13

THE FACE OF FEAR

… the horror of Verdun was surpassed. It was no longer life at all. It was mere unspeakable suffering.

General Erich Ludendorff

Little is known of the German soldiers’ experience of this relentless bashing. How the world looked and felt to a man sitting in a hole in the ground as the vast instrument of his destruction moved towards him tends not to be asked or answered in most histories of the Western Front. Many experienced a kind of negative epiphany, an annihilation of the self, a helpless resignation to a power that reduced him to the status of an insect; others discovered a strange, careless inner strength, coupled with a reckless indifference to his own suffering.

As with the British Army, indeed all armies, the German soldier’s lot was a world away from that of his commanders: Rupprecht, Ludendorff, von Kuhl and von Armin. There he sat, in the path of a literal storm of steel, night after night, for weeks. How on earth had the German soldier resisted, for so long, the combined power of the British Empire, under the mightiest artillery bombardment ever unleashed? Why had his commanders insisted that he defend these wretched ridgelines to the death?

In early October, the German commanders surveyed the tactical war with rising alarm. Their heavy losses were admittedly disturbing. Morale had taken a serious blow. Yet they viewed the broader, strategic outlook with sanguinity. If the German Army could hold Flanders until the winter, Germany might win the war, Ludendorff believed.

Rupprecht, who commanded the German Fourth Army in Flanders, was less persuaded, but he shared Ludendorff’s reasoning. It ran like this: the British were racing against time. By early October, the British commanders (as they themselves well knew) had no hope of capturing the U-boat bases on the Belgian coast. Yet if Haig had stopped the battle at that point all his efforts would appear in vain and his ‘unimagined losses’ a worthless sacrifice. So Haig had no choice other than to continue fighting, to salvage something from the wreckage of his doomed campaign. The only ‘something’ worth fighting for was the Salient’s high point, Passchendaele Ridge, the possession of which would allow him to claim a partial victory and resume the struggle for Belgium in the spring of 1918.¹ By then, the full complement of the German Army would have arrived from the Eastern Front, a prospect Ludendorff relished, especially as they would arrive before the Americans. Until then, the German commanders resolved to commit all their resources to the defence of Passchendaele – and bleed the British and Dominion armies, as they had the French at Verdun. In short, the Germans, too, were fighting a wearing-down war – but from a position of defensive strength.

Certainly, the German frontline battalions had been badly mauled. The quick succession of British and Anzac bites had worn them down to the point of physical and nervous collapse. The incessant artillery battering had pinned the German forces to the front, so much so that it was extremely difficult to withdraw the infantry from the combat zone. ‘Men had hardly departed when Command called them back again to the front,’ notes the German history of Flanders, ‘battalions often had to start a counter-attack in the middle of their relief time.’² Losses to sickness, such as gastric disorders and trench foot, were rising alarmingly.

Yet German morale would not reach the point of collapse until mid-1918, confounding the hopes of Haig and Charteris, and confirming the verdict of Macdonogh. Nonetheless, the German commanders were deeply concerned. On 18 October, von Kuhl proposed a general withdrawal from Flanders – an idea von Armin stoutly resisted, arguing that relinquishing any ground risked the destruction of the U-boat bases. For now, the German soldier would stay in the line.

So Fritz sat there, grimly hanging on to his position in the ridges above Ypres. How the ordinary German soldier found the ‘inner combat strength’ to withstand the British attacks is one of the mysteries of history. The sentiment ‘Damn Fritz, he just won’t die’ spoke for the feelings of many Commonwealth troops in the face of an unbreakable wall of grey uniforms.

A few German soldiers took extreme measures to pre-empt the consequences of fear, such as chaining themselves to their guns. At Bullecourt, Norman Collins encountered a wounded German who had chained himself to his gun and thrown the key beyond reach: ‘Some of the bravest men we’ve ever bumped into have been Fritz gunners …’³ Or perhaps, at Flanders, these men had been reduced to an insensate state, whose ‘deadening indifference’ to suffering summoned ‘an almost automatic and calm reaction to the terrible events on the battlefield’, as one German history contends:

You are simply stuck in it, and you start to worry as little about the possibility of dying in the wet shell holes as you do about the even smaller possibility of leaving them alive. Death has lost its terror, since it has been standing next to you as a constant companion every hour of the day and night. The front instinct finds its best breeding ground in that state of ‘couldn’t care less’: verve turns into patience, courage into calm, bravery into resilience against any events of an exterior or interior kind.⁴

In this light, the Battle of Flanders had created a ‘new type of German soldier’, one who, resigned to his fate, placed little or no value on his life, on medals or on words of praise. Such a man scorned military discipline, hobnobbed with his platoon and company commanders who lay in the mud beside him, and viewed every rear area commander with contempt. Such foot soldiers were affectionately known as Frontschwein (frontline hogs). In this light, they were not dissimilar to their British, Dominion and French counterparts, who held the red-tabbed staff officers in the rear in equal contempt.

The Frontschwein:

upheld a kind of camaraderie amongst themselves which could not have been more self-sacrificing or loyal, but they considered it their right to ‘pinch’ the warm bread and rabbits from the field kitchens and the fresh vegetables and unripe potatoes from their garrisons. They knew whose shoulders the fate of the front was resting on at the decisive moment … and they accepted their duty as a matter of course and without pathos. That’s how the indestructible, 100-times proven, never to be defeated, ‘Frontschwein’ was created.⁵

On the morning of the Battle of Broodseinde, the Frontschwein were actually preparing to attack, not to defend, contradicting everything Haig and his intelligence chief had assumed about the state of the enemy. The German commanders ‘planned a large-scale counter-attack to retake the ground lost on 26 September to the south of Zonnebeke up to the Polygon Wood for this morning’.⁶ All through the previous night, they had ‘dithered’ over whether the heavier British artillery was ‘normal destructive fire’ or the ‘softening up’ that usually preceded an infantry charge. Towards morning, they decided it was the former, and upheld the order to attack. At 5.30 am, the German artillery opened up on the British and Dominion lines, killing or wounding, as we’ve seen, many Anzacs approaching the frontline.

At 6 am, when the British guns erupted, the German troops were still hoping to persuade themselves that the ‘awful intensity’ of the shelling was ‘simply English defensive fire against the beginning of the German attack’, according to the German history. The scale and density of the barrage soon corrected that assumption: ‘[T]he width across which this raging barrier of fire extended from the Houthulst Wood up to the canal to the south of Ypres soon taught them that the expected severe enemy raid had started.’⁷

The German experience of those October battles, the darkest month of the war in Flanders, bear witness to the capacity of the mind and body to endure unthinkable strain. Consider a few reactions of the men who survived the British barrage of 4 October, the worst day for Germany in 1917: ‘The aim was to snuff out all life,’ Unteroffizier Paul Stolz remembered thinking. ‘Shell after shell smashed into our ranks … Many were buried alive … In amongst the dark clouds of the explosions, fountains of dirty yellow soup-like clay spouted out of the craters, along with huge clods of earth, tree trunks and chunks of concrete.’⁸

Major Freiherr von Sobbe, commander of Infantry Regiment 92, watched his men kneeling in their trenches and praying for salvation:

The earth seemed to want to swallow up everything. The battalions clung on amidst a crazy maelstrom … Bodies trembled, pulses raced … Some of the men hunched there in silence, stripped of all their emotions … Many prayed, perhaps for the first time in a very long time: ‘My God, do not forsake me’ and, mixed in with their prayer was the glimmer of hope of men still trying desperately to hang on to life … One soldier after another was hit and rolled away into a shell crater … ⁹

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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