XXI

THE ASSAULTS ON PASSCHENDAELE

OCTOBER 12

OUR troops went forward again to-day farther up the slopes of the

Passchendaele Ridge, striking north-east towards the village of

Passchendaele itself, which I saw this morning looming through the mist

and the white smoke of shell-fire, with its ruins like the battlements

of a mediaeval castle perched high on the crest.

It has been a day of very heavy fighting, and the supreme success will

only be gained by the spirit of men resolute to win in the face of

continual blasts of machine-gun bullets, heavy shelling, and weather

which has made the ground as bad as ever a battlefield has been. The

enemy, if we may believe what his prisoners say, expected the attack,

and that they did expect it is borne out by the quickness with which

they dropped down their defensive barrage, the violent way in which they

shelled our back areas during the night, and by other unmistakable signs

of readiness. Perhaps the last attack two days ago through the wild gale

and the mud warned them that not even the elements would safeguard them

against us, and that our troops, who had already achieved something that

was next to impossible, would attempt another and greater adventure.

To me these blows through the mud seem the most daring endeavours ever

made by great bodies of men. The strength of the enemy--and he is very

strong still--and the courage of the enemy, which is high among his best

troops, are not the greatest powers which our men are called upon to

overcome in this latest fighting. Given a good barrage, and they are

ready to attack his pill-boxes now that we have broken the first evil

spell of them. But this mud of Flanders, these swamps which lie in the

way, these nights of darkness and rain in the quagmires--those are the

real terrors which are hardest to win through. Yet our men were

confident of their fate to-day, and backed each other with astounding

courage to take the ground they were asked to take; and that pledge

which they made between their battalions was after that night, now three

nights ago, when the Lancashire and Yorkshire men made their march

through the mud which I have described in other messages--eleven hours'

going before they reached their starting-line after frightful

tribulations in the darkness and before they went into the battle, late

for their barrage and exhausted in body, but still with the pluck to

fight through machine-gun fire to their objectives. They did not go as

far as had been hoped, but they did far more than any one might dare

expect in such conditions, and the men in to-day's battle depended for

success upon the starting-line gained for them by those comrades of

North-country England.

The New-Zealanders who went over to-day swore that with any luck, or

even without luck, they would plant their flag high, and among those men

there was a grim, smouldering fire of some purpose which boded ill for

the enemy they should find against them. These are not words of

rhetoric, to give a little colour to the dark picture of war, but the

sober truth of what was in those New Zealand boys' minds yesterday when

they made ready for this new battle.

It was difficult to get the men anywhere near the line of attack, owing

to the foulness of the ground. Those who were in their positions the

night before--that is, on Wednesday night--found that they were not

utterly comfortless in the sodden fields. By a fine stroke of daring and

by the great effort of carriers and transport officers, who risked their

lives in the task, bivouacs were taken up and pegged out in the darkness

under the very nose of the enemy, so that the men should not lie out in

the pouring rain, and before dawn came they were taken away, in order

not to reveal these assemblies. There was food also, and hot drink close

to the fighting-lines, and some of the coldness and horrors of the night

were relieved. A clear line was made for the barrage which would be

fired by our guns this morning. But some troops had still to go up, and

some men had to march through the night as those Lancashire men had

marched up three nights before. They had the same grim adventure. They,

too, fell into shell-holes, groped their way forward blindly in a wild

downpour of rain, lugged each other out of the bogs, floundered through

mud and shell-fire from five in the evening until a few minutes only

before it was time to attack. The enemy was busy with his guns all night

to catch any of our men who might be on the move. He flung down a heavy

barrage round about Zonnebeke, but by good chance it missed one group of

men thereabouts, and scarcely touched any of the others in that

neighbourhood. But his heavy shells were scattered over a wide area, and

came bowling through the darkness and exploding with great upheavals of

the wet earth. Small parties of men dodged them as best they could, and

pitched into shell-holes five feet deep in water when they threatened

instant death. Then gas-shells came whining, with their queer little

puffs, unlike the exploding roar of bigger shells, and the wet wind was

filled with poisonous vapour smarting to the eyes and skin, so that our

men had to put on their gas-masks and walk like that in a worse

darkness. These things, and this way up to battle, might have shaken the

nerves of most men, might even have unmanned them and weakened them by

the fainting sickness of fear. But it only made the New-Zealanders

angry. It made them angry to the point of wild rage.

"To Hell with them," said some of them. "We won't spare them when we go

over. We will make them pay for this night." They used savage and

flaming words, cursing the enemy and the weather and the shell-fire and

the foulness of it all.

I know the state of the ground, for I went over its crater-land this

morning to look at this flame of fire below the Passchendaele spur. I

had no heavy kit like the fighting men, but fell on the greasy

duck-boards as they fell, and rolled into the slime as they had rolled.

The rain beat a tattoo on one's steel helmet. Every shell-hole was

brimful of brown or greenish water; moisture rose from the earth in a

fog. Our guns were firing everywhere through the mist and thrust sharp

little swords of flame through its darkness, and all the battlefields

bellowed with the noise of these guns. I walked through the battery

positions, past enormous howitzers which at twenty paces distance shook

one's bones with the concussion of their blasts, past long muzzled high

velocities, whose shells after the first sharp hammer-stroke went

whinnying away with a high fluttering note of death, past the

big-bellied nine-point-twos and monsters firing lyddite shells in clouds

of yellow smoke. Before me stretching away round the Houthulst Forest,

big and dark and grim, with its close-growing trees, was the

Passchendaele Ridge, the long, hummocky slopes for which our men were

fighting, and our barrage-fire crept up it, and infernal shell-fire,

rising in white columns, was on the top of it, hiding the broken houses

there until later in the morning, when the rain ceased a little, and the

sky was streaked with blue, and out of the wet gloom Passchendaele

appeared, with its houses still standing, though all in ruins. There

were queer effects when the sun broke through. Its rays ran down the wet

trunks and the forked naked branches of dead trees with a curious,

dazzling whiteness, and all the swamps were glinting with light on their

foul waters, and the pack-mules winding along the tracks, slithering and

staggering through the slime, had four golden bars on either side of

them when the sun shone on their 18-pounder shells. There was something

more ghastly in this flood of white light over the dead ground of the

battlefields, revealing all the litter of human conflict round the

captured German pill-boxes, than when it was all under black

storm-clouds.

It was at the side of a pill-box famous in the recent fighting that I

watched the progress of our barrage up the slopes of Passchendaele, and

it was only by that fire and by the answering fire of the German guns

with blacker shell-bursts that one could tell the progress of our men.

"How's it going?" asked a friend of two officers of the Guards who came

down the duck-boards from Poelcappelle way.

"Pretty well," was the answer. "We have cut off four Boche guns with our

barrage, though we only had a little way to go--on the left, you know."

"Big fellows?"

"No, pip-squeak. The usual seventy-seven."

It seemed that there had been a check on the left. Our men had come up

against abominable machine-gun fire. On the right things were doing

better. Our line was being pushed up close to Passchendaele, within a

few hundred yards or so. Some prisoners were coming down--there had been

a lot of bayonet fighting, and a lot of killing. The wounded are getting

back already, most of them with machine-gun wounds, the worst of them

with shell wounds. The New-Zealanders had hardly gone over before German

flares rose to call on the guns. The guns did not answer for some little

while; but instantly there was the chattering fire of many machine-guns;

and from places above the Ypres-Roulers railway, and all the length of

the Goudberg spur of the Passchendaele, where there were many

blockhouses and concrete streets, there was poured out a sweeping

barrage of bullets.

