17

WHAT THE LIVING SAID

Whilst hundreds of thousands were being destroyed in the insane egotism of Passchendaele, every message or memorandum from Haig was full of these insistences on the importance of sending him more men to replace those he had sent to die in the mud. If Britain said, ‘Where are my lost legions?’ then anyone who asked such a question on her behalf was betraying the Army and attacking our soldiers.

David Lloyd George, War Memoir

Still swept the rain, roared guns, Still swooped into the swamps of flesh and blood, All to the drabness of uncreation sunk, And all thought dwindled to a moan, Relieve!

Edmund Blunden, ‘Third Ypres’

No other battle in British history has inspired so much righteous indignation, passionate debate and biting satire as Passchendaele. On the 100th anniversary of the campaign, it is time to attempt a fresh understanding. Was Passchendaele ‘worth it’? How did it contribute to the final victory, if at all? Should it have been fought in the first place? Perhaps we should start by asking that oddly juvenile question, ‘Who won?’

It seems perverse to speak of winners and losers in a struggle that ended so piteously. Commanders on both sides claimed Third Ypres as a great victory, of course. The cold verdict, however, is that the British and Empire forces ‘lost’ Third Ypres: they lost the body count; they lost the original strategic case for Third Ypres, in failing to capture the submarine bases on the Belgian coast; and they lost the tactical battles in August and October. Those they won were largely thanks to September’s dry weather.

And yet, in every battle, the men far exceeded what any commander could expect of a soldier. They were ordered to attack again and again, in battles that Haig and his generals knew had little or no chance of success and would inflict huge casualties. They were used as thousands of little battering rams, hurled against the enemy lines without realising that their commanders had lost hope of achieving the original goals of Third Ypres. Most were unaware that they were fighting a war of pure attrition, the point of which was to drain German lifeblood, at higher cost than to their own ranks. And that is why the Allies ultimately ‘won’ the Great War, as we’ve seen: they had a deeper pool of manpower to draw upon. They could have kept going until every last German man was dead or wounded.

How then would Haig reconcile his serial losses between 1915 and 1917 with the extraordinary triumph of 1918? He did so with a splendid flourish of his pen, assisted by the thriller writer John Buchan. In 1919, they sat down to write his final dispatch to the government, in which Haig recast Passchendaele and every other offensive under his command as ‘victories’, according to a set of criteria that overrode his previous, specific objectives (e.g. to clear the Belgian coast).

A striking example of Haig recasting the goal of an offensive to suit the result followed the Somme. In the aftermath, he described the Somme as the ‘Opening of the Wearing Out Battle’, suggesting that his chief aim had always been to wear down the enemy. In fact, the planning of the Somme prescribed a major breakthrough and the resumption of mobile warfare; its attritional ‘benefits’ were a distant second. Lloyd George would not let Haig forget it, and the Somme’s staggering casualties cursed their relationship. Indeed, even Haig’s staunchest admirers have baulked at this ex post facto justification of the slaughter.¹

Haig then extrapolated the justification for the Somme forward and backward in time, armed with the great validator of final victory. By this reading, he had always intended Passchendaele as another stage in his master plan to crush the enemy’s power to wage war; the U-boats were a secondary consideration. It bore out his general war plan, to ‘wear down the enemy but at the same time have an objective’.² This meant also winning the Materialschlacht, the battle of material attrition over the supply of munitions and war resources (which the British blockade was already winning, at great cost to German civilians).

Passchendaele was thus transformed into one battle within a great, four-year struggle that Haig had planned from the start. The war should thus be seen as ‘a single continuous campaign’, he wrote in 1919, broken into three ‘stages’: first, ‘the creation of continuous trench lines from the Swiss frontier to the sea’ (1914); second, ‘close and costly combat’ to wear down his opponent (1915–16) and ‘to pin him to his position’ (1917); third, the decisive blow, ‘when signs of the enemy becoming morally and physically weakened are observed’ (1918). At every stage, casualties ‘will necessarily be heavy on both sides for in it the price of victory is paid’.³

Here, then, under the astonished gaze of Lloyd George, was Haig’s strategic assessment of the Great War: a four-year process of chronic slaughter, which he had planned from the start. Every other rationale for the offensive, all the strategic and territorial imperatives that Haig had pinpointed on his great maps, were secondary aims of a war whose primary purpose was human annihilation.

