The road to Passchendaele
As dusk approached on that first day at Messines the generals and artillery officers in the back areas briefly lost control of the battle on the Australian front. They didn’t know where their own infantrymen were on the reverse slope that Captain Grieve had helped capture. They began dropping shells on them. These fell so heavily, and killed and wounded so many, that the infantrymen had to pull back. Wounded lay everywhere amid hot shell fragments. Some of the wounded begged their comrades not to leave them; one man asked to be shot. But the Australians retreated and more died as they tried to run back through the barrage.
Around this time Major Consett Riddell, an engineer in the 4th Division, had to supervise the digging of a trench at the new frontline. Riddell, thirty years old, held degrees in mining engineering and science from Melbourne University and had been wounded on Gallipoli and in France. He sent home elaborately crafted drawings of trench systems and tunnels. Now at Messines he decided to go some hundreds of yards ahead of where his engineers were about to start work. He wanted to look back at the lie of the land, to see what the Germans would see. Then he would know where to site the trench. When he returned a barrage was falling where he had left his men. There was no sign of them. Riddell searched for them for about an hour before being knocked unconscious by a lump of earth or brick. He woke up at dusk, and eventually found his men. By dawn they had almost completed the new trench and its screen of wire.
Riddell walked back through Messines with his runner. Near a wrecked house they saw a board that read ‘Ortskommandant’ (town commander). They went inside and filled two sandbags with maps and papers and also took two hurricane lamps. They headed for divisional headquarters, each with a sack over his shoulder and a lantern and, as Riddell put it, looking pretty disreputable. They ran into a colonel who greeted Riddell as ‘Bill Sikes’, the robber and murderer in Oliver Twist. Riddell pulled out a handful of maps. ‘Almost the first one we looked at had the whole detail of the German battery positions …’
The runner was sent straight to artillery headquarters with the map. Riddell had to go forward with the colonel and spent the whole day showing him over the front. At 9 pm Riddell ate his first meal in thirty-six hours. ‘So ended one of my busy days.’ Riddell was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his work. He received a letter of congratulations from his father, and replied:
You know that for a long time I have been very sorry that you were disappointed because I was never any good at games, I could not play any game at all. I could see that you and your old school friends expected more. When the War started I made up my mind to make up by length of service what I could not hope for in brilliance, so that you would not have any further cause to think that in this biggest of all games I was also a failure. It is this thought that has mainly kept me going.
THE BIG BATTLE at Messines had been virtually won on the first day, indeed in that first hour when the mines went off and the barrage rolled across the German lines. And it had been won in the weeks before because of the finicky planning of Plumer and Harington, and of artillerymen who had glimpsed the formula for success and, to a lesser extent, the skills of divisional commanders such as Monash. The Australian wrote a short letter to his wife on the night of the first day. It was typical of him in that he sometimes measured his own success, and his own importance, with numbers. His casualties were about 2000, he told Vic. His division captured eleven field guns, fifty machine guns and lots of trench mortars and munitions. ‘I fired from first to last over £1,000,000 worth of ammunition …’
The battle went on another week. The British and dominion troops strengthened their front positions. The Germans counterattacked, mostly without much heart, and eventually began to pull back. The allied staff work wasn’t always as thorough as on the first day. The gunners didn’t seem to know where their front troops were and kept hitting them. And the fighting was often as cruel as anything that had happened at Mouquet Farm and the two Bullecourts.
Joseph Trotman was a young sergeant in the 4th Australian Division. A shell hit him on the fourth day of the battle, the day his battalion was due to come out. ‘He sent some H. E. over & luckily I was the only one hit. We had a muster & roll call before this & only 170 answered it so you can guess it’s pretty rough.’ It wasn’t so rough early in the battle. Trotman said the Australians lay down and shot the Germans as they ran – ‘it was like knocking rabbits.’ Trotman captured a group of prisoners by himself. ‘They didn’t want any forcing to come when I had a revolver in one hand & a couple of Bombs in the other. Some of the beggars were only youngsters about 17 to 18.’ Trotman’s wound healed and he rejoined his battalion the following month, on his twentieth birthday.
Lieutenant Walde Fisher, whom we left watching the preliminary bombardment, wrote in his diary for June 12 that he had been through a terrible time. He and his company had been under a heavy barrage all day and all night. There were no proper trenches, just shallow ditches. ‘Men were blown up and killed all along – it was impossible to describe the scene.’ By morning Fisher and two others were the only officers left in two companies. Fisher’s own company was down to fifty-eight men. They were still trapped there the next day. ‘The stench from the dead was dreadful – many were in pieces and could not be identified – while the dead and unburied enemy in front of us added to the nauseous horror … What has been doing in the rest of the line we know not, though we hear rumours of great deeds …’ Two days later he was out of the line, ‘but many of us are yet sick from gas and “dennerite” fumes – it brings on a condition akin to bronchitis, most annoying.’