Our men, advancing on all sides of the Passchendaele Ridge and right up

to the edge of Houthulst Forest, were everywhere checked a while by the

swampy ground. The streams, or beeks, that intersect this country, like

the Lekkerbolerbeek and the Ravelbeek, had lost all kind of bounds, and

by the effect of shell-fire had flowed out into wide bogs. Here and

there the men crossed more easily, and that led to some parts of the

line getting farther forward then others and so to being enfiladed on

the right or left. It is on the left that we have had most difficulty,

round about Wolfe Copse and Marsh Bottom. On the right it is reported

that some of the Anzacs have been seen going up across the slopes of

Crest Farm, which is some 500 yards from Passchendaele village, on the

heights of the ridge. At the present time it is impossible to tell more

about this battle than to say it is being fought desperately. Our airmen

are unable to bring back exact news owing to the darkness which has

again descended, and all that is known so far is that our men are making

progress in spite of the deadly machine-gun fire against them, and that

they are resolute to go on. The enemy is fighting hard, and his Jaegers,

with green bands round their caps, and the men of the 223rd Reserve

Division, have not surrendered easily, though many of them are now our

prisoners. It is raining again heavily, and the mists have deepened.

XXII

ROUND POELCAPPELLE

OCTOBER 14

To-day there was a fine spell, though yesterday, after Friday's battle,

it was still raining, and looked as if it might rain until next April or

March. Our soldiers cursed the weather, cursed it with deep and lurid

oaths, cursed it wet and cursed it cold, by day and by night, by

duck-boards and mule-tracks, by shell-holes and swamps, by Ravelbeek and

Broenbeek and Lekkerbolerbeek. For it was weather which robbed them of

victory on Friday and made them suffer the worst miseries of winter

warfare, and held them in the mud when they had set their hearts upon

the heights. It was the mud which beat them. Man after man has said that

to me on the day of battle and yesterday.

"Fritz couldn't have stopped us," said an Australian boy, warming his

hands and body by a brazier after a night in the cold slime, which was

still plastered about him. "It was the mud which gave him a life

chance."

"It was the mud that did us in," said an officer of the Berkshires,

sitting up on a stretcher and speaking wearily. "We got bogged and

couldn't keep up with the barrage. That gave the German machine-gunners

time to get to work on us. It was their luck."

A young Scottish Borderer, shivering so that his teeth chattered, spoke

hoarsely, and there was no warmth in him except the fire in his eyes.

"We had a fearful time," he said, "but it was the spate of mud that kept

us back, and the Germans took advantage of it."

"Whenever we got near to Fritz he surrendered or ran," said a young

sergeant of the East Surreys. "We should have had him beat with solid

ground beneath us, but we all got stuck in the bog, and he came out of

his blockhouses and machine-gunned us as we tried to get across the

shell-holes, all filled like young ponds, and sniped us when we could

not drag one leg after the other."

No proof is needed of the valour of our men. It is idle to speak of it,

because for three years they have shown the height of human courage in

the most damnable and deadly places. But I have known nothing finer in

this war than the quality of the talk I have heard among the men who

fought all Friday after a night exposure in wild rain, and lay out all

that night in water-pools under gun-fire, and came back again yesterday

wounded, spent, bloody and muddy, cramped and stiff, cold to the

marrow-bones, and tired after the agony of the long trail back across

the barren fields. They did not despair because they had not gained all

they had hoped to gain. "We'll get it all right next time," said man

after man among them. They all stated the reasons for their bad luck.

"If you step off a duck-board you go squelch up to the knees, and

handling them big shells is no joke. All that means delay in getting up

ammunition." This was from a young soldier who had been flung 50 yards

and senseless away from a group of comrades who were all killed by a

big shell-burst. His senses had come back, and a quiet, shrewd judgment

of all he had seen and his old faith that our men can win through every

time if they have equal chances with the enemy. That faith, that

confidence in their own fighting quality, was not dimmed because on

Friday they did not go far. The fire of it, the beauty of it, the

simplicity of it shone in the eyes of these men, who were racked by

aches and shot through with pain, all befouled by the mud, which was in

the very pores of their skin, and seared by remembrances of tragic

things. To command soldiers like that should be the supreme joy of their

officers, and indeed there is not one of our officers who does not think

so, and is not proud of them with a pride that is full of comradeship

for his good company. Napoleon's Old Guard was not of better stuff than

these boys from English farms and factories, Scottish homesteads,

Australian and New Zealand sheep-farm runs.

In these recent battles home troops and overseas troops have been mixed

together in the mud of battlefields, and they come down together out of

the shell-fire to field dressing-stations, waiting to have their wounds

dressed and telling their tales of the fighting. There is no difference

there between them. They are all figures carved out of the same clay,

with faces and hands of the tint of clay, like men risen out of wet

graves. A moist steam rises from them as they group round the braziers,

and they know each other--Australian and English lad, Scot and Welsh,

Irish, New-Zealander--as comrades who have taken the same risks,

suffered the same things, escaped from death by the same kind of

miracle. They talk in low voices. There is no bragging among them; no

wailing; no excited talk. Quietly they tell each other of the things

that happened to them and of the things they saw, and it is the naked

truth, idle sometimes as truth itself. So when they say, as I heard them

say yesterday, "It is all right, it was only the mud that checked us,"

one knows that this is truth in the hearts of brave men, the truth of

the fine faith that is in them.

I told in my last message how the enemy was ready for attack and tried

to prevent it, before it started, by violent shelling over our back

areas, all through Thursday night, mixing his high explosives with

gas-shells and trying to catch our men on the move and our batteries

deep in the mud. It is certain that his aeroplanes, flying low through

mists, saw great traffic behind the lines and the work of thousands of

men laying down new tracks and getting forward with supplies. That could

not be hidden from them. We did not try to hide it, but worked in the

daylight under the eyes of their observers in Passchendaele and in Crest

Farm below it, and on the high ground above Poelcappelle, so that they

could see the tide of all this energy when the gunners, pioneers,

engineers, transports drivers, mule leaders, and the long winding

columns of troops surged up the arteries of the battlefields and choked

them about the Piccadilly Circus of the crater-land.

It was a supreme defiance of the enemy's power, a challenge louder than

any herald's trumpet announcing the beginning of a new battle. The enemy

accepted the challenge, though not, as we know, with any gladness of

heart. Behind his lines there was disorder and dismay, and his

organization had been horribly strained by the rapid series of blows

which had fallen on him and by his great losses. His local reserves had

been flung together anyhow, to meet the pressure we had put upon him.

Remnants of battalions were mixed up with other remnants, and our

prisoners are from many units. These divisions of his which have

withstood the brunt of this recent fighting, like the 195th and the 16th

and the 227th, were horribly mauled and broken, and other divisions

coming up to relieve them were caught by our long-range guns far back

from the lines, and lost their way in the swamps which are on their side

of the battlefield as well as on ours, and struggled forward in the

darkness and shell-fire to positions hard to find by troops new to this

ground. Their High Command issued new orders hurriedly, and made

desperate efforts to strengthen their lines. They put up new apron-wire

defences around their blockhouses. All the heavy machine-guns of the

supporting troops were sent forward to the front lines to reinforce

those already in position in their blockhouses and organized shell-holes

between the blockhouses and the narrow streets of concrete. Never before

did the enemy mass so many machine-guns on his front for continuous

barrage over a wide region, and to defend the last spurs of

Passchendaele. He had machine-guns up trees as well as on the ground,

and he scattered his riflemen among the shell-craters with orders to

shoot until they were killed or captured.

