From Bapaume to Passchendaele, 1917

by Philip Gibbs

XXV

THE CAPTURE OF PASSCHENDAELE

November 6

It is with thankfulness that one can record to-day the capture of Passchendaele, the crown and crest of the ridge which made a great barrier round the salient of Ypres and hemmed us in the flats and swamps. After an heroic attack by the Canadians this morning they fought their way over the ruins of Passchendaele and into ground beyond it. If their gains be held the seal is set upon the most terrific achievement of war ever attempted and carried through by British arms.

Only we out here who have known the full and intimate details of that fighting, the valour and the sacrifice which have carried our waves of men up those slopes, starting at Messines and Wyschaete at the lower end of the range in June last, crossing the Pilkem Ridge in the north, and then storming the central heights from Westhoek to Polygon Wood through Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood, from Zonnebeke to Broodseinde, from the Gavenstafel to Abraham Heights, from Langemarck to Poelcappelle, can understand the meaning of to-day's battle and the thrill at the heart which has come to all of us to-day because of the victory. For at and around Passchendaele is the highest ground on the ridge, looking down across the sweep of the plains into which the enemy has been thrust, where he has his camps and his dumps, where from this time hence, if we are able to keep the place, we shall see all his roads winding like tapes below us and his men marching up them like ants, and the flash and fire of his guns and all the secrets of his life, as for three years he looked down on us and gave us hell.

What is Passchendaele? As I saw it this morning through the smoke of gun-fire and a wet mist it was less than I had seen before, a week or two ago, with just one ruin there—the ruin of its church—a black mass of slaughtered masonry and nothing else, not a house left standing, not a huddle of brick on that shell-swept height. But because of its position as the crown of the ridge that crest has seemed to many men like a prize for which all these battles of Flanders have been fought, and to get to this place and the slopes and ridges on the way to it, not only for its own sake but for what it would bring with it, great numbers of our most gallant men have given their blood, and thousands—scores of thousands—of British soldiers of our own home stock and from overseas have gone through fire and water, the fire of frightful bombardments, the water of the swamps, of the beeks and shell-holes, in which they have plunged and waded and stuck and sometimes drowned. To defend this ridge and Passchendaele, the crest of it, the enemy has massed great numbers of guns and incredible numbers of machine-guns and many of his finest divisions. To check our progress he devised new systems of defence and built his concrete blockhouses in echelon formation, and at every cross-road, and in every bit of village or farmstead, and our men had to attack that chain of forts through its girdles of machine-gun fire, and, after a great price of life, mastered it. The weather fought for the enemy again and again on the days of our attacks, and the horrors of the mud and bogs in this great desolation of crater-land miles deep—eight miles deep—over a wide sweep of country, belongs to the grimmest remembrances of every soldier who has fought in this battle of Flanders. The enemy may brush aside our capture of Passchendaele as the taking of a mud-patch, but to resist it he has at one time or another put nearly a hundred divisions into the arena of blood, and the defence has cost him a vast sum of loss in dead and wounded. I saw his dead in Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood, and over all this ground where the young manhood of Germany lies black and in corruption. It was not for worthless ground that so many of them died and suffered great agonies, and fought desperately and came back again and again in massed counter-attacks, swept to pieces by our guns and our rifle-fire. Passchendaele is but a pinprick on a fair-sized map, but so that we should not take it the enemy had spent much of his man-power and his gun-power without stint, and there have flowed up to his guns tides of shells almost as great as the tides that flowed up to our guns, and throughout these months he has never ceased, by day or night, to pour out hurricanes of fire over all these fields, in the hope of smashing up our progress. A few days ago orders were issued to his troops. They were given in the name of Hindenburg. Passchendaele must be held at all costs, and, if lost, must be recaptured at all costs. Passchendaele has been lost to the enemy to-day, and if we have any fortune in war, it will not be retaken.

The Canadians have had more luck than the English, New Zealand and Australian troops who fought the battles on the way up with most heroic endeavour, and not a man in the Army will begrudge them the honour which they have gained, not easily, not without the usual price of victory, which is some men's death and many men's pain. For several days the enemy has endeavoured to thrust us back from the positions held round Crest Farm and on the left beyond the Paddebeek, where all the ground is a morass. The Artists and Bedfords who fought there on the left on the last days of last month had a very hard and tragic time, but it was their grim stoicism in holding on to exposed outposts—small groups of men under great shell-fire—which enabled the Canadians this morning to attack from a good position. A special tribute is due to two companies of Shropshires who, with Canadian guides, worked through a woodland plantation, drove a wedge into enemy territory, and held it against all attempts to dislodge them.

