Fifteen years ago Winston Groom, a Vietnam War veteran and the author of nearly two dozen books, had published by Grove Press [now Grove/Atlantic, Inc.] a book on the subject of The Great War titled A Storm in Flanders, subtitled The Ypres Salient, 1914-1918: Tragedy and Triumph on the Western Front which largely draws as the subject of its focus the action and experiences of the British Army in Belgium Flanders during World War 1. You may purchase his superlative book by clicking here. This past December here in the digital pages of Heavy Artillery were excerpted at length Winston's Groom stirring narrative of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, quoted from his excellent book 1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls.
What follows (below) is not intended to be read as a single continuing narrative, as was the December 7th piece, but rather as a series of brief excerpted and edited passages taken mostly from just the first half of the book which should illustrate for you some concept of the subject, tone and descriptive nature of A Storm in Flanders as a whole.
What is not included here but will be of interest to the reader are the book's repeated examinations of two of the world's most notable people who both, prior to their global fame (for one) and infamy (for the other), were participants in the Flanders theater of war; Churchill and Hitler. Furthermore, A Storm in Flanders will inform the reader about;
a) The familial relations of the leaders of England, Germany and Russia at the start of the war, the myriad of pre-war alliances and treaties which drew so many countries into the conflict and, of course, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria.
b) Germany's U-Boat campaign in the Atlantic that eventually led to the notorious sinking of the RMS Lusitania in 1915.
c) The Russian Revolution and it's effect on the Allied war effort.
d) Fighting that took place in Italy.
e) The introduction of such then-new military technology as the machine gun, aviation, tanks and ever-increasing magnitudes of firepower and explosive ordinance as evidenced by Germany's so-called "Paris Gun" - a 400-ton, 12-story high cannon which fired a 300-pound shell into the stratosphere - and detonations in Belgium so concussive that they were heard and felt across the English Channel in England.
f) America's later entry and engagement in World War 1.
A Storm in Flanders is detailed and comprehensive on the subject of World War 1 yet the book is also concise, weighing in at just under 270 pages in paperback form.
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Edited Excerpts from A Storm in Flanders
Flanders is the ancient name for the mostly flat countryside that stretches from the North Sea coast in Belgium south to the French coast along the English Channel. It's name in Flemish means, literally, "flooded land," and it is no bigger than the size of greater Los Angeles. It lies on the same latitude as Quebec and the average temperature is 49 degrees. It rains there practically every other day. Over the centuries the Belgians had drained it by an elaborate system of locks, dams, canals, and ditches and had channeled most of the overflow into the river Yser, which rises in central Flanders and flows northwesterly toward the sea. Its pastoral scenes and portraits of lively village life and its inhabitants remain immortalized by its many painters including such well-known artists as Rubens, Brueghel, van Eyck, and van Dyck.
Belgian farmers over the years raised root crops of beets, turnips, and potatoes as well as flax, cotton, tobacco, grain, and fodder. They kept cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, geese, and ducks. Years earlier, in the outlying areas, wealthy merchants and farmers erected elegant castlelike chateaux, around which villages and farms sprang up, each with its ornate church; they planted trees, maintained roads, and not too infrequently fought off invaders. It is an ideal place for poppies to grow. For the most part, though, the water table remains fewer than two feet beneath the rich clay and sandy soil, an ominous factor that would be of considerable concern in the times to come. A Belgian author described the climate thusly: "Water is everywhere; in the air: on the ground: under the ground. It is the land of dampness, the kingdom of water. It rains there three days out of four. The north-west winds which, breaking off the tops of the stunted trees, making them bend as if with age, carry heavy clouds of cold rain formed in the open sea. As soon as the rain ceases to fall, thick white mists rise from the ground giving a ghost-like appearance to men and things alike."
