FIELDS OF FLANDERS
For the Allies, 1917 started with optimism, a belief they would be able, at last, to end the stalemate of the Western Front. Twelve months later they would look back at what had proved to be the worst year of the war. The slaughter reached new levels; the weather had been historically abysmal; and the long rolling Soviet Revolution saw Russia begin to pull out of the war, allowing Germany to reinforce its lines on the Western Front.
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And the epicentre of this year of misery was Ypres at the heart of the famous Fields of Flanders. It had become the most dreaded sector in all the Western Front.
This was the battle sector Bert was headed into.
By 1917 the trenches of the Western Front stretched from the coast of the English Channel to neutral Switzerland, with the British section of the line divided into two sectors: Ypres in Belgium and the Somme in Picardy, Northern France.
Throughout 1917 the New Zealand Brigades were repeatedly rotated to serve in the front line in Belgium – first on the outskirts of the Ypres Salient, but eventually Bert and his fellow Aucklanders were shifted to the very heart of the Salient, in front of the devastated remnants of the town of Ypres itself, to take part in what is often called the Third Ypres Campaign. There would in the end be eight separate grueling attacks made by the British in this campaign. The New Zealanders would be involved in two, one a success, one an abject failure.
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The devastating disaster for the Kiwis, one of the worst in British and NZ military history, would become synonymous with the waste of human life in the mud of Flanders - Passchendaele.
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Bert’s war was as a small pawn in the grand machinations of the British high command which moved armies across this battle field. To understand why Bert was there and to appreciate the sad futility of all that suffering, some background to the Flanders campaign is useful.
Politics and power games
By 1916 the initial hopes of both Allies and Germans of an early, decisive victory were well and truly dashed. It was also apparent this war was not like those of the preceding two centuries. In place of sweeping drives by highly mobile armies and pitched battles of infantry with cavalry making incisive thrusts, the huge conglomerations of men and machines of 1914 had fought themselves to a standstill, staring at each other balefully from bristling, trenched defences etched across the landscape of Europe.
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Clearly with modern rifles and machine guns, the tactics suited to the flintlock musket which took a minute to load and had an effective range of only 100 yards, were futile. Defence was now more effective than attack.
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After years of failed assaults against each other’s trenches, many had begun to understand that new answers were needed. The new British Prime Minister, the wily Welshman David Lloyd George (who had climbed to power by pillorying the former PM Asquith who had dared to suggest peace), backed by other politicians such as the young Winston Churchill, began to suggest turning the focus from frontal assaults on the Western Front to flanking attacks in the east, such as Italy, where the Austrian army could be knocked out of the war, isolating the Germans.
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But in the rarefied levels of the British Army high command the thought of anything other than attack on the Western Front was anathema. For three years they and the Germans had hurled men at each other’s trenches and seen them die for nothing, and they intended to continue that practice in 1917. For the army was in the grip of Field-Marshall Sir Douglas Haig.
Haig was a cavalry officer, even amongst the intellectually challenged British Army officer class, a group renowned as fools. He was described by one of his own fellow senior officers, General John Fuller, as: “In character he was stubborn and intolerant, in speech inarticulate, in argument dumb.”
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Haig had risen to power in the army because he played polo well. By virtue of being seen as very good at hitting a ball from the back of a horse, he was introduced to all the right people, including the future King George V, and had managed a startling rise up the military career ladder by the time war broke out. At the start of World War I he commanded a division and far from distinguished himself, but proceeded to very effectively use these back channels of personal connections to attack his senior commanders and secure their dumping and his promotion to commander-in-chief in December 1915.
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All of which might not have been too bad, but for the fatal inclination he had to study European warfare - rare for a British officer, particularly rare for a cavalry man. It was his undoing and the cause of the deaths of thousands. He was very taken by the example of Napoleon and because he was so unimaginative, he couldn’t see that the tactics of Napoleon were no longer applicable to the war he was facing. The leading example of his inability to cope with reality was that throughout the war, despite all evidence to the contrary, he stubbornly believed cavalry was the essential battle winner. Two further character flaws added to the fatal mix: he was deeply religious, believing himself the instrument of divine justice which would secure a British victory no matter what was actually happening on the battlefields; and he was convinced it would be a British victory for he was incredibly bigoted, despising all Allied nations even more than the Germans. He spurned their contributions, refused to help them in turn, and resisted any attempt to have a unified Allied command which might have coordinated the entire war effort more sensibly.
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Bert actually saw Haig during his time in France. The glorious general was contemplating whether these Kiwi colonials were good enough to throw into the cauldron of death his stupidity was creating in Belgium, so insisted they be marched to where he was for him to review them. That he could have saved the men the effort of rising at 4.30am and marching for 10kms by instead driving to their camp in his staff car never occurred to him. Bert records the moment the kiwis paraded before Haig in his diary, but it is unknown what his view of the Field-Marshall was at the time, whether the Kiwis appreciated that before them was the architect of so much death:
Friday September 14: “Reveille 4.30 parade 6am. Marched to battalion parade ground 6 miles where the whole division was reviewed by General Haig.”
