The Canadians on the right were first to get to Passchendaele Church. Wounded men say they saw the Germans running away as they worked round the church. On the left the Canadians had farther to go, but wave after wave of them closed in and got into touch with their right wing. The enemy's machine-gun fire was very severe, especially from a long-range barrage, but there was little hand-to-hand fighting in Passchendaele, and the men who did not escape surrendered and begged for mercy. Up to the time I write I have no knowledge of any counter-attack, but it was reported quite early in the morning that there were masses of Germans packed into shell-holes on the right of the village, and others have been seen assembling on the roads to the north of Passchendaele. The Canadians believe they will hold their gains. If they do, their victory will be a fine climax to these long battles in Flanders, which have virtually given us the great ridge, all but some outlying spurs of it, and the command of the plains beyond.
November 7
Hindenburg's command that Passchendaele must be held at all costs, or if lost retaken at all costs, has not so far been fulfilled by the Eleventh Prussian Division which garrisoned the crest of the great ridge. Passchendaele and the high ground about it is firmly ours, and as yet there have been only a few feeble attempts at counter-attacks by the enemy. Why there was no strong and well-organized counter-attack is a mystery to the German officers and men taken prisoner by us, and especially to two battalion commanders whom I saw marching down to-day behind our lines at the head of a small party of Prussian soldiers.
One of the German colonels was the commander of the support battalion. He had apparently come up to Passchendaele the night before to confer with the commander of the front line. Now from six o'clock yesterday morning until four o'clock in the afternoon he sat, with his brother-officer and four or five men, in that little stone house which was already their prison and might be their tomb. For some queer reason this pill-box of theirs, or dose-box as the Canadians call it, was overlooked by the assaulting troops. As no machine-gun fire came from it, it was passed by, perhaps as an empty house, and the moppers-up did not trouble about it. The commander of the support line, a tall, bearded man, very handsome and soldierly as I saw him to-day, urged the other commanding officer, a younger, weaker-looking man, to stay quiet and await the counter-attack. "Our men are sure to come," he said, "and then we shall be rescued."
But hour after hour passed following the British attack at dawn, and there was no sign of advancing Germans or of retreating Canadians. Imagine the nervous strain of those two men, and of the soldiers who sat watching them and listening to their conversation, as it could be heard through the crashing of shells outside. At four o'clock neither of these battalion commanders could endure the situation longer.
"If we stay here they will kill us when they find us," said the tall, bearded man. "It is better to give ourselves up now," they decided. So they have told their own story, and at four o'clock they went outside and crossed a few yards of ground, until they were seen by some of the Canadians, and raised their hands as a sign of surrender.
It may have been that the absence of the commander of the support line was the reason for the poor effort made to counter-attack yesterday after the Canadian assault had swept through Passchendaele and on the right and on the left had fought along the crest of the Goudberg spur through Meetscheele and Mosselmarkt. I think there must have been other reasons, but whether or no it is certain that no big attack developed. Groups of men were seen assembling yesterday at various places to the north of Passchendaele, but these were scattered by our gun-fire. Other groups were seen to the north of Mosselmarkt on the left, but these were also broken up and did not draw near. One officer tried to get up his men, but when he saw there was no support, and that our shell-fire was heavy, he retired, and a few of his men were taken prisoners. After fierce gun-fire yesterday afternoon all along the crest of the ridge, the enemy's bombardment slackened off, and the night was quieter than the Canadians had expected, though Passchendaele and its neighbourhood could not be called a really quiet spot.
I have told already in my message yesterday the general outline of the Canadian attack, which has won ground for which so many thousands of our men have been fighting, up the slopes and through the valleys along the spurs, and since the beginning of the battle of Flanders, until only this crown at the northern end of the ridge remained to be dragged from the enemy's grasp. In Passchendaele itself the Prussian garrison did not fight very stubbornly, but fled, if the men had any chance, as soon as the Canadians were sighted at close quarters. In spite of the severe machine-gun fire the Canadian advance on that right wing was rapid and complete, and they sent back about 230 prisoners from the blockhouses and cellars and shell-craters during the morning. The action was more difficult on the left, up from Meetscheele to Mosselmarkt and Goudberg, a distance of more than a thousand yards, and a farther objective than that of their comrades on the right. The Canadians here on the left were confronted with a difficult problem, owing to the nature of the ground. Below the Goudberg spur on its western side was the horrible swamp into which the Artists, Bedfords, and others had plunged when they made their desperate attack in the last days of October. The enemy had outposts in these marshes at Vine Cottage—a sweet, pitiful name for such a place—and Vanity Farm. For a time they had thrust a wedge into our line here on the left of the Canadians between Source Trench and Source Farm, but, as I have already told, an heroic little attack by English and Canadian troops drove them out before yesterday's battle, and these small groups of men held on grimly under great difficulties, quite isolated in their bog. It was necessary to capture Vine Cottage in order to defend the Canadian left flank in this last attack, and for that purpose a small body of Canadians were sent off the night before last to seize it and hold it, while the main assault of the Canadian left wing, avoiding the swamp altogether there, was to attack along the Goudberg spur. This plan of action was carried out, but not without hard fighting round Vine Cottage in the swamp. All day yesterday there was very little news of that fight, for a long time no news. The headquarters of the brigade was having a hard time under intense shell-fire, and had lost many signallers and runners. The men in the swamp had no communication with the rest of the battle-front, and fought their fight alone and unseen. It was a hard and bloody little action. The German garrison of Vine Cottage fought with great courage and desperately, not making any sign of surrender, and using their machine-guns savagely. By working through the swamp and getting on short rushes to close quarters, the Canadians were able at last to close round this blockhouse and storm it. The survivors of the garrison then surrendered, and they numbered forty men. Meanwhile on the high road of Goudberg the main left wing of the Canadian troops took the ground that was once Meetscheele village in their first wave of assault, and afterwards closed round Mosselmarkt. Here in the desert of shell-craters and wreckage there were some concrete cellars and forts, one of them being used as a battalion headquarters and another as a field dressing-station. Over a hundred prisoners were gathered in from this neighbourhood, not in big batches, but scattered about the ground in shell-craters and cellars. Three German field-guns were captured, with other trophies, including stores of ammunition. It will never be known how many prisoners were taken yesterday. Many of them never reached our lines, and never will. They were killed by their own barrage-fire, which swept over all this territory when the enemy knew that he had lost it. Rain fell in the afternoon, and more heavily to-day, in sudden storms which are broken through at times by bursts of sunshine gleaming over all the wet fields, so that there is far visibility until the next storm comes and all the landscape of war is veiled in mist. It is a dreary and tragic landscape, and though I have seen four autumns of war and the long, wet winters of this Flemish country, the misery of it and the squalor of it struck me anew to-day, as though I saw it with fresh eyes. In all this country round Ypres, still the capital of the battlefields, holding in its poor, stricken bones the soul of all this tragedy, and still shelled—yesterday very heavily—by an enemy who even now will not let its dust alone, there is nothing but destruction and the engines of destruction. The trees are smashed, and the ground is littered with broken things, and the earth is ploughed into deep pits and furrows by three years of shell-fire, and it is all oozy and liquid and slimy.
Our Army is like an upturned ant-heap in all this mud, and in the old battle-grounds they have dug themselves in and built little homes for themselves and settled down to a life of industry between one shell-crater and another, and one swamp and another, for the long spell of winter warfare which has now enveloped them, and while they are waiting for another year of war, unless Peace comes with the Spring.