While the commanders all understood what this meant, they did not spell it out to their political leaders. It would not play well in the press or with politicians, of course. Yet army commanders made no bones about the meaning of attrition among themselves. Well before Third Ypres, Haig’s chief of staff Sir Launcelot Kiggell was saying, ‘Boche killing is the only way to win war’, not territorial gain.⁴ Ludendorff said as much in April 1917: ‘Basically, this war comes down simply to killing one another.’⁵ Robertson had been saying the same since 1915. The generals were thus inured to ‘normal wastage’ at 7000 dead and wounded per week, as the price of attrition. That was planned for. During the Somme and Third Ypres, normal wastage ran at 20,000–50,000 casualties per week. That, too, was planned. A certain level of wastage was, in fact, desirable, because it implied the enemy had sustained similar losses. Allied generals would often bemoan their own low casualties as evidence of a want of offensive spirit. Haig himself had complained in his diary, on 4 September 1916, at the height of the Somme: ‘The unit did not really attack, and some men did not follow their officers. The total losses of this division are under a thousand! [i.e. too low].’⁶

Haig’s 1919 despatch, his last, makes no mention of the original goals with which he justified Third Ypres to the government and his generals in May and June 1917. The British, Anzac and Canadian soldiers thought they were fighting to capture a ridge or a submarine base or some other ‘objective’; in fact, they were fighting chiefly to kill or wound more Germans than the Germans could kill or wound of them.

Haig thus recast Passchendaele as a victory, part of the second and third stages of his four-year offensive: it had worn down the enemy and pinned the German forces to Flanders, denying them the freedom to attack the weakened French. Had he not attacked in Flanders, Haig argued, the German Army might have broken through the weak French defences and won the war.

Haig’s argument has since formed the bedrock of the case for Passchendaele as a ‘decisive’, war-winning offensive, as he wrote:

The rapid collapse of Germany’s military powers in the latter half of 1918 was the logical outcome of the fighting of the previous two years. It would not have taken place but for the period of ceaseless attrition which used up the reserves of the German Armies … It is in the great battles of 1916 and 1917 that we have to seek for the secret of our victory in 1918.⁷

At the same time, however, Haig’s war drained the manpower of the British and Dominion armies. Addressing this point, he remarked, ‘our total losses in the war have been no larger than were to be expected. Neither do they compare unfavourably with those of any other of the belligerent nations …’⁸

The slaughter of millions seems to have had no greater purchase on Haig’s moral sensibility than a cavalry charge across a Sudanese desert. His losses, he wrote, were examples of ‘splendid gallantry’. His moral compass was of a different age: Haig was a Victorian gentlemen and a Christian fatalist. He believed himself predestined to do what had to be done, in the name of God, King and Empire. He brought the morality of John Calvin and Queen Victoria to the monstrosity of the howitzer.

There are deep flaws in Haig’s case. The most damning is that it failed on its own terms: at Loos, the Somme, Arras and Third Ypres far more of his own forces were killed or ‘worn down’ than Germany’s. Passchendaele ravaged the morale of the British and Dominion soldiers, whose spirit fell into the darkest slough of despond since the war began.

Nor did Haig’s French counterparts support his Flanders operation, despite his claim that it saved them from a massed German attack. The French High Command had little faith in Third Ypres and did not encourage Haig to pursue it.⁹ Foch famously scorned the Flanders Offensive as a ‘duck’s march through the inundations to Ostend and Zeebrugge’ and Haig’s plan as ‘futile, fantastic and dangerous’.¹⁰ Nivelle thought Flanders a low priority. And General Wilson claimed that Pétain had told him, in May 1917, ‘Haig’s attack towards Ostend was certain to fail, and that his effort to disengage Ostend and Zeebrugge was a hopeless, hopeless one!’¹¹

Pétain habitually exaggerated French weakness to secure Anglo-Saxon help, as we’ve seen.¹² And Haig went along with Pétain because it served his cause in Flanders. In truth, the French forces were in much better shape than Pétain pretended. Some units were in rude good health, shown by their emphatic victory at Malmaison on 23 October 1917 – a ‘brilliant success’, as Robertson told the War Cabinet, against ‘good’ German troops, who had been well-prepared.¹³ Haig later suggested that Pétain had begged him to continue fighting in Flanders, to avoid a French collapse: there is no evidence of Pétain or any French commander pleading for Haig to continue. Nor is there any evidence of Pétain visiting Haig to urge the British commander to press on with the Flanders offensive (as Haig later claimed).¹⁴ In short, the French commanders reckoned their Army had recovered and were ready to defend France. Pétain said as much to Charteris in 1917: ‘the British as well as French Armies should confine their fighting to small operations with limited objectives’.¹⁵

The Germans were confused about the outcome: had they won it or lost it? In the immediate aftermath, Crown Prince Rupprecht claimed Germany had triumphed:

The sons of all German tribes … have made the English and French attempt to breakthrough a failure … In spite of the unheard of mass deployment of men and material the enemy has gained nothing. So the Battle of Flanders is a heavy defeat for the foe, for us it is a great victory.¹⁶

Distance yielded a different conclusion. The verdict of General der Infanterie Hermann von Kuhl, Rupprecht’s chief of staff, played into Haig’s hand. Von Kuhl did not say that British forces had won the battle; he wrote that they had had no choice other than to fight it in 1917, given the collapse of Russia, the French exhaustion and the American delay:

