From Bapaume to Passchendaele, 1917 Part 31

The London Territorials had in front of them a number of blockhouses held by the enemy's machine-gunners on each side of the road which runs from Poelcappelle to Spriet. Far out in front of their line was a place called Whitechapel--a curious coincidence that Londoners should attack in its neighbourhood--and nearer to them, scattered about in enfilade positions, were other "pill-boxes." On hard ground in decent weather these places could have been a.s.saulted and--if courage counts, as it does--taken by these splendid London lads of ours, whose spirit was high before the battle, and who have proved their quality, not only before in this Flanders battle, but also at Bullecourt and other places in the line. But yesterday luck was dead against them. Archangels would have needed their wings to get across such ground, and the London men had no divine help help in that way, and had to wade and haul out one leg after the other from this deep sucking bog, and could hardly do that. Hundreds of them were held in the bog as though in glue, and sank above their waists. Our artillery barrage, which was very heavy and wide, moved forward at a slow crawling pace, but it could not easily be followed. It took many men an hour and a half to come back a hundred and fifty yards.

A rescue party led by a sergeant-major could not haul out men breast high in the bog until they had surrounded them with duck-boards and fastened ropes to them. Our barrage went ahead and the enemy's barrage came down, and from the German blockhouses came a chattering fire of machine-guns, and in the great stretch of swamp the London men struggled.

And not far away from them, but invisible in their own trouble among the pits, the Artists Rifles, Bedfords, and Shropshires were trying to get forward to other blockhouses on the way to the rising ground beyond the Paddebeek. The Artists and their comrades were more severely tried by sh.e.l.l-fire than the Londoners. No doubt the enemy had been standing at his guns through the night, ready to fire at the first streak of dawn, which might bring an English attack, or the first rocket as a call to them from the garrisons of the blockhouses. A light went up, and instantly there roared out a great sweep of fire from heavy batteries and field-guns; 42's and 59's fell densely and in depth, and this bombardment did not slacken for hours. It was a tragic time for our valiant men, struggling in the slime with their feet dragged down. They suffered, but did not retreat. No man fell back, but either fell under the sh.e.l.l-fire or went on. Some groups of London lads were seen going over a little rise in the ground far ahead, but no more has been heard of them. Some of them got as far as the blockhouses, a.s.saulted them without any protective fire from our artillery, because the barrage was ahead, and captured them. By this wonderful courage in the worst and foulest conditions that may be known by fighting men they took n.o.ble's Farm and Tracas Farm.

It was by this latter farm that an heroic act was done by a young London lieutenant--one of those boys of ours who heard the call to the colours and went quickly round to the nearest recruiting office, not knowing what war was, but eager to offer his youth. He knew the full meaning of war yesterday by the concrete blockhouse on the Tracas road. He had a group of men with him, his own men from his own platoon, and he asked them to stick it out with him. They stuck it out until all were killed or wounded, and the last of them still standing was this lieutenant. I do not know if even he was standing at the end, for he had been wounded.

He had been wounded not once only, but eight times, and still he asked his men to stick it out with him, and at last fell among them, and so was picked up by the stretcher-bearers when they came searching round this place under heavy fire, and found all the men lying there.

There was a queer kind of road going nowhere and coming from nowhere east of Papa House. For some time before the battle Germans were seen coming out of it, remarkably clean, and not like men who have been living in mud-holes. It is a concrete street tunnelled and apertured for machine-guns, and bullets poured from it yesterday, and the London lads had a hard time in front of it. The London Regiment and the Royal Fusiliers who fought this battle, and not far from them were the Artists Rifles--the dear old "Artists" who in the old Volunteer days looked so dandy in their grey and silver across the lawns of Wimbledon. They suffered yesterday in h.e.l.lish fire, and made heavy sacrifices to prove their quality. It was a fight against the elements, in league with the German explosives, and it was a frightful combination for the boys of London and the clean-shaven fellows of the Naval Brigade, who looked so splendid on the roads before they went into this mud. They did not gain all their objectives yesterday, but what glory there is in human courage in the most fiery ordeal they gained eternally.

The gunners were great too. They were in the mud like the infantry in some places. They were heavily sh.e.l.led, and the transport men and gun-layers and gunner officers had to get a barrage down when it was difficult to stand steady in the bogs. They have done this not for one day and night but for many days and nights, and the strain upon them has been nerve-racking. After the last battle, when the Londoners were relieved and marched down past the guns, they cheered those gunners who had answered their signals and given them great bombardment and worked under heavy fire. I think the cheers of those mud- and blood-stained men to the London gunners ring out in an heroic way above the noise and tragedy of battle.

