From Bapaume to Passchendaele, 1917

by Philip Gibbs

"Fritz couldn't have stopped us," said an Australian boy, warming his hands and body by a brazier after a night in the cold slime, which was still plastered about him. "It was the mud which gave him a life chance."

"It was the mud that did us in," said an officer of the Berkshires, sitting up on a stretcher and speaking wearily. "We got bogged and couldn't keep up with the barrage. That gave the German machine-gunners time to get to work on us. It was their luck."

A young Scottish Borderer, shivering so that his teeth chattered, spoke hoarsely, and there was no warmth in him except the fire in his eyes. "We had a fearful time," he said, "but it was the spate of mud that kept us back, and the Germans took advantage of it."

"Whenever we got near to Fritz he surrendered or ran," said a young sergeant of the East Surreys. "We should have had him beat with solid ground beneath us, but we all got stuck in the bog, and he came out of his blockhouses and machine-gunned us as we tried to get across the shell-holes, all filled like young ponds, and sniped us when we could not drag one leg after the other."

No proof is needed of the valour of our men. It is idle to speak of it, because for three years they have shown the height of human courage in the most damnable and deadly places. But I have known nothing finer in this war than the quality of the talk I have heard among the men who fought all Friday after a night exposure in wild rain, and lay out all that night in water-pools under gun-fire, and came back again yesterday wounded, spent, bloody and muddy, cramped and stiff, cold to the marrow-bones, and tired after the agony of the long trail back across the barren fields. They did not despair because they had not gained all they had hoped to gain. "We'll get it all right next time," said man after man among them. They all stated the reasons for their bad luck.

"If you step off a duck-board you go squelch up to the knees, and handling them big shells is no joke. All that means delay in getting up ammunition." This was from a young soldier who had been flung 50 yards and senseless away from a group of comrades who were all killed by a big shell-burst. His senses had come back, and a quiet, shrewd judgment of all he had seen and his old faith that our men can win through every time if they have equal chances with the enemy. That faith, that confidence in their own fighting quality, was not dimmed because on Friday they did not go far. The fire of it, the beauty of it, the simplicity of it shone in the eyes of these men, who were racked by aches and shot through with pain, all befouled by the mud, which was in the very pores of their skin, and seared by remembrances of tragic things. To command soldiers like that should be the supreme joy of their officers, and indeed there is not one of our officers who does not think so, and is not proud of them with a pride that is full of comradeship for his good company. Napoleon's Old Guard was not of better stuff than these boys from English farms and factories, Scottish homesteads, Australian and New Zealand sheep-farm runs.

In these recent battles home troops and overseas troops have been mixed together in the mud of battlefields, and they come down together out of the shell-fire to field dressing-stations, waiting to have their wounds dressed and telling their tales of the fighting. There is no difference there between them. They are all figures carved out of the same clay, with faces and hands of the tint of clay, like men risen out of wet graves. A moist steam rises from them as they group round the braziers, and they know each other—Australian and English lad, Scot and Welsh, Irish, New-Zealander—as comrades who have taken the same risks, suffered the same things, escaped from death by the same kind of miracle. They talk in low voices. There is no bragging among them; no wailing; no excited talk. Quietly they tell each other of the things that happened to them and of the things they saw, and it is the naked truth, idle sometimes as truth itself. So when they say, as I heard them say yesterday, "It is all right, it was only the mud that checked us," one knows that this is truth in the hearts of brave men, the truth of the fine faith that is in them.

I told in my last message how the enemy was ready for attack and tried to prevent it, before it started, by violent shelling over our back areas, all through Thursday night, mixing his high explosives with gas-shells and trying to catch our men on the move and our batteries deep in the mud. It is certain that his aeroplanes, flying low through mists, saw great traffic behind the lines and the work of thousands of men laying down new tracks and getting forward with supplies. That could not be hidden from them. We did not try to hide it, but worked in the daylight under the eyes of their observers in Passchendaele and in Crest Farm below it, and on the high ground above Poelcappelle, so that they could see the tide of all this energy when the gunners, pioneers, engineers, transports drivers, mule leaders, and the long winding columns of troops surged up the arteries of the battlefields and choked them about the Piccadilly Circus of the crater-land.

It was a supreme defiance of the enemy's power, a challenge louder than any herald's trumpet announcing the beginning of a new battle. The enemy accepted the challenge, though not, as we know, with any gladness of heart. Behind his lines there was disorder and dismay, and his organization had been horribly strained by the rapid series of blows which had fallen on him and by his great losses. His local reserves had been flung together anyhow, to meet the pressure we had put upon him. Remnants of battalions were mixed up with other remnants, and our prisoners are from many units. These divisions of his which have withstood the brunt of this recent fighting, like the 195th and the 16th and the 227th, were horribly mauled and broken, and other divisions coming up to relieve them were caught by our long-range guns far back from the lines, and lost their way in the swamps which are on their side of the battlefield as well as on ours, and struggled forward in the darkness and shell-fire to positions hard to find by troops new to this ground. Their High Command issued new orders hurriedly, and made desperate efforts to strengthen their lines. They put up new apron-wire defences around their blockhouses. All the heavy machine-guns of the supporting troops were sent forward to the front lines to reinforce those already in position in their blockhouses and organized shell-holes between the blockhouses and the narrow streets of concrete. Never before did the enemy mass so many machine-guns on his front for continuous barrage over a wide region, and to defend the last spurs of Passchendaele. He had machine-guns up trees as well as on the ground, and he scattered his riflemen among the shell-craters with orders to shoot until they were killed or captured.

It is fair to these men to say that they obeyed their orders and fought on Friday with most fierce courage. It was only here and there that small bodies of German troops, caught in our barrage and nerve-broken by the long agony of lying in water under a ceaseless shell-fire, ran forward to our men as soon as the first brown lines appeared out of the mud and surrendered. The men behind the machine-guns opened fire at the moment of attack, and it was the noise of this light artillery, the long-drawn swish of its bullets whipping the ground, and a devil's tattoo of groups of machine-guns hidden up the slopes, that broke upon our men as soon as they began to make their way through the mud.