Haig’s warfare was not just with the Germans. He was also skirmishing with British politicians. A bitter political power struggle was underway between the British Government and the British Army command, which created a climate of disastrous decision making.
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As the cold new year dawned in January 1917 and the ship carrying Bert was steaming ever nearer to England, a conference had been called between the French and British to plot the campaign season ahead of them. Haig decided his grand offensive for 1917 would be at Ypres. Lloyd George wanted action in Italy. Both loathed and distrusted each other and manipulated to defeat each other’s schemes. The conference ended with the Italian plan rejected, but Haig’s plan also put on hold and instead the French given approval for their own Western offensive at Aisne in April. This bickering by the British was to have terrible results, because when Haig finally got the go ahead for his offensive, the weather had become a major factor.
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The French were no better off than the British however. The Aisne offensive duly took place and was duly a disaster – even more so than usual. The French lost 180,000 men, gained two miles at most and ground to a halt. But the futile assault was followed by an angry reaction from the French troops fed up with the continual slaughter. In May mutiny spread, eventually involving 54 divisions with 750,000 soldiers. The soldiers said they would defend, but never attack in such stupidly suicidal conditions again. The public backed them. Strikes and riots broke out in the cities. If the Germans had realised how divided the French were and attacked, the war could have been lost. The French politicians dumped their army commander in chief and order was slowly restored with a mixture of deals and shooting of mutiny leaders.
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Haig was delighted at the French failure. It gave him the chance now to continue with his project in Ypres.
Allied soldiers wander through the ghost town of Ypres in 1917
The Ypres Salient
The fields of Flanders are mostly flat. On such terrain a rise of even a few metres is a military advantage. Enveloping the medieval town of Ypres, a succession of low hills stretched back over several kilometres reaching its greatest height of around 60 metres at the ridgeline where, on the crest, sat the tiny village of Passchendaele.
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Already Ypres was a famous name. The ruined old town stood in British hands, a symbol of the desperate struggle by the original British troops in action in the war to halt the German advance in 1914. In October of that year both Allies and Germans hurled massive offensives at each other, ending in stalemate. As Ormond Burton, official historian of the Auckland Regiment, said in his 1922 book The Auckland Regiment Ypres was “the wall against which the Old Army had set its back and fought to the death.”
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In 1915 the Germans won the entire ridgeline above Ypres, though not Ypres itself, held stubbornly by the British who did not realise at the time it would become a suicide trap, half surrounded by Germans on the heights above. For over two years that position remained unchanged. The Ypres Salient stood now as a lone bulge protruding deep into the German lines. The Germans had circled the salient with heavy entrenchments and strengthened their lines with hundreds of pill-boxes, all of this defensive work manned with fit and rested German troops. The British, exposed to flanking fire from the Germans above on the ridgelines, lost 7,000 men a month. By 1917, a quarter of all British troops killed on land or sea since the beginning of the war had died in that one sector, the Ypres Salient.
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The Salient was therefore feared and hated by Allied soldiers across the Western Front, hated with a despair reflected even in the place-names they gave to minor landmarks or pieces of the fetid trench system: Suicide Corner, Dead Dog Farm, Idiot Crossroads, Stinking Farm, Dead Horse Corner, Shelltrap Barn, Hellfire Crossroads, Jerk House, Vampire Point. You come across such names in Bert’s diaries.
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Sir Philip Gibbs, who served as an official British war correspondent during World War I, later wrote that he had hidden the true realities of the conditions of the Ypres battleground in his stories sent to newspapers back in Britain, to spare those at home the horrors. He revealed in a book in 1920: “Nothing that has been written is more than the pale image of the abomination of those battle-fields, and that no pen or brush has yet achieved the picture of that Armageddon in which so many of our men perished.”
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The following map shows the Ypres Salient drawn onto modern Belgium, with the approximate British front line at the start of 1917 and key landmarks from WWI highlighted. On the left are the British, on the right the Germans. You can see the relationship between Messines, in the south, where the Kiwis were initially in action, and Ypres itself further north. Other areas identified which would become important during the year are Pilckem, Langemarck, Broodseinde and Passchendaele.
Had the British been logical, they would have abandoned the Salient and withdrawn to a more defensible position. The Germans had carried out a similar manoeuvre in the Somme, creating a well defended front line known as the Hindenburg line. But after so much blood spilt to save Ypres in 1914 and 1915, it was emotionally impossible for the British to abandon it.
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As for the town itself, by 1917 Ypres was a mournful skeleton. It had been bombed more than any other target in the war. In the centre only two buildings could be recognised - the old Cloth Hall and the adjacent Gothic cathedral. The ruins were surrounded by the remnants of medieval walls and a moat and riddled beneath ground by Allied catacombs.
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For the intended 1917 Flanders offensive two separate British armies were pushed into the salient – the Fifth under General Sir Hubert Gough one of Haig’s favoured cavalry comrades, regarded as impetuous and reckless, and the Second under the astute General Sir Herbert Charles Onslow Plumer, seen by history as one of the most competent British field commanders of the war.
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Within Plumer’s Second Army were two Anzac Corps – the prosaically named I Anzac made up entirely of Australians and II Anzac which included an Australian Division and the New Zealand Division.