YPRES: THE PRELIMINARIES.
I.
From now onward my own experiences with the Tank Corps in France will
take up a large part of the narrative. I came out from England as a
tank commander in G Battalion toward the end of May 1917. Only the
personnel were on the boat, as by this time the tanks were shipped
across in batches as they were completed, new battalions on their
arrival drawing their quota from the park at Erin. F Battalion had
preceded G by a week, these two units being the first to leave of those
raised at home under the new establishment.
The month of June, notable for brilliant weather, we spent partly in
the Bermicourt area, where my own company billeted in satisfactory
isolation in the village of Pierremont, and partly at Wailly, where
each company went for a week’s driving practice. The combatant
companies in the Heavy Branch were then numbered consecutively
throughout the corps, and not by their battalions; so that G, as the
seventh of the latter in alphabetical order, consisted of 19, 20, and
21 Companies--the last-named being my own. At Pierremont we led a
very placid existence for a few weeks. We route-marched and drilled a
little, toyed with Lewis guns, and played cricket: we suffered, not
over gladly, the presence in our mess of two unshaven and lugubrious
members of the Y.M.C.A. (which occasionally errs in selecting its
personnel) whom we knew only as “Watch” and “Pray”; and eventually,
with the rest of the battalion, we marched over to Erin, about four
miles distant, to draw thirty-six Mark IV. tanks. We drove our own
twelve back to a park already established in the village. At this time,
however, I had no tank to command. There were in my section three
rather senior lieutenants, hailing from the prehistoric Thetford age,
who naturally secured a tank apiece. The majority of the subalterns
in G, including myself, had been commissioned from the ranks on the
same day some six months earlier, and joined the battalion together,
and their seniority necessarily was determined by the alphabet. In
consequence of this law the fourth tank in the section fell to my
friend and contemporary Brassington (killed a year later by Monument
Wood, outside Bapaume), since “Bra” comes before “Bro.” On such
accidents of orthography, in the Army, may one’s future depend! I was
left for the time being in command of the fifth or reserve crew.
In the meanwhile Messines had been fought. We heard the guns from
Pierremont, and, a little later, learnt that we should soon move up
to the Salient ourselves to take part in the forthcoming development
of the offensive there. I remember Torbett, the company commander,
returning one evening about this time from some conference, bringing
with him a large-scale map of the country over which the battalion was
expected to operate. Few or none of us had seen the Salient then; and
on this sheet, carefully layered and thick with symmetrical villages
and roads, it looked quite attractive and very ordinary. I date from
that event an instinctive mistrust of maps depicting strange country
in war-time. I believe it would have helped us greatly in this war to
have had maps drawn especially to represent, so far as was possible,
the actual condition of the ground on most battlefields. This should
not have been difficult: primarily it would mean inventing a series
of entirely new conventional signs for mud and shelled areas and
obliterated villages and roads, to take the place of the normal
peace-time symbols of the cartographer, supplemented only by obscure
legends which nobody reads. I have experimented with such a map myself.
The ordinary production, showing every house and hedgerow and by-way
in (let us say) Poelcapelle or Pozières, which simply had ceased to
exist, was peculiarly misleading; and, so strong is habit, the more
accustomed one was to handling maps before the war (an eccentricity not
common, it is true, in the regular Army) the more misleading it became.
Looking now at any sheet professing to represent the Pilkem Ridge and
the Steenbeek Valley, and recalling what that atrocious neighbourhood
really looked like, it is a marvel to me that we ever found our
way about it at all. I am quite certain that in many cases loss of
direction, or misstatements as to position in action--errors which were
only too common--were due not to ordinary bad map-reading, although
that also was prevalent enough, but to excusable inability on the part
of an officer to reconcile the printed sheet with the actual appearance
of the country: a difficulty that might have been mitigated in part by
the use of some more appropriate system of cartography.
Toward the end of June the 1st Tank Brigade, consisting now of G and D
Battalions, received definite movement orders; and a few days later an
advance party of G, which I accompanied, moved by lorry to the Salient
to prepare a camp. We reached our destination at Oosthoek Wood, beyond
Poperinghe, about 3 o’clock of a blazing July afternoon, at the exact
moment when a German aeroplane was attacking one of our observation
balloons which hung immediately overhead. There was a hideous racket
of futile rifle and machine-gun fire: along the whole line of balloons
stretching northward observers were descending in parachutes; and two
dissolving spirals of black smoke above the trees showed where a couple
of the fragile gasbags had already been destroyed. As we tumbled out of
our lorries, wondering what all the pandemonium was about, the German
pilot was in the act of diving down upon his third victim, right above
us. The two observers were still floating uncomfortably earthward,
and the mechanics on the trolley below, at the edge of the wood, were
working frenziedly to lower the balloon, when the latter burst into
flames, shrivelled up like tissue-paper, and sank gently in a rain of
charred fragments beneath its own streamer of smoke. The aeroplane,
satisfied with a creditable afternoon’s work, circled round and climbed
toward the lines, pursued, long after it was out of range, by useless
and indiscriminate small-arm fire and the equally ineffective “Archie.”
This was not the only untoward occurrence which had disturbed Oosthoek
that day. It appeared that during the morning the whole wood, which
was full of troops, had been shelled, notably in that part where the
1st and 3rd Tank Brigades proposed to have their camps. As these
attentions were guessed correctly to be only the precursors of more, it
was decided on the spot to send the personnel of both brigades to some
area farther removed from the line. The tanks, however, would have to
remain at Oosthoek. Our advance party, therefore, after spending the
night in the wood with the Reconnaissance Officers of the battalion,
who had been established there for a week, moved back next morning to
the vicinity of Lovie Château, the headquarters of the 5th Army, where
the camps of the 1st Brigade Headquarters and D Battalion already were
in process of erection.
