From Bapaume to Passchendaele, 1917

by Philip Gibbs

"If any man feels cold," said a medical officer yesterday, "give him a hot-water bottle." To a man who had been lying in cold mud until an hour or two before it was like offering him a place by the fireside at home.

The Y.M.C.A. is busy in another tent or another dug-out. It has a cheery way of producing hot cocoa on the edge of a battlefield and of thrusting little packets of chocolate, biscuits, cigarettes, and matches into the hands of lightly wounded men as soon as they have trudged down the long trail for walking wounded and reached the first dressing-station, where there is a little group of men waiting to bandage their wounds, to say, "Well done, laddy; you did grandly this morning," and to fix them up with strange and wonderful speed for the journey to the base hospital, where there are beds with white sheets—sheets again, ye gods!—and rest and peace and warmth.

There are queer little groups between the sand-bags of those forward dressing-stations. On one bench I saw a tall New-Zealander and some Warwick boys—the Warwicks of the 48th Division did famously in this battle—and a farmer's lad from the West Country, who said "It seems to Oi," and spoke with a fine simple gravity of the things he had seen and done; and a thin-faced Lancashire boy, who still wanted to kill more Germans and put them to a nasty kind of death; and a fellow of the Lincolns, who said, "Our lads went over grand."

Near by was a wounded German soldier who had clotted blood over his face and a bloody bandage round his head. A friendly voice spoke to him and said, "Wie gehts mit Ihnen?" ("How are you getting on?") And he looked up in a dazed way and said, "Besser hier als am Kampfe" ("Better here than on the battlefield.")

The tall New-Zealander said: "Fritz fought all right. His machine-gunners fired till we were all round them."

"'Twas a bit of a five-point-nine that hit Oi in the arm," said the farmer's lad. "He put over a terrible big barrage, and Oi was a-laying up till the waist in a shell-hole all filled with mud, and Oi was starved with cold."

"They're all cowards, them Fritzes," said the Lancashire boy. "They ran so hard I couldn't catch them with my bayonet. Then a bullet came and went slick through my head." The bullet failed to kill the Lancashire boy by the smallest fraction of an inch, and had furrowed his skull.

The Warwickshire lads told queer tales of the battle, and they bear out what I have heard from their officers elsewhere. There were numbers of German soldiers who lay about in shell-holes after our barrage had passed over their lines and their blockhouses, and sniped our officers and men as they swarmed forward, though they knew that by not surrendering they were bound to die. It was the last supreme courage of the human beast at bay. There was one of these who lay under the wreckage of an aeroplane, and from that cover he shot some of our men at close range; but because there were many bullets flying about, and shells bursting, and all the excitement of a battle-ground, he was not discovered for some time. It was a sergeant of the Warwicks who saw him first, and just in time. The German had his rifle raised at ten yards range, but the sergeant whipped round and shot him before he could turn. Some of these men were discovered after the general fighting was over, and a nasty shock was given to a young A.D.C. who went with his Divisional General to see the captured ground next day. The General, who is a quick walker, went ahead over the shell-craters, and the A.D.C. suddenly saw two Germans wearing their steel helmets rise before the General from one of the deep holes.

"Now there's trouble," thought the young officer, feeling for his revolver. But when he came up he heard the General telling two wounded Germans that the English had won a very great victory, and that if they were good boys he would send up stretcher-bearers to carry them down.

All over the battlefield there were queer little human episodes thrust for a minute or two into the great grim drama of this advance by British and Overseas troops up the heights of the Passchendaele Ridge, where thousands of German soldiers who had been waiting to attack them were caught by the rolling storm of shells which smashed the earth about them and mingled them with its clods. One tragic glimpse like this was on the Australian way up to the Broodseinde cross-roads, the key of the whole position, after a body of those Australians had marched many miles through the night over appalling ground under scattered shell-fire, and were only in their place of attack half an hour before it started. The story of that night march is in itself a little epic, but that is not the episode I mean. The Australians drew close to one of the blockhouses, and the sound of their cheering must have been heard by the Germans inside those concrete walls. The barrage had just passed and its line of fire, volcanic in its look and fury, went travelling ahead. Suddenly, out of the blockhouses, a dozen men or so came running, and the Australians shortened their bayonets. From the centre of the group a voice shouted out in English, "I am a Middlesex man, don't shoot. I am an Englishman." The man who called had his hands up, in sign of surrender, like the German soldiers.