ABRAHAM HEIGHTS AND BEYOND
October 4
Another great battle has opened to-day, and in a wide attack from the ground we captured on September 26, north and south of the Polygon Wood crest, our troops have advanced upon the Passchendaele Ridge, and have reached the Gravenstafel and Abraham Heights, which crown a western spur of the ridge, and Broodseinde, which is the high point and keystone of the enemy's defence lines beyond Zonnebeke. South of that they are fighting between Cameron House and Becelaere, across the Reutelbeek and its swampy ground, and down beyond Polderhoek to the south end of the Menin road. The divisions engaged, from north to south, were the 29th, 4th, 11th, 48th, New Zealand, 3rd, 2nd, and 1st Australians.
This morning I saw hundreds of prisoners trailing back across the battlefield, and crowds of them within the barbed-wire enclosures set apart for them behind our lines. Our lightly wounded men coming down the tracks for walking wounded speak, in spite of their blood and bandages, of a smashing blow dealt against the enemy and of complete victory. "We have him beat," say the men, and they are sure of this, sure of his enormous losses and of his broken spirit, although the fighting has been bloody because of the great gun-fire through which our men have had to pass. It has been a strange and terrible battle—terrible, I mean, in its great conflict of guns and men—and the enemy, if all goes well with us, may have to remember it as a turning-point in the history of this war, the point that has turned against him with a sharp and deadly edge. For, realizing his great peril if we strengthened our hold on the Passchendaele Ridge, and knowing that we intended that—all signs showed him that, and all our pressure on these positions—he prepared an attack against us in great strength in order to regain the ground he lost on September 26, or, if not that, then so to damage us that our advance would be checked until the weather choked us in the mud again. His small counter-attacks, or rather his local counter-attacks, for they were not weak, had failed. Even his persistent hammering at the right wing by Cameron House, below Polygon Wood, had failed to bite deeply into our line, though for a time on September 25 it had been a cause of grave anxiety to us and made the battle next day more difficult and critical. But these attacks had failed in their purpose, and now the German High Command decided for a big blow, and it was to be delivered at seven o'clock this morning. It was a day and an hour too late. Our battle was fixed for an hour before his.
And so it happened that our men had to pass through a German barrage to follow their own, a barrage which fell upon them before they leapt up to the assault, and it happened also most terribly for the enemy that our men were not stopped, but went through that zone of shells, and on the other side behind our barrage swept over the German assault troops and annihilated their plan of attack.... They did not attack. Their defence even was broken. As our lines of fire crept forward they reached and broke the second and third waves of the men who had been meant to attack, caught them in their support and reserve positions, and we can only guess what the slaughter has been. It is a slaughter in which five German divisions are involved.
This battle of ours, which looks like one of the greatest victories we have had in the war, was being prepared on a big scale as soon as the last was fought and won. No words of mine can give more than a hint of what those preparations meant in the scene of war. For several days past the roads to the Front have been choked with columns of men marching forward, column after column of glorious men, hard and fit, and hammering a rhythm on the roads with the beat of their feet, and whistling and singing, in tune and out of tune, with the fifes and drums far ahead of them. Always, night and day, there was the sound of this music, always in the stillness of these moonlight nights the thud, thud of those tramping feet, always, along any track that led towards the salient, the vision of these battalions led forward by young officers with their trench sticks swinging and a look of pride in their eyes because of the fellows behind them. Their steel helmets flashed blue in the sun so that a column of them seen from a distance was like a blue stream winding between the hop-fields, or the broken ruins of old villages, or the litter of captured ground. With them and alongside of them went the tide of transport—lorries, wagons, London buses, pack-mules, guns and limbers, and the black old cookers with their trailing smoke. Everywhere there has been a fever of work, Tommies, "Chinkies," coloured men piling up mountains of ammunition to feed the guns. Under shell-fire, bracketing the roads on which they worked, pioneers carried on the tracks, put down new lengths of duck-board, laid new rails. The enemy's artillery came howling over to search out all this work, which had been seen by aeroplanes, and at night flocks of planes came out in the light of the moon to drop bombs on the men and the work. Now and again they made lucky hits—got a dump and sent it flaming up in a great torch, killed horses in the wagon-lines or labouring up with the transport, laid out groups of men, smashed a train or a truck; but the work went on, never checked, never stopping in its steady flow of energy up to the lines, and the valour of all these labourers was great and steady in preparing for to-day. Knowing the purpose of it all, the deadly purpose, the scene of activity by any siding filled one with a kind of fear. It was so prodigious, so vastly schemed. I passed a dump yesterday, and again to-day, in the waste ground on the old battlefield near Ypres and saw the shells for our field-batteries being unloaded. There were thousands of shells, brand-new from the factories at home, all bright and glistening and laid out in piles. The guns were greedy. Here was food for a monstrous appetite. We watched all this—the faces of the men going up so bright-eyed, so splendid in their youth, so gay, and all these shells and guns and materials of war, and all this movement which surged about us and caught us up like straws in its tide, and then we looked at the sky and smelt the wind, and studied a milky ring which formed about the moon. Rain was coming. If only it would come lightly or hold another day or two—one night at least.