Some account of the neighbourhood and general situation will aid the
story at this point. Oosthoek Wood, the centre of our activities for
the next four months, is a large and straggling assemblage of trees
extending in all over several hundred acres, and lying in the middle of
a triangle whose points are Poperinghe to the south-west, Vlamertinghe
to the south-east, and Elverdinghe to the north-east. The centre of
the wood was within four miles of the nearest point of the line, at
Boesinghe on the canal, and about the same distance from Ypres. It was
bisected by a timbered military road (a splendid piece of work, capable
of taking three lorries abreast) which ran from the direction of Lovie
Château across the triangle to Vlamertinghe. Beside this road a double
line of rails had been laid from Peselhoek railhead to a new and very
conspicuous detraining ramp built at the entrance to the wood for the
use of our brigade. Half a mile farther north a second ramp served the
3rd Brigade. (The 2nd Brigade was already in the area, having remained
at Ouderdom since the battle of Messines.) A series of other woods
diversified the country between Oosthoek and Lovie Château. The latter
building, standing in beautiful grounds, was about seven miles from the
line--uncommonly far forward, nevertheless, for an army headquarters.
It was, indeed, in front of the 18th Corps Headquarters, close by. The
whole of this low-lying and uninteresting region was under cultivation
as far as Oosthoek itself; and there were people living in the farms
on the western outskirts of that wood. The battered and unpleasant
town of Poperinghe, although shelled intermittently and bombed at
one time almost every night, was of course full of squalid shops and
extortionate shopkeepers, most of them women. To carry on for three
or four years a retail business under fire, within five miles of the
enemy, implies a certain enthusiasm for gain; but perhaps the ordeal
justified the imposition of high prices; and the ordinary Englishman’s
passion for buying rubbish is a direct invitation to it. The
restaurants and tea-shops in the town--“Skindle’s,” “Cyril’s,” and the
rest--swarmed all day with garrulous officers, and should have formed
useful media of information for the Germans. As for the depressed and
slatternly creatures in the farms nearer to the line, it was generally
taken for granted that they were spies. The usual stories flew about
of lamps flashing by night and cattle manœuvring suspiciously by day;
and rumour was always shooting somebody. And if there was espionage,
as there must have been, it had a mass of miscellaneous material to
sift and report on. The whole country was crowded with troops. In the
Salient alone there were two armies in one army area, Sir Hubert Gough
having brought four corps from in front of Cambrai to take post on the
2nd Army’s left. To his left again the 1st French Army had taken over
from the Belgians the line between Boesinghe and Noordschoote; while
Rawlinson’s 4th Army had come in on the sea-coast in readiness for
that flanking operation which never materialised. There could be no
attempt to keep this huge concentration a secret, or at any rate there
was none. Such a thing was not thought of in those days. Everything
went forward deliberately on old-established lines, in full view of the
enemy, who were in doubt only (and that not for long) as to the actual
day of attack.
The decision to employ three brigades of tanks, or the whole of the
Heavy Branch, had been come to in May, notwithstanding the adverse
reports on the ground submitted by the Corps Reconnaissance Staff.
From the first introduction of tanks in the field, the conditions with
which they had to contend had gone from bad to worse. Ypres was the
climax. The tanks were sent by scores, and then by hundreds, to drown
ineffectually in a morass, and the very existence of the corps was
imperilled by this misusage. The whole countryside was water-logged:
reclaimed from the sea, for even Ypres once had been a port, its
usefulness and habitability depended in normal times upon an intricate
system of drainage, for whose upkeep the farmers were responsible, and
for the neglect of which they were heavily fined. This drainage had
now been destroyed, or had fallen into desuetude and decay, over the
whole area about the front lines. During our reconnaissances in July
the deplorable results were not at first very apparent. The weather
was fine, and the surface soil dry and crumbling: we walked, so far
as it was safe, over what seemed to be solid earth covered with the
usual coarse grass and weeds; and then, from observation-points in
well-constructed trenches, peered out through our binoculars upon a
barren and dun-coloured landscape, void of any sign of human life,
its dreary skyline broken only by a few jagged stumps of trees. From
this desolation clouds of dust shot up where our shells were falling.
It was much the same as any other battlefield, to all appearance. But
even then the duckboards under foot in the trenches were squelching
upon water; and a few hours’ rain dissolved the fallacious crust into
a bottomless and evil-smelling paste of liquid mud. And rain was the
least offender. It was our own bombardment which finished the work of
ruin, pulverised the ground beyond repair, destroyed what drainage
there was left, and brought the water welling up within the shell-holes
as fast as they were formed. Long before any prolonged downpour had
fallen, indeed after the hottest spells of weather, the little white
discs on the aeroplane photographs were multiplying daily from end to
end of the field of operations.
II.
The actual detraining of the tanks of G Battalion at Oosthoek Wood
was accomplished without any serious hitch. It took place, of course,
after dark, and spread over three successive nights, each company
requiring a complete train. The workshops had already travelled up by
road. My company was the first to arrive; and the Brigadier and staff,
the Colonel and the company commander, Gordon, the company R.O., and
myself, were at the ramp to meet it. We stood about there in the dark
in some anxiety, for a night or two earlier a train of C Battalion’s
had been shelled as it drew in to the northern railhead. There had been
stories of signal rockets going up in the neighbourhood as the train
pulled in. The new white wooden ramps must have shown up clearly on
aeroplane photographs, and no one had thought of camouflaging them.