It is fair to these men to say that they obeyed their orders and fought

on Friday with most fierce courage. It was only here and there that

small bodies of German troops, caught in our barrage and nerve-broken by

the long agony of lying in water under a ceaseless shell-fire, ran

forward to our men as soon as the first brown lines appeared out of the

mud and surrendered. The men behind the machine-guns opened fire at the

moment of attack, and it was the noise of this light artillery, the

long-drawn swish of its bullets whipping the ground, and a devil's

tattoo of groups of machine-guns hidden up the slopes, that broke upon

our men as soon as they began to make their way through the mud.

I have already told how many of our men had spent the night. Large

bodies of them had lain out since Wednesday. Of these some had been

luckier than others, getting hot drink and food and shelter under

tarpaulin tents which did not keep them dry, but kept off the full force

of the beating rains. Others, not so lucky, had to lie in shell-holes

half full, or quite full, of ice-cold water, and rations had gone

astray, as many ration parties could not get up through the hostile

barrage or were bogged somewhere down below; and for some men at least

there was not the usual drop of rum to warm the "cockles of their

hearts" and to bring back a little glow of life to their poor numbed

limbs. Other men had spent the night in marching, spurred on by the

hateful fear of being too late to take their place in the battle-line,

so that their comrades would not have their help, but spurred to no

quickness because every yard of ground had its obstacle and its ditch,

and it was a crawl all the way, with many slips and falls and shouts for

help.

It was pitch-dark, and the rain beat against these men, driven by the

savage wind, plucking at their capes, buffeting their steel helmets,

straining at the straps of their packs, slashing them across the face.

Their boots squelched deep in the mud and made a queer, sucking noise as

these single files of dark figures went shuffling across along slimy

duck-boards, a queer noise which I heard when I went up with some of

them on the morning of the battle over duck-board tracks. Some of them

lost the duck-boards and went knee-deep into bogs, and waist-deep into

shell-holes, and neck-deep into swamps. In spite of all the

frightfulness of the night, the coldness, the weariness, and the

beastliness of this floundering in mud and shell-fire, they went forward

into the battle with grim, set faces, and attacked the places from which

the machine-gun fire came in blasts. The New-Zealanders attacked many

blockhouses and strong points immediately in front of their first

objective on the left above the Ypres-Roulers railway, and on the way to

the marsh bottom and rising slope of the Goudberg spur, where at

Bellevue the enemy's machine-guns were thickly clustered.

Below that, by Heine House and Augustus, the Australian troops were

trying to work their way forward to the hummock of Crest Farm, barring

the way to Passchendaele, and up on the left centre, from the

cross-roads and cemetery of Poelcappelle, the Scottish and English

battalions--Berkshires, East Surreys, West Kents, and others--assaulted

the brewery, which has been captured twice and twice lost, and a row of

buildings in heaps of ruin on the Poelcappelle road, which the Germans

use as cover for their machine-gunners. Many of these outposts were

captured by groups. Our men worked round then and rushed them, in spite

of the streams of bullets which pattered around them so that many fell

in the first attempts. Here and there the enemy fought fiercely to the

last, and fell under the bayonets of our men. Here and there, in the

open ground to the right of Poelcappelle and on the ground below

Passchendaele, batches of German soldiers made little fight, but came

rushing out of their holes with their hands up, terror-stricken.

But machine-gun fire never ceased from the higher ground, from tall

masts of branchless trees, from shell-craters beyond the reach of our

men. Our barrage travelled ahead, and slow as it was I saw it creeping

up the lower slopes of the Passchendaele ridge for the second objective

on Friday morning--our men could not keep pace with it. They were stuck

in the swamps at Marsh Bottom in the Lekkerbolerbeek below Poelcappelle

and in the bogs below Crest Farm. They plunged into these bogs, fiercely

cursing them, struggling to get through them to the enemy, but the men

could do nothing with their legs held fast in such slime, nothing but

shout to comrades to drag them out. While they struggled German snipers

shot at them with a cool aim, and the machine-gun bullets of the deadly

barrage lashed across the shell-craters.

Australian troops on the right made good and reached the edge of the

hummock called Crest Farm. Some of them swarmed up it and fought and

killed the garrison there, but beyond was another knoll with

machine-gunners and riflemen, and as our men came up to the top of Crest

Farm they were under close and deadly fire. They would have held their

ground here if they could have been supported on the left, but the

New-Zealanders were having a terrible time in Marsh Bottom and Bellevue,

and could not make much headway because of the deadly fire which came

down from the spur on which Bellevue is perched. All this time it was

raining hard, making the ground worse than before, and the wet mists

deepened, preventing all visibility for our machines working with the

guns. Orders were given not to continue the second stage of the attack,

because the weather was too bad, and the Australians on the right centre

withdrew their line in order not to have an exposed flank. In the

afternoon the enemy's heavy artillery, which had been very hesitating

and uncertain during the first stages of the attack, began to barrage

the ground intensely, and continued this fire all the night.

Meanwhile close and fierce fighting was all about Poelcappelle. English

and Scottish troops entered the ruins of the village, in spite of the

waves of machine-gun bullets which girdled it, drove the Germans out of

the brewery buildings for a time, fought their way among the brick-heaps

and ruined houses, killed many men who held out there, and with bayonet

and rifle defended themselves against counter-attacks which came down

the Poelcappelle road. It was as savage and desperate fighting as any

episode in this war at close quarters, without mercy on either side, one

man's life for another's. Our men were reckless and fierce. They fought

in small parties, with or without officers. Ground was gained and lost

by yards, and men fought like wild beasts across the broken walls and

ditches and shell-craters which go by the name of Poelcappelle. It was

five o'clock in the evening that another strong counter-attack by the

enemy came down Poelcappelle road and drove in our advanced posts. The

brewery then became a sort of No Man's Land--an empty shell between

opposing sides. Our men were spent after all that night and day in the

mud and all this fighting, and now dusk was creeping down, and it was

hard to see who was friend and who was enemy among the figures that

crawled about in the slime.

It was the turn for stretcher-bearers, those men who work behind the

fighting-lines and then come to gather up the human wreckage off it.

With great heroism they had worked all day under heavy fire, and now

went on working without thought of self. They were visible to the enemy,

and their Red Cross armlets showed their mission. Away on the slopes of

Passchendaele his stretcher-bearers could be seen working too. One body

of 200 men came out, waving the Red Cross flag, with stretchers and

ambulances, and went gleaning in these harvest-fields, and no shot of

ours went over to them. But on our side shots from German snipers were

still flying and our stretcher-bearers were hit. Three of them carrying

one stretcher were killed, and the officer with them directing this work

near Poelcappelle was fired with a flame of anger. He seized a Red Cross

flag and made his way very quickly over the shell-holes towards the

enemy's position, and standing there, this officer of the R.A.M.C.

shouted out a speech which rang high above the noise of gun-fire and all

the murmur of the battlefield.

