The Guns of October
‘At length our barrage lifted we all once more formed up and made a rush for the village. What was our dismay upon reaching almost to the top of the ridge to find a long line of practically undamaged German concrete machine-gun emplacements with barbed wire entanglements in front of them fully 50 yards deep. The wire had been cut in a few places by our artillery but only sufficient to allow a few men through at a time. Even then what was left of us made an attempt to get through the wire and a few actually penetrated up to his emplacements only to be shot down before their surviving comrades’ eyes. It was now broad daylight and what was left of us realised that the day was lost . . . We had lost nearly 80 percent of our strength and gained about 300 yards of ground. This 300 yards was useless to us for the Germans still held and dominated the ridge.’—Corporal Len Hart describes the New Zealanders’ attack at Passchendaele on 12 October 1917.163
By September 1917, the combined casualties of the Somme and Messines offensives and the steady drain on manpower were worrying the New Zealand Government. There was a feeling within the country, Allen wrote to Godley, that New Zealand was being ‘bled to death’ while Australia and Canada were not making a fair contribution to the war effort.164 Godley rejected the suggestion, arguing that Australian troops in France had been more regularly employed and had seen harder fighting than those of the New Zealand Division. By September 1917, he wrote, the New Zealanders had been used only twice in offensive operations—on the Somme and at Messines. At all other times they had been deployed in a quiet and easy part of the line.165 The bloody sacrifice of Passchendaele a month later and the costly battles of 1918 would soon remedy that.
In 1917, Passchendaele was a small, nondescript village astride a low ridge in northwest Belgium, near France’s northern border. By September that year it was a pile of rubble and still in German hands. The offensive that had reduced it to that state would not have taken place if British Prime Minister Lloyd George had had his way. Despite the success at Messines, Lloyd George was haunted by the rising toll of British casualties on the Western Front—already 250,000 dead—for what he felt were paltry strategic gains. His preference was to conserve manpower by postponing any further offensives until American troops arrived in France in sufficient force to swing the military balance of power against Germany. In the end, however, Lloyd George and his Cabinet gave Haig reluctant approval for the second part of his planned Flanders offensive.
Haig’s task was a formidable one. Since Messines, the Germans had strengthened their defences on the ridge and their positions were again some of the strongest on the Western Front. To reach the German positions the attacking British divisions would have to traverse low-lying, flood-prone ground that had been turned into a quagmire by three years of constant shelling.
On 22 July 1917, the Third Battle of Ypres opened with the greatest artillery bombardment in the history of land warfare. On 31 July, the British Second and Fifth armies, and part of the French First Army, attacked on a 25-kilometre front—their objective, the low ridge on which stood the remains of Passchendaele village. By the end of the first day of the offensive Gough’s Fifth Army alone had lost more than a third of its strength in killed, wounded and missing. Haig assured the War Cabinet in London that the results were ‘highly satisfactory and the losses slight for so great a battle’.166
On 4 September, Haig was summoned to London to justify a campaign in which 18,000 British troops had now been killed or were missing, and 50,000 wounded. Lloyd George wanted the offensive stopped immediately, arguing that with Russia now out of the war and a mutiny in the French Army seriously undermining France’s ability to carry on, British forces should stay on the defensive until American troops arrived in force the following year.
Haig and Chief of General Staff Sir William Robertson took the opposite view, arguing that it was precisely because the Allies were now so weak that the offensive should continue. Again the soldiers’ case prevailed. As military historian John Keegan put it: ‘However ill-judged his [Haig’s] strategy and harmful its effects on his long-suffering army, it was to be continued for want of a better man or plan.’167
By the first week of October, Allied casualties in the Third Battle of Ypres had reached nearly 163,000. Alarmed at the high cost for so little gain, Haig’s two senior generals, Gough and Plumer, urged him to halt the offensive. Haig, however, would not be moved. There were solid reasons still for carrying on, he argued—securing the positions already won, robbing the enemy of observation over the British line, and assisting the forthcoming French offensive on the Aisne. Enemy losses so far had also been severe and their morale was assumed to be low. One more blow might do the trick.
It was at this point that the New Zealand Division joined the Third Battle of Ypres as part of Godley’s II Anzac Corps. The bloody fields of the Somme were a year behind it, and three months earlier it had achieved a brilliant, if costly, success at Messines. Now it was to play a key role in what subsequently became known as the Battle of Broodseinde, scheduled for 4 October.
