‘Cor, look at the lyddite shells bursting along Jerry’s trench,’ a look-out in the trenches east of St Julien called down from the parapet to his pals below on the afternoon of 22 April. Lyddite was a novelty, a British-patented high explosive based on picric acid that emitted puffs of yellow smoke on impact, and it was good to see ‘our guns’ pounding the enemy lines. But, as he watched, the look-out was puzzled: there was something strange about those puffs. A few seconds later he gave a louder yell: ‘Blimey, it’s not lyddite, it’s gas!’, he warned; the 2nd battalion, Lancashire Regiment, discovered they were facing a new and terrible weapon.1 The Germans had released 168 tons of chlorine from batteries of 6,000 cylinders along more than 4 miles of front from the Yperlee canal at Steenstraat eastwards to the Ypres–St Julien–Poelcapelle road.
To those who lived through that first experience of gas warfare, the evening of 22 April was unforgettable. Lieutenant Louis Strange of No. 6 Squadron, RFC, had a unique view: ‘I was cruising up and down over the Salient . . . watching out for gun flashes in the fading light when suddenly my attention was attracted by what appeared to be streams of yellowish-green smoke coming from the German front-line trenches. This was such a strange phenomenon that we dropped to 2,000 feet to have a good look at it. At first I was completely puzzled but finally my brain connected it with rumours about poison gas,’ he wrote in his memoirs, adding: ‘We raced back full throttle to Poperinghe.’ From there he and his observer were taken straight to V Corps headquarters to make their report to General Plumer in person.
Down in the trenches south of Langemarck a Canadian officer watched with awed fascination as two ‘greenish-yellow clouds’ filled out and, carried westward by a light wind, became a ‘bluish-white mist, such as seen over water-meadows on a frosty night’. Another Canadian, Private Underwood, was to recall how ‘It was the first gas anyone had seen or heard of’; Sergeant Dorgan of the 7th Northumberland Fusiliers explained, ‘We’d no training for gas prevention, never heard of the gas business.’ Within minutes of the first alarm Lieutenant-Colonel Beckles Willson was appalled to see, sweeping down the road to Ypres, ‘a panic stricken rabble of Turcos and Zouaves with grey faces and protruding eyeballs, clutching their throats and choking as they ran’. The gas had enveloped the French colonial troops’ trenches, and all discipline was gone. Further west, a regiment of French Territorials was in little better shape, with those who had fled the toxic smoke staggering wearily on towards the Yserlee canal without guns or equipment.2
The terror weapon created a gap of some four and a half miles in the allied line, achieving in little more than five minutes the decisive breakthrough that had eluded Falkenhayn throughout First Ypres. It swept down not only on the French and the Canadians but also on the British 28th Division and on the Belgian Grenadiers and Carabiniers defending the line of the Yperlee around Boesinghe. Behind the gas cloud the 45th, 46th, 51st and 52nd Reserve Divisions of the Duke of Württemberg’s Fourth Army advanced with impregnated gauze pads protecting their mouths and noses. The 45th Division soon took Steenstraat; the 40th crossed the canal at Het Sas; the 51st entered Langemarck and, half an hour after the gas’s release, the 52nd were in Pilckem, only two and a half miles from Ypres’s Menin Gate. Before nightfall these four advancing divisions – some 50,000 men – had captured 51 guns, mainly French 75-mms, and rounded up 2,000 dazed or wounded prisoners. Then to the relief of their adversaries the Germans began to dig in rather than continue to press forward on Ypres itself. Their orders stipulated that the immediate objective was the seizure of Pilckem Ridge, and this task was soon accomplished. The Duke of Württemberg was without reserves on hand to back up what Falkenhayn had regarded in the first place as essentially a strategic diversion embodying an experiment in weaponry.3
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Although the allied troops in the trenches were taken by surprise, the possibility of resort to chemical warfare had long been recognized by governments and by humanitarians seeking to limit the horrors of war. The Hague Convention of 1907 condemned the development of weapons capable of spreading poison among combatants or civilians; Britain, France and Germany were among the signatories. Nevertheless individual scientists continued research into chemical warfare. Among them was the 12th Earl of Dundonald, a retired cavalry general and friend of Sir John French, who revised proposals put forward by his great-grandfather during the Crimean War for the emission of sulphurous fumes to prise the enemy out of prepared fortifications. In 1854 the great Michael Faraday authenticated the feasibility of the Dundonald project, though it was never tested. Sixty years later the revised version aroused little interest. At French’s request, Haig received Dundonald on 12 March, at the height of the battle of Neuve Chapelle but was dismissive. ‘I asked him how he arranged to have a favourable wind,’ Haig commented contemptuously in his diary.4
The Germans treated science with respect and took inventors more seriously. Research scientists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin worked closely with IG Farben’s chemical experts, and the Prussian Ministry of War showed interest. Soon after the start of war, Pioneer Regiment No. 36 was established to develop weapons capable of discharging chlorine. Field howitzers fired shells containing lachrymatory gas against the Russians at Bolomow, near Warsaw, on 3 January 1915 but with no effect. As an alternative way of discharging gas, orders were given for the manufacture of cylindrical tubes, of small diameter and some 5 feet long. Training was then given to selected ‘gas pioneers’, serving soldiers who possessed some knowledge of science. The pioneers were to place the cylinders in position under cover of darkness, sited on their objective but concealed from prying eyes or cameras. Before the start of an infantry attack a pioneer wearing a primitive respirator would remove the cap on the cylinder, enabling the gas to be forced out of the tube by its own pressure and wafted into enemy lines by the prevailing wind. No explosive charge was required: all that was needed was a steady wind, fresh but not gusty and blowing from the right quarter.