Perhaps what he said was quite incoherent and wild. Perhaps no man who

heard him could understand a word of what he said, but there in the

shell-holes hidden from him in the mud were listening men with loaded

rifles, and they may have raised their heads to look at that single

figure with the flag. They understood what he meant. His accusing figure

was a message to them. After that there was no deliberate sniping of

stretcher-bearers, though they still had to go through shell-fire. It

was hard on the wounded that night. The lightly wounded made their way

back as best they could, and it was a long way back, and a dark way back

over that awful ground. God knows how they managed it, these men with

holes in their legs and mangled arms and bloody heads. They do not know.

"I thought I should never get back," said many of them yesterday. "It

was bad enough going up, when we were strong and fit. At the end of the

journey we could hardly drag our limbs along to get near the enemy. But

coming down was worse."

They fell not once but many times, they crawled through the slime and

then fell into deep pits of water with slippery sides, so that they

could hardly get out. They lay down in the mud and believed they must

die, but some spark of vitality kept alive in them, and a great desire

for life goaded them to make another effort to go another hundred yards.

They cried out incoherently, and heard other cries around them, but

were alone in some mud-track of these battlefields with a great

loneliness of the soul. One man told me of his night like that, told me

with strange smiling eyes that lightened up the mud mask of his face

under a steel hat that was like an earthenware pot on his head. All the

time he opened and shut his hands very slowly and carefully, and looked

at them as things separate from himself. They had become quite dead and

white in the night, and were now getting back to life and touch from the

warmth of a brazier over which he crouched.

"I crawled a thousand yards or so," he said, "and thought I was

finished. I had no more strength than a baby, and my head was all queer

and dizzy-like, so that I had uncommon strange thoughts and saw things

that weren't there. The shells kept coming near me, and the noise of

them shook inside my head so that it went funny. For a long time while I

lay there I thought I had my chums all round me, and that made me feel a

kind of comfortable. I thought I could see them lying in the mud all

round with just their shoulders showing humped up and the tops of their

packs covered in mud. I spoke to them sometimes and said, 'Is that you,

Alf?' or 'Come a bit nearer, mate.' It didn't worry me at first because

they didn't answer. I thought they were tired. But presently something

told me I was all wrong. Those were mud-heaps, not men. Then I felt

frightened because I was alone. It was a great, queer kind of fear that

got hold of me, and I sat up and then began to crawl again just to get

into touch with company, and I went on till daylight came and I saw

other men crawling out of shell-holes and some of them walking and

holding on to each other. So we got back together."

They came back to the field dressing-stations, where there was warmth

for them and hot drinks, and clean bandages for their wounds; and groups

of men, who had fought with the same courage, and now, in spite of all

they had endured, spoke brave words, and said it was not the enemy that

had checked them but only the mud. Their spirit had not been beaten, for

no hardships in the world will ever break that.

But while I was talking with these men a figure came and sat on a bench

among them speechless, because no one understood his tongue. It was a

wounded German prisoner, and I saw from his shoulder-strap that he

belonged to the 233rd Regiment of the 119th Division. Among all these

men of ours who spoke with a fine hopefulness of what they would do next

time he was hopeless. "We are lost," he said. "My division is ended. My

friends are all killed." When asked what his officers thought, he made a

queer gesture of derision, with one finger under his nose when he says

"Zut." "They think we are 'kaput' too; they only look to the end of the

war."

"And when do they think that will come?" He said, "God willing, before

the year ends."

In civilian life he was a worker in an ammunition factory at Thuringen,

by the Black Forest. He had seen many English there, and never thought

he should fight against them one day. His father, who is forty-seven, is

in the war. He himself looked a man of that age--old and worn, with a

week's beard on his chin; but when I asked him his age he replied, "I am

twenty-one. Last night I was twenty-one, when I lay after three days in

a shell-hole--['ein granatenloch']--and your men helped me out because I

was wounded."

"What do you think of our men?" he was asked, and he said, "They are

good. Your artillery is good. It is very bad for us. We are 'kaput.'"

On one side of the fire were the men who think they are winning,

whatever checks they may have, and who always attack with that faith in

their hearts. On the other side was the man who said "We are finished,"

and sat huddled up in despair. All of them had suffered the same things.

To-day the sky is clear again, and the pale gold of autumn sunlight lies

over the fields, and all the woods behind the lines are clothed in

russet foliage. It is two days late, this quiet of the sky, and if

Friday had been like this there would have been a flag of ours on the

northern heights of Passchendaele Ridge. But still the gunners go on

with their toil, those wonderful gunners of ours, who get very little

sleep and very little rest and go down for an hour or two into a hole in

the earth in those sodden fields where all day long and all night there

is the tumult of bombardment. Piles of shells lie on the ground, heaps

around them, and behind men are labouring to bring up more; and across

the battlefields, strangely close to the actual fighting-line, black

trains go steaming along rails which hundreds of men have risked their

lives to lay a hundred yards, so that the guns shall be fed and the

gunners have no respite. On the left of the line there is blue among

the brown of our armies, and on the morning of the battle I saw French

limbers and transport wagons using the same tracks as our own, and heard

the rattle of the "soixante-quinze" again below Houthulst Forest, where

there are still leaves on the trees and the beauty of a dense yellowing

foliage is there beyond all those other woods where there are only fangs

and stumps of trees in the fields where our men have fought.

* * * * *

OCTOBER 23

The fighting yesterday east of Poelcappelle and on the right of the

French by Houthulst Forest across the Ypres-Staden railway showed a

curious inequality in the strength and determination of the German

defence. The French themselves had easy going, swinging up from Jean

Bart House across some trench works and through a cluster of

blockhouses. The German artillery-fire was slight against them, so that

their losses are very few--though they were held a while in the centre

by machine-gun fire--and it seems likely that the French gas-shells,

fired over the enemy's batteries before the attack, had had a paralysing

effect on some of the German gunners. Whatever the cause, there was a

strange absence of high explosives, and the line was not thickly held by

the men of the 40th Division, who have lately come from Russia. One

officer and a score of men were captured, and a number of dead lie about

the blockhouses, killed by the French bombardment. The others fled into

the forest. Behind them they left two field-guns.

East of Poelcappelle and on the right of our attack the German infantry

were also weak in their resistance, and our men of the Norfolk and Essex

Regiments who advanced hereabouts did not have much trouble with them at

close quarters. What trouble there was came from a machine-gun barrage

farther back, which whipped over the shell-craters and whistled about

the ears of our assaulting troops. The heavy gunning that we have put

over this ground for more than a week, with special concentration on

strong points like the ruined brewery outside the scrap-heap village of

Poelcappelle and the other blockhouses, had made this area a most

unhealthy neighbourhood for German garrisons, and they had withdrawn

some of their strength to safer lines, leaving small outposts, with

orders to hold out at all costs--orders easy to give and hard to obey in

the case of men dejected and shaken by a long course of concussion and

fear.

A Bavarian division, the Fifth Bavarian Reserve, had been living in

those pill-boxes and shell-holes until two nights ago, and whatever the

German equivalent may be of "fed up" they were that to the very neck.