Birdwood, now in command of I Anzac Corps, wrote to Allen of his pleasure in having the ‘magnificent New Zealand Division’ fighting once again beside him. ‘I know it will do as well as it has always done, and that is saying a great deal, for I am not flattering when I say that no Division in France has a higher reputation than yours.’168
The main attack on 4 October was to be carried out by I and II Anzac corps, and 44th and 66th divisions of the British Fifth Army. The task of the attacking forces was to seize the low ridge in front of Passchendaele village as preliminary to capturing the village itself. For the first time on the Western Front four Anzac divisions would advance side by side in the centre of the battle line. Three Australian divisions were to take Broodseinde Ridge and the village of Zonnebecke while the New Zealanders would capture the Abraham Heights and Gravenstafel Spur. To ensure surprise, there would be no preliminary bombardment until zero hour.
Unknown to the Anzacs and their supporting divisions, the Germans were massing for an attack of their own, timed to begin at almost the same time. Packed densely in their assembly trenches, the German infantry were slaughtered by the opening barrage, which fell on them just as they were about to advance. On the front of 1st Auckland Battalion alone, 500 of a German Guards division lay dead, and every shell hole contained several corpses.
By 11 am, however, the New Zealanders had gained all their objectives and taken over 1100 prisoners, 60 machine guns and a large quantity of war material. Ten German counter-attacks were successfully beaten off. If victory this time was relatively easy, it was again costly—over 1650 killed and wounded, mostly from machine-gun fire from German pillboxes and shellfire on the bare slopes of Abraham Heights.
From his headquarters on the Ypres Canal, Russell observed that the enemy infantry did not put up much resistance on the day, ‘the mud being a worse enemy than the Germans’. The division’s casualties were ‘not so heavy as at Messines, nor nearly as heavy as at the Somme, which was the biggest battle, and the heaviest fighting that we shall ever see I hope. These long casualty lists, with all they mean, do not lose their effect through familiarity. It seems so futile, though one knows it isn’t.’169
The Battle of Broodseinde cost the British forces over 20,000 casualties, but took the line about 1000 metres closer to the Passchendaele Ridge. Over 5000 Germans had been captured. Plumer was ecstatic, describing Broodseinde as ‘the greatest victory since the Marne’. Godley was convinced that the Germans were now quite demoralised. He wrote to Allen:
Units were chucked into the attack anyhow, obviously without proper preparation, or method, or orders, and on our front line alone we took prisoners of a very large number of German divisions. Their artillery retaliation, though severe, was very desultory and unmethodical and irregular . . . The whole of the battlefield of our successive advances is covered with dead Huns.170
The excitement of Plumer and Godley was premature. On 5 October, the rain set in, turning the cratered battlefield into a lake and preventing artillery and essential supplies, including ammunition, from getting forward. Anxious to exploit the successes of 4 October, Haig instructed his commanders to continue with the offensive, at least until the Passchendaele Ridge was secured. ‘We are practically through the enemy’s defences,’ he told a meeting of war correspondents on 9 October. ‘The enemy has only flesh and blood against us.’171
The attack that day—the so-called Battle of Poelcappelle—was a dismal failure. Preparations had been rushed, the weather was bad, and many of the attacking troops were exhausted before the assault even began. Failure to get enough heavy guns forward resulted in a feeble supporting barrage, which left the dense wire entanglements intact. As a result, none of the attackers’ objectives were reached, and little or no ground was taken. The cost was again severe: the British 49th Division suffered over 2500 casualties; the 66th over 3000; and the supporting Australians over 1200.
Haig and Plumer were undeterred. The attack would be renewed and extended in spite of the foul weather and evidence that no useful gains had been made. Anxious to atone for the failure on 9 October, Godley told Haig that his corps was determined to take Passchendaele in this attack and would plant the Australian flag on it.
For the attack of 12 October, the 3rd Australian and New Zealand divisions would be used in tandem, supported by the 9th Division of Gough’s Fifth Army. The aim of the attack was to strengthen the British hold on the ridge by capturing the village of Passchendaele and the Bellevue Spur to the north. The New Zealanders would take the spur; the Australians the village of Passchendaele itself. The Australian advance, however, would largely be determined by the speed with which the New Zealanders secured Bellevue Spur.