The one and only army capable of offensive action was the British … If they had broken off their offensive, the German army would have seized the initiative and attacked the Allies where they were weak … For these reasons the British had to go on attacking until the onset of winter ruled out a German counter-attack. Today, now that we are fully aware about the critical [state of] the French army … in the summer of 1917, there can be absolutely no doubt that through its tenacity the British Army bridged the crisis in France. The French army gained time to recover its strength; the German reserves were drawn towards Flanders. The sacrifices that the British made for the Entente were fully justified.¹⁷

Third Ypres, Kuhl added, was Germany’s ‘worst ordeal of the World war’; his men had suffered their ‘greatest martyrdom’ in Flanders fields, which had inflicted irreparable damage on German morale. ‘The former sharp German sword became blunt.’¹⁸

Further distance produced fresh German interpretations, in histories and memoirs. Ludendorff’s and Hindenburg’s memoirs acknowledge that Passchendaele had depressed German morale, though no more so than British morale. Yet Third Ypres had failed to break the German spirit. ‘The enemy,’ wrote Ludendorff, years later, ‘charged like a wild bull against the iron wall which kept him from our submarine bases … He dented it in many places, and it seemed as if he must knock it down. But it held, although a faint tremor ran through its foundations.’¹⁹

The German history of Flanders cast Third Ypres as both a German and a British victory. Haig lost the tactical war to Germany’s ‘flexible defence’ (and the weather!) and lost the strategic war because the ridges he gained had no strategic value and were easy targets for German counter-attacks.²⁰ At the same time, however, the British forces had won at Passchendaele, ‘by tying up the Germans with the most severe of exertions’ and wearing them out. ‘In the year 1918, it turned out that this victory played a decisive part in terminating the war in favour of the Allied Forces …’²¹

It is a rich irony that the German commanders became Haig’s biggest cheerleaders. Yet their case cannot go unchallenged. For one thing, it is impossible to calculate the extent to which Passchendaele helped or hindered the Allied victory. To call Passchendaele ‘decisive’ retrospectively endows a strategically useless slaughter (as the Germans described it) with the status of a turning point in the war. This ignores a multitude of more forceful long-run ‘causes’ of the eventual Allied victory: the British blockade, Germany’s economic and logistical collapse, the American reinforcements, the French recovery, and the extraordinary revival of the British and Dominion forces.

One could persuasively argue that Passchendaele prolonged and almost lost the war for the Allies, given the staggering casualties and collapse in morale it produced, which directly led to the near-vanquishing of the British and Dominion armies in early 1918. Certainly, Lloyd George thought so. ‘The Passchendaele fiasco imperilled the chances of final victory,’ he concluded.²² And Paul Harris, a senior lecturer in War Studies at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and a trenchant critic of Haig’s war, writes of Third Ypres:

some phases had a quality more nightmarish than anything previously experienced. Whereas the British Army came out of the Somme campaign with remarkably good morale, Third Ypres seems to have left much of it distinctly despondent … It seems clear, therefore, that, in terms of morale, Haig had done proportionally very much more damage to his own army than to the Germans. The British Army (and their Dominion ranks) had been the only army of the Allies in a fair state of both morale and efficiency when Third Ypres began. Haig’s conduct at Third Ypres, especially in the latter stages of the campaign, can be regarded as amounting to reckless endangerment of the Allied cause.²³

It is often asked why Britain did not join France’s defensive war. For one thing, ‘defending’ ran counter to all of Haig’s instincts. He was a basher, always ‘on the offensive’, physically and temperamentally. Yet Lloyd George and the French commanders, for different reasons, saw a defensive war as an appealing alternative to profitless attrition.

Their pressure spurred Haig to devote a whole section of his 1919 report to justifying his offensive. Under the heading ‘Why We Attacked Whenever Possible’, Haig wrote, ‘The idea that a war can be won by standing on the defensive and waiting for the enemy to attack is a dangerous fallacy, which owes its inception to the desire to evade the price of victory …’ – that is, a higher casualty rate. ‘A defensive strategy,’ he continued, implied a ‘distinct lowering of the moral [sic] of the troops, who imagine that the enemy must be the better man, or at least more numerous … Once the mass of the defending infantry become possessed of such ideas, the battle is as good as lost …’²⁴

His argument pivots on the flawed assumption that braver soldiers, or ‘better men’, fight offensive actions, while cowards or lesser men fight defensive wars. This ignores the extraordinary courage of the German Army, which had successfully fought a three-year defensive war. Morale had held up throughout. Indeed, the Germans would lose the war as a result of their over-ambitious offensive in 1918.