This night, happily, was exceptionally quiet; only a few heavy shells
whistled far overhead on their way into Poperinghe. It was very dark,
but fine, with a brilliant display of stars. It was also, I remember,
uncommonly cold for July. The train drew in about eleven o’clock,
creeping up so quietly that the dark bulk of the first tank, shrouded
in tarpaulin sheets, was towering above the ramp before I knew anything
about it. We had a party ready at hand for the business of chocking up,
and these men fell to work at once while the tank crews unlashed and
cleared away the sheets and started their engines. “Chocking up,” by
the way, was a process in use to save the springs of the earlier K.T.
trucks, heavy T-shaped baulks of timber being wedged under the ends of
each truck to carry the weight of the tank as it moved off. A later
type of K.T. carried its own chocks in the form of screw-jacks beneath
the buffers.
Everything went well until the eleventh tank refused to start up.
Eventually it had to be towed off. In the meantime, Gordon and I had
been leading the others to their allotted hiding-places in the wood.
Parking tanks (especially Mark IV.’s) among timber at night is always a
noisy and trying operation, resembling in sound and destructiveness the
gambols of a herd of inebriated elephants. The tank-driver, unaided,
can see nothing whatever, and has to be guided by the flashings of an
electric torch, with which refinements of signalling are difficult and
generally misunderstood. The trees, which appeared to be harmless and
nicely spaced in the daytime, become indued with a malignant spirit and
(apparently) have changed their positions since last seen. It was as
black as a coal-pocket in Oosthoek Wood that night; and for an hour or
so it rang with curses and exhortations and the crash and rending of
ill-treated timber as tank after tank tried to swing this way or that
and pushed down a young tree or two in the act. However, soon after one
o’clock we had them all in, herded together more or less in sections,
and the first arrivals were already camouflaged. Although the foliage
was fairly thick, and probably would have formed an adequate screen,
we were running no risks. The camouflage nets were suspended from the
trees a few feet above the tanks, the sides being drawn down at a slant
and pegged to the ground. All this was exhausting work in the pitchy
darkness, and very trying to the temper. At the same time a party was
obliterating the tracks we had made between the ramp and the wood. By
three o’clock the work was done, and we lay down in and under the tanks
to sleep for a few hours. Lorries were due to arrive at six to take all
the personnel, except a guard, back to the camp at Lovie Château.
It was very cold, and personally I hardly slept at all. About five
o’clock every one was aroused very effectually by the arrival of a
high-velocity shell, which burst under the nose of a tank, made a small
hole in another, blew half a camouflage net to tatters, and flung a
haversack into a tree. We were still collecting our wits, and a few
dishevelled figures were crawling out of sponson doors, when a second
shell burst twenty yards beyond the first; and with that every tank
disgorged its occupants in a hurry and all of us dived for shelter.
There were various old pits and trenches in the wood, and within these
we crouched for a short time, while the shells continued to arrive
punctually at half-minute intervals. All of them except the first one
fortunately burst beyond the tanks, although near enough for fragments
to fly among the latter and over our heads. As the wood manifestly
was no place for repose at the moment, we were ordered to leave it;
and having collected the scattered parties (a proceeding interrupted
periodically by the whistle of another approaching shell), we retired
in some disorder upon the military road, near the ramp, where a party
of negro labourers was watching the bombardment with marked uneasiness.
The methodical gun, however, made no attempt to traverse or elevate:
it continued to plant its projectiles around the same spot for another
ten minutes, and then fell silent. Our only casualty was X. (as we
will call him), who ran into a tank in the pardonable excitement of
the moment, cut his forehead, and was removed within half an hour to
the C.C.S. on the Elverdinghe road. There was no further shelling of
the wood that morning. We had every opportunity of establishing this
fact, as, owing to some muddle over the lorries, they were four hours
late. Tired, hungry, and dirty, feeling acutely that no one loved us,
we sat by that accursed military road until midday, when at length the
transport appeared and carried us back to the new camp at Lovie.
During the two ensuing nights 19 and 20 Companies detrained in peace
and were followed shortly after by D Battalion. F Battalion having
also joined C, the 1st and 3rd Brigades were now concentrated near
to one another, mustering between them (including supply and signal
machines) nearly 170 tanks. Every day the crews of the four battalions
marched down from Lovie Château to their work in the wood, returning
after tea. By this time the Germans had acquired the habit of shelling
Oosthoek in a rather desultory fashion every day. In the centre of
the wood, where a number of camps and hutments clustered about some
cross-roads, casualties became so frequent that the whole of the troops
in the neighbourhood were withdrawn: the baths, canteens, and Church
Army huts were closed down; and only a few details remained to dig
themselves in and hope for the best. At our end the nuisance was less
pronounced, although quite troublesome enough. In addition to our old
friend the high-velocity gun, which, situated apparently somewhere
near Langemarck, favoured us with its attentions almost every day,
other pieces of ordnance took a hand occasionally; but in the 1st
Brigade neither men nor tanks were ever hit. As the latter were packed
together like herrings, one or two heavy projectiles among them might
have done a lot of damage. The 3rd Brigade, less fortunate, suffered
several casualties, five men being killed and five wounded in one
morning. We used to debit this unpleasantness to the growing account
of Sergeant Phillips. This gentleman (whose actual regiment, a Welsh
one, I have forgotten), having been captured in a raid, proceeded to
give to the enemy every atom of information in his possession. Most of
it was fairly accurate. Among other things, he disclosed the presence
and approximate numbers of the tanks hidden in Oosthoek Wood. This
piece of treachery having come to the knowledge of our Intelligence
Corps, a summary of the disclosures, together with a prophecy as to the
offender’s probable destiny if ever he returned to England, was ordered
to be read out every week on parade throughout the Army. Now that the
war is over, and the prisoners are returned, I have often wondered what
really has happened to Sergeant Phillips. As he appeared to be a man of
some intelligence, he probably has remained in Germany.