Lieutenant George Carson, from Monash’s division, wrote home a few days after he came out of the fight:
I’ve been knocked over by a shell covered by another and dug out disputed the point with four Fritzies and hung on to a position for 32 hours with one man only and four dead stinking Huns. We could not get Food sent up the shelling was damnable and eventually the four Napoo Huns were so objectionable that we had to cut them up bit by bit and throw them as far away from us as possible.
BEAN KEPT SCRIBBLING notes as the battle petered out. On June 11 he noticed a small detachment of cavalry going towards Huns’ Walk. ‘Fancy cavalry!’ They were supposed to establish outposts beyond the front. ‘Pure eyewash,’ Bean declared.
Godley was unpopular as a corps commander, Bean wrote. One day he changed an order four times after the men had started out. Holmes, commander of the 4th Division, and other senior officers told Bean they were longing to be back under Birdwood. Bean said Godley ‘never strikes me as being in the least sincere’. Godley sent Bean a message saying that he was going to review the 3rd Division, which was now back from the front. What he was really saying, Bean felt, was: ‘Come and report my speech.’
Bean felt the 3rd Division was ‘finding its feet’. The only trouble was that some of the commanding officers ‘are a bit shy of fire in some cases & Monash is not the man to keep them up to it’. Bean didn’t approve of Monash. It shows in his diaries and notes and in the official history and it is tiresome. Monash had already shown at Messines that he was better at planning a battle than Birdwood or White or any of the other divisional commanders. But Bean, with perhaps a touch of malice, had identified the one defect in Monash’s leadership. It was not Monash’s way to go briefly to the frontline and see what was really happening. Holmes went to the front at least twice during Messines.
Bean by now had heard a little about the French mutinies. ‘The French don’t seem to have the stick of other troops,’ he wrote, which overlooked the fact that the French had suffered worse casualties than other allied troops. ‘The Russian relaxation of army discipline – voluntary salutes etc – has not affected our men in the least. I suppose Australian salutes are mostly voluntary as it is.’ But desertions among the Australians had increased. ‘There is a fair amount of feeling amongst Australian officers that one or two of the worst cases ought to be shot. The same sort of thing started in the Canadian Force … Two men were shot & it stopped.’
WE DON’T KNOW what Phillip Schuler, the journalist turned soldier, did during the battle of Messines. Bean simply tells us in one of his oblique footnotes that Schuler ‘won much credit for his gallantry’. A fortnight after Messines opened Schuler was guiding an expert on cooking arrangements around the back area when a shell landed. Schuler was carried to the casualty-clearing station at Trois Arbres near Steenwerck, just over the border in France, with wounds to his left arm, face, throat and right leg.
Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Dowse was a staff officer in the 4th Division and a friend of Schuler’s. He drove to Trois Arbres to see Schuler. ‘His head was all bandaged up,’ Dowse wrote, ‘but he had use of one eye & when he saw me remarked “Dick, well I ask you”, a favourite saying of his. He knew he was for it & gave me a few messages and instructions before I left. He died about an hour later …’
Dowse wrote to Sir Ian Hamilton in London. ‘Your letter … has made me feel very bad,’ Hamilton’s reply began. ‘From the first moment I met Phillip Schuler I was attracted by his personality and instinctively made friends with him … I am quite upset myself to think that a man who had such a future before him; who possessed such a delightful personality and who would certainly have made a name for himself by his writings in the future has prematurely dropped out. I must write to his father by this Mail.’
Frederick Schuler became withdrawn on hearing the news. He had been pilloried for his German origins; now the war had taken his only son. He sought consolation in reading, art and music. Eventually he received Phillip’s personal effects. They included a Bible, a watch (damaged), a gold ring, a pair of spurs, a fountain pen, two erasers, a dictionary, a riding crop, an ashtray and three pairs of socks.
Schuler had attended Melbourne Grammar, which ran an obituary that included a tribute from Bean. ‘All his friends knew him for the brilliantly handsome, bright, attractive, generous youngster that he was.’ Bean said Schuler wrote only what he saw. ‘His [reports] were true, and only those who know what oceans of false stuff have been poured out on to the world in this war can appreciate what that means.’ Bean spoke of ‘a boy of delicate, almost fastidious tastes, fond of flowers, scrupulously neat, even under conditions of discomfort’.