The central town in Belgian Flanders is Ypres, which, by the fourteenth century, had become the center of the cloth trade in Europe. It was then inhabited by more than 40,000 souls and widely known for its magnificent stone structure called the Cloth Hall, finished in 1260, in which cloth of all description was bought and sold. Over time, Ypres had declined in trading importance and lost more than half of its population, but at the outset of the war it was still a quaint medieval European city with its imposing St. Martins Cathedral. Its large cobblestone town square regularly served as an open-air marketplace for farm produce and other goods. On clear days, from the tops of the towers of cathedrals and the Cloth Hall one could see the North Sea. By all accounts, in 1914 Ypres was a serene and lovely place. The thick fortress walls of the city, designed in the seventeenth century by the renowned French military architect Sebastien Vauban, had by then been breached for a railroad, which brought tourists to admire the medieval ornamental spires and neat, clean buildings and shops. Then, in the autumn of that year, the Germans came.
Ypres sits at the foot of a series of ridges, an eight-mile-long arc of high ground to the east that semi-circles it like a huge amphitheater. The highest ridges are no more than 160 feet tall but afford a complete and commanding view of the entire plain of Flanders, as well as of Ypres itself. (It may be remembered that 160 feet is roughly the height of a sixteen-story building.) On or near these ridges, from south to north, were located the several dozen villages and terrain features that would forever figure prominently in the history of warfare: the villages of Messines, Wytschaete, Langemarck, Zonnebeck; the features of Nuns' Wood, Gheluvelt, Zillebeck, Hill 60, Pilckem Ridge, Polygon Wood and - the most bloodcurdling name of all - Passchendaele.
During the autumn of 1914, as a result of almost ceaseless fighting on these slopes and in these same woods, the old British professional army - the "Old Contemptibles" - was virtually annihilated, and soon afterward the volunteer civilian "New Army," would endure a bloodbath of unprecedented proportions. Toward the end of the war, years later, the newly conscripted British Army replacements would leave untold numbers in the rotted, fetid landscape. It was in this small confine of Belgium from 1914 to 1918 that more than a million soldiers were shot, bayoneted, bludgeoned, bombed, grenaded, gassed, incinerated by flamethrowers, drowned in shell craters, smothered by caved-in trenches, obliterated by underground mines, or, more often than not, blown to pieces by artillery shells. It became one of the most vast graveyards on earth.
In the early autumn of 1914 no one, on either side, would have possibly imagined this.
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The newly formed British Naval Division landed on the Belgian coast and reached Antwerp, an effort organized by naval minister Winston Churchill to save that vital city. It was, however, to no avail because the Germans brought up a number of behemoth 17-inch howitzers acquired from, and manned by, the Austrians. Mounted on railcars their 2,000-pound shells, "the size of a full-grown hog," began to obliterate the Belgian fortifications from five or six miles away. Having no defense against this, on October 6 King Albert ordered his five Belgian divisions to evacuate Antwerp and head westward, toward the sea. There they met two fresh divisions of British infantry, which had just landed at Ostend and were destined for Antwerp. There was nothing for them to do but join the Belgian retreat. Antwerp fell on October 9, but its determined, drawn-out resistance had given the main part of the British Expeditionary Force time to move in good order from the outskirts of Paris all the way up to Belgian Flanders. Rupert Brooke, the most famous young English poet of his day and a brand-new lieutenant with the British Naval Division at Antwerp, was inspired to write his famously patriotic verse:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England...
Six months later Brooke was dead.
But before we let Brooke pass entirely from the scene, an examination of his psyche and motivation for supporting the war sheds light on why so many young men of the British aristocracy and upper classes raised in the tranquility of Edwardian and Georgian England suddenly and willingly offered themselves up to the stink and death of the trenches. In one of his letters after the retreat from Antwerp, Brooke wrote: "It hurts me, this war. Because I was fond of Germany. There are such good things in her, and I'd always hoped she'd get away from Prussia and the oligarchy in time. If it had been a mere war between us and them I would have hated fighting. But I'm glad to be doing it for Belgium. That's what breaks the heart to see and hear of."
Brooke, who was a socialist and an atheist, positions that had become somewhat fashionable among many upper-class intellectuals of his day, goes on to describe the suffering and destruction wrought by the Germans on the city of Antwerp and its citizens: hundreds of thousands of refugees, things on fire or blown to bits, old men weeping, frightened women and children. He states: "It's queer to think one has been a witness to one of the greatest crimes of history. Has a nation ever been treated like that?"