As soon as G Battalion was settled down at Lovie Château,
reconnaissance of the area by tank commanders and N.C.O.’s was begun.
Our part in the forthcoming attack had been decided upon a month
before. We were working with General Maxse’s 18th Corps on the left
centre of the 5th Army front. General Elles was opposed to the use of
tanks anywhere north of the Wieltje road; but the corps commander asked
urgently for two companies, and guaranteed that his engineers would, if
necessary, get them to the crossing of the Steenbeek at St Julien. The
action of the tanks, nevertheless, was to be subsidiary to the infantry
assault, as the battle was being conducted on the stereotyped lines
which had failed so often before. 19 and 21 Companies of my battalion
were detailed to the 18th Corps, 20 Company remaining in corps reserve.
D Battalion, for the time being, was in army reserve. The object
of the first day’s attack was the capture of the enemy’s first and
second systems on the Pilkem Ridge, and the securing of the Steenbeek
crossings. This was to be followed on the second day by a push for the
third system and the Passchendaele Ridge beyond; after which it was
hoped to break through in the direction of Thourout simultaneously
with an offensive by the 4th Army on the coast and the landing at
Middelkerke. Our advanced headquarters party of Reconnaissance Officers
had already worked out routes to the front line, and collected much
valuable information about the ground beyond. The first serious
obstacle to tank operations north of Ypres was the famous canal. This
forbidding and ill-omened waterway, lined on both sides by blasted and
withered poplars, haunted by cemeteries, and sunk within high banks
honeycombed with terraces of dug-outs, was crossed between Brielen and
La Brique by a series of earthen causeways. Over one of these, known
as Marengo, a few hundred yards north of the dismal region called
the Dead End of Ypres, the tanks were to pass. The prospect was not
inviting, as the whole canal was shelled on and off every day and
night, especially in the neighbourhood of the causeways; and a single
tank disabled on Marengo would hold up all behind it. There was no
alternative crossing, all the others being engaged for the passage of
artillery and supplies. Beyond the canal a maze of old and new trenches
and wire climbed a gentle slope to the only eminence, if such it can
be called, within the original salient, on the summit of which, about
2000 yards from the front line, the ruins of Frascati Farm lay hidden
among some fine trees. From the farther edge of this timber nothing
but a line of high camouflage netting, strung on poles, interrupted
the view across the slight depression where the front lines ran to the
Pilkem Ridge and the ragged outline of Kitchener’s Wood behind the
second German system. So long as one’s body and legs are covered, one
can look over a parapet with comparative equanimity; but it seemed to
me always a strange thing to stand upright, and entirely unprotected,
behind this fictitious screen of netting, and watch through its meshes
the whole extent of the enemy’s trenches over an area of several miles,
with our shells bursting in clouds of dust about them. The front lines
themselves, on the marshy ground of the hollow below, were on an
average three or four hundred yards apart. Along No Man’s Land, just
in front of and parallel to our trenches, ran an unhappy thoroughfare
called Admiral’s Road, down which, for two years and a half, neither
admirals nor common folk (except the nightly patrols) had ever stepped.
The German front-line trenches took in a number of farms--Mousetrap,
Hampshire, Canadian, Krupp, and others; but these were only names upon
the map. Even the remnants of the buildings had vanished utterly long
before: there was not a brick remaining to mark the sites; nothing
was left but foul water and mud and a few pollarded willows that
somehow had survived the annihilating pestilence of high explosives.
These Flemish farmsteads were surrounded almost invariably by moats
and pools, and the water had now overlapped its ruined confines and
inundated acres of ground on every side. And behind this barrier,
along the crest of the Pilkem Ridge, another series of obliterated and
water-logged farms--Juliet, Oblong, Racecourse, Below--formed outposts
to the second German system. Nor was this the end of these amphibious
obstacles. Beyond the ridge lay what once had been the Steenbeek--a
sluggish stream crawling between muddy banks, ten or fifteen feet in
width and three or four in depth; now a strip of quagmire, believed to
be impassable for tanks except at the ruined bridge of St Julien--an
obvious defile marked down and taped to a yard by the German batteries.
Nor, again, was this all. It was indeed only the beginning. East of the
Steenbeek, Von Armin, commanding the 4th German Army, had extemporised
for defence in a different manner a third series of farmhouses (in
front of his third line), by filling their ruins with reinforced
concrete. Similar strong-points on a smaller scale, known generically
as “pill-boxes,” were dotted thickly about the Pilkem Ridge; but it
was in the area behind, out of our observation, that this type of
pocket-fortress reached its climax of strength and ingenuity. Here also
were the main-battery positions. The enemy had come to realise, after
Arras and Messines, that any front line could be made untenable by a
heavy bombardment, and that even the second line should be regarded
chiefly as a means of delaying and disorganising the assault. The third
line, covered by a forward system of strong-points, was the main zone
of resistance, behind which, in comparative security, reserves could be
massed for a counter-attack. Adapted, by the “pill-box” system, to the
abnormal conditions of the Salient (where deep dug-outs, and in some
places adequate trenches even, were out of the question), this was the
first application of the principle of an elastic “defence in depth,” as
opposed to the rigid obstacle of such fortifications as the Hindenburg
Line. Resistance hardened automatically as the attack progressed. The
field batteries were kept well back. The scheme depended for success
upon the quality of the defending infantry and machine-gunners, who
must be equal to the task of holding isolated posts unsupported for
a period long enough to disorganise and weary the assailants, and
allow the counter-preparations to mature. Upon this personal factor,
under the influence of tanks, the method broke down during our final
offensive a year later; but at the end of 1917 the German _moral_ was
still high, and in the Salient the tanks had few chances of undermining
it.