The ‘beautiful and gifted’ woman who was said to be Schuler’s fiancée placed a tablet to Phillip’s memory in a Cairo church.
A LITTLE MORE than a week after Schuler’s death General William Holmes, the citizen-soldier who commanded the 4th Division, died in similar circumstances. He was showing a group of politicians, including William Holman, the Premier of New South Wales, around the Messines battlefield. The party was well behind the front. A shell burst. Holmes alone was hit, in the chest and lungs. He died while being carried to a dressing station. He was the most senior Australian officer killed on the western front. He lies near Schuler in Trois Arbres cemetery.
THE DAY BEFORE Holmes died the Russians began an offensive on their southern front against Austria-Hungary. It was folly, but one can see how it came about. Russia was in no state to mount an offensive anywhere. Bean had been worrying about the odd desertion among Australian troops. Some two million Russians had deserted in March and April. The revolution was half-complete. The Tsar was gone and few were sorry, but Russia didn’t know what it wanted to become. The authority of the provisional government was forever being challenged, chiefly by the soviets that claimed to represent the workers and soldiers. Lenin was waiting to strike; he knew exactly what sort of country Russia should become.
Alexander Kerensky, the Minister for War and the dominant figure in the provisional government, thought a victory would lend authority to the government. Hence the offensive on the Austrian front. It went reasonably for several days. Then came mutinies and mass desertions. The Germans and Austrians drove the Russians back. The broken army became a rabble. It was finished, and this had implications for the offensive Haig and Gough were planning for Ypres. It wasn’t immediately obvious in the west, but the balance of the war had changed again. American troops had begun to land in France on June 25. Before they would be in the field Russia would be out of the war.
HAIG WAS RIGHT: Messines had been his most successful operation, even if the credit belonged with Plumer and Harington. The battle had mostly gone as it was supposed to go; the Germans could no longer watch the British preparing for the new Ypres offensive from Messines ridge. The British and dominion casualties came in at about 26,000, half of them on the Anzac front. The New Zealand Division lost about 5000 men, Monash’s 3rd Division 4100 and Holmes’ 4th Division 2700. Most of the casualties came after the frontline and the two villages had been taken.
There were obvious lessons from Messines. The mines had broken German morale but they couldn’t be used on that scale in future battles. The artillery plan could. It had shown that trenches could be captured, quickly and with relatively light casualties, if firepower was concentrated and ammunition plentiful. The counter-battery work had been good. The machine-gun barrages had worked. The wire had been cut. The attack had also shown the importance of superiority in the air. And it had not been too ambitious: Plumer had gone for a bite-and-hold operation that was achievable rather than a dramatic attempt at breakthrough that was not. Did Haig and Gough realise what had happened at Messines? Did Lloyd George?
HAIG WAS TELLING Lloyd George and others that German morale was crumbling. It wasn’t, not in the frontline anyway. Charteris, the head of intelligence, tended to tell Haig what he thought the field-marshal wanted to hear. Ludendorff, for his part, was saying before Messines that the German submarine campaign had been so successful that Britain could stay in the war only another three months. Then she would run out of food. This wasn’t true either. Lloyd George had encouraged the ever-timid naval leaders to introduce a convoy system for merchant shipping. German submariners at once found fewer easy targets.
Hindenburg and Ludendorff had other problems. Austria-Hungary was searching for a peace formula. Turkey was war-weary. The Reichstag had begun to split into factions. Socialists and communists were more vocal now that the Tsar had been thrown out. The struggle between labour and capital had taken on a new edge: workers sensed their power and rulers worried for theirs. Bismark’s idea of government was breaking down. It depended on a strong monarch or a strong chancellor. Germany had neither. Kaiser Wilhelm was not made for adversity. Bethmann, the Chancellor, was close to a nervous collapse. Neither the Reichstag nor the monarch nor the military leaders much believed in him.
Bethmann late in June received a Papal envoy. Pope Benedict XV had offered to broker a peace. Bethmann rashly talked about Germany giving up Belgium. He had wandered down a cul-de-sac. Hindenburg and Ludendorff didn’t want this sort of negotiated peace; neither did Britain or France. The Reichstag now came up with a peace resolution. Hindenburg and Ludendorff were appalled, but they also saw a chance to rid themselves of Bethmann. They told the Kaiser they could not work with the Chancellor. Bethmann resigned in mid-July before the dispute could be arbitrated. Georg Michaelis, a little-known bureaucrat, became Chancellor. Bethmann had lost his job; the Kaiser had lost authority. Hindenburg and Ludendorff had increased theirs. Germany edged closer to a military dictatorship.
