TWELVE
Passing it
on at
Passchendaele

In the first half of 1917, there had been deep murmuring in the ranks of the French army, leading to a series of spontaneous acts of collective disobedience. General Nivelle, who was the French commander-in-chief, had failed to provide solid leadership or to advance the protracted war and, within a short time, just over half of the French divisions, especially those who had returned to rest areas behind the lines, refused to return to the front. This amounted to mutiny, but dealing with it was difficult. In the end there were an estimated 30 executions – a mild response given the magnitude and potential effect of this dangerous situation.

To address the problem, in May the French government replaced Nivelle with the popular General Pétain and French soldiers were provided with better conditions, billets and food, and longer leave. Though their soldiers returned, the French army reverted to the defensive, focusing on holding the line. The Italians also failed to take the offensive. The Allies had no likely support in the east, either, as Russia's provisional government, after the abdication of the Tsar in March 1917, had its mind on consolidating its power and eliminating opposition rather than continuing the war against Germany. Should the Russians make a separate peace, nearly 60 German divisions now on the Eastern Front could be diverted to the Western Front, a daunting possibility for the Allies.

With unreliable and reluctant allies, Britain's General Haig was forced to take the initiative again. The success of the British at the battle of Messines, even though it had cost 17,000 Allied casualties, opened the way for the next phase of the great offensive, which became known as the Third Battle of Ypres, or simply Passchendaele, the town that was the last objective of the 14-week series of battles.

Eliminating the salient and advancing the line at Messines Ridge had been a welcome victory for the Allies, but the hope remained for a major breakout, ideally one that would carry them to the Channel coast, and so in early October 1917, the British renewed their attacks on the Ypres sector in the expectation of capturing the high ground to the northeast of the town. There was, however, fear in military and political circles that ambitious large-scale offensives such as that in 1916 on the Somme were recipes for disaster and that small-scale operations – known as 'bite and hold' – that achieved limited gains, were more effective. The successful Canadian attack on Vimy Ridge, France, in April 1917 had confirmed this strategy, as had the success at Messines. But now Haig planned another great offensive, this time to straighten the Ypres salient, take the high ground along the Passchendaele Ridge and push through to the Belgian coast.

The offensive was to be launched from the Allied-held Belgian town of Ypres. Dominated by the cathedral built in the thirteenth century and by the enormous Cloth Hall completed in 1304, Ypres had been an important centre for the weaving of wool and the trading of fabrics. Because of its commercial importance it was encircled by a defensive wall and these ramparts were to offer protection to the Allied armies for the remainder of the war. At the northeastern edge of the town was the Menin Gate, featuring two prominent lion statues, which now stand at the entrance to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra; to the southwest was the Lille Gate.

Ypres had been close to the frontline since the start of the war. In late 1914, the town formed part of the British defensive line and just survived a concerted German attack. Then in April 1915, the Germans used gas – for the first time in the Western Front – near Ypres and nearly took the town, but it survived and remained in Allied hands. During this period, enemy shelling had reduced the city to ruins and destroyed both the cathedral and the Cloth Hall.

From then until the offensives of late 1917, known in history as the 'Third Battle of Ypres', a stalemate existed along the front, with neither side able to make or hold gains, although limited localised offensives were mounted by each side. However, the Germans held the high ground to the east, and taking this from them was a key goal of the Allied offensive in 1917.

After Messines, General Haig had put General Sir Hubert Gough in charge of the area instead of General Plumer, who had carried out the successful Messines attack. The battle began on 31 July 1917. The operational plan was ambitious and even after a heavy artillery bombardment, advances were limited. And then came the rains, turning the battlefields to mud. Gough's failure to capture the first objectives before the Passchendaele Ridge soon had him replaced by Plumer, a man more cautious and careful in advancing and more methodical and professional in preparations. Having shown his concern for his men and a high degree of planning, he was also popular with the Australians, something most British senior staff could not claim, if indeed they cared.