Such, then, was the position the two companies of G Battalion had to
assist the infantry to capture. On our left the 14th Corps and General
Anthoine’s Frenchmen were attacking without tanks up the Ypres-Staden
railway, and toward the dismal Forest of Houthoulst. South of our
sector the 2nd and 3rd Tank Brigades were operating with the 2nd and
19th Corps respectively against Frezenberg and the frightful region
beyond Hooge. Here the conditions were similar to those with which we
should have to contend: if possible, even worse. The approach-marches
of these brigades were complicated, not only by the canal, but also by
two streams, called the Kemmel Beek and the Lombart Beek, over which
five causeways had to be built. This work, as well as the construction
of splinter-proof shelters, the filling in of smaller dykes and
craters, the bridging of innumerable trenches, and every other form of
engineering device necessary, was performed by the 184th Tunnelling
Company, attached to the Heavy Branch for the operations. One section
of this company worked with each brigade, and all rendered invaluable
service.
III.
The third battle of Ypres was unique in the history of the Tank Corps
in the facilities afforded for preliminary reconnaissance. A natural
prejudice impels me to the conclusion that in this department, as in
all the rest, the work of my own battalion was more thorough than
that of most others; and undoubtedly some of the older units were
inclined to think that because they had been in action on the Somme
they knew everything about tank warfare. This was much as if the
cavalry should believe Pinkie Cleugh to be the last word on mounted
tactics--as sometimes it appears that they do. For much had been done
and more learnt since Flers and Courcelette. In any case, all of us had
exceptional opportunities for preparation in the Salient. It was a pity
they were squandered on so unprofitable a battlefield. The 2nd Brigade
had been in the area since Messines, and the Reconnaissance Officers
of the other two had lived in Oosthoek Wood for a fortnight before the
personnel arrived. By the time section and tank commanders were free
to begin their individual surveys, a great mass of information had
already been gathered and sorted out. Aeroplane photographs had been
collected, special maps prepared, landmarks identified, and routes to
the front line decided upon. And still there was ample time for every
crew to become familiar (so far as was possible from a distance) with
the deplorable country over which it would have to fight. For three
weeks parties of officers, N.C.O.’s, and men of G Battalion went daily
up the line. To begin with, each tank commander walked with his drivers
two or three times over the penultimate approach route from Oosthoek
Wood to Frascati Farm beyond the canal--a distance, by the circuitous
way chosen, of about 10,000 yards. It was divided into two stages. It
led by a narrow and winding by-way from the military road to Hospital
Farm, on the northern edge of the wood, and thence along a track,
known to the whole British Army as Rum Road, to a point north-west of
Brielen village, where there was an enclosure surrounded by trees and
overgrown hedges, which we called Halfway House. Here the tanks of 19
and 21 Companies were to spend X-day, or the day but one before the
battle. During X-Y night they were to move forward again along Rum
Road, past Murat Farm, across Marengo Causeway, and so to Frascati,
lying up throughout Y-day under the trees there. The remaining stage of
the approach-march to the front line at Forward Cottage was a mile in
length. As it was impossible to walk over this in daylight, it was to
be taped by the R.O.’s on the final evening.
The next preparatory step was the reconnaissance of the ground beyond
the German lines. Parties of us would go by lorry to Reigersberg
Château, a dismal modern building, greatly shattered, standing behind a
high wall among trees a mile north-west of Ypres on the Brielen road.
The whole of this region was thick with heavy guns, and there was a
peculiarly obnoxious battery of 8-inch howitzers, hidden behind a hedge
on the roadside opposite the château, which invariably fired with an
ear-splitting blast of sound at the moment when one was standing by the
lorry a dozen yards in front of the muzzles. As the Germans indulged
in a good deal of retaliation in the neighbourhood, Reigersberg was no
place to linger about. A section commander and an R.O. of F Battalion
were blown to pieces one morning by a heavy shell which burst at their
feet in the château grounds; and the gunners who lived there suffered
casualties every day. Leaving this lugubrious mansion with some haste,
therefore, we used to push forward on foot to another unhealthy spot,
Bridge 4 over the canal. This was a timber structure for infantry
and field-guns, built over the wreck of a sunken steamboat. It was
constantly shelled, and I suppose at that time was hit on an average
at least once a day; while if high explosive was not coming over, one
could always expect a few bursts of heavy shrapnel above one’s head.
Owing to the causeways which blocked the canal lower down, the water
here was stagnant and choked with weeds; but in fine weather, if
the German guns were quiet, men usually were bathing in it; and, as
somebody remarked, “it really became more like the Serpentine every
day.” Beyond Bridge 4 we entered the annihilated region of the real
Salient. Along the high canal bank, with its terraces of sand-bagged
dug-outs, named and numbered like suburban thoroughfares, stood the
wreckage of a line of magnificent trees, the counterpart of that on the
west bank. Half of these were mere splintered trunks or lay entirely
prostrate, and those still erect were gashed and torn. They rose
mournfully above the frightful welter of shell-holes and trenches,
the litter of timber and rubbish, the rusted entanglements, and the
patches of marsh lined with unhappy pollards, which sloped up gently
to Frascati and the remains of La Brique. Our route from the bridge
usually took us in one of two directions across this wasted land.
