A look at a contour map explains the reason why the 11th Bavarians were satisfied with their defensive position at Bellevue, on Goudberg or Meetscheele spur, which strikes out westwards from the main Passchendaele Ridge. The deep gully of the Ravelbeek rims below the slopes on which Bellevue is raised, and down there there is one filthy swamp of mud and water. On the other side of the gully is a hill which rises to Passchendaele, and the separate hummock of Crest Farm, south-east of that high pile of ruin, which commands the long, wide view of the plains beyond. Bellevue on one side and Crest Farm and Passchendaele on the other support each other from attack, and from their blockhouses they are able to sweep machine-gun fire upon any bodies of men advancing up either slope. So the Australians found in the great attack on October 12, when they had to fall back, when Passchendaele itself was almost in their grip, because of the enfilade fire from the ground about Bellevue, while other Australians, trying to work up those slopes on the west side of the Ravelbeek, were terribly scourged by the machine-gun barrage. The Canadians knew all that. They, too, had the black luck of that terrible twelfth of October, when English and New Zealand and Australian troops advanced into bogs, struggled through a sea of mud, and failed to gain a victory not by lack of valour, for the courage of them all was almost super-human, or rather human as we know it in this war, but by the sheer impossibility of getting one leg after the other in the slime that covered all this ground.
It was as bad on Friday morning—worse. The rain had poured down all night and the shell-craters brimmed over, and every track was so slippery that men with packs and rifles fell at every few steps. Beyond the duck-board tracks there were no tracks for 1500 yards, and there was a morass knee-deep and sticky, so that men had to haul each other to get unstuck. In the darkness and pouring rain and shell-fire it was hard going—a nightmare of reality worse than a black dream. But the men got to their places and lay in the mud, and hoped they were not seen. As I said in my last message, some of them seem to have been seen by hostile aircraft coming out before the moon went down, and the enemy's guns ravaged the ground searching for them.
The right body of Canadian troops worked up towards Crest Farm along the main Passchendaele Ridge—that is to say, on the right of the Ravelbeek gully. Their ground here was very bad, but nothing like that on the left below Bellevue. They got close to Duck Wood, where there are a few stumps of trees to give a meaning to the name, and on their right other troops pushed forward towards Decline Copse, which protected their flank. Heavy machine-gun fire came at them out of Duck Wood, from shell-craters and "pill-boxes," and the enemy shelled very fiercely all around with high explosives and a great number of whiz-bangs from field-batteries very close to them just below Passchendaele. All the Canadian soldiers speak of these whiz-bangs, directed, after the ground was taken, by low-flying aeroplanes, who signalled with flash-lamps or with a round or two of machine-gun fire when they saw any group of men. The signals were answered rapidly by a flight of the small shells.
But from a tactical point of view, apart from the hardships and perils of the men, the situation on the Canadian right was good. They had their ground, and would have found it easier to hold if all had been well on the other side of the Ravelbeek up by Bellevue. All was not well there at that time. The Canadian troops on the left were having the same tragic adventure as befell the Australians in the same place two weeks before. In trying to work up beyond Peter Pan House they were caught in the clutch of the mud, and moving slowly behind their barrage came under the fire of many machine-guns worked by those 11th Bavarians from a row of blockhouses along the road running across the crest of the ridge, and from other strong points above and below that line. The Canadian Brigade made most desperate attempts to get as far as those damnable little forts, and small parties of grim, resolute fellows did get a footing on the higher slopes, scrambling and stumbling and falling, with the deadly swish of bullets about them, and those Bavarians waiting for them with their thumbs on the triggers of their weapons behind the walls.
Behind, it was difficult to get news of that heroic Canadian Brigade. Foul mists and smoke lay low over them; no signals or messages came back. An airman, who flew along the line to work in contact with the guns, could see nothing at two thousand feet, nothing when he risked his wings at a thousand feet, nothing still on another journey at half that height. The Canadian rockets were all wet, and no light answered the airman's signals. Ten times he flew along the line, twice at last within two hundred yards of the ground, when he did see the infantry struggling through the enemy's lash of bullets. A bit of shrapnel or shell casing smashed through the airman's engine, and his wings were pierced. He flew in a staggering way on our side of the lines and crashed down and got back with his report.
The next news was not good. It looked like a tragedy. Under the continued fire the Canadian Brigade had to fall back from Bellevue almost to their original line. It was then that officers and men of this Canadian Brigade showed what stuff they were made of—stuff of spirit and of body. Imagine them, these muddy, wet men, with their ranks thinned out by losses up those hellish slopes of Bellevue, and with all their efforts gone to nothing as they gathered together in the mist in the low ground again. It was enough to take the heart out of these men. Strengthened by a small body of Canadian comrades they re-formed and attacked again. That was great and splendid of them. The barrage was brought back and the lines of its shell-fire moved slowly before them again as when they had first started. So they began all over again the struggle through which they had already been, and went out again into its abomination. Even now I do not know how they gained success where they had failed. I doubt whether they know. The enemy was still up the slopes and on the slopes, still protected in his concrete, and with his machine-guns undamaged. But these Canadians worked their way forward in small packs, and each man among them must have been inspired by a kind of rage to get close to the blockhouses and have done with them. They went through those who had fallen in the first attack, and others fell, but there was enough to close round the concrete forts and put them out of action. The garrisons of these places, thirty in the largest of them, fifteen to twenty in the smaller kind, had been told to hold them until they were killed or captured. They obeyed their orders, but preferred capture when the Canadians swarmed about them and gave them the choice. There were about 400 prisoners brought down from Bellevue, and nearly all of them were taken from the blockhouses on the way up to the crest and from a row of them along the road which goes across the crest.
It was a few hours before the enemy behind launched his counter-attacks, after a heavy shelling of Bellevue, which he now knew was lost to him—a bitter surprise to his regimental and divisional commanders. It is uncertain what delayed his counter-attacks, but the mud had something to do with it, for on the German side as well as on ours there are swamps in which tall men sink to their necks, and bogs in which they are stuck to their knees, so badly that some of our prisoners lost their boots in getting free of this grip.
It was at about four o'clock in the afternoon that the first German column tried to advance upon Bellevue from the northern end of the spur. They were caught in our barrage and shattered. Half an hour later another heavy attack was delivered against the Canadians on the main Passchendaele Ridge, and this was repulsed after close and fierce fighting, in which fifty prisoners were taken by our side.
All through the night, after those vain efforts to get back their ground, the enemy shelled the Canadian positions heavily, but on the left, by Bellevue, the men of that brigade, which had done such heroic things, not only held their ground, but went farther forward to Bellevue cross-roads, where there was another row of blockhouses. They were abandoned by the enemy, who had fled hurriedly, leaving behind their machine-guns and ammunition—eighteen machine-guns on 300 yards of road, which shows how strongly this position was held by machine-gun defence. Yesterday there were more counter-attacks, but they had no success, and many lie on the ground.
The price of victory for the Canadians was heavy in physical suffering, and unwounded men as well as wounded had to endure agonies of wetness and coldness and thirst and exhaustion. It was only their hardness which enabled them to endure. They lay in cold slime, and a drop of rum would have been elixir vitæ to them. Away behind, carrying parties were stuck in bogs as the fighting men had been stuck. Pack-mules were floundering in shell-craters. Men were rescuing their comrades out of pits and then sinking themselves and crying for help. At ten yards distance no shout was heard because of the roar of gun-fire and the howling of shells and the high wailing of the wind.