Generals proud of the superior fire-power of Krupps big guns had no confidence in this bombardment by drain-pipe. Some 17 years later the Reichsarchiv history of the Ypres campaign recalled that officers and men ‘almost without exception mistrusted the still untried weapon, if they were not totally against it’.5
But despite these doubts, the first cylinders arrived in Flanders in mid-March. Soon afterwards prisoners taken by the French blabbered carelessly about the new weapon, enabling General d’Urbal of France’s Tenth Army to circulate an intelligence assessment on 30 March that described the cylinders with remarkable accuracy. By then, however, d’Urbal and his Tenth Army had left the Salient and were 100 miles away, fighting in Artois. General Smith-Dorrien does not appear to have heard of the Tenth Army’s discovery until the second week of April, the news being followed by reports of a German captured in the Yserlee canal sector of the Salient who was carrying a protective gas pad. No. 6 Squadron, RFC, was ordered to search from the skies, but the gas-release batteries were so effectively concealed that neither pilots nor observers saw any signs of the cylinders. On 15 April, Smith-Dorrien noted in his diary that he had received information about ‘enormous tubes of asphyxiating gas’, adding the comment: ‘In case there is any truth in it, I have let all commentators know.’ General Plumer passed the report on to his divisional commanders ‘for what it is worth’, and Sir John French, who had also heard tales of a gas weapon, was no less scornful. When rumours of a German attack for the night of 15–16 April proved unfounded, this widespread scepticism seemed justified. Through the following week the fate of Hill 60 held the generals’ attention.6
Falkenhayn originally contemplated no more than a limited offensive along the Menin Road, where he had been thwarted five months earlier, and the gas cylinders were stored near Gheluvelt. It was not a good site: Passchendaele Ridge acted as a wind shield, and promising north-easterlies – rare anyhow in western Belgium – tended to veer round unpredictably, threatening to blow back a gas cloud towards the attackers. In mid-April the cylinders were moved to the northeast sector, where the ridges were lower and ran for the most part parallel to the line of attack.
Poelcapelle, the pivotal village for the German assault, faced what was at that moment the most vulnerable defensive position in the Salient, for the Poelcapelle–St Julien road marked the northern boundary of the British Second Army’s sector. West of the road the line was held by the 87th French Territorial Division and the 45th Algerian Division, both under the command of General Putz. They had only recently moved up to the Front and were assigned some four and a half miles of trenches, reaching out to the Belgian Army’s southern posts along the Yserlee canal, slightly north of Steenstraat. The Territorials included elderly Breton reservists, les pépères (‘grandads’), while the 45th Division comprised Zouaves and a far from reliable ‘white’ punishment battalion as well as the so-called ‘Turcos’, native Algerian riflemen.
To the east and south of the road was the 1st Canadian Division, who had already seen action at Neuve Chapelle. Like Putz’s motley force, the Canadians were newcomers to the Salient, though they were troops of very different mettle. Their three infantry brigades formed part of General Plumer’s V Corps together with (from north to south) the 28th, 27th and 5th British divisions. The most experienced Canadian regiment, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry – the veterans who had landed in France shortly before Christmas – remained attached to the 27th Division until November 1915, and on 22 April they were too far south to be caught under the asphyxiating yellow cloud. But within a fortnight ‘Princess Pat’s’, too, were to be caught up in Second Ypres, fighting desperately around Frezenberg and Wieltje as the battle moved into its final phase.
The initial success of the German attack carried them forward almost 3 miles in less than five hours. Fortunately the Canadians, on the left of the allied centre, held firm throughout the night of 22–23 April. Smith-Dorrien realized that the Front could only be stabilized if the French found substitutes for the two divisions that had fled in panic. But Foch was slow to respond: GQG was engrossed with preparations for their own offensive in Artois, and Joffre could not spare more troops for Flanders. The best Foch could offer was General Putz’s reorganized Territorials, augmented by some ‘loose’ battalions from his 10th Division. There was, however, no prospect of effective French aid plugging the gap earlier than the evening of 23 April, and it was left to Plumer and to Brigadier-General Turner VC of the 3rd Canadian Brigade to douse the German dragon’s fire and fury throughout St George’s Day.
Plumer ordered the consolidation of a line already improvised south of the Bois de Cuisiniers, an extensive copse off the Menin Road near Hooge, soon anglicized as Kitchener’s Wood (but no longer extant). At a quarter past four in the afternoon the 6th Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry and the East Yorkshires pressed a counter-attack forward towards Pilckem. The Germans, however, had placed machine-gun nests on the slopes of the ridge, with tragic consequences. As soon as the attackers broke cover, they were mown down by machine-guns and suffered appalling losses. After three hours of heavy fighting the East Yorkshires, who had a nominal strength of 2,000 men at the start of the day, were left with only seven officers and 280 men alive and unwounded. Everywhere around the edge of the ground lost on the previous day Württemberg’s artillery rained down what was in effect a protective screen.