Some of our Suffolk and Berkshire boys had taken prisoners among these

Bavarians on days and nights before the attack, and these men made no

disguise of their disgust at their conditions of life. Like other

Bavarians taken elsewhere, they complained that they were being made

catspaws of the Prussians, and put into the hottest parts of the line to

save Prussian skins. Some of the Bavarian battalions have had an

epidemic of desertion to the back areas, in the spirit of "I want to go

home." A fortnight ago there was a case of thirteen men who set off for

home. A few of them actually reached Nuremberg, and others were arrested

at Ghent.

One strange and gruesome sign of trouble behind the German firing-line

was found by one of our Cameronians the other day after an advance. It

was a German officer bound and shot. Opposite Poelcappelle the German

Command thought it well to pull out the 5th Bavarian Reserve and replace

them two nights ago by Marines of the 3rd Naval Division, who are stout

fellows, whatever their political opinions may be after the recent

mutiny at Wilhelmshaven, from which some of them have come. On our left

centre yesterday they fought hard and well, with quick counter-attacks,

but opposite Poelcappelle they did not resist in the same way and did

not come back yesterday to regain the ground taken by our men of the

Eastern Counties.

The Norfolk and Essex battalions had to make their way over bad ground.

In spite of a spell of dry weather one night of rain had been enough to

turn it all to sludge again and to fill and overflow the shell-holes,

which had never dried up. The Lekkerbolerbeek has become a marsh

waist-deep for men, not so much by rain-storms as by shell-storms which

have torn up its banks and slopped its water over the plain. Before the

attack yesterday morning our air photographs taken in very low flights

showed the sort of ground our men would have to cross. Everywhere the

shell-craters show up shinily in the aerial photographs, with their

water reflecting the light like silver mirrors. Higher up there are

floods about Houthulst Forest extending to the place where the enemy

keeps his guns behind the protection of the water, and no lack of

rain-filled shell-holes on each side of the Ypres-Staden railway.

Bad going; but our battalions went well, keeping close to their

whirlwind barrage of fire and keeping out of the water-pits as best they

could, and scrambling up again when they fell over the slimy ground.

Manchesters and Lancashire Fusiliers, Cheshires, Gloucesters, and Royal

Scots; Northumberland Fusiliers, Suffolks and Norfolks, Essex and

Berkshires--how good it is to give those good old names--went forward

yesterday morning in the thick white mist, and took all the ground they

had been asked to take whether it was hard or easy. It was hardest to

take, and hardest to hold, on the right of Houthulst Forest and on the

left of the Ypres-Staden railway. Here the enemy held his line in

strength, and protected it with a fierce machine-gun barrage and

enfilade fire from many batteries which were quick to get into action.

Houthulst Forest, in spite of all the gas that has soaked it, was full

of German troops of the 26th Reserve Division, under stern orders to

defend it to the death, with another division in support, and the

Marines on their right. They had many concrete emplacements in the cover

of the forest, from which they were able to get their machine-guns into

play, and along the Staden railway there were blockhouses not yet

destroyed by our bombardment, which were strongholds from which they

were not easily routed. There was hard fighting by the Royal Scots for

some huts along the railway, and after holding them they had to withdraw

in the face of a heavy counter-attack, which the enemy at once sent down

the line. Elsewhere the Manchesters had a similar experience, coming

under heavy cross-fire and then meeting the thrust of German storm

troops. They and the Lancashire Fusiliers behaved with their usual fine

courage, and were slow to give ground at one or two points, where they

were forced to draw back two hundred yards or so. The Cheshires and the

Gloucesters were severely tried, but the Gloucesters especially held out

yesterday in an advanced position, with the most resolute spirit against

fierce attacks and great odds, and still hold their ground. At daybreak

to-day, after all the exhaustion of yesterday and a cold wet night and

heavy fire over them, they met another attack, shattered it, and took

twenty prisoners. That is a feat of courage which only men out here who

have gone through such a day and night--and there are many thousands of

them--can properly understand and admire. It is the courage of men tried

to the last limit of human will-power and sustained by some burning

fire of the spirit in their coldness and their weariness. The

Northumberland Fusiliers, at another part of the line, and the Cheshires

and Lancashire Fusiliers dug in round an old blockhouse, using their

rifles to break up the bodies of Germans who tried to force through. At

night, or rather at eight o'clock last evening, when it was quite dark,

the enemy regained a post, but could do no more than that, and it was a

small gain. On the whole the progress made yesterday was good, and

considering the state of the ground, still our greatest trouble, was a

splendid feat of arms by those men of the old county regiments who are

given the honour they deserve by public mention.

The enemy losses were heavy. All last week they were heavy, owing to the

ceaseless fire of our guns, and the dead that lie about the ground of

this new advance, to a thousand yards in depth, show that his men have

suffered.

XXIII

THE CANADIANS COME NORTH

OCTOBER 26

Once again our troops, English and Canadians, have attacked in rain and

mud and mist. It is the worst of all combinations for attack, and during

the last three months, even on the dreadful days in August never to be

forgotten by Irish battalions and Scots, they have known that

combination of hostile forces not once but many times, when victory more

complete than the fortune of war has given us yet, though we have had

victories of real greatness, hung upon the moisture in the clouds and

the difference between a few hours of sunshine and the next storm.

To-day our men of the 5th Division have again attacked Polderhoek

Chateau, the scene of many fights before, and taken many prisoners from

that 400 men of four German companies who were its garrison, holding the

high ruins which looked down into swamps through which our men had to

wade. They have fought their way to the vicinity of Gheluvelt. This

ground is sacred to the memory of the British soldiers who fought and

died there three years ago. One of our airmen, flying low through the

mist and rain-squalls, is reported to have seen Germans running out of

Gheluvelt Chateau, a huddle of broken walls now after this three years'

war, and escaping down the Menin road. Nothing is very definite as I

write from that part of the line, as nothing can be seen through the

darkness of the storm and few messages come back out of the mud and

mist.

Northwards the Canadians have taken many "pill-boxes" and an uncounted

number of prisoners--not easily, not without tragic difficulties to

overcome in the valleys of those miserable beeks, which have been spilt

into swamps, and up the slopes of the Passchendaele spur, such as

Bellevue, with its concrete houses which guard the way to the crest.

North still, beyond Poelcappelle, where the Broenbeek and the

Watervlietbeek intermingle their filthy waters below two spurs, which

are thrust out from the main ridge like the horns of a bull, south of

Houthulst Forest, battalions of the London Regiment with Artists Rifles

and Bedfords have attacked the enemy in his stone forts through his

machine-gun barrages and have sent back some of their garrisons and

struggled forward up the slopes of mud in desperate endeavour. And on

the left of us this morning the French made an advance where all advance

seemed fantastic except for amphibious animals, through swamps

thigh-deep for tall men. This was west of a place falsely named

Draeibank, and surrounded by deeper floods, which would have made the

most stalwart "Poilus" sink up to their necks, and, with their packs on,

drown. It was no good going into that, though on the right edge of the

deep waters some French companies waded through and took a blockhouse,

with a batch of prisoners and machine-guns.

West of Draeibank there were several blockhouses, but their concrete had

been smashed under the French bombardments, and those Germans who had

not been killed fled behind the shelter of the waters. Their barrage of

gun-fire fell heavily soon after the attack began by the French, but for

the most part into the floods which our "Poilu" friends did not try to

cross, so that they jeered at these water-spouts ahead of them.

Our troops had a longer way to go and a worse way, and it has been a day

of hard fighting in most miserable conditions. Their glory is that they

have done these things I have named on such a day. The marvel is to me

that they were able to make any kind of attack over such ground as this.