Should Britain and the Dominions have fought a defensive war in 1917? There were compelling points in favour. First, the Germans could not afford to lose men at the rate of Britain and were thus reluctant to mount major offensives. Second, the attacking force usually lost more men than the defending one (which is one reason why the German Army had been defending for so long). Third, the Allies together would have imposed a formidable defensive barrier, as the British showed at First Ypres in 1914. Fourth, the French were committed to a defensive battle until the Americans arrived, under Clémenceau’s leadership, and wanted the British to join them. Fifth, British forces fielded far more heavy guns and machine guns than the Germans in 1917 and were producing them at a faster rate. And sixth, the Germans had fewer men than the Allies on the Western Front in 1917, and were unable to mobilise the bulk of their eastern forces until the end of the year and into 1918. And as every general knew, a vast numerical advantage, in the order of three to one, was needed to win a major offensive in an entrenched war of attrition. Haig never had that advantage.

That is not to suggest they should have sat and waited for victory to come. Rather, in 1917, Britain would have been defending, from a position of strength, until the Americans arrived and French returned. That was not the case in early 1918, when they had fewer men, fewer guns and dreadful morale, as a result of Passchendaele. It is something of a miracle that they held on, and won. Indeed, the Allies won by waging a defensive war (a ‘fighting withdrawal’) deep into French territory, drawing out the German supply lines then hitting back with the full complement of the American and French armies and the revived Commonwealth forces.

Against this, a defensive war did not sit well with the press and public, who, like Haig and his generals – though from a position of ignorance – were overwhelmingly in favour of great offensive actions. They wanted bold thrusts and gallant victories. And that is why Flanders went ahead despite the prime minister’s strong opposition to it before it began.

Since the end of the Great War, a chorus of voices have variously praised or condemned it. Thousands of books have examined the legacy of the war and whether it was just or unjust, inevitable or avoidable. Since the 1960s, the Great War has been variously and near-unanimously condemned as a tragic bungle, state-sponsored mass murder and/or a crime against humanity, which destroyed the best part of a generation and plunged the world into economic chaos and tyranny. The rise of Nazism and the Soviet Union would not have been possible without the conditions created by the Great War: on that, most experts are agreed.

In recent years, however, a new breed of self-described ‘revisionist’ historians have emerged to champion the Great War as just, ‘worth it’, and absolutely necessary. They hail the Somme and Passchendaele as vital battles in a necessary war against German aggression. They defend the war of attrition, more or less, as the only option open to Haig, and praise him for making the best of a botched hand. They have no truck with what they derisively call the war poet’s view of the Western Front – dispatching, at a stroke, some of the finest writers on the experience of the Great War (who also happened to fight it with great courage). On an operational level, some revisionists defend the huge attritional struggles as valuable lessons in the use of new weapons, such as howitzers, gas, flame-throwers and grenades; and new applications, such as the creeping barrage. They tend to aim their hostility at harmless targets – poets, artists, musicians and comedians (chiefly the late twentieth-century serial, Blackadder) – betraying an oddly fragile sensitivity.

The revisionists’ high priest is John Terraine, who bludgeoned the popular horror of the war in the 1960s with a stringently argued case that Haig had done all he could to win, within the limitations imposed on him. Terraine’s heirs are numerous, but their most recent ranks include Gary Sheffield, Sir Max Hastings and Gordon Corrigan. Sheffield’s central theme is that the Great War was a ‘forgotten victory’ over German aggression, which also provided the Allied commanders with a good education in strategy and weaponry. Hastings’ position is confused: he is absolutely convinced that Britain had no choice other than to go to war against Prussian aggression; on the other hand, as he stated in a debate recently, he admits that ‘if the Germans had not gone into Belgium, I would find it very difficult to say I would assuredly have said that we could and should have fought in 1914’.²⁵ This does not cohere. If Germany really was the terrible threat to world peace and liberty that he claims, then surely Britain should have gone to war to defend France – and Europe – from Berlin’s aggression regardless of whether the German Army respected Belgium’s neutrality. Would the threat have disappeared had Germany bypassed Belgium?

The revisionists have no doubt that the war and its battles were worth fighting, despite the catastrophic cost. Passchendaele was ‘worth it’, they variously argue, as part of a victorious four-year struggle – here, they tend to march in lockstep with Haig’s last dispatch – that ended with the greatest feat of arms in British history. That may be true, in a pure military sense. But they fail to explain exactly what advantages accrued to Britain from fighting the war in the first place, or just how the war achieved anything worthwhile for Europe.

Victors tend to justify the act of winning, no matter how atrocious, wasteful or wrong-headed the conflict, on the spurious grounds that the end justifies the means: for them, victory is self-validating. Few British historians critically examine, for example, the illegal Naval Blockade, which they pass over as a valid instrument of war. By any other definition, it was a war crime that killed almost 800,000 German civilians. Many strategists argue that winning is all that matters, regardless of the means, or the human or material cost. They discuss the strategic usefulness of poison gas as though it were a variant on the cavalry charge. In a world of banned weapons and laws against war crimes that is nonsense, of course: if might were right, the use of gas, firebombs and nuclear weapons would all be justifiable, as would torture and civilian slaughter.