Next morning (Saturday, 24 April) the Germans turned their attention to the exposed apex of the Canadian trenches, releasing gas cylinders well before dawn. The artificial cloud on this occasion was some 15 feet deep and, caught by a strong wind, soon swept down on the Canadians. They had no respirators, but they gained some protection by taking advantage of the soluble character of chlorine and covering their mouths and noses with wet towels or handkerchiefs, sometimes kept damp with urine. Remarkably three-quarters of the defenders were fit enough to continue the fight after the gas dispersed, and the Canadian field guns gave the infantry steady support.
By nine o’clock the battle had become an artillery duel, in which the Germans possessed heavier howitzers, capable of shelling support roads and destroying signal wires. It was hard for Smith-Dorrien, and even Plumer, who was much nearer the fighting, to keep in touch with the balance of a battle that was constantly changing: it was harder still for Sir John French, studying the map out at headquarters in Hazebrouck, to appreciate the problems in the forward trenches. Yet, despite the difficulties of communication, GHQ accepted that a general directive was needed for commanders in the field. It came soon after four o’clock on that Saturday afternoon: Plumer received from French the laconic order, ‘Every effort must be made at once to restore and hold the line at St Julien.’
But St Julien was not, like Gheluvert and St Eloi, a village at a strategic crossroads. It was little more than a hamlet, 2 miles south of Langemarck and straggling along a road beside the Hannebeek, one of several small streams coming down from Passchendaele Ridge. A single day’s fighting had already reduced the line of cottages to ruin. When the 10th Brigade sought to fulfil French’s orders, in heavy rain early next morning, the 2nd Seaforth Highlanders and 1st Warwickshires were exposed to enfilade fire across the fields and shelling from the adjoining slopes, while also checked by machine-gun nests set among the rubble. Almost 2,500 of the brigade’s 4,000 officers and men were lost during the attack and to little purpose. The Germans remained firmly in control of the charred stones that had been St Julien, though the 10th Brigade succeeded in blunting the impetus of their assault. Later on that Sunday and 2 miles further east, a composite Landwehr division struck at the flank of the battle-weary Canadians and captured the village of Gravenstafel.
In the early evening most units of the 1st Canadian Division were pulled back from the forward trenches into reserve. The division, numbering some 10,000 men at the start of the battle, had lost 1,700 killed in the 72 hours that followed the first release of gas, with more than 2,500 wounded. But the Canadian casualties were not limited to the 1st Division. Today, Chapman Clemesha’s magnificent 35-foot high Brooding Soldier statue stands at Vancouver Corner, where the N313 to Poelcapelle meets the Zonnebeke–Langemarck road. The statue carries an awesome tribute as unadorned in its proud simplicity as the monument itself: ‘This column marks the battlefield where 18,000 Canadians on the British left withstood the first German gas attacks, the 22–24 April 1915; 2,000 fell and lie buried nearby.’7
Individual acts of valour during the ordeal of the Canadians were subsequently recognized by the award of two Victoria Crosses, both posthumously. Lance-Corporal Frederick Fisher braved heavy artillery fire to cover troops in a support trench with his machine-gun; Sergeant-Major William Hall twice left his trench to bring back wounded men under heavy fire. The shelling persisted even as the division pulled back, adding more names to the long casualty list. On 25 April, Captain Francis Scimager, a doctor serving at an advanced dressing station in a farm, won a third Canadian VC for saving his wounded patients when the farm buildings became a target for the German guns.
A week later, in a neighbouring dressing station, the death of a Canadian officer inspired an enduring tribute to those who took ‘up our quarrel with the foe’. At Essex Farm, Colonel John McCrae was saddened by the fate of his friend, Lieutenant Helmer, who was receiving treatment when he was hit by a German shell. After the fighting died away McCrae mourned Helmer in an elegy for the thousands killed in the springtime of their lives and buried close to where they fell. Punch published ‘In Flanders Fields’ on 8 December 1915, to rekindle emotions aroused earlier in the year by the war sonnets of Rupert Brooke. McCrae immortalized the image of the blood-red poppies that ‘blow between the crosses row by row’. His deeply moving sincerity has survived changes of attitude towards war through four generations.
After less than three days of battle it seemed as if Württemberg’s troops had secured a potential victory of far greater value than Falkenhayn ever anticipated. They were across the Yserlee canal at Lizerne, though the Belgian Carabiniers continued to offer stiff resistance. Their field artillery maintained a steady bombardment of forward positions from three sides, and their heavy guns pounded the congested roads along which relief columns were making their way to the Front. There was, it appeared, no answer to the improved Maxim machine-guns, and the constant fighting exacted a heavy toll of the best troops. It was a harsh week for George V’s armies. Across Europe, the first landings had been made at Gallipoli on 25 April; the British at Cape Helles suffered 1,700 casualties on that morning, and further up the peninsula 1,252 Australians and New Zealanders (Anzacs) were killed over the next six days, one-in-four of those who landed.
Yet although the Germans in Flanders had prised the latch off the gate barring access to the Channel ports, they failed to press forward into the open country beyond. The unexpected always caught Falkenhayn off balance: he hesitated, and time overtook him. The French recovered Lizerne on 27 April and supported the Belgians in clearing the western bank of the canal by mid-May; though the British continued to suffer heavy losses in counter-attacks, their line was never broken.