The answer, of course, is that all through history a great many nations and peoples had been treated like that, except that Brooke had not been there personally to witness it. His compassion at the fate of the Belgians had quite remarkably turned him away from the skepticism of socialism-atheism into an altruistic young Englishman, willing to fight and die for what many believed was the noblest cause since the Crusades.
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"On 20 October the battle broke out along the whole line, on a front of about 60 miles." So says the official German report on the action, and it goes on to speak of the "numerically superior" allied forces facing the German Army. The conclusion was ridiculous, even if they believed it. By this time reinforcements arriving daily across the English Channel had brought the original British Expeditionary Force up to about 250,000 men (about 100,000 of whom were in Belgian Flanders, ferried to the front in London omnibuses replete with colorful advertisements for alcoholic beverages, cigarettes, tonics and the like). The Belgian Army had by now been reduced to about 70,000 and the French Army in Flanders consisted of two corps of infantry, totaling about 100,000, including two divisions of Moroccans from French North Africa, Muslims wearing fezzes and dressed in pantaloons, and one corp of French cavalry. Thus the Allies could muster a combined force of about 270,000 to contend with half a million Germans.
The day before the big battle opened, General Sir John Denton Pinkstone French put into motion the first phase of the British assault to roll up the German right flank - an eastward sweep by Rawlinson's 7th Division to capture and secure the town of Menin and consolidate the cavalry's occupation of the ridges that overlooked Ypres.
It quickly turned toward a disaster. British cavalry and infantry on the ridges began to see huge columns of smoke and flame where there were towns and villages on the plains to the east. Then came the swarms of pitiful refugees, weeping women, children, old men carrying what they could, many with horse carts or dog carts, all headed toward Ypres. And behind them were the dark gray-clad masses of the German Army, tens of thousands of them: infantry, horsemen, wagons, artillery, spread out on the distant plain like so many toy soldiers. Worse, reports were pouring in to Rawlinson's headquarters that, as one observer put it, "something very nasty was skulking at the far end of the Menin Road."
Rawlinson's corps reported taking very heavy casualties from German artillery and its advance was halted. This news might have struck in General French a note of caution but it did not. Instead, he remained exquisitely confident and clung to his theory that north of Ypres there was probably no more than a single understrength German corps. In fact, they were facing the entire German Fourth Army, which Sir John French had not known existed but was to soon find out.
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On a front of nearly twenty miles tens of thousands of men came to grips and did their best to murder each other in the cold, misty hills around Ypres. In many places the fighting was hand-to-hand. That morning divisions of the German Fourth Army consisting in large part of students, attacked the British line, such as it was.
In a fit of Wagnerian frenzy, the German students came on arm-in-arm or waving their rifles in the air, singing, and with their spiked pickelhaube helmets festooned with flowers. By the thousands they were shot down. Even though they outnumbered the British at times six to one that morning, they faced the most professional and elite regiments in the British Army, if not the world: the Black Watch, Coldstream Guards, Scots Guards, Camerons, Grenadier Guards, Irish Guards, Staffords, Gordon Highlanders, Green Howards, Royal Scots Fusiliers, Welsh Fusiliers, and others almost too numerous to mention, including Hussars and Dragoons of the cavalry corps. When it was all over, the British Official History estimated that at least half of these youthful Teutonic warriors - 100,000 of them - had been shot down. The Germans named the battle "The Massacre of the Innocents."
Nevertheless, it was clear to the British corps commanders that the Germans were far stronger than they and that, at best, the British Army was only holding its own.
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October 30, there was none of the usual preliminary bombardment by German artillery. Then at dawn a sudden wind blew away the fog to reveal a dense mass of Germans coming along both sides of the Menin Road toward the village of Gheluvelt, which was defended in the forward positions by elements of the British 1st Division: the Black Watch, Coldsteam Guards, the Camerons, Scots Guards, the Welsh and the South Wales Borderers. These were among the old regiments of the army whose antecedents had fought in most of the British campaigns on the continent and elsewhere up to the Napoleonic Wars, and then they fought him to, too, at the Battle of Waterloo, just down the road. They had fought the Americans in the Revolution and in the War of 1812. They had fought at the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan and in South Africa during the Zulu and Boer Wars and in Egypt and Khartoum and the Sudan and a dozen other places where Britannia ruled, or wished to. But they had never fought anything such as this.