Either we descended at once into trenches and made our way to various
points in the reserve or support lines from which we could obtain a
fair view of the Pilkem Ridge, or we walked above ground with some
disquietude of spirit through Frascati and La Brique to Wilson’s Post,
a concrete observation-point on the forward slope beyond. This journey
never was an unmixed joy. We had to pass through the garden of the last
house (or, to be accurate, what had been the garden of what had been
the last house) in La Brique. At one time the ruins of this building
had been used as a machine-gun post. The Germans, having become aware
of this, shelled it heavily, and the guns were withdrawn. The derelict
house, however, was still an occasional target, and was yet another
point where no sensible man lingered. Wilson’s Post, a quarter of a
mile in front, was a small two-storied tower embedded literally to
its eyelids in the earth, its cranium concealed in willows and other
shrubs. It was approached from La Brique by an unfinished trench about
the depth of a roadside gutter. In the bottom storey, illuminated by a
candle, an orderly sat over a telephone; in the upper chamber--about
five feet square and reached by a ladder--a telescope peered through
two shallow slits on the ground-level and swept from an angle the whole
front over which my battalion was to attack. Sitting on a little bench
with one’s feet dangling over the trap-door, one could see the brown
slope of the Pilkem Ridge, seamed with lighter-coloured lines which
marked the enemy’s trenches, the foliage of Kitchener’s Wood appearing
over the crest, and, away to the left, the debris of the estaminet
called Boche Castle and a few clumps of skeleton trees which, on that
obliterated countryside, served us for landmarks--English Trees,
Marsouin Trees, Hurst Park, and that solitary but useful vegetable
known to us as Lone Tree. (The fate of English Trees, marking the site
of a vanished farm, was followed by us with peculiar interest, and odds
were laid on or against their survival. Originally they were eleven
in number, but our preliminary bombardment thinned their ranks, and
the eclipse of one or another was sedulously recorded, and the vital
information circulated throughout the battalion. About half a dozen, I
think, all considerably the worse for wear, survived the ordeal, and
may be standing yet.) Far beyond these outposts we could see the hazy
woods about Pilkem and Langemarck and Poelcapelle. We were provided
with sketches professing to depict all these features, and even such
details as Langemarck Church and the Institute (whatever that might
be) at Passchendaele; but no two of us could ever agree in identifying
these remote buildings. Of far greater merit was a panorama, taking
in our entire front, drawn from Wilson’s Post by an R.E. officer
named Brennan. This was of real service to us. One singular object, I
remember, situated prominently on the ridge-top in front of Kitchener’s
Wood, puzzled us till the end. It was square in outline and of the size
of a small cottage, only no cottage could be standing there and none
was marked on the map. The map, on the contrary, misled apparently by a
light railway which aeroplane photographs showed running out to it from
the wood, marked it as an ammunition dump! This palpably was absurd,
and was the result of some one making a guess without looking at the
ground. Only a lunatic would erect a dump ten or twelve feet high a
thousand yards from the front line and in full view of the enemy. I saw
this mystery at close quarters for the first time on the afternoon of
1st August, when I was trudging homeward through the mud and rain with
the remains of my crew, and then discovered it to be a large concrete
machine-gun fort, covered with sheets of brown camouflage netting. It
had been hit more than once, probably by the 9.2 shells with which we
bombarded the enemy’s second line; but these huge projectiles had only
cracked the walls. The effect of the concussion inside, however, must
have been terrible. A dead German, with wide-open blue eyes staring
out of a grey face, was lying on his back half out of the entrance,
and no doubt there were others within. I was in no mood for grisly
investigations, and even my crew were too scared and exhausted to
indulge the ruling passion for souvenirs.
Among the other attractions of La Brique and its salubrious
neighbourhood were a couple of trees fitted with iron rungs and used
as occasional o.p.’s, and a third dummy stump made of steel, inside
which the observer insinuated himself. I never ascended the tallest
tree, eighty feet high, and never had the least desire to do so;
but I clambered once up the shorter one, which stood at the head of
the ditch leading to Wilson’s Post. I did not think that the view
obtained therefrom was worth the trouble and anxiety involved. On
another occasion a fellow tank commander, Merchant, and myself were
reconnoitring together from this point. He was up the tree and I was
sitting at the foot of it, asking, like the lady in the poem, “Can you
see anything, Sister Anne?” and wishing he would make haste. He might
have replied, after Bairnsfather’s hero, “They must have seen _me_!”
For immediately after we both heard a familiar whistling crescendo, a
sound whose disturbing quality time cannot stale nor custom wither--the
shriek of an approaching shell. Merchant came down that tree like an
acrobat; and our simultaneous arrival in the ditch coincided with
that of the shell a few yards away. In point of fact, the wretched
last house in La Brique, already adverted to, was again the object of
unmerited suspicion. A succession of projectiles fell about it and
about us, for the shooting was not very good, while we crouched on
all-fours in the unfinished trench, and bobbed up like marionettes
after each explosion to see how big a margin had been granted us. As
this did not appear too generous, we withdrew presently to Wilson’s
Post, and there, a few minutes later, it began to rain gas-shells.
Heaven knows what the Germans saw or thought they saw. Probably the
whole business was mere caprice. There was no one but ourselves moving
above ground for miles around, and we had been very circumspect,
keeping under cover and refraining from flapping large maps about in
the open after the fashion of some of these reconnoitring parties.
Happily, the demonstration was short-lived. When it subsided we hurried
back without undue ceremony through La Brique to Bridge 4, Reigersberg,
and the waiting lorry.
While Reigersberg itself was no sanatorium, the village of Brielen,
through which our transport had to pass on these excursions, became
toward the end of July even more unpopular. Situate on one of the main
thoroughfares into Ypres, with cross-roads running through it from
Vlamertinghe to the canal, it was an obvious target, and under the
continual impact of high-explosive shell it decayed very rapidly. In
the autumn of 1916 it was still inhabited: by the following spring
it was a mere avenue of empty ruins; and when I left the Salient in
October ’17, most of the debris even had been carted away as road
ballast. And during our reconnaissances it was no uncommon thing to
wait anxiously for an hour in the grounds of Reigersberg Château, with
one eye upon the sand-bagged cellars there, watching the fragments of
Brielen, two or three hundred yards up the road, ascending gracefully,
at regular and frequent intervals, into the air.