The task facing the Anzac divisions was formidable. The distance set for their final objective was some 1000 metres deeper than had been achieved in any of Plumer’s three previous advances. Moreover, all of these attacks had been carried out after a preparation time of between 6 and 21 days. That had now been squeezed into just 20 hours, and the weather was abysmal. The war diary of the Pioneer Battalion noted ‘a steady fight with mud . . . guns and horses are bogged down everywhere. We have pulled many guns out and into position but the road is in a fearful condition . . . rain every day.’172
Bad weather and limited visibility meant that there had been no effective counter-battery fire to neutralise the German guns. Since 9 October the Germans had strengthened their barbed-wire defences, especially around strongpoints and pillboxes. The élite Jäger troops opposing II Anzac Corps had also been equipped with twice the usual number of machine guns—177 per regiment. Added to all of this, the New Zealand troops were tired, particularly the men of the 3rd (Rifle) Brigade who had just spent a month burying cables and building roads, mostly at night and often under fire. Badly in need of rest and time to train for this attack, they were given neither.
The New Zealanders relieved the British 49th Division in the St Jean sector at 10 am on the morning of 11 October, with Russell’s headquarters on the Ypres Canal. Before them lay the evidence of the failed British attack of 9 October—scores of wounded men abandoned in no-man’s-land without protection from the weather or enemy shellfire. In the short time available, every effort was made to recover these men, but many were still there when the New Zealanders attacked the following morning.
On the night of 10 October, a patrol led by Sergeant Dick Travers had brought Russell bad news: no-man’s-land was covered with water-filled shell holes, strewn with broken wire and overlooked by lines of pillboxes surrounded by thick barbed-wire entanglements. The reconnaissance revealed that, in spite of a preliminary bombardment, the pillboxes were intact and the wire was uncut.
On the morning of the 11th, Plumer was advised of the formidable wire entanglements facing the New Zealand Division and the supporting 3rd Australian Division. He was told that that these could not possibly be cut by shellfire within the 20 hours left before the attack, and that something also had to be done about the hundreds of wounded men still stranded in the mud between the lines. ‘Sir Herbert was non-committal; he turned his face aside; the attack would go on.’173
About midday, a worried Brigadier-General Napier Johnston, commander of the divisional artillery, called on Russell at his headquarters. Russell noted in his diary: ‘Napier Johnston came to see me after lunch: the guns are all forward, but he evidently feels uneasy about the attack—says preparations inadequate.’
As events were to prove, Johnston was right about the lack of preparations but wrong about the guns. Congested roads torn by shellfire and often submerged in mud had made it almost impossible to get all the guns forward for the attack, and many of them had bogged down in the mire. Artillery batteries that should have had thousands of rounds of ammunition at their disposal had in most cases only a few hundred.
Sometime in the afternoon, Major Bob Wilson, a New Zealander in command of a supporting battery of British artillery and an old polo-playing friend of Russell’s, also called in to divisional headquarters. He told Russell that the attack could not succeed under such ‘awful’ conditions and should be immediately called off. Russell told Wilson that he had already tried to have the attack postponed, but that his attempt had failed. The army commander (Plumer) had made it clear that this was an ‘army’ attack and that it was too late to delay it, he told Wilson. Their information was that with one more push the enemy would collapse, so nothing could be done.174
Monash, in command of the Australians, had also attempted to get the attack postponed, but the message was essentially the same: ‘The chief [Plumer] decided that every hour’s postponement gave the enemy breathing time.’175 Concerned about the Anzacs’ chances of success in the dreadful conditions, General Gough phoned Plumer that night to add his voice to the opposition. Plumer was again unmoved—the attack would go ahead as planned.
The start line for Russell’s 2nd and 3rd brigades was Waterloo Farm on the Gravenstafel Road. The march up the night before in high winds and rain had been a nightmare, with men sinking up to their knees in mud. Soaked and exhausted, they dug foxholes in the slush and waited in the dark and rain for zero hour. Facing them on the high ground across no-man’s-land was their objective—dark rows of concrete bunkers and many concealed machine-gun nests, all protected by thick belts of barbed wire. Around them still lay scores of badly wounded men, unattended and unprotected from the weather, evidence of the disastrous attack of 9 October.
The German positions on Bellevue Spur had been bombarded by the division’s artillery from 9 October to the afternoon of the 12th, but with little damage to either strongpoints or their protecting wire. At zero hour, 5.30 am, the artillery opened up again, but the creeping barrage was weak and patchy. With no stable platforms on which to rest, the guns tilted and sank into the mud as they fired and shells fell short, killing and wounding troops still in their assembly positions. Many of the shells landing on the spur buried themselves in the mud and failed to explode, or sent up harmless geysers of mud and water. Unmolested by the artillery, the German machine gunners and snipers now had a free hand.