XXV

THE CAPTURE OF Pa.s.sCHENDAELE

NOVEMBER 6

It is with thankfulness that one can record to-day the capture of Pa.s.schendaele, the crown and crest of the ridge which made a great barrier round the salient of Ypres and hemmed us in the flats and swamps. After an heroic attack by the Canadians this morning they fought their way over the ruins of Pa.s.schendaele and into ground beyond it. If their gains be held the seal is set upon the most terrific achievement of war ever attempted and carried through by British arms.

Only we out here who have known the full and intimate details of that fighting, the valour and the sacrifice which have carried our waves of men up those slopes, starting at Messines and Wyschaete at the lower end of the range in June last, crossing the Pilkem Ridge in the north, and then storming the central heights from Westhoek to Polygon Wood through Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood, from Zonnebeke to Broodseinde, from the Gavenstafel to Abraham Heights, from Langemarck to Poelcappelle, can understand the meaning of to-day's battle and the thrill at the heart which has come to all of us to-day because of the victory. For at and around Pa.s.schendaele is the highest ground on the ridge, looking down across the sweep of the plains into which the enemy has been thrust, where he has his camps and his dumps, where from this time hence, if we are able to keep the place, we shall see all his roads winding like tapes below us and his men marching up them like ants, and the flash and fire of his guns and all the secrets of his life, as for three years he looked down on us and gave us h.e.l.l.

What is Pa.s.schendaele? As I saw it this morning through the smoke of gun-fire and a wet mist it was less than I had seen before, a week or two ago, with just one ruin there--the ruin of its church--a black ma.s.s of slaughtered masonry and nothing else, not a house left standing, not a huddle of brick on that sh.e.l.l-swept height. But because of its position as the crown of the ridge that crest has seemed to many men like a prize for which all these battles of Flanders have been fought, and to get to this place and the slopes and ridges on the way to it, not only for its own sake but for what it would bring with it, great numbers of our most gallant men have given their blood, and thousands--scores of thousands--of British soldiers of our own home stock and from overseas have gone through fire and water, the fire of frightful bombardments, the water of the swamps, of the beeks and sh.e.l.l-holes, in which they have plunged and waded and stuck and sometimes drowned. To defend this ridge and Pa.s.schendaele, the crest of it, the enemy has ma.s.sed great numbers of guns and incredible numbers of machine-guns and many of his finest divisions. To check our progress he devised new systems of defence and built his concrete blockhouses in echelon formation, and at every cross-road, and in every bit of village or farmstead, and our men had to attack that chain of forts through its girdles of machine-gun fire, and, after a great price of life, mastered it. The weather fought for the enemy again and again on the days of our attacks, and the horrors of the mud and bogs in this great desolation of crater-land miles deep--eight miles deep--over a wide sweep of country, belongs to the grimmest remembrances of every soldier who has fought in this battle of Flanders. The enemy may brush aside our capture of Pa.s.schendaele as the taking of a mud-patch, but to resist it he has at one time or another put nearly a hundred divisions into the arena of blood, and the defence has cost him a vast sum of loss in dead and wounded. I saw his dead in Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood, and over all this ground where the young manhood of Germany lies black and in corruption. It was not for worthless ground that so many of them died and suffered great agonies, and fought desperately and came back again and again in ma.s.sed counter-attacks, swept to pieces by our guns and our rifle-fire.

Pa.s.schendaele is but a pinp.r.i.c.k on a fair-sized map, but so that we should not take it the enemy had spent much of his man-power and his gun-power without stint, and there have flowed up to his guns tides of sh.e.l.ls almost as great as the tides that flowed up to our guns, and throughout these months he has never ceased, by day or night, to pour out hurricanes of fire over all these fields, in the hope of smashing up our progress. A few days ago orders were issued to his troops. They were given in the name of Hindenburg. Pa.s.schendaele must be held at all costs, and, if lost, must be recaptured at all costs. Pa.s.schendaele has been lost to the enemy to-day, and if we have any fortune in war, it will not be retaken.

The Canadians have had more luck than the English, New Zealand and Australian troops who fought the battles on the way up with most heroic endeavour, and not a man in the Army will begrudge them the honour which they have gained, not easily, not without the usual price of victory, which is some men's death and many men's pain. For several days the enemy has endeavoured to thrust us back from the positions held round Crest Farm and on the left beyond the Paddebeek, where all the ground is a mora.s.s. The Artists and Bedfords who fought there on the left on the last days of last month had a very hard and tragic time, but it was their grim stoicism in holding on to exposed outposts--small groups of men under great sh.e.l.l-fire--which enabled the Canadians this morning to attack from a good position. A special tribute is due to two companies of Shropshires who, with Canadian guides, worked through a woodland plantation, drove a wedge into enemy territory, and held it against all attempts to dislodge them.