On 1 May the 15th Brigade of the 5th Division thwarted a gas attack for the first time, made on Hill 60. The 1st battalion Dorset Regiment were among forward troops issued with gauze and flannel pads to be hung around the neck, ready to be wetted by means unspecified when a gas alarm sounded. The attack, launched at 7.15 in the evening, took the Dorsets by surprise, but a young subaltern, Second Lieutenant Kestell-Cornish had the enterprise to seize a rifle and, with the only four men in his platoon still able to stand, fired rapidly into the yellow cloud from the trench parapet checking the advancing Germans, who could reasonably assume a machine-gun post had remained unaffected by the gas. Reserves from the 1st Devons and 1st Bedfords brought support to the Dorsets, but for three hours there was close fighting in the trenches at the foot of the hill. Ninety men were fatally gassed in the trenches that evening. Of 207 wounded brought back to the dressing station, ‘46 died almost immediately and 12 after long suffering’. Kestell-Cornish spent two days in hospital, recovering from the effects of the gas, but he was back in the trenches within a week.8
Sadly the Dorsets’ resolute defence was to no avail; a second German attack four days later could not be repulsed. The 1st Cheshires were brought up hurriedly from their billets in Ypres to bolster the Dorsets, 1st Norfolk and 2nd Duke of Wellingtons after the Germans discharged thicker gas from flank positions that ran the length of their trenches, causing heavy casualties. At one point the Cheshires were engaged for half an hour in a deadly exchange of hand grenades, their ‘jam tin variety’ bombs less effective than ‘those horrid little black grenades that the Germans fling so accurately’, complained Second Lieutenant Arthur Greg, a Rugbeian who cut short his studies at New College, Oxford, to enlist in the previous September. ‘An officer of the Dorsetshire Regiment had his head blown off just as he was handing me a new box of grenades,’ Greg wrote. ‘I felt very upset.’9 For 48 hours the British tried to hold the hill or recover it by counter–attacks, but they could not dislodge their enemy. Hill 60 remained in German hands for the next two years.
By 27 April, Smith-Dorrien had become seriously alarmed at the exposed position of V Corps and angered by the commander-in-chief’s insistence on pressing ahead with inter-allied counter-attacks. It seemed evident that GHQ at distant Hazebrouck did not realize the Second Army was short of troops and that French support had proved limited in numbers and reluctantly given. Without consulting Sir John, Smith-Dorrien ordered all offensive operations to cease ‘forthwith’, and he sent an urgent 900-word letter to General Robertson, who had become the chief of French’s general staff in January. Smith-Dorrien respected Robertson, known as Wully, the Lincolnshire lad who 38 years back in time ran away from home to enlist as a private and rose to high command through natural intelligence. Over strategic issues Wully seemed a sensible realist, and the letter put forward a sound case for pulling back to the so-called ‘GHQ line’, a defensive semicircle 2 miles east of Ypres prepared by the French in January.10 But Robertson’s realism was compounded of ruthlessness and ambition; he expressed neither agreement nor doubt. In the early afternoon he telephoned Smith-Dorrien to say that ‘the Chief does not regard situation nearly so unfavourable as your letter represents’. Smith-Dorrien was told to co-operate with the French in a simultaneous combined attack with ‘due regard to previous instructions’. A letter would ‘follow’, brought by a staff officer.
No letter came. Instead, Smith-Dorrien received that evening a telegram sent en clair by a staff major ordering him to hand over to General Plumer ‘the command of all troops engaged in present operations about Ypres’. Smith-Dorrien remained in the Salient another ten days, still technically responsible for II Corps, out on Messines Ridge. On 6 May, Smith-Dorrien received by telephone the news he had anticipated: ‘’Orace, you’re for ’ome,’ Robertson allegedly told him. On this occasion formal, written instructions did ‘follow’ the call: he was to return to England; Plumer would succeed him in command of the Second Army. Thus was the most senior general serving in the British army dismissed at the height of a critical battle; no explanation was given.11 Ironically, Plumer had by then already retreated to the GHQ line or, more precisely, to forward trenches hurriedly dug ahead of it. Sir John French would accept proposals from the tactful Plumer that from his predecessor would have been anathema. A feud between choleric generals fighting the same battle was potentially disastrous, as the Russians had found at Tannenberg in August 1914.
The slaughter of Second Ypres dragged on into May, irrespective of the retirement to the GHQ line. During the second week of the month the German 53rd Reserve Division attacked the 27th and 28th Divisions in great strength along a ridge that runs west of Frezenberg southwards from Wieltje to merge imperceptibly into a higher ridge, covering the woods and lake at Bellewaarde, to the east of Hooge chateau on the Menin Road. Heavy bombardment and persistent infantry assaults killed nine officers and 382 men in Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry on 8 May, leaving the regiment only 154 survivors. At nightfall the 12th London Regiment, nominally 1,000-men strong, could muster a mere 53 other ranks and no officers. The German bombardment was so deep that one company (250 men), marching through darkened streets on the eve of the battle, suffered 80 casualties from falling masonry. Several eye-witnesses comment on the agonies of horses hit by shell splinters or by breaking their legs in potholes. A pitiful neighing backed the stench of rotting carcasses along the roads.