Under a hail of machine-gun and sniper fire, the leading waves went forward to the attack. Many were cut down almost as soon as they left their trenches; the remainder came up against great belts of uncut wire and pillboxes surrounded by their own wire entanglements. The wire had been cut in places but only enough to allow a few men through at a time. Some reached the pillboxes, only to be shot down before they could use their bombs; others found a break in the wire where the sunken Gravenstafel road ran up the slope. They made a dash for the gap but soon discovered it was a trap, swept from all points by enemy machine guns. In the water-filled shell holes that covered the ground dozens of wounded men slipped back and drowned.
At 10 am both brigades reported that they were being held up by machine guns and uncut wire; the barrage had been lost and they were digging in on the line gained. On their flank, the Australians had been stopped by ‘the same withering blasts of fire, the same tremendous difficulties of uncut wire and enemy blockhouses’.176
Believing that that the Australians had secured their objectives and now had a dangerously exposed left flank, Godley ordered that the attack be resumed at 3 pm. The commander of the 2nd Brigade, Brigadier ‘Bill’ Braithwaite, was adamant that it should not. He told Russell that his brigade could not go on without suffering further heavy casualties, and could not be reorganised in daylight because of heavy German sniper and machine-gun fire. Further bombardment of the pillboxes was also out of the question because his men were too closely dug in under the enemy wire. Braithwaite’s protests were at first ignored, but the order was finally cancelled once it became clear that the Australian brigades and elements of the 9th Division had either made little progress against the German defences or had been forced to withdraw.
By now, over 850 men of the New Zealand Division had been killed and about the same number wounded—making 12 October the worst single day in New Zealand’s military history. Monash’s 3rd Australian Division was also badly mauled, with 3200 casualties. The supporting British 9th Division had fared no better—its troops were massacred by German machine guns while trapped in swampy ground to the left of the Anzacs.
The area captured by the New Zealanders was minimal: 500 metres on the left of the planned 2500-metre advance, but no ground on the right. Russell’s diary entry that day was brief but poignant: ‘Attacked this morning at daybreak. We and indeed all other divisions were held up from the start by MG [machine-gun] fire . . . the artillery preparation was insufficient, the barrage poor, and it goes to show the weakness of haste. Our casualties are heavy . . . I am very sad.’
Phase two of the tragedy now began—the recovery of hundreds of badly wounded men lying out in no-man’s-land, including the last survivors of the British attack on 9 October. For the rest of that day and throughout the night, stretcher-bearers toiled in deep mud to clear the wounded from the battlefield—a 6-kilometre carry under fire from enemy artillery, machine guns and snipers. On 13 October, an informal armistice was agreed with the Germans. More than 3000 extra troops, including 1600 New Zealanders, worked to get the remaining wounded to casualty clearing stations behind the front line, unmolested now by enemy snipers or machine-gun fire.
Atrocious weather, rushed preparations, weak artillery support and uncut wire had defeated the best efforts of the attacking divisions in what came to be known as the First Battle of Passchendaele. From a deserter, the Germans had known on the night of 11 October that they would be attacked early the following morning. All units had been alerted and the New Zealand troops walked into a trap. Burton had no doubt about the causes of the failure on 12 October: ‘Mud, uncut wire, an ineffective barrage, and an attack that gambled on a German loss of nerve. Instead they had taken heart of grace, stood to their machine guns, and the helpless infantry went down in hundreds in the black slough.’177
Reporting to Defence Minister Allen, Russell’s assessment was blunt:
We were brought in on the 11th to renew the attack on the morning of the 12th. This, though not an entire failure, was very nearly so. Uncut wire was the cause of our failure. It is true that the artillery barrage was quite inadequate, owing to the difficulties in getting guns forward, so reducing the number available. With no stable platform from which to shoot, their registration was also faulty and they were frequently out of action owing to the trails or wheels sinking in the mud and soft ground.178
Godley glossed over the disaster of 12 October, describing the battle as ‘a very good day’s work’ that had gained the division an advance of 500 metres and nearly 600 prisoners. The casualties from the two October attacks, he told Allen, were ‘not unduly heavy’. Godley quoted with approval the comment of a captured German officer that in such conditions no troops in the world would have attempted to advance—choosing to see this as a tribute to the fighting qualities of his men instead of the statement of disbelief it probably was. He concluded evasively: ‘There is no doubt, however, that these repeated blows are having their effect in wearing the Boche out. One of his few remaining good Divisions [a Jäger division] was entirely knocked out by the NZ Division in the last fight.’179