Heavy German counter-attacks were made during the past few days to drive us off Crest Farm and the Meetscheele spur, but they only made a slight lodgment near Crest Farm and were thrust back with great loss to themselves. Meanwhile there was the usual vast activity on our side in making tracks and carrying railroads a few hundred yards nearer, and hauling forward heavy guns out of the slough in which they were deeply sunk, and carrying up stores of ammunition and supplies for men and guns, and all this work by pioneers and engineers and transport men and infantry was done under infernal fire and in deep mud and filth. Last night the enemy increased his fire as though he guessed his time was at hand, and all night he flung down harassing barrages and scattered shells from his heavies and used gas-shells to search and dope our batteries, and tried hard by every devilish thing in war to prevent the assembly of troops. The Canadians assembled—lying out in shell-craters and in the deep slime of the mud, and under this fire, and though there were anxious hours and a great strain upon officers and men, and many casualties, the spirit of the men was not broken, and in a wonderful way they escaped great losses. It was a moist, soft night, with a stiff wind blowing. The weather prophets in the evening had shaken their heads gloomily and said, "It will rain, beyond all doubt." But luck was with our troops for once, and the sun rose in a clear sky. There was a great beauty in the sky at daybreak, and I thought of the sun of Austerlitz and hoped it might presage victory for our men to-day. Beneath the banks of clouds, all dove-grey, like the wings of birds, the sun rose in a lake of gold, and all the edges of the clouds were wonderfully gleaming. The woods in their russet foliage were touched with ruddy fires, so that every crinkled leaf was a little flame. The leaves were being caught up by the wind and torn from their twigs and scattered across the fields, and the wet ditches were deep with leaves that had fallen and reddened in last week's rain. But it was the light of the dawn that gave a strange spiritual value to every scene on the way to the battlefield, putting a glamour upon the walls of broken houses and shining mistily in the pools of the Yser Canal and upon its mud-banks, and the strange little earth dwellings which our men once used to inhabit along its line of dead trees, with their trunks wet and bright. When I went up over the old battlefields this glory gradually faded out of the sky, and the clouds gathered and darkened in heavy grey masses and there was a wet smell in the wind which told one that the prophets were not wrong about the coming of rain. But the duck-boards were still dry and it made walking easier, though any false step would drop one into a shell-crater filled to the brim with water of vivid metallic colours, or into broad stretching bogs churned up by recent shell-fire and churned again by shells that came over now, bursting with a loud roar after their long high scream, and flinging up water-spouts after their pitch into the mud. The German long-range guns were scattering shells about with blind eyes, doing guesswork as to the whereabouts of our batteries, or firing from aeroplane photographs to tape out the windings of our duck-board tracks and the long straight roads of our railway lines. For miles along and around the same track where I walked, single files of men were plodding along, their grey figures silhouetted where they tramped on the skyline, with capes blowing and steel hats shining. Every minute a big shell burst near one of these files, and it seemed as if some men must have been wiped out, but always when the smoke cleared the line was closed up and did not halt on its way. The wind was blowing, but all this grey sky overhead was threaded through with aeroplanes—our birds going out to the battle. They flew high, in flights of six, or singly at a swift pace, and beneath their planes our shells were in flight from heavy howitzers and long-muzzled guns whose fire swept our with blasts of air and smashed against one's ears. Out of the wild wide waste of these battlefields with their dead tree-stumps and their old upheaved trenches, and litter of battle, and endless craters out of which the muddy water slopped, there rose a queer big beast, monstrous and ungainly as a mammoth in the beginning of the world's slime. It was one of our "sausage" balloons getting up for the morning's work. Its big air-pockets flapped like ears, and as it rose its body heaved and swelled.

It was beyond the line of German "pill-boxes" captured in the fighting on the way to the Steenbeek, and now all flooded and stinking in its concrete rooms, that I saw Passchendaele this morning. The long ridge to which the village gives its name curved round black and grim below the clouds, right round to Polygon Wood and the heights of Broodseinde, a long formidable barrier, a great rampart against which during these four months of fighting our men flung themselves, until by massed courage, in which individual deeds are swallowed up so that the world will never know what each man did, they gained those rolling slopes and the hummocks on them and the valleys in between, and all their hidden forts. Below the ridge all our field-guns were firing, and the light of their flashes ran up and down like Jack o' Lanterns with flaming torches. Far behind me were our heavy guns, and their shells travelled overhead with a great beating of the wind. In the sky around was the savage whine of German shells, and all below the Passchendaele Ridge monstrous shells were flinging up masses of earth and water, and now and then fires were lighted and blazed and then went out in wet smoke.

The Canadians had been fighting in and beyond Passchendaele. They had been fighting around the village of Mosselmarkt, on the Goudberg spur. It was reported they had carried all their objectives and were consolidating their defences for the counter-attacks which were sure to come. The enemy had put a new division into the line before our attack, a division up from the Champagne, and, judging from the prisoners taken to-day, a smart, strong, and well-disciplined crowd of men. But they did not fight much as soon as the Canadians were close up on them. The Canadian fighting was chiefly through shell-fire which came down heavily a minute or so after our drum-fire began, and against machine-gun fire which came out of the blockhouses in and around Passchendaele, from the cellars there, and other cellars at Mosselmarkt.