Four days later (12 May) the ‘Cavalry Force’, fighting as dismounted infantry, relieved the 27th Division. They had hardly reached the lines facing Frezenberg on that Thursday when the full fury of bombardment fell on them. The shellfire continued for eleven and a half hours, inflicting heavy casualties, particularly on the 1st Life Guards, whose trenches were destroyed. The Leicestershire Yeomanry lost 96 of the 282 men who set out from their billets on the previous day; of those killed, 83 had no known grave; their names are inscribed on the Menin Gate. Yet somehow the North Somerset Yeomanry’s trenches continued to offer some cover despite the bombardment, enabling a counter-attack with bayonets to be made later in the day. Renewed shellfire checked two other counter-attacks by the regrouped cavalry during the afternoon.12
Personal tragedies abounded on that ghastly Thursday: one robbed England of yet another poet of budding talent. Julian Grenfell, a captain in the 1st Royal Dragoons, was gravely wounded in the trenches on the edge of the wood north of Hooge by a shell splinter that penetrated his skull. His ‘Into Battle’, completed a fortnight earlier, conveys the alternating emotions of fear and elation he had experienced five months previously during First Ypres, the contrast between the soldier’s ‘dreary, doubtful, waiting hours, before the brazen frenzy starts’ and that ‘burning moment’ when ‘only joy of battle takes him by the throat, and makes him blind’ to all things else. Premonition darkens his later stanzas: ‘In the air death moans and sings’; calmly the poet–soldier resigns himself to ‘Destined Will’. The wound proved fatal; Grenfell was taken fully conscious to a military hospital in Boulogne. There he lingered for 12 days until night could finally ‘fold him in soft wings’.13
Officially Second Ypres ended on 24 May, when four German divisions made a final attempt to push forward from a line north of Bellewaarde Ridge along the Menin Road. More gas was released than in any earlier attack, but counter-measures were improving day by day; East Enders working overtime at Allen and Hanbury’s, the pharmaceutists of Bethnal Green, enabled primitive respirators fitted with eye-shields to be rushed out from London. But only strong shields for the body could have given protection from the thrust and counter-thrust with bayonet that followed when the infantry clashed once the gas cloud lifted. The fighting continued all day, until around eight o’clock in the evening the British 4th Division pulled back from Wieltje to newly dug trenches extending GHQ line to the northwest.
After 34 days of battle the Germans had trimmed the Salient drastically, though most of the territory was gained in the first two days. The British suffered almost 60,000 casualties, the French about 10,000 and the Belgians slightly more than 1500, a total of 71,500 allied dead, missing or seriously wounded. By contrast the Germans sustained 35,000 casualties, less than half their enemy’s number. On war maps printed in the newspapers the ground won seemed of little importance. Although Falkenhayn’s troops were in some places only 2 miles from the Grand Place, they had made little progress towards those elusive Channel ports: Dunkirk was still 30 miles ahead of them, Calais some 50. But the crests of the arc of ridges around Ypres were in enemy hands. From Bellewaarde and from Hill 60 the Germans enjoyed clear views extending well behind the British trenches. The roads to the French border had long come under haphazard shellfire. Now observers could sight the artillery on targets out at Poperinghe, Dickebusch and Vlamertinghe with ominous accuracy.
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Sir John French admitted to Haig that he had spent ‘several bad nights as the result of anxiety’ over Ypres, but increasingly he was looking beyond the old frontier, tempted by the prospect of a battle for Lille.14 By 6 May, Haig completed plans for supporting Joffre’s spring offensive. In what might be regarded as Neuve Chapelle Mark 2, the First Army would make a second attempt to reach the high ground southwest of Lille, this time by securing Aubers Ridge, the objective that proved too distant two months earlier. The following day – while the Germans were massing their artillery in the Salient around Frezenberg – French summoned First Army’s commanding generals to GHQ in Hazebrouck for a confident briefing on the favourable position of the allies across Europe and his hopes for Aubers Ridge and the simultaneous French assault on Vimy Ridge.
His optimism was misplaced. On the Eastern Front the Russians were forced back from the foothills of the Carpathians into Galicia; from Gallipoli the news grew gloomier by the day; in Artois the French advanced 3 miles and briefly held the crest of Vimy Ridge, only to be overwhelmed by counter-attacks, and on the same day – Sunday, 9 May – Aubers Ridge proved a costly disaster. The First Army and the Indian Corps incurred 11,500 casualties in 12 hours of battle. Haig lacked guns of heavy calibre, and the artillery was woefully short of high explosive. Shrapnel shells failed to cut through the barbed wire, exposing the infantry to merciless machine-gun fire. Haig wished to resume the offensive on the Monday, but each of his three corps commanders reported they did not have enough shells to support further attacks.15 A second battle was fought around Festubert (15–25 May), when once again initial success was thwarted by lack of high-explosive shells.
