Our luck with the weather went out with the stars, and this morning when our men went away the ground was more hideous than it has ever been this year, and that would seem a wild exaggeration to men who tried to get through Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood on the wet days of August. They went into swamps everywhere, into the zone of shell-craters newly brimmed with water, and along tracks without duck-boards, where men went ankle-deep, if not knee-deep or waist-deep.
The enemy was expecting them. There seems no doubt of that. An hour or so before the attack he began to barrage the ground in some parts, and in their blockhouses the German machine-gunners got ready to sweep the advancing battalions. Our own barrage thundered out shortly before six from all the guns which had got to their places after the great struggle in the mud. On the right the ground about Polderhoek Château was flooded down in the hollow below that ruin, which is perched up on a rise. Our men of the 5th Division—Devons, Scottish Borderers, Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry—were not far away from it, a few hundred yards, but it was a difficult place to attack. The enemy had built concrete defences inside and blockhouses on either side of it and in the wood behind. But our men went very gallantly through the morass, in spite of the machine-gun fire that swept over them, and worked on either side of the château, closing round the blockhouse, while from the centre they made a direct attack on the château ruins. In spite of the foul weather, with a high wind blowing and a thick, wet mist, our airmen went out all along the line and flew very low, peering down at our men. One of them reported quite early that our boys were all round Polderhoek Château, hauling out the Huns, while bombing fights were in progress on either side of it. Later messages confirmed this. Sixty prisoners were seen coming back down the Menin road. A wounded German officer said the garrison of the château was 400 men, of four companies. It seems that they must all have been taken or killed, for later it was established that all the blockhouses and the château had been cleared, and our men were fighting beyond Polderhoek Wood.
Farther south there was fighting round about Gheluvelt, by Devons and Staffords of the 7th Division, and an observer reported that he had seen Germans running out of that château down the high road east of it, but it seems that there were a number of dug-outs in Gheluvelt Wood where the garrisons held out after our advance attack had passed, and this was a great menace to our men, so that they may have had to withdraw in order to avoid that trap, or to keep in touch with the troops on their right, who were held up at a couple of redoubts in the morning.
Meanwhile the fiercest battle was being fought by the Canadians near the centre of the attack, up the slopes of Bellevue below Goudberg (which is just west of Passchendaele), where the enemy had long and elaborate defences of concrete, and to the right and left of that from Vienna House, below Crest Farm on the right, to the ground on the left beyond Wolfe Copse. It was from the direction of Peter Pan House and Wolfe Copse that the Canadians succeeded in getting a grasp of the Bellevue slopes, attacking a row of concrete huts in a sunken road which were strongly held by German machine-gunners. The enemy counter-attacked strongly and sharply down the northern end of the spur, and from the direction of Passchendaele, and drove our men for a time down the slopes, though only for a time. Farther left there was heavy fighting round the pill-boxes. Two of them, Moray House and Varlet House, yielded a score or more of prisoners each, but the ground all about the left of our attack by the Broenbeek and the Watervlietbeek was one great deep marsh, through which the men had the utmost difficulty in struggling.
The German wounded are in a terrible condition, covered in mud and blood, and shaking as men with ague. They are full of despair, and their officers say that Germany is only holding out in the hope of a U-boat victory. The German people, they say, will suffer badly this winter from lack of food. Our own wounded are men who seem to have come out of watery graves, and are plastered from head to foot in a whitish slime. In the field dressing-stations they are as patient as after all these battles, and if in some places they had ill luck they blame the weather for it. No words are too bad for that, but in spite of it our men did wonders to-day.
October 28
The most important position in the attack yesterday was given to the Canadians to carry, and the story of their capture of the Bellevue spur is fine and thrilling as an act of persistent courage by bodies of men struggling against great hardships and under great fire. Nothing that they did at Courcelette and Vimy and round about Lens was finer than the way in which on Friday they fought their way up the Bellevue spur, were beaten back by an intense destructive fire, and then, reorganizing, went back through the wounded and scaled the slope again and drove the German machine-gunners out of their blockhouses.
I have seen those Germans as prisoners of the Canadians. They are men of the 11th Bavarian Division, which includes the 3rd Bavarian Infantry Regiment and two reserve infantry regiments. The other day I wrote about undersized, half-witted fellows who were caught by our men, and said the German man-power must be wearing thin if they sent recruits like this. These Bavarian soldiers are not undersized, but tall, proper men, and stout fellows who fought hard. They carried their mud with a certain swagger, not as men who had surrendered easily, and were not utterly dejected, like so many of our prisoners. They had been picked to hold Bellevue because of their good moral, and they were full of confidence in their defensive position. They were perched up above the swamps through which our men had to wade to get at them. They had plenty of concrete houses for their shelter, and their machine-guns. The weather was in their favour. They guessed that the British would try to attack them again, but they looked at the floods and rain-clouds, and felt safe, or pretty safe. For some reason of psychology—which is greatly influenced by shell-fire—these men of the 11th Bavarian Division were not mutinous against discipline like other Bavarians, who are cursing the Prussians because of too much fighting, and malingering, and jeering at the officers, or refusing to go into the forward positions, like 800 men of the 99th Reserve Infantry Regiment, who, according to a prisoner, revolted against going into the line at Lens.
"They were all sent to prison," says the man, "and seem to have been very pleased with the change."