In contrast to his superior, Russell took full responsibility for the debacle on 12 October, and particularly for his failure to check the state of the wire before his men went over the top. ‘Whatever then the obstacles might have been on our front,’ he wrote to Allen, ‘it was too late to deal with them by artillery preparation. We, as a Divisional staff, assumed that the wire had been cut. Assumption in war is radically wrong if by any means in your power you can eliminate the uncertain. This, of course, is pure theory, but we made a mistake.’180
Had the wire been cut, Russell was convinced that the attack would have been successful despite the weak creeping barrage and the heavy fire from the German pillboxes: ‘You cannot fight machine guns, plus wire, with human bodies. Without the wire to check them the men would have tackled machine guns in spite of their losses. As it was, they tried heroically to tackle both. This was humanly impossible.’181
The pressures Russell and his staff were under on the afternoon of 11 October made errors of some kind almost inevitable. They were dealing with the myriad details of an attack into which the division was being rushed at very short notice and in appalling conditions. Brigade and battalion headquarters had to be selected and medical stations set up, planked roadways and duckboard tracks laid, streams and swamps bridged, approach routes for the troops taped, and detailed instructions issued to unit commanders. Harried by deadlines and coping with the effects of a severe cold or bronchitis, Russell failed to do what he customarily did—go forward and see the conditions for himself, or ensure that a member of his staff did so.
While admitting his error, Russell also identified its underlying cause—a rushed attack that gave the commanders responsible for it insufficient time to prepare: ‘Want of careful preparation, due probably to the hope that the Boche was played out and prepared to run, covers the whole question,’ he wrote to the president of the Board of Agriculture, Sir James Wilson. ‘These risks no doubt have to be taken occasionally in war if you are ever to secure a big success, but I am very sorry for the sake of the men and all the poor fellows whom we shall leave behind that it was the lot of the NZ Division to be in the line at that particular juncture.’182
Would it have made any difference if Russell had checked the wire, found it uncut, and again asked for a postponement? Probably not; Plumer had already made it clear that the attack would not be held up because of the particular difficulties of the two Anzac divisions, and this had been reiterated to Monash and to Russell the day before the attack.
Russell himself believed this was the case. On 24 October, he told his senior officers that even if the strength of the German defences had been known earlier, it was unlikely that ‘the non-success of one division’ would have caused the programme already set for the two attacking armies to be changed in any way.183 As Stewart put it: ‘The decision did not rest with the Division or with the Corps. The Army’s orders had been issued and the divisions were but pawns in the tremendous game played over these Flanders swamps and ridges.’184
Russell’s subsequent letter to Allen made no reference to an attempt to secure a postponement the day before the attack on Bellevue Spur. He indicated only that responsibility for the disaster should be his alone, if any questions were asked in Parliament. It was a rare example, wrote Pugsley, of a military commander’s willingness to accept responsibility for failure in war.185
The political fallout Russell expected did not immediately occur. No comments were made or questions asked when Allen revealed the casualty figures in the House on 1 November 1917.186 By January 1918, however, the events of 12 October were creating unease on the home front. Allen wrote to Russell:
Rumours have been circulating through parts of New Zealand that the situation was not properly appreciated, and that it was known to some senior officers, at any rate, that it would be impossible for the Artillery to clear up the wire and to preserve the barrages as they have done in previous attacks. I quite understand your position, namely, that you and your Divisional staff assumed the wire had been cut, and I lay no blame on you, nor indeed do I blame anybody, but there is a feeling of unrest and I have it myself. There is no use denying it.187
The principal responsibility for the failure of the New Zealanders’ attack on 12 October, however, lay not with Russell but with Haig and his senior generals. Against the advice of his peers, Haig had chosen this part of Flanders to launch his next major offensive in 1917. The Passchendaele Ridge was one of the most strongly fortified parts of the German line, and the plains in front of it were prone to severe flooding, even in summer.
Once embarked on the offensive, Haig consistently refused to call it off, despite atrocious conditions, heavy casualties and minimal gains. He and his senior commanders nursed the delusion that significant progress had been made on 9 October. The Germans, they felt sure, were on the brink of defeat, and one more push would take the British Army through their defences and onto higher, drier ground for the winter.