The Australians entered the Third Battle of Ypres on 20 September, when the 1st and 2nd divisions were used in an attack to the southeast of Ypres along the Menin Road, and by late September had switched their attack to the east of Ypres near Zonnebeke. At 5.30 a.m. on 26 September, the Australian 4th and 5th divisions were part of a large Allied force that attacked along a 10-kilometre front that stretched from south of the Menin Road to north of Zonnebeke. The Australian front was 2,500 metres and ran through Polygon Wood, with its main objective a mound of high ground that had once been the butt of the local rifle range.

Today the wood is thick, with well-established trees, but at the time it was shattered and desolate after a period of prolonged artillery barrage. Although the Australians took their objectives, they suffered heavy casualties, particularly the 5th Division, who after the war sited their divisional memorial on this hard-fought-over high ground.

After taking terrible casualties at Messines, the 45th Battalion had spent late August and the first weeks of September rebuilding the battalion, absorbing reinforcements and carrying out vigorous training and exercises. At Cuhem in the Bomy area, southwest of Aire, the battalion history records:

The billets were not good but, although it was the first time Australians had been billeted in this locality, the diggers soon made friends with the hospitable French people.¹

Not Private Lynch, though. His medical record states he was wounded on 20 August, when the battalion was in the frontline at Wambeke, northeast of Messines village, and taken to the rear and shipped to England on the 23rd. Like Nulla, who is wounded in the foot in this chapter, Lynch's medical record notes 'GSW foot', meaning 'gunshot wound, foot'. Lynch chose to put his narrator at Passchendaele and, given the historical and geographical accuracy of his account, it seems that he turned to the official battalion history for details and perhaps to photographs of the battlefields.

The battalion was given a number of inspections by General Plumer, General Birdwood and the new divisional commander, Major General Sinclair-Maclagan. Men were presented with their decorations and no doubt congratulated on their fine work at Messines.

But Nulla knows what these inspections are really all about:

Three inspections, plenty of reinforcements and an overdose of drill told us we were in for another stunt. A few inspections from the heads and it's a case of 'into the line' again. We know it only too well. It's not the first time we've seen the cooks inspecting the geese. [p. 177]

On 25 September, the 45th Battalion were brought up to be in the reserve line for an attack on Broodseinde Ridge. To get there, the men were forced on extended and exhausting route marches, sometimes 30 kilometres in a day, each weighed down with full packs, ammunition and a rifle. Although mechanised transport in the form of trucks, buses and trains was available, these long marches were made, both coming into and leaving the frontline, and this continued as the most common way of moving men for the rest of the war.

The road to the line took them through Ypres, past the ruined cathedral and the crumbling walls of the Cloth Hall, along the narrow streets, out through the Menin Gate and onto the Menin Road. Today, it is lined with commercial buildings and the once-feared Hellfire Corner that Nulla refers to – a vital crossroads that came under constant fire from the Germans on the high ground – is a sweeping landscaped roundabout. From here the road runs down a slight hill to Birr Cross Roads, easily missed except for the large Allied cemetery on the right. From there, the route to the front split off the Menin Road and became a corduroy track littered with smashed wagons, dead animals and the detritus of war.

Duckboards and corduroy roads were essential for moving men over the mud, but they were also death traps, as they were targets for German artillery, were easily seen and attacked from the air and there was often nowhere to escape off them. The area from Hellfire Corner to the frontline was under continual German observation and shelling. It is no wonder then that there were dead men and horses and wasted and destroyed war material and supplies strewn in the mud.

Reading these passages of Lynch's work, it is as if the unforgettable photographs of Australian photographer Frank Hurley have sprung to life. His photographs introduced the world to the hell of Passchendaele: stark, limbless trees, churned-up mud, lifeless bodies and Australian soldiers making their way over duckboard tracks that skirted water-filled shell-holes.