Heavy German counter-attacks were made during the past few days to drive us off Crest Farm and the Meetscheele spur, but they only made a slight lodgment near Crest Farm and were thrust back with great loss to themselves. Meanwhile there was the usual vast activity on our side in making tracks and carrying railroads a few hundred yards nearer, and hauling forward heavy guns out of the slough in which they were deeply sunk, and carrying up stores of ammunition and supplies for men and guns, and all this work by pioneers and engineers and transport men and infantry was done under infernal fire and in deep mud and filth. Last night the enemy increased his fire as though he guessed his time was at hand, and all night he flung down hara.s.sing barrages and scattered sh.e.l.ls from his heavies and used gas-sh.e.l.ls to search and dope our batteries, and tried hard by every devilish thing in war to prevent the a.s.sembly of troops. The Canadians a.s.sembled--lying out in sh.e.l.l-craters and in the deep slime of the mud, and under this fire, and though there were anxious hours and a great strain upon officers and men, and many casualties, the spirit of the men was not broken, and in a wonderful way they escaped great losses. It was a moist, soft night, with a stiff wind blowing. The weather prophets in the evening had shaken their heads gloomily and said, "It will rain, beyond all doubt." But luck was with our troops for once, and the sun rose in a clear sky. There was a great beauty in the sky at daybreak, and I thought of the sun of Austerlitz and hoped it might presage victory for our men to-day. Beneath the banks of clouds, all dove-grey, like the wings of birds, the sun rose in a lake of gold, and all the edges of the clouds were wonderfully gleaming.

The woods in their russet foliage were touched with ruddy fires, so that every crinkled leaf was a little flame. The leaves were being caught up by the wind and torn from their twigs and scattered across the fields, and the wet ditches were deep with leaves that had fallen and reddened in last week's rain. But it was the light of the dawn that gave a strange spiritual value to every scene on the way to the battlefield, putting a glamour upon the walls of broken houses and shining mistily in the pools of the Yser Ca.n.a.l and upon its mud-banks, and the strange little earth dwellings which our men once used to inhabit along its line of dead trees, with their trunks wet and bright. When I went up over the old battlefields this glory gradually faded out of the sky, and the clouds gathered and darkened in heavy grey ma.s.ses and there was a wet smell in the wind which told one that the prophets were not wrong about the coming of rain. But the duck-boards were still dry and it made walking easier, though any false step would drop one into a sh.e.l.l-crater filled to the brim with water of vivid metallic colours, or into broad stretching bogs churned up by recent sh.e.l.l-fire and churned again by sh.e.l.ls that came over now, bursting with a loud roar after their long high scream, and flinging up water-spouts after their pitch into the mud. The German long-range guns were scattering sh.e.l.ls about with blind eyes, doing guesswork as to the whereabouts of our batteries, or firing from aeroplane photographs to tape out the windings of our duck-board tracks and the long straight roads of our railway lines. For miles along and around the same track where I walked, single files of men were plodding along, their grey figures silhouetted where they tramped on the skyline, with capes blowing and steel hats shining. Every minute a big sh.e.l.l burst near one of these files, and it seemed as if some men must have been wiped out, but always when the smoke cleared the line was closed up and did not halt on its way. The wind was blowing, but all this grey sky overhead was threaded through with aeroplanes--our birds going out to the battle. They flew high, in flights of six, or singly at a swift pace, and beneath their planes our sh.e.l.ls were in flight from heavy howitzers and long-muzzled guns whose fire swept our with blasts of air and smashed against one's ears. Out of the wild wide waste of these battlefields with their dead tree-stumps and their old upheaved trenches, and litter of battle, and endless craters out of which the muddy water slopped, there rose a queer big beast, monstrous and ungainly as a mammoth in the beginning of the world's slime. It was one of our "sausage" balloons getting up for the morning's work. Its big air-pockets flapped like ears, and as it rose its body heaved and swelled.

It was beyond the line of German "pill-boxes" captured in the fighting on the way to the Steenbeek, and now all flooded and stinking in its concrete rooms, that I saw Pa.s.schendaele this morning. The long ridge to which the village gives its name curved round black and grim below the clouds, right round to Polygon Wood and the heights of Broodseinde, a long formidable barrier, a great rampart against which during these four months of fighting our men flung themselves, until by ma.s.sed courage, in which individual deeds are swallowed up so that the world will never know what each man did, they gained those rolling slopes and the hummocks on them and the valleys in between, and all their hidden forts.