It would be unfair, however, to cast the pro-First World War brigade as warmongers, as some critics have done. A curious emotional dissonance leavens their prose. Their conclusions seem ruptured, torn between the heart and the head, as if doubt lurks in the margins of their minds. On the one hand, they plunder the stock of popular phrases to describe the Great War – thus they agree that it was ‘catastrophic’,²⁶ and ‘tragic’, in which the ‘butcher’s bill’²⁷ was ‘appalling’²⁸; on the other hand, they claim the war was absolutely necessary and worth the cost. This jarring of word and thought begs the question: at what point would the catastrophe not have been worth it? How many millions would have had to die, how many nations destroyed, how many fascist and communist seedlings sown, how many families struck down with grief, before politicians, the press and military revisionists would concede that the First World War was not worth it?

Perhaps those who argue that the First World War was ‘necessary’, and that the Somme and Passchendaele were ‘worth it’, should submit their views to my Scroll Back Test. Knowing what we know now, of the cost in blood, grief and economic loss, imagine you’re able to travel back in time to 1914 to serve as a mediator between the governments of Europe. How would you advise them to act on the brink of hostilities? Would you urge the Entente to go to war because you genuinely believe, in accordance with the views you hold today, that Germany was a tyranny intent on world conquest and had to be crushed (ignoring the fact that Germany’s political system at the time was just as democratic and progressive as Britain’s, and the Berlin government negotiable, well into 1914)? Or would you advise the governments of Europe to pull back from the brink and negotiate a peaceful settlement (as they succeeded in doing in the crises of 1905, 1911 and 1912–13)? In the first instance, you would have unleashed the Four Horsemen, but your advice would cohere with your views today. In the second, you would have saved the world from a holocaust, and yet contradicted everything you’ve said or written since in support of the case for a ‘necessary war’ against Germany.

The Great War was an avoidable tragedy that condemned Europe, the fount of Western civilisation, to political degeneracy, economic collapse and totalitarian rule. Even many of today’s ‘revisionist’ historians, who argue that the war was necessary, recognise this. ‘The British,’ writes Sheffield, ‘could have perhaps have been [sic] more generous in [their] response to the emergence of German power.’²⁹ Nor was war inevitable, he concedes: as late as July–August, Germany and Austria ‘might have got their way without fighting’.³⁰ By then, it was too late: Russia had mobilised and the Prussian commanders were effectively in charge in Berlin.

In this light, the recent process of ‘normalising’ Passchendaele as ‘worth it’ appals sensitive-minded civilians who, in the intervening years, have longed to find some redemptive meaning in all this.

Many ordinary people despair of the ‘expert’ view of the Somme and Passchendaele as ‘necessary’ battles in a ‘just’ war. They find deeper meaning in the war poets’ portrait of the Western Front as pointless butchery, the rupture of the human soul, conveyed in the most powerful lines ever to emerge from a battlefield: those of Wilfred Owen, David Jones, Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Richard Aldington. Graves’s Goodbye To All That and Aldington’s Death of a Hero are surely the most bitter expressions of this sensibility; Owen’s poetry and Jones’s epic, In Parenthesis, the noblest. The greatest literary voices on the German side were the veterans Erich Maria Remarque, whose novel and memoir All Quiet on the Western Front gave the German nation a heartfelt morality play; and Ernst Jünger, the highly decorated German officer, whose novel Storm of Steel delivered the unadorned truth about the professional soldier.

A subtler literary response was that of the British soldier-poet Edmund Blunden. He was one of the few who fought at Passchendaele, the memory of which became a ceaseless torment, so much so that his friends worried for his sanity. His poem ‘Third Ypres’ summoned a nightmarish vision of devolved humanity in ‘uncreation sunk’:

The more monstrous fate

Shadows our own, the mind swoons doubly burdened,

Taught how for miles our anguish groans and bleeds,

A whole sweet countryside amuck with murder;

Each moment puff ed into a year with death.

Still swept the rain, roared guns,

Still swooped into the swamps of flesh and blood,

All to the drabness of uncreation sunk,

And all thought dwindled to a moan, Relieve!

But who with what command can now relieve

The dead men from that chaos, or my soul?