HAIG COULD ONLY assume that he would receive Cabinet approval for his Ypres adventure. Planning went ahead. Gough and Neill Malcolm, his chief-of-staff, set up headquarters north of Poperinghe. Before they had worked out a final plan they had already handed the Germans an advantage. Haig’s insistence that Gough, rather than Plumer, lead the main attack meant there would be a gap of six-to-seven weeks between Messines and the opening of Third Ypres. The German defences at Ypres were formidable before Messines; now Ludendorff, sensing what was coming, ordered them strengthened. As a result the British in some places faced seven lines of defences that stood seven-miles deep. The British might break into the front trenches easily enough (these were in fact breastworks because of the high water table), but they would keep meeting fresh German troops as they moved deeper into what the Germans called their ‘battle zones’. Dotted between the lines were hundreds of concrete pillboxes covered with earth and turf. Regiments marked down as counter-attackers waited behind the third line. Most of the German heavy guns were out of sight behind the Gheluvelt Plateau and the Passchendaele Ridge. As Prior and Wilson say in Passchendaele: ‘Haig, in short, had arranged matters in a way which proved greatly to his enemy’s advantage.’
Gough decided to attack on a front of about eight miles, from around Steenstraat, north of Ypres, to Kleine Zillebeke in the south. The thrust of the offensive would be roughly north-east. The vital ground Gough had to take were the ridges to the east that led on to Broodseinde and Passchendaele. Gough had French troops above him on his left and Plumer’s 2nd Army below him on the right.
He didn’t have to think too much about his preliminary bombardment: it would have to be long and terrific because of the depth of the German defences. Gough tried to be typically cavalier in plotting his first-day advance. He would try for 4000 to 5000 yards, to take a line from Langemarck in the north to Polygon Wood in the south, in four phases. This would carry him beyond Pilckem Ridge in the north and well on to the Gheluvelt Plateau in the south. One suspects that Plumer or Rawlinson, had they been in charge, would have gone for a first-day advance of about 2000 yards. This would have allowed the artillery fire to be concentrated.
Gough didn’t have enough artillery to advance 5000 yards. He and Haig were forgetting the lessons of Messines, if indeed they had ever recognised them. Gough would have about 1400 field guns and some 750 heavy pieces. He would also have support from French artillery in the north and Plumer’s army to the south. He had more guns than Plumer had at Messines. But he didn’t have Plumer’s mines, and he had further to go. His troops would be going beyond the range of the field guns. There would be no creeping barrage for the infantry going for the farthest objectives. And Gough’s intelligence staff had decided there were 205 German batteries opposite him. In truth the figure was nearer to 400.
Gough planned to use nine infantry divisions, some 100,000 men, on the first day, the same number that Plumer had employed at Messines. No Australian divisions would be taking part: most were having a long rest.
HAIG CONTINUED HIS wearing-out campaign against the frocks. The doubters in the War Cabinet included Lloyd George, Bonar Law and Lord Milner. Jan Christian Smuts, the South African statesman, and Lord Curzon were in favour of the Passchendaele offensive – but vaguely. Robertson, the chief military adviser to the Cabinet, was a doubter in private: he thought Haig had underestimated Germany’s ability to fight on. Still, he was always going to back a gentleman-soldier against a clutch of politicians.
There was ‘trouble in the land’, Robertson told Haig by letter in mid-June. The War Cabinet wanted to ‘get at facts’. Robertson warned Haig that Lloyd George wanted to settle the war from Italy – ‘today the railway people have been asked for figures regarding the rapid transfer of 12 [British] divisions and 300 heavy guns to Italy! They will never go while I am CIGS but all that will come later.’ Then he told Haig how to negotiate. ‘Don’t argue that you can finish the war this year or that the German is already beaten. Argue that your plan is the best plan – as it is – that no other would even be safe let alone decisive, and then leave them to reject your advice and mine. They dare not do that.’
Haig went to London to argue his case. He wrote in his diary that Lloyd George wanted to do little or nothing, except support Italy with guns and gunners. Haig told the War Cabinet that Germany was within six months of running out of reserves, so long as the fighting continued at its present intensity. He wanted more men and guns. Jellicoe, the First Sea Lord, told the Cabinet that Germany’s submarine campaign meant that Britain could not stay in the war in 1918. ‘We cannot go on,’ he said. This claim probably helped Haig’s case for the Passchendaele campaign, yet one senses that Haig dismissed it for the panicky outburst it was. It has long been part of the mythology of the Great War to cast Britain’s army leaders as butchers and buffoons; one day someone may look at the fretful men who had charge of the Royal Navy.