Rain fell a little yesterday. The ground was sticky when I went up beyond Wieltje to look at the Passchendaele Ridge to see some boys getting ready for the "show" to-day, and to watch the beginning of the great bombardment.... Curse the rain! It would make all the difference to our fighting men, the difference perhaps between great success and half a failure, and the difference between life and death to many of those boys who looked steadily towards the German lines which they were asked to take. What damnable luck it would be if the rain fell heavily! Last night the moon was hidden and rain fell, but not very hard, though the wind went howling across the flats of Flanders. And this morning, when our men rose from shell-holes and battered trenches and fields of upheaved earth to make this great attack, the rain fell still but softly, so that the ground was only sticky and sludgy, but not a bog. The rain was glistening on their steel helmets, and the faces of our fighting men were wet when they went forward. They had passed already through a fiery ordeal, and some of them could not rise to go with their comrades, and lay dead on the ground. Along the lines of men, these thousands of men, the stretcher-bearers were already busy in the dark, because the enemy had put over a heavy barrage at 5.30, and elsewhere later, the prelude to the attack he had planned. His old methods of defence and counter-attack had broken down in two battles. The spell of the pill-box, which had worked well for a time, was broken, so that those concrete blockhouses were feared as death-traps by the men who had to hold them. The German High Command hurried to prepare a new plan, guessing ours, and moved the guns to be ready for our next attack, registered on their own trenches, which they knew they might lose, and assembled the best divisions, or the next best, ready for a heavy blow to wind us before we started and to smash our lines, so that the advance would be a thousand times harder. The barrage which the Germans sent over was the beginning of the new plan. It failed because of the fine courage of our troops first of all, and because the German infantry attack was timed an hour too late. If it had come two hours earlier it might have led to our undoing—might at least have prevented anything like real victory to-day. But the fortune of war was on our side, and the wheel turned round to crush the enemy.
The main force of his attack, which was to be made by the Fourth Guards Division, with two others, I am told, in support, was ready to assault the centre of our battle-front in the direction of Polygon Wood and down from the Broodseinde cross-roads. It was our men who fought the German assault divisions at the Broodseinde cross-roads, and took many prisoners from them before they had time to advance very far. The enemy's shelling had been heavy about the ground of Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood, where a week or so ago I saw the frightful heaps of German dead, and spread over a wide area of our line of battle along the Polygon Wood heights and the low ground in front of Zonnebeke. The men tell me that it did not do them as much harm as they expected. The shells plunged deep into the soft ground, bursting upwards in tall columns, as I saw them this morning on the field, and their killing effect was not widespread. Many of them also missed our waves altogether. So, half an hour later, our men went away behind our own barrage, which was enormous and annihilating. The wet mist lay heavily over the fields, and it was almost dark except for a pale glamour behind the rain-clouds, which brightened as each quarter of an hour passed, with our men tramping forward slowly to their first objective.
The shell-craters on the German side were linked together here and there to form a kind of trench system, but many of these had been blown out by other shell-bursts, and German soldiers lay dead in them. From others, men and boys, many boys of eighteen, rose with their arms upstretched, as white in the face as dead men, but living, and afraid. Across these frightful fields men came running towards our soldiers. They did not come to fight, but to escape from the shell-fire, which tossed up the earth about them, and to surrender. Many of them were streaming with blood, wounded about the head and face, or with broken and bleeding arms. So I saw them early this morning when they came down the tracks which led away from that long line of flaming gun-fire.
The scene of the battle in those early hours was a great and terrible picture. It will be etched as long as life lasts in the minds of men who saw it. The ruins of Ypres were vague and blurred in the mist as I passed them on the way up, but as moment passed moment the jagged stump of the Cloth Hall, and the wild wreckage of the asylum, and the fretted outline of all this chaos of masonry which was so fair a city once, leapt out in light which flashed redly and passed. So it was all along the way to the old German lines. Bits of villages still stand, enough to show that buildings were there, and where isolated ruins of barns and farmhouses lie in heaps of timber and brickwork about great piles of greenish sand-bags and battered earthworks. Through shell-holes in fragments of walls red light stabbed like a flame, and out of the darkness of the mist they shone for a second with an unearthly brightness. It was the light of our gun-fire. Our guns were everywhere in the low concealing mist, so that one could not walk anywhere to avoid the blast of their fire. They made a fury of fire. Flashes leapt from them with only the pause of a second or two while they were reloaded. There was never a moment within my own range of vision when hundreds of great guns were not firing together. They were eating up shells which I had seen going up to them, and the roads and fields across which I walked were littered with shells. The wet mist was like one great damp fire, with ten miles or more of smoke rising in a white vapour, through which the tongues of flames leapt up, stirred by some fierce wind. The noise was terrifying in its violence. Passing one of those big-bellied howitzers was to me an agony. It rose like a beast stretching out its neck, and there came from it a roar which clouted one's ear-drums and shook one's body with a long tremor of concussion. These things were all firing at the hardest pace, and the earth was shaken with their blasts of fire. The enemy was answering back. His shells came whining and howling through all this greater noise, and burst with a crash on either side of mule tracks and over bits of ruin near by, and in the fields on each side of the paths down which German prisoners came staggering with their wounded. Fresh shell-holes, enormously deep and thickly grouped, showed that he had plastered this ground fiercely, but now, later in the morning, his shelling eased off, and his guns had other work to do over there where our infantry was advancing. Other work, unless the guns lay smashed, with their teams lying dead around them, killed by our counter-battery work with high explosives and gas; for in the night we smothered them with gas and tried to keep them quiet for this battle and all others.