In August 1917, James Frances (Frank) Hurley had been appointed one of the AIF's official photographers and given the honorary rank of captain. Hurley had made a name for himself filming Ernest Shackleton's famous Antarctic expedition of 1914 to 1916, where he graphically captured the crushing of the expedition ship Endurance by pack ice and survived to present an exhibition in London. Sent by the AIF to Belgium, he took many graphic and horrifying photographs of the Broodseinde– Passchendaele fighting and photographed the 45th Battalion on Anzac Ridge, Garter Point, near Ypres.

If Hurley missed an event, he would sometimes get soldiers to re-stage it. For the sake of aesthetics and drama, he would mix images from different negatives to form a composite image. He was soon clashing with official historian Charles Bean, who criticised such methods. Due to the friction between the two men, Hurley threatened to resign, then was sent to Palestine to photograph the Light Horse.

Nulla mentions coming to the 'shell-torn ground of Bellewaerde Ridge' and today this is the site of a sprawling fun park. The men made their way to Westhoek Ridge and were kept busy in working parties, repairing the Westhoek to Zonnebeke road. Parties were also sent forward to reconnoitre possible routes to the Australian frontline positions they would shortly be required to take over. Moving forward, they occupied support-line positions at Garter Point on Anzac Ridge, relieving the Australian 50th Battalion just north of Polygon Wood. On 28 September, they took the right sector of the divisional front from the 13th and 15th battalions. Here they established four strongposts on the newly captured line and carried out 'vigorous patrolling'.

After four days in support of the 4th and 5th divisions' attack on Polygon Wood, the 45th were relieved and marched back to a communications trench dubbed The Great Wall of China, just a few hundred metres from the perilous Hellfire Corner. The nearby Perth (China Wall) British Cemetery was probably a burial ground for men who died while in the medical lines at China Wall. Even though the battalion had been in the reserve line, they had suffered 17 men killed, two officers and 50 men wounded and one officer missing believed killed. From here they were bussed to Steenvoorde to join the nucleus who had been left behind.

While the 45th were at Garter Point on Anzac Ridge, the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Australian divisions, along with the New Zealanders, were preparing to push over the Broodseinde Ridge towards Passchendaele. The assault began on 4 October, the men having moved into position the previous night under constant drizzle. Just after 5 a.m., as they lay waiting on their start line for the advance, a deadly German artillery barrage fell upon them, inflicting heavy casualties. The Australian barrage in support of their attack opened up, but as the men rose out of the shell-holes in which they were waiting, they came under attack. Unknown to each other, the Germans and the Allies had planned attacks at exactly the same time. The two advancing lines of infantrymen suddenly found themselves in hand-to-hand fighting in no-man's-land.

The Allies took Broodseinde Ridge, but their casualties were far greater than they had expected. Further attacks were planned, but by 8 October the rain that had started just before the attack was torrential. Suddenly the offensive – reliant on men being in position, supplies coming forward and artillery advancing with the troops – became all but impossible. The ground turned into such a quagmire that in many places the frontline was indiscernible and battalion headquarters found it hard to locate their men and resupply and feed them. Progress was extremely difficult as men and transports had to skirt shell-holes full of water and meander across the shattered, muddy ground. As difficult as it was for infantry to move in such conditions, it was impossible for artillery batteries with horses and heavy gun carriages. Artillery was crucial to the advance but General Haig, oblivious to the mud and the conditions at the frontline, expected that they too could take their place in the attack. Passchendaele became synonymous with bottomless mud, rain, destruction and the insanity of command that resulted in enormous casualties for the Germans and the Allies.

The relief of the men in the 45th Battalion was short-lived, for after five days at Steenvoorde they were on the move, heading towards the front, as fighting on the ridgeline had slowed to a crawl and the battle was chewing up men daily. The battalion was not happy. As Nulla says early in the chapter, 'some of the men very decidedly voiced their opinions that the army heads had broken faith with our division'. The 4th Division had had the least rest as it had been rotating in and out of the line constantly, unlike the other four divisions of the AIF, which had had long periods in back areas. It was also weakest in numbers.