Blunden’s was a calm patriotic soul. The bitter volleys of Graves and Aldington he eschewed as ‘a betrayal of the experience of the war, and of those … who died in it’.³¹ In one poem, ‘Illusions’, he asks the reader’s forgiveness for finding beauty, loveliness, in the trenches, before the ‘Terror’ shatters his reverie, and he sees ‘death’s malkins dangling in the wire’.³² The ‘steely glitter’ of Blunden’s eye, to whom the horror is ironic, aberrational, redeems him from the charge of enclosing a charnel house in lyricism, of composing ‘quatrains in an abattoir’.³³ Long after the war, he continued to believe in the possibility of love, rendering him unacceptable to the ‘Modernist’ literary set, for whom love was a perversion and compassion a sickness – a style of ‘cultural criticism’ to which the German philosopher Theodor Adorno appended the grim epitaph: ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’³⁴

It is time to offer some of my own conclusions about Passchendaele, based on my work in the preceding pages. Primarily, I believe that the poisonous relationship between Lloyd George and Douglas Haig offers a fresh, human perspective through which to understand the battle. Their mutual hatred and furious disagreement on how to fight the war led to a near-complete breakdown in communication between the prime minister and his commander-in-chief. The collapse of a partnership so vital to British security needlessly prolonged and thus, to a real extent, exacerbated the tragedy of Passchendaele.

Let us ask ourselves, for example, the question that has vexed historians, soldiers and academics since 1917: why did Haig prolong the battle after 9 October, when heavy rainfall, terrible losses, the advice of senior officers (though not Gough or Plumer) and the evidence of his eyes pointed to futile slaughter and counselled against continuing? We already know the official military explanation: Haig pressed on because he felt he was on a winning streak; perhaps the weather would hold; the Germans were on the brink of collapse, etc. He could hardly halt below the village, on a mud plain within German sights, where nobody would have lasted ‘any more minutes than necessary’, as Harington observed.³⁵ Nor could Haig withdraw to Pilckem Ridge and regroup – a sensible option in military terms, as Sheffield states, but ‘to give up territory so recently captured at such heavy cost, was psychologically and politically impossible’.³⁶

And militarily unsound, he writes, in a remark of devastating consequence that he curiously underplays in his recent book: ‘To accept the logic of a battle of pure attrition, that ground [Passchendaele] was unimportant …’³⁷ The ‘logic’ was to destroy as many of the enemy as possible; it didn’t really matter where.

There is a darker explanation for Haig’s decision to keep slogging away, rooted in the psychology of power and pride. Haig was a proud man who had been brutally used by a politician he loathed. According to Haig’s original plan, the capture of Passchendaele had always been his ‘fall-back’ position if the battle failed to advance as he hoped.

In this light, had Haig failed to reach the village, the prime minister would have been the first out of the blocks to damn him as a total failure. Not only Haig’s job but his entire reputation and legacy were at stake. Had he called off the battle on 9 October, at such immense cost in soldiers’ lives, having fallen so short of the goals he had laid before the War Cabinet, Haig would have handed Lloyd George the perfect chance not only to sack him but also to destroy his name under a barrage of schadenfreude.

Lloyd George admits this in a revealing paragraph in his memoir:

There were two courses open to Sir Douglas Haig [around 9 October]. One was to go to the Cabinet and admit that the campaign was a complete failure based on an absurd miscalculation of essential facts. He would have to own up that the criticism directed against the scheme by the Prime Minister had been justified by the event. The other course was to persevere stubbornly with his attacks, knowing that at the worst he would gain some ground, with a chance that one day the enemy morale might break … He gambled on the latter chance rather than face the dread alternative of a confession of failure to the politicians … ³⁸

There is a further, metaphysical dimension to Haig’s persistence: the lavish religious tones of the word ‘Passchendaele’ resonated with politicians, civilians and journalists as a symbol of redemption, of Christ’s sacrifice, of Easter. Passchendaele was ‘popular’. By this reading, the Allies were fighting a righteous war towards a shell-strewn Calvary. Possessing Passchendaele exerted a near-mystical hold on certain soldiers’ minds. None paused to ask why or when Passchendaele had become a vital military target. (By November, it had no strategic value as an end in itself; its value as a jumping-off point as part of an attack on the coast had ceased to exist). The men simply assumed it must be, and not only the ordinary soldiers. When General Godley ordered thousands of New Zealanders to their deaths in a battle he knew they couldn’t win, he was acting in the thrall of Haig’s orders to seize the village.

Haig, too, a man of keen religious faith, fell under the siren-like allure of the little cross on the hill. Capturing Passchendaele became something of an obsession for the field marshal who, on several occasions in his life, imagined himself a tool of the Almighty. At the end of 1914, he started to experience a ‘Higher Power’ commanding his destiny.³⁹ We have already seen him on the eve of the Somme, confiding in his wife that he felt a higher power working through him. On the eve of the battles of Passchendaele, Haig felt similarly guided: he prayed and frequently visited his favourite chaplain, and his faith acquired a deeply personal dimension, as Charteris observed:

He came to regard himself with almost Calvinistic faith as the predestined instrument of Providence for the achievement of victory for the British armies. His abundant self-reliance was reinforced by this conception of himself as the child of destiny.⁴⁰

With this spiritual armour, Haig went in person to implore the Canadians to finish the job that the British and Anzacs had started.