In those vast miles of slime there has been from six o'clock this

morning enough human heroism, suffering, and sacrifice to fill an epic

poem and the eyes of the world with tears. It is wonderful what these

men of ours will do. But in telling their tale they smile a little

grimly in remembrance, or say just simply: "It was hell!"

There is more in a battle than fighting. What goes before it to make

ready for the hour of attack is as vital, and demands as much, perhaps a

little more, courage of soul. Before this battle there was much to be

done, and it was hard to do. Guns had to be moved, not far, but moved,

and out of one bog into another bog--those monsters of enormous weight,

which settle deeply into the slime. To be in time for this morning's

barrage, gunners, already worn, craving sleep and silence, dog-weary of

mud and noise after weeks and months of great battles, had to work like

Trojans divinely inspired to win another day's victory, and they spurred

themselves harder than their horses in this endeavour. They were often

under shell-fire. Not only the gunners, but all the transport men, all

the pioneers and working parties have done their utmost. Battalions of

fighting men, busy not with their rifles but with shovels and

duck-boards, worked in the mud--mud baulking all labour, swallowing up

logs, boards, gun-wheels, shells, spades, and the legs of men, the slime

and filthy water slopping over all the material of war urgently wanted

for this morning's "show." The enemy tried to harass the winding teams

of pack-mules staggering forward under a burden of ammunition boxes,

rations, every old thing that men want if they must fight. Those mule

leaders and transport men do not take a lower place than the infantry

who went away to-day. They took as many risks, and squared their jaws to

the ordeal of it all like those other men. The fighting troops went

marching up or driving up in the rain. Far behind the Front the roads

were filled with dense surging traffic, which we out here will always

see and hear in our dreams after peace has come, the great never-ending

tide of human life going forward or coming back, as one body of men

relieve those who have gone before. Rain washed their faces, so that

they were red with the smart of it. It slashed down their mackintosh

capes and beat a tattoo on their steel helmets. On the tops of London

buses, the old black buses which once went pouring up Piccadilly before

they came out to these dirty roads of war, all the steel helmets were

tilted sideways as the wind struck aslant the muddy brown men with

upturned collars on their way up to the fighting-lines.

But last night was fine. The sky cleared and the stars were very

shining. Orion's Belt was studded with bright gems. It was like a night

of frost, when the stars have a sharper gleam. Away above the trees

there was a flash of gun-fire, red spreading lights, and sudden quick

stabs of fire. The guns were getting busy again. "A great night for

bombing," said an officer; "and good luck for to-morrow." Our night

patrols were already out. In the garden where that officer spoke there

was a white milky radiance, so that all the trees seemed insubstantial

as in a fairy grove where Titania might lie sleeping. Far off beyond the

trees was a white house, and the moonlight lay upon it, and gave it a

magic look. Perhaps the work being done inside was the black magic of

war, and men may have been bending over maps strangely marked, and full

of mystery, unless one knows the code which deals with the winning of

battles. "For once we may have luck with the weather," said another

officer. About midnight there was a change. Great clouds gathered across

the moon. It began to rain gustily, and then settled down to a steady,

slogging downpour.

Our luck with the weather went out with the stars, and this morning when

our men went away the ground was more hideous than it has ever been this

year, and that would seem a wild exaggeration to men who tried to get

through Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood on the wet days of August.

They went into swamps everywhere, into the zone of shell-craters newly

brimmed with water, and along tracks without duck-boards, where men went

ankle-deep, if not knee-deep or waist-deep.

The enemy was expecting them. There seems no doubt of that. An hour or

so before the attack he began to barrage the ground in some parts, and

in their blockhouses the German machine-gunners got ready to sweep the

advancing battalions. Our own barrage thundered out shortly before six

from all the guns which had got to their places after the great struggle

in the mud. On the right the ground about Polderhoek Chateau was flooded

down in the hollow below that ruin, which is perched up on a rise. Our

men of the 5th Division--Devons, Scottish Borderers, Duke of Cornwall's

Light Infantry--were not far away from it, a few hundred yards, but it

was a difficult place to attack. The enemy had built concrete defences

inside and blockhouses on either side of it and in the wood behind. But

our men went very gallantly through the morass, in spite of the

machine-gun fire that swept over them, and worked on either side of the

chateau, closing round the blockhouse, while from the centre they made a

direct attack on the chateau ruins. In spite of the foul weather, with a

high wind blowing and a thick, wet mist, our airmen went out all along

the line and flew very low, peering down at our men. One of them

reported quite early that our boys were all round Polderhoek Chateau,

hauling out the Huns, while bombing fights were in progress on either

side of it. Later messages confirmed this. Sixty prisoners were seen

coming back down the Menin road. A wounded German officer said the

garrison of the chateau was 400 men, of four companies. It seems that

they must all have been taken or killed, for later it was established

that all the blockhouses and the chateau had been cleared, and our men

were fighting beyond Polderhoek Wood.

Farther south there was fighting round about Gheluvelt, by Devons and

Staffords of the 7th Division, and an observer reported that he had seen

Germans running out of that chateau down the high road east of it, but

it seems that there were a number of dug-outs in Gheluvelt Wood where

the garrisons held out after our advance attack had passed, and this was

a great menace to our men, so that they may have had to withdraw in

order to avoid that trap, or to keep in touch with the troops on their

right, who were held up at a couple of redoubts in the morning.

Meanwhile the fiercest battle was being fought by the Canadians near the

centre of the attack, up the slopes of Bellevue below Goudberg (which is

just west of Passchendaele), where the enemy had long and elaborate

defences of concrete, and to the right and left of that from Vienna

House, below Crest Farm on the right, to the ground on the left beyond

Wolfe Copse. It was from the direction of Peter Pan House and Wolfe

Copse that the Canadians succeeded in getting a grasp of the Bellevue

slopes, attacking a row of concrete huts in a sunken road which were

strongly held by German machine-gunners. The enemy counter-attacked

strongly and sharply down the northern end of the spur, and from the

direction of Passchendaele, and drove our men for a time down the

slopes, though only for a time. Farther left there was heavy fighting

round the pill-boxes. Two of them, Moray House and Varlet House, yielded

a score or more of prisoners each, but the ground all about the left of

our attack by the Broenbeek and the Watervlietbeek was one great deep

marsh, through which the men had the utmost difficulty in struggling.

The German wounded are in a terrible condition, covered in mud and

blood, and shaking as men with ague. They are full of despair, and their

officers say that Germany is only holding out in the hope of a U-boat

victory. The German people, they say, will suffer badly this winter from

lack of food. Our own wounded are men who seem to have come out of

watery graves, and are plastered from head to foot in a whitish slime.

In the field dressing-stations they are as patient as after all these

battles, and if in some places they had ill luck they blame the weather

for it. No words are too bad for that, but in spite of it our men did

wonders to-day.

* * * * *

OCTOBER 28

The most important position in the attack yesterday was given to the

Canadians to carry, and the story of their capture of the Bellevue spur

is fine and thrilling as an act of persistent courage by bodies of men

struggling against great hardships and under great fire. Nothing that

they did at Courcelette and Vimy and round about Lens was finer than the

way in which on Friday they fought their way up the Bellevue spur, were

beaten back by an intense destructive fire, and then, reorganizing, went

back through the wounded and scaled the slope again and drove the German

machine-gunners out of their blockhouses.