Below the ridge all our field-guns were firing, and the light of their flashes ran up and down like Jack o' Lanterns with flaming torches. Far behind me were our heavy guns, and their sh.e.l.ls travelled overhead with a great beating of the wind. In the sky around was the savage whine of German sh.e.l.ls, and all below the Pa.s.schendaele Ridge monstrous sh.e.l.ls were flinging up ma.s.ses of earth and water, and now and then fires were lighted and blazed and then went out in wet smoke.

The Canadians had been fighting in and beyond Pa.s.schendaele. They had been fighting around the village of Mosselmarkt, on the Goudberg spur.

It was reported they had carried all their objectives and were consolidating their defences for the counter-attacks which were sure to come. The enemy had put a new division into the line before our attack, a division up from the Champagne, and, judging from the prisoners taken to-day, a smart, strong, and well-disciplined crowd of men. But they did not fight much as soon as the Canadians were close up on them. The Canadian fighting was chiefly through sh.e.l.l-fire which came down heavily a minute or so after our drum-fire began, and against machine-gun fire which came out of the blockhouses in and around Pa.s.schendaele, from the cellars there, and other cellars at Mosselmarkt.

The Canadians on the right were first to get to Pa.s.schendaele Church.

Wounded men say they saw the Germans running away as they worked round the church. On the left the Canadians had farther to go, but wave after wave of them closed in and got into touch with their right wing. The enemy's machine-gun fire was very severe, especially from a long-range barrage, but there was little hand-to-hand fighting in Pa.s.schendaele, and the men who did not escape surrendered and begged for mercy. Up to the time I write I have no knowledge of any counter-attack, but it was reported quite early in the morning that there were ma.s.ses of Germans packed into sh.e.l.l-holes on the right of the village, and others have been seen a.s.sembling on the roads to the north of Pa.s.schendaele. The Canadians believe they will hold their gains. If they do, their victory will be a fine climax to these long battles in Flanders, which have virtually given us the great ridge, all but some outlying spurs of it, and the command of the plains beyond.

NOVEMBER 7

Hindenburg's command that Pa.s.schendaele must be held at all costs, or if lost retaken at all costs, has not so far been fulfilled by the Eleventh Prussian Division which garrisoned the crest of the great ridge.

Pa.s.schendaele and the high ground about it is firmly ours, and as yet there have been only a few feeble attempts at counter-attacks by the enemy. Why there was no strong and well-organized counter-attack is a mystery to the German officers and men taken prisoner by us, and especially to two battalion commanders whom I saw marching down to-day behind our lines at the head of a small party of Prussian soldiers.

One of the German colonels was the commander of the support battalion.

He had apparently come up to Pa.s.schendaele the night before to confer with the commander of the front line. Now from six o'clock yesterday morning until four o'clock in the afternoon he sat, with his brother-officer and four or five men, in that little stone house which was already their prison and might be their tomb. For some queer reason this pill-box of theirs, or dose-box as the Canadians call it, was overlooked by the a.s.saulting troops. As no machine-gun fire came from it, it was pa.s.sed by, perhaps as an empty house, and the moppers-up did not trouble about it. The commander of the support line, a tall, bearded man, very handsome and soldierly as I saw him to-day, urged the other commanding officer, a younger, weaker-looking man, to stay quiet and await the counter-attack. "Our men are sure to come," he said, "and then we shall be rescued."

But hour after hour pa.s.sed following the British attack at dawn, and there was no sign of advancing Germans or of retreating Canadians.

Imagine the nervous strain of those two men, and of the soldiers who sat watching them and listening to their conversation, as it could be heard through the crashing of sh.e.l.ls outside. At four o'clock neither of these battalion commanders could endure the situation longer.

"If we stay here they will kill us when they find us," said the tall, bearded man. "It is better to give ourselves up now," they decided. So they have told their own story, and at four o'clock they went outside and crossed a few yards of ground, until they were seen by some of the Canadians, and raised their hands as a sign of surrender.

It may have been that the absence of the commander of the support line was the reason for the poor effort made to counter-attack yesterday after the Canadian a.s.sault had swept through Pa.s.schendaele and on the right and on the left had fought along the crest of the Goudberg spur through Meetscheele and Mosselmarkt. I think there must have been other reasons, but whether or no it is certain that no big attack developed.