The fighting slowly moved forward through Zonnebeke to the Broodseinde Ridge just below Passchendaele. On 9 October, the 45th Battalion was sent forward on a forced march with a break of five minutes every hour. The narrow corduroy track was lit by exploding shells and German flares and congested by hundreds of men, including many wounded moving to the rear.

Uncertain of just where the frontline was, the battalion took up a defensive line along the Broodseinde Ridge just off the Zonnebeke to Passchendaele road in an area where a modern factory stands today. Looking at that modern factory with its metal walls, car parks and signage, it is all but impossible to believe this was part of the frontline and a place of such destruction and muddy desolation.

Cold, tired and wet, Nulla and his mates take their positions, load their rifles, snap on their bayonets and wait for first light. However, before dawn they must first establish contact with the posts next to them. Nulla and a sergeant crawl out into the mud to find themselves in a shattered trench near a narrow-gauge railway line, a length of track having been flung into the trench by shellfire. This was the remains of the Roulers to Ypres railway and the embankment and cuttings still exist today. The disused remnant of this railway crosses the road about 50 metres from the factory site and no more than 20 metres from the line of outposts that Lynch found himself in. This low railway cutting features in a famous Frank Hurley photograph and shows exhausted, wounded and dead Australians lying in the muddy ground.

As we know from his personal record, Lynch did not experience first-hand the action he wrote about, but was already in England recovering from his wounds. It is fascinating to see how he skilfully translated the 45th Battalion history into Nulla's unique and characteristic voice. In the battalion history we read:

Active patrolling was carried out and in one patrol ... all the members were wounded, but managed to get back to our lines. Three prisoners were captured by a patrol under Sgt Payne and another patrol ... captured two Germans ... ²

In Somme Mud, we read:

Suddenly rifles crash in front. An enemy machine-gun is spluttering savagely in the darkness. We grab our rifles and stand to anxiously. Gradually the racket quietens down. Our first patrol is out and back again. Word comes along that our patrol almost walked into an enemy post and were fired upon. The patrol had run for it and got back in, but every man was wounded ... [pp. 181–182]

And soon after:

Night drags slowly on. We hear that a patrol has captured three Fritz. An hour or so later word comes through that another patrol has landed two more prisoners. The boys are doing good work tonight. [p. 182]

The attack by the 2nd Division on 9 October failed, so on 12 October the Australian 47th and 48th battalions, in conjunction with the 3rd Division, attacked the Germans in the village of Passchendaele, on top of the Passchendaele Ridge. Carrying parties were sent from the 45th Battalion to take up rifle ammunition for the attack. Readers of Somme Mud see the action from the point of view of Nulla, who is working as a runner, delivering messages between his frontline position and the battalion headquarters.

The men involved in the attack faced heavy fire, and in 'Passing it on at Passchendaele', very soon we see the wounded streaming back, toppling into the shallow post where Nulla is awaiting further orders. These men carry smashed arms; they limp back with bloodshot eyes and, as Nulla says, 'tortured faces'. He joins with other able-bodied men to bind up the wounds, noting, 'Our teeth and lips are brown with iodine stains from biting through the tops of iodine bottles' [p. 185]. Word comes through that the first and then the second objective for the attack have been taken, as captured Germans stream back, forced to carry Australian wounded but glad to be out of the fight.

With another runner, Nulla is sent to deliver a message to the rear, when they are caught in a terrific barrage. Blown off his feet by a shell burst, he finds himself in a trench, lying awkwardly on the hard wooden duckboards and in great pain. Given that Lynch himself sustained a serious gunshot wound to the foot, there is little doubt that his account of Nulla's experiences authentically reflects his personal experience. Indeed, what he describes is typical of many thousands of men wounded in the First World War.