I have seen those Germans as prisoners of the Canadians. They are men of

the 11th Bavarian Division, which includes the 3rd Bavarian Infantry

Regiment and two reserve infantry regiments. The other day I wrote about

undersized, half-witted fellows who were caught by our men, and said the

German man-power must be wearing thin if they sent recruits like this.

These Bavarian soldiers are not undersized, but tall, proper men, and

stout fellows who fought hard. They carried their mud with a certain

swagger, not as men who had surrendered easily, and were not utterly

dejected, like so many of our prisoners. They had been picked to hold

Bellevue because of their good moral, and they were full of confidence

in their defensive position. They were perched up above the swamps

through which our men had to wade to get at them. They had plenty of

concrete houses for their shelter, and their machine-guns. The weather

was in their favour. They guessed that the British would try to attack

them again, but they looked at the floods and rain-clouds, and felt

safe, or pretty safe. For some reason of psychology--which is greatly

influenced by shell-fire--these men of the 11th Bavarian Division were

not mutinous against discipline like other Bavarians, who are cursing

the Prussians because of too much fighting, and malingering, and jeering

at the officers, or refusing to go into the forward positions, like 800

men of the 99th Reserve Infantry Regiment, who, according to a prisoner,

revolted against going into the line at Lens.

"They were all sent to prison," says the man, "and seem to have been

very pleased with the change."

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 vitae 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.

"I saw some fellows in front of me," said a wounded lad of the Devons,

"and I halloed to them because I wanted company and a bit of help. But

they didn't hear all my halloing, and they went faster than I could, and

I could not catch up with them because my leg was bad."

"It was water we wanted most," said a young Canadian, "and some of us

were four days thirsty in the front line. No blame to anybody. It was

the state of the ground."

"I had a poisoned finger," said a young field-gunner, "and my arm

swelled up, but I couldn't leave the battery before the show, as they

were short-handed."

Sitting round after the battle these men out of the slime, these muddy,

bloody men, spoke quietly and soberly about things they had seen and

suffered, and the tales they told would freeze the blood of gentle souls

who do not know even now, after three years of war, what war means to

the fighting men. But as they listened to each other they nodded, as

though to say, "Yes, that's how it was," and there was no consciousness

among them of extraordinary adventures, and neither self-glory nor

self-pity. They had just done their job, as when their wounds heal they

will do it again, if fate so wills.

What I have written about the Canadians is true of all English

battalions who were fighting on each side of them, and to whom I devoted

most of my message on the day of the battle. Those London Territorials,

Lancashire troops, Artists Rifles, Bedfords, and the old county

regiments of the 5th and 7th Divisions who were fighting around

Polderhoek Chateau and on the way to Gheluvelt had the same sufferings,

the same difficulties in bad ground, the same ordeal of shell-fire,

machine-gun fire, and German counter-attacks. They showed the same

courage, neither more nor less, and although the capture of Bellevue

spur was the most important gain of the day, it was only possible

because the English battalions on either side kept the enemy hotly

engaged, and assaulted his lines of blockhouses with repeated efforts.

The fighting of the Artists Rifles and Bedfords of the 63rd Division was

typical of all the history of this day in hardship and valour. Even the

German officers taken prisoners by them expressed their wonderment and

admiration. "Your men are magnificent," they said. "They have achieved

the impossible. We did not think any troops could cross such ground."

That belief was reasonable. The stream of the Paddebeek had become a

wide flood, like all the other beeks in the fighting ground. It seemed

unfordable and impassable, and on the other side of it was the old

German trench system with machine-gun emplacements. The 63rd plunged in,

wading up to their waists, and horribly hampered while machine-gun

bullets whipped the surface of the water. There was fierce fighting for

Varlet House, a strong blockhouse, and the Artists and Bedfords, Royal

Fusiliers and Shropshires swarmed round it, and finally routed the

garrison. Desperate attempts were made against other strong points, and

the men of the 63rd Division gained some of them, and captured about 140

prisoners.

Meanwhile on the left of our line, around the flooded areas to the west

of Houthulst Forest, the French have made great progress on Friday and

Saturday. The Belgians have made a dash too, and there was a gallant

episode, not without a gleam of humour, when a small party of Belgian

soldiers crossed the marshes in a punt, found the ground deserted by the

enemy, and went forward at a hot pace to join up with the French in the

freshly captured village of Merckem. The French themselves have cleared

a wide tract of marsh-land during these two days' operations, cleared it

of men and cleared it of guns, which the enemy had just time to drag

away round a spit of land on the edge of the floods. These floods are

very deep and broad above Bixschoote and below Dixmude, where the

St.-Jansbeek slopes over by Langewaade and swirls round a peninsula of

mud.

On Friday the French routed out the German outposts who guarded that

mud-bank, several thousands yards in length, and yesterday made a bigger

attack above St.-Jansbeek and Draeibank. Before their gallant infantry

advanced through these bogs, for it is all a bog, the French gunners

were in full orchestra, and played a terrible symphony on the 75's and

120's. Over 160,000 shells were fired by the "soixante-quinze" batteries

at the German positions in the marshes and on the west side of Houthulst

Forest. Then under cover of this fury of the fire the French infantry

advanced in waves. In spite of the ground they went very fast and very

far, and spread out in a fan-shaped phalanx between Merckem and Aschoop.

Their field-guns are now able to enfilade Houthulst Forest on the

western side, and the German guns north of that must be making their

escape. It is an important tactical success, which will make Houthulst

Forest less tenable by the enemy.

* * * * *

OCTOBER 30

Following up the heroic capture of Bellevue spur, on October 26, the

Canadians attacked again this morning on both sides of the Ravelbeek,

working up from Bellevue to the top of Meetscheele spur on the left, and

gaining Crest Farm on the right, up the main ridge of Passchendaele. If

this ground can be held--and the taking is sometimes not so hard as the

holding--almost the last heights of the Passchendaele Ridge are within

our grasp, and all the desperate fighting of the last three months or

more, the great assaults on the ridges by English, Scottish, Irish,

Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian troops, through bogs and marshes

in the low ground, against concrete blockhouses and great numbers of

machine-guns, against masses of the finest German troops fighting every

yard of the way, and against incredibly bad luck with the weather, even

as far back as August, will have given us the dominating ground in

Flanders overlooking the plains beyond.

Crest Farm, on a knoll below the village of Passchendaele, is the outer

fort of Passchendaele itself, and its capture exposes the greater

fortress under the ragged ruins which stick up like fangs on the skyline

of the ridge.

Without Crest Farm Passchendaele was unapproachable, and the capture of

this hummock is of historical importance. But in order to take or hold

it, as the Australians found, it was necessary that Bellevue and

Meetscheele should also be ours. Both heights were taken this morning by

the Canadians.

It was not a great battle in numbers of men, and the longest distance to

go was not more than a thousand yards, but it was a hard battle, not won

lightly, because of the desperate resistance of the enemy, the

difficulty of the ground, the badness of the weather, and the physical

hardships endured by the men. The enemy had relieved his troops who met

the Canadians' attack on Bellevue on Friday last--the 11th Bavarian

Division, who are now said to be on their way to Italy--although I saw

one of their non-commissioned officers this morning, taken prisoner a

few hours before, after he had been lying in a shell-hole for three

days. He knew nothing about his division and nothing about the German

thrust in Italy. Nor did he care what had happened over there, but was

only glad to be out of the shell-fire with the hope that the war would

end soon, somehow and anyhow. His division had apparently been replaced

by the 238th, a strong and well-disciplined crowd of men, who knew the

value of the Passchendaele Ridge, and fought hard this morning until the

Canadians had forced their blockhouse when the rest of them ran back

into Passchendaele.