On 14 May, the eve of Festubert, The Times caused a sensation in London with an article under the triple headline, ‘Need for shells. British attacks checked. Limited supply the cause’.16 Colonel Repington, the paper’s military correspondent, based his article on figures fed to him secretly by Sir John French, who also sent his military secretary and an aide-de-camp to London to contact Lloyd George, knowing that the chancellor of the exchequer had for the past month been chairing a cabinet committee on munitions, from which Kitchener was pointedly excluded. On 21 May the Daily Mail – the paper with the largest circulation and, like The Times, owned by Lord Northcliffe – blamed the war secretary for the ‘shell scandal’. To French’s disappointment, however, Kitchener was not swept from office. Asquith had already resolved to strengthen the government’s authority by bringing the Conservative Unionists into a coalition. Bonar Law, their leader, insisted on keeping Kitchener at the War Office: the head he demanded was that of Churchill, the initiator of Gallipoli.
On 27 May, when the Liberal–Unionist coalition took office, Churchill was removed from the Admiralty, while Lloyd George left the Exchequer to become minister of munitions. Sound administration, together with unprecedented powers of requisitioning, ensured that the manufacture of weapons and output of shells and ammunition were speeded up. Within a month shell production had risen to 4,000 a day and by the autumn it reached 10,000, but for Haig the improved figure was far from satisfactory: in battles on the Western Front the British guns could get through 40,000 shells in a single day. Lloyd George was convinced that in the spring of 1916 the BEF would have all the guns and explosives needed for a sustained offensive – but not sooner. And still lacking was any means by which infantry could penetrate sophisticated field defences, where concrete pillboxes and deep dug-outs seemed impervious to artillery.
The summer of 1915 became a season of ripe politicking. There were jointly productive Anglo-French talks over munitions problems at Boulogne; discussions over the extent of the British commitment in France at Calais on 6 July, with subsequent Joffre–Kitchener talks later in the month, and the first inter-allied conference over grand strategy, at Chantilly, on 7 July. Ever present in the background was the British fear that if the BEF failed to back Joffre’s planned offensives to the hilt an exhausted France would seek a separate peace. To guard against this contingency Kitchener, while opposing ‘a too vigorous offensive’, pressed Sir John French to pledge his support for GQG even if the BEF suffered ‘very heavy casualties’. The war minister left Sir John to face harsh decisions in the months ahead, sometimes taken against his own strategic instincts.
Meanwhile, as May came to an end, Plumer was made sharply aware of business left unfinished from Second Ypres. Hooge chateau remained a British outpost defying German mastery of Bellewaarde Ridge, and work began on a redoubt to strengthen an almost untenable position. On 2 June a heavy bombardment of the chateau grounds was followed by an infantry assault that forced the British to pull back before the redoubt was completed. Next day an attempt was made to recover the chateau, the 1st Lincolns pushing ahead to the ruined stables, but they made too good a target to consolidate their position. Careful planning was needed to loosen the German hold on either the chateau or Bellewaarde behind it. Much of the summer’s deadliest fighting was a quest for the ridge with a view.
Over the next ten days the staff of V Corps – under Allenby’s command since Plumer’s promotion – meticulously planned an operation on 16 June committing the 3rd Division to recovering Bellewaarde Ridge. The attack followed two days of aerial reconnaissance, and Allenby’s staff even provided the forward troops with carrier pigeons to let headquarters know of progress or setbacks should shelling cut telegraph links. The attack was preceded by a two-hour bombardment of the German lines, a barrage that dug deeply into the limited stock of shells.
At dawn the 9th Infantry Brigade went over the top, met surprisingly little resistance and headed north-eastwards beyond Railway Wood to the embankment carrying the line to Roulers. A second wave from the 7th Infantry Brigade – the 1st infantry battalion of the Honourable Artillery Company (1/1 HAC), the Liverpool Scottish, the 1st Lincolns, the 2nd Royal Irish Rifles – also went forward towards the embankment, advancing so rapidly that they came under shellfire from the British guns and, at the same time, from German positions along the embankment and on their flank. Casualties were heavy, and a German counter-attack drove them back to the trenches taken in the first attack. Out of 540 officers and other ranks in the Liverpool Scottish who fought on that day, 180 were killed and 218 wounded.
The dazed survivors of the brigade, now supported by the 3rd Worcesters, rallied and in the late afternoon attempted to resume their advance. ‘There was great confusion,’ Sergeant John Lucy of the Irish Rifles later wrote. ‘The German front line occupied by us was filled with the dead and wounded of about eight regiments, and our men . . . had to go forward without direct artillery support, over muddy ground spurting shell explosions every few yards and raked by enemy machine-guns from an unprotected left flank.’17 By the end of the day the British had to be content with taking more than 150 prisoners, capturing two machine-guns and a half-mile line of better-built trenches 250 yards ahead of the ones they held when the attack began. To achieve these gains the 3rd Division lost 140 officers and 3,391 other ranks in 14 hours of battle. Among the 9th Brigade’s wounded was their brigade major, Archibald Wavell, who had been married in London on the day Second Ypres began. A shell splinter hit him on the forehead, blinding his left eye and threatening the sight of his right.18 He recovered in hospital in London. Colonel Wavell was beside Allenby when the victorious general in Palestine made his formal entry into Jerusalem in December 1917, and he went on to command in the Middle East in 1940–41. Two years later he became the only field marshal appointed viceroy of India.