Groups of men were seen a.s.sembling yesterday at various places to the north of Pa.s.schendaele, but these were scattered by our gun-fire. Other groups were seen to the north of Mosselmarkt on the left, but these were also broken up and did not draw near. One officer tried to get up his men, but when he saw there was no support, and that our sh.e.l.l-fire was heavy, he retired, and a few of his men were taken prisoners. After fierce gun-fire yesterday afternoon all along the crest of the ridge, the enemy's bombardment slackened off, and the night was quieter than the Canadians had expected, though Pa.s.schendaele and its neighbourhood could not be called a really quiet spot.

I have told already in my message yesterday the general outline of the Canadian attack, which has won ground for which so many thousands of our men have been fighting, up the slopes and through the valleys along the spurs, and since the beginning of the battle of Flanders, until only this crown at the northern end of the ridge remained to be dragged from the enemy's grasp. In Pa.s.schendaele itself the Prussian garrison did not fight very stubbornly, but fled, if the men had any chance, as soon as the Canadians were sighted at close quarters. In spite of the severe machine-gun fire the Canadian advance on that right wing was rapid and complete, and they sent back about 230 prisoners from the blockhouses and cellars and sh.e.l.l-craters during the morning. The action was more difficult on the left, up from Meetscheele to Mosselmarkt and Goudberg, a distance of more than a thousand yards, and a farther objective than that of their comrades on the right. The Canadians here on the left were confronted with a difficult problem, owing to the nature of the ground.

Below the Goudberg spur on its western side was the horrible swamp into which the Artists, Bedfords, and others had plunged when they made their desperate attack in the last days of October. The enemy had outposts in these marshes at Vine Cottage--a sweet, pitiful name for such a place--and Vanity Farm. For a time they had thrust a wedge into our line here on the left of the Canadians between Source Trench and Source Farm, but, as I have already told, an heroic little attack by English and Canadian troops drove them out before yesterday's battle, and these small groups of men held on grimly under great difficulties, quite isolated in their bog. It was necessary to capture Vine Cottage in order to defend the Canadian left flank in this last attack, and for that purpose a small body of Canadians were sent off the night before last to seize it and hold it, while the main a.s.sault of the Canadian left wing, avoiding the swamp altogether there, was to attack along the Goudberg spur. This plan of action was carried out, but not without hard fighting round Vine Cottage in the swamp. All day yesterday there was very little news of that fight, for a long time no news. The headquarters of the brigade was having a hard time under intense sh.e.l.l-fire, and had lost many signallers and runners. The men in the swamp had no communication with the rest of the battle-front, and fought their fight alone and unseen. It was a hard and b.l.o.o.d.y little action. The German garrison of Vine Cottage fought with great courage and desperately, not making any sign of surrender, and using their machine-guns savagely. By working through the swamp and getting on short rushes to close quarters, the Canadians were able at last to close round this blockhouse and storm it.

The survivors of the garrison then surrendered, and they numbered forty men. Meanwhile on the high road of Goudberg the main left wing of the Canadian troops took the ground that was once Meetscheele village in their first wave of a.s.sault, and afterwards closed round Mosselmarkt.

Here in the desert of sh.e.l.l-craters and wreckage there were some concrete cellars and forts, one of them being used as a battalion headquarters and another as a field dressing-station. Over a hundred prisoners were gathered in from this neighbourhood, not in big batches, but scattered about the ground in sh.e.l.l-craters and cellars. Three German field-guns were captured, with other trophies, including stores of ammunition. It will never be known how many prisoners were taken yesterday. Many of them never reached our lines, and never will. They were killed by their own barrage-fire, which swept over all this territory when the enemy knew that he had lost it. Rain fell in the afternoon, and more heavily to-day, in sudden storms which are broken through at times by bursts of sunshine gleaming over all the wet fields, so that there is far visibility until the next storm comes and all the landscape of war is veiled in mist. It is a dreary and tragic landscape, and though I have seen four autumns of war and the long, wet winters of this Flemish country, the misery of it and the squalor of it struck me anew to-day, as though I saw it with fresh eyes. In all this country round Ypres, still the capital of the battlefields, holding in its poor, stricken bones the soul of all this tragedy, and still sh.e.l.led--yesterday very heavily--by an enemy who even now will not let its dust alone, there is nothing but destruction and the engines of destruction. The trees are smashed, and the ground is littered with broken things, and the earth is ploughed into deep pits and furrows by three years of sh.e.l.l-fire, and it is all oozy and liquid and slimy.

Our Army is like an upturned ant-heap in all this mud, and in the old battle-grounds they have dug themselves in and built little homes for themselves and settled down to a life of industry between one sh.e.l.l-crater and another, and one swamp and another, for the long spell of winter warfare which has now enveloped them, and while they are waiting for another year of war, unless Peace comes with the Spring.