It may be said that this sort of thing was child’s play to the
conditions endured in the line itself. And so, in one sense,
undoubtedly it was. A walk to Frascati or St Jean and back was, on the
face of it, preferable to a week’s residence in either of those places.
Yet I think that every one who knew the Salient in the summer of 1917
will agree that its most disagreeable feature, during what would be
called inactive periods, was this persistent shelling of back areas. On
any other front one felt moderately safe two miles behind the line, but
never at Ypres. For troops in support there was no real peace east of
Poperinghe. While the front trenches might be wrapped in quiet, shells
would be falling all day in Brielen or Vlamertinghe or even in Oosthoek
Wood. And the reason was obvious. The Salient was very narrow as well
as very pronounced. As a purely military position it was absurd. A gun
of quite moderate calibre, emplaced on either flank, could have fired
right across the chord of the arc. At Boesinghe the enemy actually
was north-west of Ypres: in front of Wytschaete, before the battle of
Messines, he was south-west of it; and between these two points the
distance was only seven miles. From the centre of a line drawn from
one to the other, the Salient projected about four miles. Even after
Messines the line of investment still ran through half a circle, and
commanded, from the concentric Pilkem Ridge, almost all the ground up
to the canal. Within this enclosure, only half the size of the city of
Paris, the country was flat, marshy, and intersected by minor streams
and dykes; while the obstacle of the canal caused all the main roads
from the west, down which our men and supplies must march, to converge
on the crossings at Ypres itself. On these roads, therefore, on the
points where they were cut by lateral thoroughfares, and especially
on the point of convergence, the hostile fire naturally was directed.
And there were a thousand other targets for less concentrated effort.
Troops swarmed everywhere from Ypres to the Belgian frontier; and in
the forward area, in addition to the camps of infantry and gunners,
there were hosts of engineers and labour men digging gun-pits, laying
roads and railways, putting up horse lines and dumps and water systems.
Light and heavy trains moved up and down all day. The Germans were
perfectly aware of this activity; and it was an unlucky battery that
could not score a hit or two in the course of twenty-four hours’
speculative shooting over so congested a countryside.
IV.
Our camp of bell-tents in the copse at Lovie Château, where we spent
our nights, was outside the normal area of this unpleasantness.
Poperinghe, of course, two miles to the south, was shelled for half an
hour or so every morning, often in the evening, and occasionally at
odd hours during the day. The shells passed almost over our camp; and
while one was dressing or preparing to turn in for the night one used
to hear the whistle overhead and then the distant crash and echo in the
unfortunate town. And once we were genuinely entertained by a crisis
nearer at hand. An enterprising 15-inch gun, probably travelling in
luxury on a train, took a few pot-shots at the 5th Army Headquarters in
the château itself. When one or two of these colossal projectiles burst
in the aerodrome across the road, the army became alarmed, assumed
hurriedly the unfamiliar steel helmet, and presently departed, bag
and baggage, for Proven. The Germans, well informed as usual, learnt
almost at once of this translation: the 15-inch gun was turned on the
new refuge; and the Higher Command, choosing the most comfortable
of two evils, came back to Lovie again, greatly to the annoyance of
the Flying Corps, who in the meantime had occupied the château. The
humour of this episode will be apparent to every one who has seen
the vast paraphernalia accompanying a British army headquarters in
the field--the scores of offices, the hosts of B.G.G.S.’s, G.S.O.’s,
A.P.M.’s, clerks, orderlies, and interpreters, the attached French
missions and Belgian missions, and missions from Liberia and Paraguay
and the Great Cham, the numberless boxes of maps and crockery and
returns and red-tape--all of which had to be conveyed in an armada of
cars and lorries from Lovie to Proven and back from Proven to Lovie
again within a fortnight. If three domestic removals are as bad as a
fire, two moves of an army headquarters can be compared only to an
earthquake. After the second hegira, the enemy, feeling no doubt that
a continuance of this barbarous treatment (if it ever came to light)
would bring down upon him the just execration of the civilised world,
diverted his gun to more appropriate targets, and fell back upon an
accepted method of irritating such exalted quarters--namely, bombing.
Bombing, indeed, was a very serious plague throughout the area that
summer; and the subject raises an unpleasant question on which a few
words must be said, both on general grounds and because it affected
the tank units in a peculiar degree. There can be no two opinions as
to who held command of the air (to use the cant phrase) in the Ypres
sector in 1917. Our photographic and gun-spotting machines continued
to perform their dangerous and thankless tasks with unfailing skill
and courage, as they have throughout the war; but their work required
experience, its results could be checked, and it was therefore in the
hands of the best type of officer. The so-called scouts or fighting
machines, unfortunately, came in a different category. In this branch
the Germans appeared to have things very much their own way. During the
Somme battles the losses in the Flying Corps were extremely heavy, and
fell naturally upon the class of pilot which could least be spared.
Afterwards, with the continual growth of the corps, there began that
wholesale raking-in of officers from the highways and byways, and
from the very junior ranks of garage and bicycle-shop assistants--a
policy which has steadily undermined the efficiency and credit of the
force. The pay was high, and the opportunities for shirking unpleasant
duties exceptional. It is not for nothing that the present R.A.F. is
called the Hot Air Force, and has acquired a reputation in the Army
sufficient to damn any organisation that is not exploited continually
for commercial reasons by a wealthy newspaper syndicate. This is not a
mere question of envy or rumour: the facts of the decline are patent
and well known; and to clinch them one has only to recall to mind
the type of flying officer (dressed like an attendant at a cinema
theatre, and usually behaving as such) who swarmed in the London bars
and in the clubs in France, and who afterwards swarmed in Germany.