Most of the fighting in the Salient during the summer of 1915 took place around Hooge, the apex of the British defensive line east of Ypres. It was even the scene of the first spectacular duel in the skies. In the evening of 25 July, Captain Hawker, flying a single-seat Bristol Scout from Abeele aerodrome, completed the pursuit of three German two-seaters that had begun above Passchendaele by swooping down sun from 11,000 feet to within a hundred yards of the rear aircraft and sending it crashing in flames by a burst of Lewis gun-fire over Hooge; Hawker was awarded the Victoria Cross ‘for most conspicuous bravery and very great ability’.19
A map recovered from the crashed aircraft identified the position of German batteries in the neighbourhood. It did not, however, give warning of the attack that would come five days later, when liquid flame projected from a steel cylinder Flammenwerfer added a second terror weapon to the horrors of the Salient. The German assault was triggered by the British explosion of a mine, which had destroyed a fortified post behind the ruins of Hooge village on the evening of 20 July, enabling the 4th battalion the Middlesex Regiment and the 2nd Gordon Highlanders to rush forward into and around the crater, occupying good trenches, dug recently. The Germans made every effort to prevent the British consolidating their gains but failed to dislodge them. Like Allenby in the previous month, the Duke of Württemberg ordered careful planning for a sustained attack.
It came soon after three o’clock in the morning of 30 July. ‘There was a sudden hissing sound and a bright crimson glare over the crater turned the whole scene red’, Lieutenant Carey of the 8th Rifle Brigade recalled. ‘As I looked I saw three or four distinct sheets of flame – like a line of powerful fire-hoses spraying fire instead of water – shoot across my fire-trench.’ Carey was the only officer of his company to survive the day; a neighbouring company ‘seemed to have been almost completely obliterated’.20 Flame-throwers were also employed in a simultaneous attack south of the Menin Road at the northern fringe of Sanctuary Wood. Inevitably the surprised defenders – mostly from the King’s Royal Rifle Corps (KRRC) – fell back across the fields towards Ypres. Once again ‘resting’ battalions were ordered from their billets and hurried eastwards up the Menin Road, under renewed shelling. By the afternoon the 1st Sherwood Foresters – technically the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Regiment – and the 6th Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry (DCLI) had joined the KRRC in blunting the impetus of the enemy assault, but nothing could shift the Germans from the crater and the chateau stables.
‘I simply looked upon the coming adventure in much the same way that I looked forward to an exciting game of Rugger,’ Private Pollard of the HAC wrote years later, as he recalled his feelings on the eve of the first attack on Bellewaarde.21 At times it seems as if this terrible war, ever spawning agonizing ways to kill, had become trivialized into a deadly contest for possession of the ball among rival teams competing for a local trophy. No sooner had the British lost shell-pocked Hooge than they began for a third time to devise means to recover it and Bellewaarde Ridge, too. On this occasion resort was made to subterfuge: German airmen were able to see British and French troops assembling to the north, as if to bring the fighting back to Pilckem and Langemarck; observers at Messines could direct artillery on newly dug trenches that attracted attention, and there was constant movement out towards Zillebeke and Hill 60.
But at 2.45 in the morning of 9 August a half-hour bombardment of the Hooge crater area left no doubt of the objective. The 2nd Durham Light Infantry formed the vanguard of the 6th Division’s attack, together with the Sherwood Foresters. The day’s heavy fighting, much of it with bayonet, brought some success. The line was pushed back east of Hooge hamlet and to the south of the Menin Road, but ferocious German shelling made it impossible to retain the furthest gains. In the end, the 6th Division had advanced the British position some 250 yards. Sensibly the Germans did not attempt to come forward again. The two armies were separated by a wide no man’s land of broken tree stumps, shell holes filling readily with water and churned-up clay that a rain shower would turn into glutinous mud, even under the August sun. That night, as their colonel reported, the 2nd Durhams ‘marched to billets at Ypres – strength 4 officers and 166 men . . . For our time in the trenches’, they had lost 6 officers and 92 men killed, 6 officers and 262 men wounded, while another 100 were ominously listed as ‘missing’.22
A billet in Ypres was hardly recuperative. ‘The town is a mere heap of rubble, cinders and rubbish’, the Life Guards captain, Sir Morgan Crofton, wrote in his diary a few weeks earlier. ‘Not a cat lives there now, it is the abomination of desolation.’23 It was also at times a death-trap, liable to attract attention from the German heavy guns whenever intelligence believed troops were massed inside the city. On 12 August a company from the 6th DCLI was caught by a bombardment of the Grand Place. Some sought refuge under the twelfth-century cloisters of the cathedral. There they were trapped when another round of shells struck St Martin’s. Efforts to rescue them were frustrated by more shelling, in which their commanding officer was killed. After the war ended 40 bodies were discovered, entombed by fallen masonry.
‘The Salient at Ypres is simply an inferno,’ Crofton had added in his diary entry. ‘It is not war, but murder pure and simple . . . As a strategic or tactical point Ypres is worthless. Why we don’t give it up now, God alone knows.’ It was, he assumed, a question of pride and prestige. Crofton was jotting down private opinions at the close of a hot and humid day, and perhaps his comments should not be taken too seriously, but he was an intelligent officer from a military family, and he may well have been right. Ypres was already symbolic, a name in the headlines for the last eight months, the town where in November the ‘Old Contemptibles’ denied the kaiser the triumphant entry he daily anticipated. Crofton thought ‘this muck heap’ should be evacuated, with the Germans denied possession by using ‘our guns’ to make the place ‘untenable’, though at the same time he deplored the shortage of guns and ammunition: ‘If only we had shells, we would push through to the Rhine,’ he wrote confidently. Other field officers, including on occasions Haig himself, considered straightening the Salient by withdrawing from the forward trenches and falling back on the canal and the remains of Vauban’s ramparts. But Krupps and Skoda fire-power had already destroyed with ease Brialmont’s fortresses: it is doubtful if improvised defences amid the rubble of Ypres could have long delayed a German advance to the Channel ports.
