October 31
We still hold the high ground about Crest Farm and the Meetscheele Spur, from which Passchendaele is only 400 or 500 yards distant, and the Canadians have consolidated their positions there, and with the help of the guns have beaten off the enemy's counter-attacks. Up there the ground is dry, and the Canadian soldiers are on sandy soil above the hideous swamps of the valleys and beeks. The enemy's batteries are shelling our new lines with intense fire, and are attempting as usual to harass our tracks and artillery. To-day, after the battle, the weather is clear and beautiful again, as it was on the day after the last battle—a tragic irony which makes our men rather bitter with their luck—and in the sunshine and fleecy clouds there are many hostile aeroplanes overhead and many air combats between their fighting-planes and ours. I saw the beginning of one over Ypres this morning before the chase of the enemy machine passed out of sight with a burst of machine-gun fire, and all through the morning our anti-aircraft guns were busy flinging white shrapnel at these birds, who came with prying eyes over our camps, their wings all shining in the sunlight and looking no bigger than butterflies at the height they flew. Yesterday, during the battle, it was almost impossible to fly, owing to the strength of the gale, and impossible to see unless a pilot almost brushed the earth with his wings. One of our airmen did fly as low as that, as I have told, and went ten times on his business up and down the Canadian lines. But elsewhere, above the dreadful swamps of the Paddebeek and the Lekkerbolerbeek, the airmen had an almost hopeless task.
It was partly owing to this that it was very difficult to get any news of the London Territorials of the 58th Division and the Artists, Bedfords, and others of the 63rd who went away at the same time as the Canadians in the low ground instead of on high ground. Even their battalion commanders, not far behind, could see nothing of the men when the attack had started, and could get no exact knowledge of them for many hours. The wounded came back to give vague hints of what was happening, but as a rule wounded men know nothing more than their own adventures in their own track of shell-craters. Some of them have never come back. No man knows yet what has become of them out there. Little groups may still be holding on to advanced posts out there in the swamps.
It is idle for me to try to describe this ground again, the ground over which the London men and the Artists had to attack. Nothing that I can write will convey remotely the look of such ground and the horror of it. Unless one has seen vast fields of barren earth, blasted for miles by shell-fire, pitted by deep craters so close that they are like holes in a sieve, and so deep that the tallest men can drown in them when they are filled with water, as they are now filled, imagination cannot conceive the picture of this slough of despond into which our modern Christians plunge with packs on their backs and faith in their hearts to face dragons of fire a thousand times more frightful than those encountered in the "Pilgrim's Progress." The shell-craters yesterday were overbrimmed with water, and along the way of the beeks, flung out of bounds by great gun-fire, these were not ponds and pools, but broad deep lakes in which the litter and corruption of the battlefield floated.
The London Territorials had in front of them a number of blockhouses held by the enemy's machine-gunners on each side of the road which runs from Poelcappelle to Spriet. Far out in front of their line was a place called Whitechapel—a curious coincidence that Londoners should attack in its neighbourhood—and nearer to them, scattered about in enfilade positions, were other "pill-boxes." On hard ground in decent weather these places could have been assaulted and—if courage counts, as it does—taken by these splendid London lads of ours, whose spirit was high before the battle, and who have proved their quality, not only before in this Flanders battle, but also at Bullecourt and other places in the line. But yesterday luck was dead against them. Archangels would have needed their wings to get across such ground, and the London men had no divine help help in that way, and had to wade and haul out one leg after the other from this deep sucking bog, and could hardly do that. Hundreds of them were held in the bog as though in glue, and sank above their waists. Our artillery barrage, which was very heavy and wide, moved forward at a slow crawling pace, but it could not easily be followed. It took many men an hour and a half to come back a hundred and fifty yards. A rescue party led by a sergeant-major could not haul out men breast high in the bog until they had surrounded them with duck-boards and fastened ropes to them. Our barrage went ahead and the enemy's barrage came down, and from the German blockhouses came a chattering fire of machine-guns, and in the great stretch of swamp the London men struggled.
And not far away from them, but invisible in their own trouble among the pits, the Artists Rifles, Bedfords, and Shropshires were trying to get forward to other blockhouses on the way to the rising ground beyond the Paddebeek. The Artists and their comrades were more severely tried by shell-fire than the Londoners. No doubt the enemy had been standing at his guns through the night, ready to fire at the first streak of dawn, which might bring an English attack, or the first rocket as a call to them from the garrisons of the blockhouses. A light went up, and instantly there roared out a great sweep of fire from heavy batteries and field-guns; 4·2's and 5·9's fell densely and in depth, and this bombardment did not slacken for hours. It was a tragic time for our valiant men, struggling in the slime with their feet dragged down. They suffered, but did not retreat. No man fell back, but either fell under the shell-fire or went on. Some groups of London lads were seen going over a little rise in the ground far ahead, but no more has been heard of them. Some of them got as far as the blockhouses, assaulted them without any protective fire from our artillery, because the barrage was ahead, and captured them. By this wonderful courage in the worst and foulest conditions that may be known by fighting men they took Noble's Farm and Tracas Farm.
It was by this latter farm that an heroic act was done by a young London lieutenant—one of those boys of ours who heard the call to the colours and went quickly round to the nearest recruiting office, not knowing what war was, but eager to offer his youth. He knew the full meaning of war yesterday by the concrete blockhouse on the Tracas road. He had a group of men with him, his own men from his own platoon, and he asked them to stick it out with him. They stuck it out until all were killed or wounded, and the last of them still standing was this lieutenant. I do not know if even he was standing at the end, for he had been wounded. He had been wounded not once only, but eight times, and still he asked his men to stick it out with him, and at last fell among them, and so was picked up by the stretcher-bearers when they came searching round this place under heavy fire, and found all the men lying there.
There was a queer kind of road going nowhere and coming from nowhere east of Papa House. For some time before the battle Germans were seen coming out of it, remarkably clean, and not like men who have been living in mud-holes. It is a concrete street tunnelled and apertured for machine-guns, and bullets poured from it yesterday, and the London lads had a hard time in front of it. The London Regiment and the Royal Fusiliers who fought this battle, and not far from them were the Artists Rifles—the dear old "Artists" who in the old Volunteer days looked so dandy in their grey and silver across the lawns of Wimbledon. They suffered yesterday in hellish fire, and made heavy sacrifices to prove their quality. It was a fight against the elements, in league with the German explosives, and it was a frightful combination for the boys of London and the clean-shaven fellows of the Naval Brigade, who looked so splendid on the roads before they went into this mud. They did not gain all their objectives yesterday, but what glory there is in human courage in the most fiery ordeal they gained eternally.
The gunners were great too. They were in the mud like the infantry in some places. They were heavily shelled, and the transport men and gun-layers and gunner officers had to get a barrage down when it was difficult to stand steady in the bogs. They have done this not for one day and night but for many days and nights, and the strain upon them has been nerve-racking. After the last battle, when the Londoners were relieved and marched down past the guns, they cheered those gunners who had answered their signals and given them great bombardment and worked under heavy fire. I think the cheers of those mud- and blood-stained men to the London gunners ring out in an heroic way above the noise and tragedy of battle.