The German Command probably expected an attack this morning. As usual,

yesterday he shelled heavily over the neighbourhood of our tracks and

back areas of the battle zone in order to hinder the getting up of

supplies, and in the night he sent out his air squadrons to bomb the

country about Ypres and try to play hell generally behind our lines. Our

airmen were about in the night too. It was the night of the full moon,

wonderfully clear and beautiful in this part of Flanders, and many tons

of explosives were dropped over enemy dumps and batteries and routes of

march. The weatherwise, who have been gloomy souls for some weeks, and

no wonder, predicted heavy rain before the night was out, and a rising

gale of wind. They were right about the wind. It came howling across the

sea and the flats from somewhere in the west of Ireland, but it veered

to the east later in the night and the rain held off until after midday.

By that time our attack had gone away and gained the ground; and it is

in their new positions that the Canadians and other British troops are

now suffering the foul storm, with a cold rain slashing upon them. The

night was cold for them, and they lay out in shell-holes, getting

numbed and cramped and longing for the first gleam of light, when they

could get on the move and do this fighting. It is the waiting which is

always worst, and it was waiting under the heavy fire of big shells and

shrapnel and whiz-bangs and gas-shells and machine-gun bursts scattered

over the sodden fields in this wet darkness without aim, but sinister in

its blind search for men. The carriers trudged through all this,

stubborn in spirit, to get up ammunition and supplies. There was rum for

the fighting men, and they thanked God for it, because it gave them a

little warmth of body and soul in the cold quarter of an hour before an

attack at dawn, when the vitality of men is low.

Some of the Canadians say that the enemy started to barrage before our

own artillery gave the signal of attack by combined fire. Five minutes

before the start, they say, hostile shell-fire burst over them. Men get

this fancy sometimes when there is no truth in it, but it may have been

true. They all agree that the German SOS flared up instantly the attack

was begun, and that the enemy's gunners answered it without a second's

pause. At the same time many machine-guns began their sharp tattoo from

the blockhouses on the slopes above and from many hiding-places. In

front of the Princess Patricia's Light Infantry there was a number of

fanged tree-stumps called by the sylvan name of Friesland Copse. They

expected one or two machine-guns there, but found a nest of them. It was

a hornets' nest, not easily routed out. The German machine-gunners kept

up a steady stream of bullets across their field of fire, and the

Princess Pat's suffered in trying to rush the place. Small parties of

them assaulted it with grim courage, and when they fell, or took cover

in shell-craters, others made their way forward, trying to get round the

flanks of the position. It was in that way finally that they made the

last close dash upon the emplacements and destroyed them. Some of the

German gunners surrendered here, but not many. Hard and fierce was the

fighting at close quarters.

The Canadian troops pushed on to Meetscheele village--no village at all,

as you may guess, but just a tract of shell-craters and a few mounds of

broken brick about a few concrete chambers, with dead bodies of German

soldiers lying huddled outside the walls. That is a village in the

battlefields. The blockhouses gave trouble, for there were living men

inside with the usual weapon which spat out bullets. So there was

another struggle here, very fierce and bloody, and the place was only

taken by groups of men who crawled round it in the mud, sprang at it out

of shell-craters, and acted with individual cunning and courage. That at

least is how some of these men described it this morning, when they came

away with wounds. Beyond Meetscheele was another row of blockhouses on a

road, and another fight, desperate and exhausting and bloody. But it was

from that neighbourhood that the Germans began to run, and when they

were seen running the Canadians knew that the objectives had been won.

All that was on the left of the Ravelbeek stream, which is a No Man's

Land of slime between the slopes.

On the right, which is the main Passchendaele Ridge, another Canadian

Brigade was fighting up to Crest Farm. They, too, had to assault some

"pill-boxes" and had to fight hard for their ground, but they captured

Crest Farm and the farmer's boys, who were stalwart young Germans, and a

number of machines with which they plough the fields for the harvest of

death. These machine-guns and their ammunition store were used against

the enemy by the Canadians, and helped to smash up the counter-attacks,

which assaulted the new positions very quickly after their capture. On

the extreme right of the Canadians the enemy opened a very heavy

bombardment from the Keifburg spur, and it was so violent that special

artillery action was called for, and a number of Australian heavies took

measures to silence these guns. The first counter-attack developed at

about eight o'clock, from the direction of Mosselmarkt, but this was

dealt with by our guns, and did not reach the Canadian lines. Our

airmen, flying in the gale, reported groups of men retreating in a

disorderly way and the German stretcher-bearers were busy. At about 9.30

hostile infantry in extended order were seen advancing towards the

front, and our guns again got busy. Meanwhile the Artists, Bedfords,

Royal Fusiliers, and Shropshires of the 63rd Division, and London men of

the 58th Division were fighting in the low swampy ground to the north of

the Canadians. They have had a very hard time on both sides of the

Paddebeek and in other swamps, where little isolated garrisons of the

enemy hold their "pill-boxes" in a girdle of the machine-gun fire. The

rain is now heavy, and a thick, dank mist lies over the fields, and

what was bad ground is now worse ground. There is no aeroplane

observation this afternoon, and the Canadians, who are holding the

captured positions, can no longer be seen by the hostile air squadrons.

This morning they flew very low over the infantry in places, dropping

bombs and firing their machine-guns at groups of men. The battle is one

of those called "a minor operation," but the ground taken by heroic

effort is the gateway to Passchendaele.

XXIV

LONDON MEN AND ARTISTS

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.

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.

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.

PRINTED AT THE COMPLETE PRESS

WEST NORWOOD LONDON

* * * * *

Transcriber's Notes

Obvious punctuation errors repaired.

In the captions, a caret (^) denotes that the following letter

is a superscript.

Thought breaks have been used consistently before a section that starts

with a new date.

Captions have been added to "Illustrations" where they

are lacking.

Hyphens added: battle-ground (p. 174), pock-marked (p. 243), bog-land

(p. 243), hop-fields (page 257), water-spouts (p. 379).

Hyphens removed: skyline (p. 141), blockhouse (p. 243), armpits (p.

331).

Page 58: "wooded" changed to "wooden" (his wooden bridges).

Page 62: "Oberlieutenant" changed to "Oberleutnant".

Page 82: "penumonia" changed to "pneumonia" (died of weakness and

pneumonia).

Page 150: "Tilloy-les-Mufflains" changed to "Tilloy-les-Mufflaines".

Page 160: "highly" changed to "lightly" (proportion of highly wounded).

Page 163: "Spanbeckmolen" changed to "Spanbroekmolen".

Page 203: "Blaupoortbeek" changed to "Blawepoortbeek".

Page 222: "bueer" changed to "ueber" (Viel tausend ueber Nacht) and "durich

den Fruehlinges jubel" changed to "durch den Fruehlingesjubel".

Page 246: "deadful" changed to "dreadful" (their dreadful night).

Page 269: "Thiepval" changed to "Thiepval".

Page 323: "matellic" changed to "metallic" (metallic tinkling sound).