Nulla is quickly helped, given water and assisted by the stretcher-bearers who come to his aid. They find it hard, however, to cut his laces and get his boot off until they realise he has used insulated telephone wire for bootlaces. With his boot off, they dress the wound and bandage it up. A stretcher cannot be used in the narrow trench, so they put him on the back of a strong stretcher-bearer to take him to the rear.

With shells exploding all around him, he is carried along, his mangled foot painfully banging against the side of the trench. At a relay station he is transferred to a stretcher and is subjected to a terrifying journey, held aloft, exposed as bullets whistle past. When the stretcher party is bombed by a German plane, Nulla manages to get off the stretcher and run for cover until the plane passes. The stretcher-bearers then carry him through the night and place him in a motor ambulance. Though it is a more comfortable ride with a mattress and blankets, the corrugations of the log roads increased wounded men's pain and suffering. And being in a clearly marked Red Cross vehicle did not guarantee protection. Ambulances came to grief, breaking through the corduroy roads or skidding into the mud and tipping over – or, as in Nulla's case, driving through enemy shelling.

Nulla arrives at a large Casualty Clearing Station. The doctors at Regimental Aid Posts and battalion headquarters could only provide basic medical help, such as stopping bleeding and ensuring wounds were sterilised and bandaged. At the Casualty Clearing Centre, a man's wounds could finally be given more than cursory attention. Men were bathed and cleaned up before being operated on in a more sterile environment. Then they were each given one of the 'row upon row of beds, clean beds' that entice Nulla.

Just the sight of a bed with snowy sheets seems to fly one into another world, a world removed from mud and slush, from bursting shells and tangled wire, from belching guns and circling flares. [p. 194]

Here too was a comforting sight to the wounded: female Australian nurses, who had been with the soldiers overseas from the very beginning of Australia's involvement in the war. Nurses had been part of the first convoy that left in October 1914, had arrived in Marseilles and travelled in mid-April 1916 to base hospitals in Étaples, Le Havre, Rouen and other places in northern France. Nurses were paid seven shillings a day, a shilling more than a private soldier, and sisters were paid nine shillings and sixpence a day. A total of 2,139 served with the Australian Army Nursing Service during the course of the war. Australian nurses also served in England with the Queen Alexandra Imperial Military Nursing Service, while others served in Salonika, in present-day Greece, and India.

Like all wounded men, Nulla is taken from the Casualty Clearing Station by slow train to the coast, in his case to Le Havre via Rouen, to be placed aboard a steamer for the short trip across the Channel to a large military hospital. Men with lesser wounds would have been sent to the hospitals at Étaples just south of Boulogne or to other rear areas to recover and convalesce.

On the wharf in England, men were helped from the ships by conscientious objectors. Lynch does not recoil from showing the lack of respect Nulla and the men have for those who refused to serve:

They are perhaps doing their bit on home service, but nevertheless we somehow despise them. Able-bodied men lurking at home when hundreds of army nurses and other women's units are often under shellfire across the Channel. [p. 197]

For a time, the war was over for both Edward Lynch, and his character Nulla. Lynch's wounds were to keep him out of the war for nine months, between late August 1917 and May 1918, when his personal record says he returned to his unit. For the rest of his life he would carry not only the physical and mental scars of his injuries, but also four pieces of shrapnel that were left in his body because they were considered too difficult to extract. They were still there when the family buried him in 1980.

Meanwhile, on the frontline at Passchendaele, in the face of heavy fire, the Australians could not hold the ground they had taken. The conditions remained bad, with men trying to fight through a morass of mud. Casualties climbed to an alarming level and eventually they had to fall back. Exhausted, their numbers severely depleted, they could do no more. Passchendaele would live on in Australia's memory as a deplorable, muddy nightmare, epitomised in row upon row of graves in the Tyne Cot cemetery.