Lord Derby, the War Minister, came to see Haig in London. He pulled a slip of paper with notes written on it out of his pocket. He then made a speech offering Haig a peerage. Haig thanked him and said no. A peerage, he said, would force him to live beyond his means.
Haig returned to France. King George came across and made him a Knight of the Thistle. Queen Mary dined at Haig’s headquarters, the first woman to do so. A few days later Raymond Poincaré, the French President, came to lunch. Haig wrote a typical judgement: ‘He is a worthy little man, extremely self-satisfied I think, and rather unsympathetic and cold, a regular lawyer in fact.’
Haig was at it again a few days later when General John Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force, and several of his officers, including an aide-de-camp, came to dinner. Haig was struck by Pershing’s ‘quiet gentlemanly bearing – so unusual for an American’. The aide-de-camp, a Captain Patton, was ‘a fire-eater, and longs for the fray’. This was the young George Smith Patton who would do much fire-eating in another world war.
On July 19, when Gough was only twelve days away from launching his first attack at Ypres, Robertson told Haig that Cabinet still hadn’t approved the offensive but probably would in the next few days. Haig made the reasonable comment that Cabinet didn’t understand how the army prepared for a battle. A few days later the approval came, but with a condition and a concession.
The condition was that if the first phase of Third Ypres failed to succeed, the offensive would be called off and troops sent to Italy. Haig did not have authority to run another Somme campaign. He described the idea of sending troops to Italy as ‘the act of a lunatic’. One indeed has to wonder whether this prospect made Haig push even harder for Ypres: did he feel he had to tie up his troops before Lloyd George grabbed them for a half-thought-out adventure in Italy? Lloyd George also longed to capture Jerusalem, which would make an uplifting tale for vicars to deliver in their Sunday sermons but had almost nothing to do with winning the war.
The concession granted to Haig was that he would be consulted before any decision was made to halt the offensive. This raised questions. Who would define ‘success’? And how would it be measured? Lloyd George and his Cabinet – and the same had been true of Asquith’s administration – didn’t really want to know too much about tactics and detail. Otherwise they would have wanted to know more about Messines and why it worked. They simply longed for a big victory.
WE ARE CLIMBING the Wytschaete–Messines ridge when a young pheasant hen, fawn and short-tailed and confused, trots frantically beside the road, veering this way and that before darting into the underbrush. ‘Climbing’ is too lofty a verb. The ridge doesn’t seem high, mainly because it isn’t, just a bump on a soggy plain, but high enough for one to see just about everything to the south and west. You know, as soon as you reach the crest, why it had to be taken before Haig could begin his Passchendaele campaign.
Two German pillboxes stand sullenly in the New Zealand Memorial at Messines. The concrete walls are more than two-feet thick and reinforced with looped iron rods now rusty and spiky. From here the Germans could see the villages of Wulvergem and Neuve-Eglise on the plain to the west and, to the south, Ploegsteert Wood, where the Australians were gassed. Beyond the wood you can see deep into France. Philip Gibbs, the journalist, stood near here a few days after Messines opened. He looked back at the old British lines and saw every detail laid out like a relief map brightly coloured. ‘My God,’ said a British officer standing nearby, ‘it’s a wonder they allowed us to live at all!’
From this spot you also realise the importance of the mines and the massed artillery. The New Zealanders advanced across an exposed plain that in other circumstances would have given the Germans a clear field of fire. But on that morning long ago the plain was about mushroom clouds and shivering earth, dead Germans and half-crazed Germans. The rim of Spanbroekmolen crater is overgrown with tangles of blackberries and weeds. The green-stained water with its beds of lilies stretches for several hundred feet. All around are fields of corn and small herds of fat grey cattle, low-slung brick piggeries and, near Ploegsteert Wood, fields of hops. A family is out harvesting potatoes. Red poppies burn brightly amid the withered plants.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row …
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
A tractor, clanking and rolling like a tramp steamer in a swell, works through wheat stubble under a big grey sky near Trois Arbres cemetery. The discs throw up a cloud of brown-red dust beyond which one can glimpse the spire of Steenwerck. A grave lies in the shadow of a crab-apple tree. Here, a long way from home, is Phillip Schuler.
On the outskirts of Wytschaete a contractor works a backhoe to dig a trench for an electrical cable. The trench is ten-feet long and perhaps six-feet deep. So far it has produced thirty-one shrapnel canisters from British eighteen-pounders, the base of a toffee-apple mortar and hundreds of rusty tendrils of barbed wire. The likelihood is that the contractor has strayed into a shell hole that had been filled with debris in the nineteen-twenties. There was human ‘debris’ too back then. A local man tells us his father could remember seeing children playing soccer with human skulls.