The second of the architects of failure on 12 October was Plumer himself. Godley’s II Anzac Corps was given only six days to march from its training area at Lumbres to Ypres and plan and execute an attack on a front quite unknown to the corps and its divisions. More seriously, the 20 hours’ notice Plumer gave Godley for the attack of 12 October was impossibly short. Under pressure to meet Haig’s expectations, Plumer then ignored the difficulties faced by the two Anzac divisions and brushed aside requests for a postponement.
The causes of failure on the 12th, however, were more fundamental, and again Plumer and his staff were mostly responsible. No attempt had been made to ensure that the road forward to the front line was fit for heavy traffic before II Anzac Corps took over its section of the front on 11 October. There were no light railway tracks or tramlines forward of Wieltje, 4 kilometres behind the front line, and the few tracks in place ceased altogether 3 kilometres short of the line. In the opinion of the commander of the Pioneer Battalion, the failure to ensure that proper road and rail links were in place when the weather was fine—that is, before 5 October—was the direct cause of failure of Godley’s corps on both 9 and 12 October.188
The future major-general, Lindsay Inglis, felt that the tragedy of 12 October had its roots in the failure of the British commanders to exploit their gains at Broodseinde eight days earlier:
The tragedy of the attack [at Broodseinde] was that we were tied down strictly to limited objectives, for we could have walked on to Passchendaele almost unopposed that morning . . . At the time we cursed the inelastic British tactical methods, but were more bitter still when the attempt to do a week later what could so easily have been achieved on the 4th failed in atrocious weather at the expense of thousands of casualties in our 2nd and 3rd brigades.189
Heavy rain and mud compelled Haig to cancel the offensive the day after the failed Anzac assault, but the Canadian Corps under General Sir Arthur Currie was then ordered to finish the job. Currie was determined not to repeat the mistakes that had doomed the attacks of 9 and 12 October. He insisted on sufficient time for planning and preparation, enough guns and ammunition to support his infantry, and proper tracks to move and supply his troops. His careful planning paid off. On 26 October, ‘the wild bull charged against the iron wall’ and the remains of Passchendaele village finally fell to the Canadians on 6 November at a cost of another 16,000 casualties.
Haig brought the Third Battle of Ypres to an end six days later. The deepest penetration made by his forces was just over 10 kilometres, and they had yet to fully accomplish the first of the objectives laid down in July. Less than half the ridge was now in British hands, and Haig’s ambitious plan to capture the Channel ports of Ostend and Zeebrugge had been abandoned. The decision to press on with the attacks when all the factors were against it, wrote military historian Trevor Wilson, was ‘the most lamentable decision of his [Haig’s] lengthy and sometimes distinguished command’.190
Army and corps commanders rarely visited the front line and were ignorant of the appalling conditions under which their men were fighting. On 7 November, General Sir Lawrence Kiggell, Haig’s second in command, paid his first visit to Passchendaele since the battle had begun nearly four months before. ‘Good God’, he exclaimed, ‘did we really send men to fight in that?’191
They did indeed. Some 70,000 British and Dominion soldiers were killed in the Third Battle of Ypres and over 200,000 wounded, for no significant gain in territory. With total German casualties at about 200,000, General von Kuhl, the chief of staff of German forces in Flanders, had good reason to describe the battles that culminated in Passchendaele as ‘the greatest martyrdom of the World War’.
The Third Battle of Ypres weakened the German Army’s ability to continue the war, but in the end it was all for nothing. The ground so grimly fought over for four months was lost in three days when the great German counter-offensive was launched in March 1918. The 10 or 12 British divisions squandered at Passchendaele were the reserve that could have halted the German advance a great deal sooner and at less cost, so sparing the Allies ‘the gravest crisis of the war’.192
Burton wrote:
At the end of the battle we were left sitting in the mud while the Germans had merely dropped back into comfortable unbroken country. The Russians were out [of the war] and we did not know that the tide was beginning to turn against the German submarines. Fortunately, nothing was known of the mutiny in the French Army. The Tommies had just about had it. Some deeply moving songs were going round among them about the useless slaughter at Passchendaele.193
Lieutenant-Colonels King and Winter-Evans were killed at Passchendaele on 12 October. So too was the legendary captain of the 1905 All Blacks, Dave Gallaher, the two Stewart brothers—Jock and Harold—and all three of the Newlove brothers—Edwin, Leonard, and Leslie. George King was buried by the men of his Pioneer Battalion to the poignant words of the Maori lament for a fallen chief. The others are listed on the Memorial to the Missing at the beautiful Tyne Cot cemetery just below the village. With them are the names of hundreds of other New Zealand soldiers whose bodies were never found.