After the failure of Aubers Ridge and Festubert, the ‘sleek deadheads of the Headquarters Staff’– as Crofton contemptuously called French’s team24 – turned again to plans for backing GQG’s grand offensive. Joffre intended to strike at the German right flank at Vimy, and he suggested the BEF might find the Loos area ‘particularly favourable ground’ for an attack: Loos, 5 miles south-west of Lille, was an unattractive mining town in which a historic Cistercian abbey now served as a prison. Haig disliked the project from the first, insisting that First Army still lacked shells and artillery. French vacillated. He rode forward to a distant ridge on 12 July, peered down on the industrial murk of the Loos valley, where the slag-heaps, canals and miners’ cottages revived memories of the difficulties of fighting in Mons, and he shared Haig’s doubts. But assurances that he could now employ chlorine gas and would receive two divisions of Kitchener’s New Army as reinforcements induced him to change his mind.
Haig’s First Army launched the attack on Loos at 5.15 in the morning of 25 September, after four days of preliminary bombardment (in which 250,000 shells were fired). The town was taken, without the costly struggle French had feared, by the 1st (Scottish) Division – to Germans ‘the devils in skirts’. The chlorine gas threw the defenders of the formidable Hohenzollern redoubt into such panic that it fell within the first hour of battle. But by half-past seven the gas cloud had drifted northwards; the British encountered the solid line of the German second position and could make no dent in it. The Germans summoned up reserves, including a guards division. But when Haig, in turn, called for reserves, they were held back on French’s orders, for he feared Haig would commit them too early. By the time 12 battalions of Kitchener’s New Army – 10,000 initiates – went into action on the second morning, the Germans had strengthened their positions, and artillery stocks were running low. In four hours the 12 battalions suffered 8,000 casualties. Like the battles in the Ypres Salient, the carnage continued long after the first two decisive days; officially the battle of Loos ended on 4 November. By then, 16,000 British soldiers were dead and more than 25,000 wounded: 2 miles of French soil was freed from the enemy.25
As a feint, intended to prevent German reinforcements from being drawn southwards to Lille, Plumer was ordered to mount a diversionary attack on 25 September along the Menin Road. At precisely the same hour that the chlorine gas enveloped Loos, the Second Army’s 3rd division went forward on a mile-long front straddling the road between the lake at the foot of Bellewaarde Ridge and the northern edge of Sanctuary Wood. The brunt of the fighting was left to the veterans of the 1st infantry battalion of the HAC and the 2nd battalion Royal Irish Rifles (RIR). There was a shortage not only of shells for the gunners but of grenades and wire-cutters for the infantry as well. The RIR fought with particular tenacity, amid craters and shell holes familiar to them from the attack three months earlier. On this occasion the holes held more water and the churned-up clay made for slow progress. Little could be achieved; another 4,000 names were added to the lengthening casualty list of dead and wounded.
For the remaining weeks of the year the Salient was, officially, ‘quiet’. In reality, there was constant activity and the imminence of a mortal wound never receded. Around Zillebeke opposing trenches were no more than 25 yards apart. For a tall man to raise his head above the fire parapet was to court a sniper’s bullet. Any suspicious move sighted in a communications trench would bring a ‘whiz–bang’ crunching down, to be followed by an artillery duel that might drag on for more than an hour. The bitter cold, constant rain and need to wade through flooded communication trenches made life intolerable even without the proximity of the enemy, and spells of duty in the trenches rarely lasted longer than four days at a time, although the processes of being relieved and marching back again a few nights later were no less dangerous. The vibration of a bombardment would loosen the wet earth of dug-outs, which would then collapse and trap any troops taking cover within them. Shells exploding short of the trenches would leave gaps in the barbed wire.
On the night of 22 December, in bright moonlight, Second Lieutenant Roland Leighton of the 7th Worcesters was ordered to take his platoon forward to repair just such a gap in the wire. As he was supervising their work, a machine-gun already trained on the gap opened up, and he was hit by a bullet that penetrated his stomach. An ambulance took him, mortally wounded, to a clearing station 10 miles behind the lines, where he died the following night. He had been granted Christmas leave in England and his fiancée, Vera Brittain, by now a nurse with the Voluntary Aid Detachment, awaited him jubilantly at the Grand Hotel, Brighton. There on Christmas Day a telephone call from his sister told her Roland had been killed.26
Similar tragedies rent other grieving families across Britain and Canada, France, Belgium and Germany in that traditionally festive season. On Christmas morning a Bavarian gesture of fraternization tempted some Coldstream Guards, but it was sternly rebuffed on orders from their Corps commander. ‘Our Artillery fired throughout the day as ordered,’ Major-General Cavan assured Haig. There would be no Flanders truce over this second Christmas at war.27