Half the subalterns to be seen did not wear even the observer’s
single wing--and, to hazard a guess for once, had no desire to wear
it. All cannot have belonged to the equipment branch. I am sorry if
remarks of this kind seem to do injustice to many gallant and capable
pilots. At the close of the war there were, I believe, something
like 30,000 officers in the R.A.F. A third of these may have been,
and probably were, thoroughly efficient; but there remained a heavy
balance of the untrustworthy; and it was for the hard work and devoted
sacrifices of the minority that this discreditable residue received
especial privileges and honours, and was allowed a general licence
of behaviour exceeded only by that of colonial troops, who at least
had the excuse of brilliant service in the field. The evil itself
was fully recognised in the corps, and it is high time some protest
was uttered against the unscrupulous nonsense which has flooded our
newspapers for the past few years. The point, however, that I wish to
bring out at the moment is that the results of employing bad material
for tasks requiring a peculiar degree of nerve and a strong sense of
responsibility were seriously felt for the first time at Ypres in 1917.
The old Somme fighters were dead or captured; and now the back areas of
the Salient were infested day and night by German bombing squadrons.
The Germans, presumably, picked their aviators as they picked their
machine-gunners. They did not lose their heads after a costly battle
and rush to commission thousands of Berlin counter-jumpers, who
might be excellent in the ranks but were useless as officers. The
difficulties of countering night attacks by aeroplanes were obvious;
but it was humiliating as well as unpleasant to have a dozen enemy
machines sailing over the lines two or three times a day, bombing camps
and towns, destroying balloons, driving off the slow and helpless
gun-spotters and photographers (and their escorts), and obtaining
into the bargain much valuable information. During four months in the
area, while this infliction was occurring almost every day, I saw only
one German aeroplane brought down behind our own lines; and this was
destroyed, above two of our aerodromes, by a couple of French pilots.
Possibly our own squadrons were simultaneously bombing Roullers or
Menin. One hopes they were. But every aerodrome was crowded with
fighting machines, which used to perform tricks overhead when all was
quiet, but made no apparent attempt to cut off the enemy’s raiders. One
corps commander informed the squadron attached to him that if he did
not see it do more useful work, he would make every pilot fly for two
additional hours a day.
I have written enough, perhaps too much, on this unsavoury topic. And
it may be asked--What has all this recrimination to do with tanks? It
has, in point of fact, a great deal to do with them. Tank warfare can
be assisted or hindered to a marked degree by aeroplane co-operation
or the lack of it. A man or a tank, or even a column of troops, can
often elude observation from above merely by remaining still. It is
movement which betrays. Infantry, moreover, can always take cover
rapidly; but it is impossible to camouflage a tank in the open in a
few seconds. In consequence it is inadvisable to move tanks during
daylight near the front line, if any of the enemy’s aeroplanes are
likely to be about. In the Salient they were always about; and things
had got to this pitch--that although we were hidden in a wood, with
clearings close at hand where we could have tested our machines secure
from direct observation, _during the whole month of July no tank was
permitted to move a yard except by night_. At any hour of the day some
German aeroplane, unmolested except by “Archies,” which were more
dangerous to us below than to the pilot, might come flying low over
Oosthoek. In my own case, a fortnight before the battle I took over
a new tank just arrived from Erin by night, and driven into the wood
by another crew. I had no opportunity of testing it under way until
we actually moved off on our approach-march to Halfway House on the
evening of 29th July. As was to be expected of a brand-new machine, one
or two mechanical parts were then found to require slight adjustments.
A slipping clutch, which would have been discovered and remedied in a
few minutes during a preliminary trial, gave considerable trouble, and
held up all the tanks behind me for some time.
Secondly, contact aeroplanes can be of the greatest use in battle
by reporting the situation of tanks, of which battalion and company
commanders can have little or no knowledge. Infantry send back runners;
but tanks, except for their pigeons, reserved (when available at all)
for use at definite objectives, have no means as yet of communicating
their whereabouts or condition once they have crossed the front line.
In view of this, arrangements were made with the Flying Corps for tanks
to carry certain permanent marks which would attract the attention of
contact-pilots. Every machine had its number painted in large black
characters on a white ground on top of the cab, and carried in addition
a square of white cloth to be tied on the roof when ditched. The duty
of a contact-pilot, as everybody knows, is to fly at a sufficiently
low altitude to discover the position of his own infantry, and a tank,
even without any distinguishing marks, is more conspicuous than a row
of mud-plastered human figures. But no reliable information, so far
as my battalion was concerned, ever came through from this source: in
fact, I do not think the position of a single tank was reported. Most
of them, of course, were ditched during a large part of the day, and
possibly the other tank commanders acted as I did. When I found myself
hopelessly bogged on the Pilkem Ridge, the last thing I dreamt of doing
was to hang out my conspicuous square of cloth. I was at some pains
even to obliterate with mud the number on my cab. I was convinced that
if any aeroplanes flew low above me, in all probability they would
be Germans. And in fact many ditched tanks, lying well behind our
infantry, were attacked by the enemy’s pilots, who machine-gunned the
crews as they struggled with booms and shovels to get under way again.
The foregoing may seem rather a lengthy and unnecessary digression, but
it is a poor book which one cannot write in one’s own way. And war,
after all, cannot be made or described (as some think) in water-tight
compartments. Each arm is dependent upon the rest, and sees much of
their work. And a fairly long and varied experience has driven home
to most civilian soldiers like myself certain conclusions regarding
the various branches of the British Army in Europe. The cavalry, since
1914-15 (when they fought on foot) have been utterly useless, in part
because they will not see things as they are; the Flying Corps, since
1916, has declined steadily in quality and value; but throughout, for
the infantry, the gunners, and the engineers, on the whole no praise
can be too high.