October 12
OUR troops went forward again to-day farther up the slopes of the Passchendaele Ridge, striking north-east towards the village of Passchendaele itself, which I saw this morning looming through the mist and the white smoke of shell-fire, with its ruins like the battlements of a mediæval castle perched high on the crest.
It has been a day of very heavy fighting, and the supreme success will only be gained by the spirit of men resolute to win in the face of continual blasts of machine-gun bullets, heavy shelling, and weather which has made the ground as bad as ever a battlefield has been. The enemy, if we may believe what his prisoners say, expected the attack, and that they did expect it is borne out by the quickness with which they dropped down their defensive barrage, the violent way in which they shelled our back areas during the night, and by other unmistakable signs of readiness. Perhaps the last attack two days ago through the wild gale and the mud warned them that not even the elements would safeguard them against us, and that our troops, who had already achieved something that was next to impossible, would attempt another and greater adventure.
To me these blows through the mud seem the most daring endeavours ever made by great bodies of men. The strength of the enemy—and he is very strong still—and the courage of the enemy, which is high among his best troops, are not the greatest powers which our men are called upon to overcome in this latest fighting. Given a good barrage, and they are ready to attack his pill-boxes now that we have broken the first evil spell of them. But this mud of Flanders, these swamps which lie in the way, these nights of darkness and rain in the quagmires—those are the real terrors which are hardest to win through. Yet our men were confident of their fate to-day, and backed each other with astounding courage to take the ground they were asked to take; and that pledge which they made between their battalions was after that night, now three nights ago, when the Lancashire and Yorkshire men made their march through the mud which I have described in other messages—eleven hours' going before they reached their starting-line after frightful tribulations in the darkness and before they went into the battle, late for their barrage and exhausted in body, but still with the pluck to fight through machine-gun fire to their objectives. They did not go as far as had been hoped, but they did far more than any one might dare expect in such conditions, and the men in to-day's battle depended for success upon the starting-line gained for them by those comrades of North-country England.
The New-Zealanders who went over to-day swore that with any luck, or even without luck, they would plant their flag high, and among those men there was a grim, smouldering fire of some purpose which boded ill for the enemy they should find against them. These are not words of rhetoric, to give a little colour to the dark picture of war, but the sober truth of what was in those New Zealand boys' minds yesterday when they made ready for this new battle.
It was difficult to get the men anywhere near the line of attack, owing to the foulness of the ground. Those who were in their positions the night before—that is, on Wednesday night—found that they were not utterly comfortless in the sodden fields. By a fine stroke of daring and by the great effort of carriers and transport officers, who risked their lives in the task, bivouacs were taken up and pegged out in the darkness under the very nose of the enemy, so that the men should not lie out in the pouring rain, and before dawn came they were taken away, in order not to reveal these assemblies. There was food also, and hot drink close to the fighting-lines, and some of the coldness and horrors of the night were relieved. A clear line was made for the barrage which would be fired by our guns this morning. But some troops had still to go up, and some men had to march through the night as those Lancashire men had marched up three nights before. They had the same grim adventure. They, too, fell into shell-holes, groped their way forward blindly in a wild downpour of rain, lugged each other out of the bogs, floundered through mud and shell-fire from five in the evening until a few minutes only before it was time to attack. The enemy was busy with his guns all night to catch any of our men who might be on the move. He flung down a heavy barrage round about Zonnebeke, but by good chance it missed one group of men thereabouts, and scarcely touched any of the others in that neighbourhood. But his heavy shells were scattered over a wide area, and came bowling through the darkness and exploding with great upheavals of the wet earth. Small parties of men dodged them as best they could, and pitched into shell-holes five feet deep in water when they threatened instant death. Then gas-shells came whining, with their queer little puffs, unlike the exploding roar of bigger shells, and the wet wind was filled with poisonous vapour smarting to the eyes and skin, so that our men had to put on their gas-masks and walk like that in a worse darkness. These things, and this way up to battle, might have shaken the nerves of most men, might even have unmanned them and weakened them by the fainting sickness of fear. But it only made the New-Zealanders angry. It made them angry to the point of wild rage.
"To Hell with them," said some of them. "We won't spare them when we go over. We will make them pay for this night." They used savage and flaming words, cursing the enemy and the weather and the shell-fire and the foulness of it all.
I know the state of the ground, for I went over its crater-land this morning to look at this flame of fire below the Passchendaele spur. I had no heavy kit like the fighting men, but fell on the greasy duck-boards as they fell, and rolled into the slime as they had rolled. The rain beat a tattoo on one's steel helmet. Every shell-hole was brimful of brown or greenish water; moisture rose from the earth in a fog. Our guns were firing everywhere through the mist and thrust sharp little swords of flame through its darkness, and all the battlefields bellowed with the noise of these guns. I walked through the battery positions, past enormous howitzers which at twenty paces distance shook one's bones with the concussion of their blasts, past long muzzled high velocities, whose shells after the first sharp hammer-stroke went whinnying away with a high fluttering note of death, past the big-bellied nine-point-twos and monsters firing lyddite shells in clouds of yellow smoke. Before me stretching away round the Houthulst Forest, big and dark and grim, with its close-growing trees, was the Passchendaele Ridge, the long, hummocky slopes for which our men were fighting, and our barrage-fire crept up it, and infernal shell-fire, rising in white columns, was on the top of it, hiding the broken houses there until later in the morning, when the rain ceased a little, and the sky was streaked with blue, and out of the wet gloom Passchendaele appeared, with its houses still standing, though all in ruins. There were queer effects when the sun broke through. Its rays ran down the wet trunks and the forked naked branches of dead trees with a curious, dazzling whiteness, and all the swamps were glinting with light on their foul waters, and the pack-mules winding along the tracks, slithering and staggering through the slime, had four golden bars on either side of them when the sun shone on their 18-pounder shells. There was something more ghastly in this flood of white light over the dead ground of the battlefields, revealing all the litter of human conflict round the captured German pill-boxes, than when it was all under black storm-clouds.
It was at the side of a pill-box famous in the recent fighting that I watched the progress of our barrage up the slopes of Passchendaele, and it was only by that fire and by the answering fire of the German guns with blacker shell-bursts that one could tell the progress of our men.
"How's it going?" asked a friend of two officers of the Guards who came down the duck-boards from Poelcappelle way.