In this light, is it fanciful to suggest that Passchendaele had acquired in Haig’s mind the aura of the last station on a terrible and unremitting Via Dolorosa, along whose bloody path his armies had staggered Christ-like, past the ‘stations’ of Pilckem, Gheluvelt, Broodseinde and Gravenstafel, before their final sacrifice on Passchendaele Ridge?

Lloyd George presents the other face of this Janus-like duo. The prime minister had approved the Flanders Offensive in the last week of June 1917 on the understanding that he would end it should it fail to progress. It failed and he didn’t – contrary to his later claim that he had done his best to terminate the battle:

I resisted to the very last the whole project before it was ever commenced, and confidently predicted its failure, giving reasons for my prediction. After its failure was beyond reasonable doubt, I did my best to persuade the Generals to break it off.⁴¹

True, Lloyd George opposed the offensive before it began; but there is no record of him telling Haig to end it after it began. Nor did the prime minister have much to say about the progress of the battle; the subject surfaced fleetingly in Cabinet, as we’ve seen. Had the prime minister more important things on his mind than one of the bloodiest military encounters in British history? Or did he withhold his disgust behind the steeliest exertions of self-restraint? The answer to both questions is no: Lloyd George lived and breathed the war effort; he was a stranger to self-restraint.

He had his own reasons for deciding not to call off the offensive. Those reasons were not the ones he later gave, such as ignorance: ‘I was a layman and in matters of military strategy I did not possess the knowledge and training that would justify me in overriding soldiers of such standing and experience. Accordingly, the soldiers had their way.’⁴² That rings hollow in light of his brash intervention to put Haig under French command, and his solo crusade for the Italian campaign.

A less risible case for Lloyd George’s decision not to intervene was that he bowed to conservative pressure. ‘Passchendaele could not have been stopped without dismissing Sir Douglas Haig,’ he later wrote. ‘But I could not have done it without the assent of the Cabinet. I sounded the Members of the Cabinet individually on the subject and I also spoke to some of the Dominion representatives. They – or most of them – were under the spell of the synthetic victories distilled at G.H.Q.’⁴³ Again, this fails to convince. Are we led to believe that this rowdiest of political animals, leader of a nation at war, yielded to a few colonials and conservative politicians, who were in no position to replace him?

There is a Machiavellian explanation for Lloyd George’s inertia: he was giving Haig enough rope to hang himself. This scenario courts power politics at its most brutal, but it has substance in the context of their bitter personal struggle and eye on their place in history. The prime minister certainly recognised the cost to Haig personally of failing to take Passchendaele, as we’ve seen. In which case, if Lloyd George overruled his commander, and called off the offensive on 9 October, he would have rescued Haig from any responsibility for its failure. The press would have leaped to defend their favourite commander against a meddling politician. And Haig would have been able to blame Lloyd George for preventing his men from capturing Passchendaele and perhaps breaking through. Lloyd George might even have gone down as the prime minister who lost the war.

Lloyd George later conceded as much. Had he tried to stop Passchendaele, he remarked, ‘they would have said I had spoilt the chance of a decisive success, and of saving us from the danger of submarines’.⁴⁴ At the time to which he refers, he knew Britain had won the U-boat war. In other words, here speaks the consummate politician, pursuing his personal legacy ahead of thousands of lives. And so, throughout October, the prime minister stood quietly watching, letting Haig pursue an offensive that Lloyd George already thought a spectacular, bloody failure – but one that must be seen to be Haig’s failure.

Lloyd George would not reveal the true state of his mind for decades. When it showed itself, with the publication of his memoirs in the 1930s, his wrath was terrible to behold. Guilt tormented him: he had long brooded on the tragedy of Flanders, and by molten increments the demon of conscience had worn him down. In the post-war years, in a terrific outpouring of rage, blame, grief and regret, he sat down to write his memoir. With his hair hanging long and white, and his mind as agile as ever, the retired politician then in his late 60s took up his pen and with every weapon in his formidable intellectual armoury sallied forth to clear his name and excoriate the man he held solely responsible for ‘the most gigantic, tenacious, grim, futile and bloody fight ever waged in the history of war’.⁴⁵

First published in 1933, the memoir devoted an entire chapter to Passchendaele, under the title ‘The Campaign of the Mud’. A few extracts convey Lloyd George’s mood and intent. Passchendaele was a ‘ghastly fiasco’⁴⁶, fought according to the ‘unimaginative’ and ‘commonplace’ strategy of attrition, ‘an afterthought of beaten Generals to explain away their defeat …’⁴⁷

It got worse: ‘But as soon as the troops went over the top, they found that they had to pass through exactly the same experiences as those to which they had been subjected in the discredited offensives of the past few years – machine guns playing upon their crumbling ranks from positions which had not been touched by their artillery … the enemy still entrenched behind a line of impregnable earthworks.’⁴⁸

