife on 14 October that the ‘rain has upset our arrangements a good deal’. The bad weather, he wrote, had also fouled an officers’ afternoon garden party.¹²⁶ Haig was not being wilfully callous; his mind simply failed to rise to the occasion. His letters and diary suggest a spectator in the wings, at this stage of the battle, not a commander at the centre of events. He exhibited no sense of regret at the staggering losses. He writes as though they were inevitable, not his responsibility, simply the cost of attrition. No doubt, he wished to spare his wife the gruesome details (though he could be very candid with her when he chose). He ended this letter with the hope that ‘before long’ the weather would improve and the ground become ‘as dry as it was in 1914 at the end of October’.¹²⁷

The press echoed Haig’s optimism, with the same curious detachment from reality. The Birmingham Gazette rejoiced in the Tommies’ defiance of the weather, as if the want of an umbrella were their chief discomfort: ‘The Germans could hardly have anticipated that we should strike again so soon in weather which would keep most troops under cover.’¹²⁸ Several papers, including the Gazette and the Liverpool Echo, quoted Haig’s verdict on the battle: ‘We have driven the Germans practically out of the whole depth of their defensive front … The early reports back from the fighting lines are very encouraging. At 7.40 a.m. it was reported that all was going splendidly …’ Haig later corrected this: ‘Since my last report the weather has closed in as thick as pease soup … and I understand operations have been brought to a temporary standstill.’¹²⁹

Haig gave a pithy answer as to why he pressed on, in his 1917 report to the Cabinet: ‘progress’, he explained, ‘had not yet become impossible’.¹³⁰ If these words meant anything, they meant that Haig would decide, not the rain or the mounting losses, when progress would become impossible. Until then, he would drive his men to the limits of endurance.

Haig justified this decision on the basis of the comparative wastage figures that he dispatched to the War Cabinet on 16 October 1917, which suggested he was ‘winning’ the battle of attrition. The figures stated that 32 of 66 British (including Anzac) divisions had been ‘sent away exhausted’ or soon would be, compared with 53 of Germany’s 72 divisions (see Appendix 8).¹³¹ This little chart of dubious accuracy neglected complicating factors such as the arrival of fresh German divisions and the severity of the collapse in morale in both armies. For Haig, however, the numbers were a restorative, and cemented his faith in his forces’ resilience. They would simply go on and on until the Germans were destroyed or surrendered.

The next day, the War Cabinet examined Haig’s wastage report alongside the total losses in Flanders up to 5 October. According to the latter, which excluded the terrible battles of Poelcappelle and First Passchendaele, British and Dominion casualties were 148,470 against German losses of 255,000.¹³² The striking thing about these numbers is not merely that they were wrong – the reverse more accurately assessed the comparative body count, as later research has shown – but that they provoked so little discussion in the government. The War Cabinet concluded that it was ‘not in the public interest’ to publish the totals and wrapped up the meeting by deciding that Lloyd George would make an ‘occasional statement’ to Parliament to correct persistent ‘false’ rumours that ‘Colonials’ were doing most of the fighting (at that point, the Dominions were certainly leading most of the battles – see appendices 8 and 9).¹³³ So much for Lloyd George’s later claim that the generals had hidden the truth about the extremity of the situation from the government. The Cabinet had all the information before them; they simply failed to act on it.

Instead, the government chose this moment (16 October) to send Haig a message of congratulations, in recognition of his ‘dogged advance of 4½ miles in conditions of great difficulty’:

Starting from the position in which every advantage rested with the enemy, and hampered and delayed from time to time by most unfavourable weather, you and your men have nevertheless continuously driven the enemy back with such skill, courage and pertinacity as to have commanded the grateful admiration of the people of the British Empire.¹³⁴

What was Lloyd George’s dark purpose, wondered Haig and Robertson, as they scanned this missive of silken praise, addressed to them at a time of reversal and crisis? Haig decided, with a mixture ‘of conceit and cynicism’, that public support for his leadership must have pressed the government to act.¹³⁵

In truth, the prime minister had not a shred of faith in his commander-in-chief, and was busying himself with a fresh plan to subordinate Haig to French command. The prime minister believed that if Haig was not actually insane, then he was ‘wholly indifferent to human suffering’, according to one view of Lloyd George’s thinking.¹³⁶ This time, however, the prime minister hoped to avoid the charge that he was undermining his field commander, thus enraging the conservative press. His letter of congratulations may thus be seen as a new tack in his ‘wearing-down war’ against Haig, to lull the target into a false sense of security: by congratulating his commander for doing everything he had asked him not to do, Lloyd George had prepared the ground to launch a fresh assault on Haig – under the cover of praise.

As he schemed, the prime minister drew renewed confidence from the continuing victory over German submarines: by the end of October, German U-boats had sunk just ten vessels out of 99 British convoys, or 0.66 per cent of the total.¹³⁷

Meanwhile, the survivors of the October battles rested, wrote home and looked forward to mail. On the 18th, Allhusen thanked his mother for sending chocolate, toffee, Horlicks and apples. They were ‘an absolute blessing. You’ve no idea what a difference these things can make … The chocolate kept the remains of my platoon going.’¹³⁸