From Bapaume to Passchendaele, 1917

by Philip Gibbs

I have already told how many of our men had spent the night. Large bodies of them had lain out since Wednesday. Of these some had been luckier than others, getting hot drink and food and shelter under tarpaulin tents which did not keep them dry, but kept off the full force of the beating rains. Others, not so lucky, had to lie in shell-holes half full, or quite full, of ice-cold water, and rations had gone astray, as many ration parties could not get up through the hostile barrage or were bogged somewhere down below; and for some men at least there was not the usual drop of rum to warm the "cockles of their hearts" and to bring back a little glow of life to their poor numbed limbs. Other men had spent the night in marching, spurred on by the hateful fear of being too late to take their place in the battle-line, so that their comrades would not have their help, but spurred to no quickness because every yard of ground had its obstacle and its ditch, and it was a crawl all the way, with many slips and falls and shouts for help.

It was pitch-dark, and the rain beat against these men, driven by the savage wind, plucking at their capes, buffeting their steel helmets, straining at the straps of their packs, slashing them across the face. Their boots squelched deep in the mud and made a queer, sucking noise as these single files of dark figures went shuffling across along slimy duck-boards, a queer noise which I heard when I went up with some of them on the morning of the battle over duck-board tracks. Some of them lost the duck-boards and went knee-deep into bogs, and waist-deep into shell-holes, and neck-deep into swamps. In spite of all the frightfulness of the night, the coldness, the weariness, and the beastliness of this floundering in mud and shell-fire, they went forward into the battle with grim, set faces, and attacked the places from which the machine-gun fire came in blasts. The New-Zealanders attacked many blockhouses and strong points immediately in front of their first objective on the left above the Ypres-Roulers railway, and on the way to the marsh bottom and rising slope of the Goudberg spur, where at Bellevue the enemy's machine-guns were thickly clustered.

Below that, by Heine House and Augustus, the Australian troops were trying to work their way forward to the hummock of Crest Farm, barring the way to Passchendaele, and up on the left centre, from the cross-roads and cemetery of Poelcappelle, the Scottish and English battalions—Berkshires, East Surreys, West Kents, and others—assaulted the brewery, which has been captured twice and twice lost, and a row of buildings in heaps of ruin on the Poelcappelle road, which the Germans use as cover for their machine-gunners. Many of these outposts were captured by groups. Our men worked round then and rushed them, in spite of the streams of bullets which pattered around them so that many fell in the first attempts. Here and there the enemy fought fiercely to the last, and fell under the bayonets of our men. Here and there, in the open ground to the right of Poelcappelle and on the ground below Passchendaele, batches of German soldiers made little fight, but came rushing out of their holes with their hands up, terror-stricken.

But machine-gun fire never ceased from the higher ground, from tall masts of branchless trees, from shell-craters beyond the reach of our men. Our barrage travelled ahead, and slow as it was I saw it creeping up the lower slopes of the Passchendaele ridge for the second objective on Friday morning—our men could not keep pace with it. They were stuck in the swamps at Marsh Bottom in the Lekkerbolerbeek below Poelcappelle and in the bogs below Crest Farm. They plunged into these bogs, fiercely cursing them, struggling to get through them to the enemy, but the men could do nothing with their legs held fast in such slime, nothing but shout to comrades to drag them out. While they struggled German snipers shot at them with a cool aim, and the machine-gun bullets of the deadly barrage lashed across the shell-craters.

Australian troops on the right made good and reached the edge of the hummock called Crest Farm. Some of them swarmed up it and fought and killed the garrison there, but beyond was another knoll with machine-gunners and riflemen, and as our men came up to the top of Crest Farm they were under close and deadly fire. They would have held their ground here if they could have been supported on the left, but the New-Zealanders were having a terrible time in Marsh Bottom and Bellevue, and could not make much headway because of the deadly fire which came down from the spur on which Bellevue is perched. All this time it was raining hard, making the ground worse than before, and the wet mists deepened, preventing all visibility for our machines working with the guns. Orders were given not to continue the second stage of the attack, because the weather was too bad, and the Australians on the right centre withdrew their line in order not to have an exposed flank. In the afternoon the enemy's heavy artillery, which had been very hesitating and uncertain during the first stages of the attack, began to barrage the ground intensely, and continued this fire all the night.

Meanwhile close and fierce fighting was all about Poelcappelle. English and Scottish troops entered the ruins of the village, in spite of the waves of machine-gun bullets which girdled it, drove the Germans out of the brewery buildings for a time, fought their way among the brick-heaps and ruined houses, killed many men who held out there, and with bayonet and rifle defended themselves against counter-attacks which came down the Poelcappelle road. It was as savage and desperate fighting as any episode in this war at close quarters, without mercy on either side, one man's life for another's. Our men were reckless and fierce. They fought in small parties, with or without officers. Ground was gained and lost by yards, and men fought like wild beasts across the broken walls and ditches and shell-craters which go by the name of Poelcappelle. It was five o'clock in the evening that another strong counter-attack by the enemy came down Poelcappelle road and drove in our advanced posts. The brewery then became a sort of No Man's Land—an empty shell between opposing sides. Our men were spent after all that night and day in the mud and all this fighting, and now dusk was creeping down, and it was hard to see who was friend and who was enemy among the figures that crawled about in the slime.

It was the turn for stretcher-bearers, those men who work behind the fighting-lines and then come to gather up the human wreckage off it. With great heroism they had worked all day under heavy fire, and now went on working without thought of self. They were visible to the enemy, and their Red Cross armlets showed their mission. Away on the slopes of Passchendaele his stretcher-bearers could be seen working too. One body of 200 men came out, waving the Red Cross flag, with stretchers and ambulances, and went gleaning in these harvest-fields, and no shot of ours went over to them. But on our side shots from German snipers were still flying and our stretcher-bearers were hit. Three of them carrying one stretcher were killed, and the officer with them directing this work near Poelcappelle was fired with a flame of anger. He seized a Red Cross flag and made his way very quickly over the shell-holes towards the enemy's position, and standing there, this officer of the R.A.M.C. shouted out a speech which rang high above the noise of gun-fire and all the murmur of the battlefield.

Perhaps what he said was quite incoherent and wild. Perhaps no man who heard him could understand a word of what he said, but there in the shell-holes hidden from him in the mud were listening men with loaded rifles, and they may have raised their heads to look at that single figure with the flag. They understood what he meant. His accusing figure was a message to them. After that there was no deliberate sniping of stretcher-bearers, though they still had to go through shell-fire. It was hard on the wounded that night. The lightly wounded made their way back as best they could, and it was a long way back, and a dark way back over that awful ground. God knows how they managed it, these men with holes in their legs and mangled arms and bloody heads. They do not know.

"I thought I should never get back," said many of them yesterday. "It was bad enough going up, when we were strong and fit. At the end of the journey we could hardly drag our limbs along to get near the enemy. But coming down was worse."

They fell not once but many times, they crawled through the slime and then fell into deep pits of water with slippery sides, so that they could hardly get out. They lay down in the mud and believed they must die, but some spark of vitality kept alive in them, and a great desire for life goaded them to make another effort to go another hundred yards. They cried out incoherently, and heard other cries around them, but were alone in some mud-track of these battlefields with a great loneliness of the soul. One man told me of his night like that, told me with strange smiling eyes that lightened up the mud mask of his face under a steel hat that was like an earthenware pot on his head. All the time he opened and shut his hands very slowly and carefully, and looked at them as things separate from himself. They had become quite dead and white in the night, and were now getting back to life and touch from the warmth of a brazier over which he crouched.