‘The troops felt that they had been fooled and sold and their comrades butchered.’⁴⁹

‘When it was finally concluded, the attack had completely failed in all the purposes for which it was originally designed …’⁵⁰

‘Whilst hundreds of thousands were being destroyed in the insane egotism of Passchendaele, every message or memorandum from Haig was full of these insistences on the importance of sending him more men to replace those he had sent to die in the mud. If Britain said, “Where are my lost legions?” then anyone who asked such a question on her behalf was betraying the Army and attacking our soldiers.’⁵¹

The question of ‘blame’ is always fraught. On the one hand, there are many who follow Lloyd George’s lead and hold Haig chiefly responsible. Among them are millions of tender souls who defend the war but condemn the way it was fought, as if humane methods were at the commanders’ disposal. Theirs is a decent hypocrisy. Yet to criticise Haig or Ludendorff for not fighting a ‘nicer’ or more restrained war is akin to criticising a lion for not showing mercy to a zebra; or decrying the lack of morals in a virus. That is not to suggest the commanders were ‘willing executioners’ – most were deeply affected by their soldiers’ sacrifice. It is simply to state the unpalatable fact that the commanders on the Western Front had little choice other than to fight the war as they did; the casualties were not only planned for, they were inevitable, in the absence of the political will to stop the carnage.

In this sense, Haig’s or Ludendorff’s characters were irrelevant, because force of will ultimately had little bearing on the kind of war being fought in France and Belgium. Every commander – to the dismayed incomprehension of their civilian leaders – was condemned to fight or defend within the straitjacket of attrition. Over and again, the British, French, Dominion and German armies explored ways to end the struggle of the trenches, to return to open, mobile battle: Nivelle’s ‘two-day miracle’, Gough’s ‘breakthrough’, Plumer’s ‘bite and hold’, clouds of gas, huge mines, the creeping barrage, shock troops, lightning counter-attacks, massed tanks … None changed the fundamental conditions of the bashing war of the trenches. No army or weapons system was able to break the deadlock until the last do-or-die onslaughts of 1918, when the Allies’ numeric supremacy and the Germans’ exhaustion determined the outcome. In sum, if the Great War was not inevitable – there ‘are always choices’, as the historian (and Lloyd George’s great-granddaughter) Margaret MacMillan reminds us⁵² – the methods of fighting it were.

This powerlessness manifested itself at government level, too. Having declared war, the European powers had little control over the monster they had unleashed, or how it should be fought. Once they had said ‘yes’ to war, they had said ‘yes’ to the creeping barrage, frontal assaults and enormous casualties – an equation the civilian rulers misunderstood or refused to accept. It meant unleashing every available weapon on the enemy’s lines, no matter how horrible or ‘illegal’. International law had banned but failed to prevent the use of mustard gas, of course (just as it would fail to prevent firebombs in the Second World War and napalm in Vietnam).⁵³

On the other hand, to exonerate the commanders and politicians as helpless pawns who were ‘unable to impose their will on events’ is to remove the human agency from the machinery of war.⁵⁴ What men had begun, they were able to end, had there been the political and moral will to do so. Yet nobody took responsibility. The politicians stood aside. As with the Vietnam and Iraq wars, those in charge escaped any punitive action for their colossal misjudgements. A soldier who lost control of himself and deserted faced severe punishment, possibly execution. A commander or politician who lost control of the war, or whose errors caused thousands of needless casualties, could expect to be forgiven, lauded and ennobled.

Though he was later rewarded with an earldom, greatness would always be denied Field Marshal Haig. ‘Why has not Haig been recognised as one of England’s greatest generals?’ asked a newspaper eighteen years after the armistice. ‘The answer may be given in one word – “Passchendaele”.’⁵⁵

Humanely, then, we are driven to conclude with a question. A war armed with the technology to kill a generation of men, doomed to use it because the generals could find no other way: did this not place an unprecedented responsibility on the political leaders to intervene and agree a compromise peace? That is the question Passchendaele forces upon us. Haig himself believed a negotiated truce the only option, when his spirits were lowest, in early 1918. Knowing, by 1917, that the trenches were unbreakable without appalling losses, the governments of Europe had a historic duty to find a way to end it, to save the flower of European youth. They chose not to, and utterly failed the societies they ruled or represented.

The people were ignorant of these issues, of course, so it is no good defending the continuation of the war on the grounds that ‘the people’ wanted it (as some historians have suggested). Few knew what had actually happened in Flanders until well after the war. Lloyd George knew, and this is how he carried the burden of truth:

If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow, but of course they don’t – and can’t know. The correspondents don’t write and the censorship won’t pass the truth … The thing is horrible and beyond human nature to bear and I feel I can’t go on with this bloody business … ⁵⁶