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What had possessed the British and the other Allies to fight and die for such ground and put themselves in a decidedly inferior position in the Salient? The only explanation is the queer psychology of the battlefield; it is one thing to the men in the front lines, quite another to somebody looking at a map far back out of harm's way. On the one hand, the French - and General Joffre in particular, who had said the soldiers "must be killed in their tracks rather than drawback" - had developed the mindset that not a single inch of ground should be given up to the Germans without a fight, even if that meant putting the Allies on disadvantageous terrain, such as the bulge in the Ypres Salient. For their part, the British had spilled much precious blood for their little Salient; the ground was literally soaked with it. Basically this strategy was a political decision; the men, the officers of the line, and even their superiors at brigade and division staff positions saw the danger - even the stupidity - in it. But it was too bitter a pill for Sir John French and the politicians and people back home to contemplate the earlier threat by General Haig to pull back, however seriously or not he might have meant it at the time. It was completely against their grit to give up all the hard-fought ground in the Salient and straighten out the line so that it ran through Ypres itself. The result, of course, was the ominous bulge that had to be constantly manned and held by flesh and blood, overlooked now on three sides by the frowning guns of the Germans on the high ground. Quite naturally, the Germans set out forthwith to make the Allies pay dearly for their tenacity.
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The butcher's bill for the First Battle of Ypres was higher than for any battle that either nation had ever fought in its history. The British lost more than 60,000 men; the story was the same in virtually every Allied line unit that had been fighting there: at best, those battalions, which had arrived full strength at 1,100 men (and most hadn't because they had been fighting since August), were now reduced to a few officers and two or three hundred men. At worst, many battalions simply ceased to exist. The British professional army, the Old Contemptibles, had effectively been obliterated as a fighting force.
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With the arrival of the Canadian Corps, beginning in February and stretching through March, 1915, the BEF now took over from the French the entire length of line in the northern part of the Salient and, to the profound regret of many, would remain responsible for holding it for the duration of the war. Because of the shortages of artillery shells, no large-scale operations were contemplated for the time being, but British Headquarters busied itself planning so-called limited attacks to wrest a particular piece of ground or a terrain feature from which the Germans were annoying them. One of these, perhaps the most notorious, was known simply as Hill 60.
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The balmy afternoon of April 22 had been oddly quiet for the Canadians and French colonial troops manning the trenches north of the Salient. They were, in fact, awaiting orders for a major Allied attack against the Germans, which would hopefully drive them from Flanders. What the British High Command did not know was that the Germans had finally decided to launch a major attack of their own all along the Ypres Salient, in the hopes of breaking the stalemate or at least improving their trench positions and kicking the British out of Ypres.
In part the German rationale for a major attack was to test a controversial and startling new weapon they had developed. Suddenly, at about 5pm, a furious German artillery barrage crashed down on the French positions to the northeast of Ypres, which were manned by a colonial division of Algerians, dressed in pantaloons and fezzes, and a territorial division of French Africans. At the same time, those Canadians who dared to peep over their parapets noticed a strange and menacing looking cloud, several miles long, rise up from the German lines and begin rolling across no-man's-land.
It was a heavy, low cloud, as far as the eye could see; they described it variously as "greyish-yellow," or "greenish-yellow," and also as "two clouds... which appeared to merge into each other." As the thing roiled toward them, the Canadians were baffled. Some thought it was some kind of smoke; others concluded a new type of gunpowder was being used by the German artillery. It was not long before the cloud reached the French lines to the north, which were joined to the Canadians' immediate left. As the dense cloud enveloped the French, nothing could be seen of them. Suddenly, the Canadians heard the French fire begin to slacken, then stop altogether. Not long afterward, the French artillery also ceased to fire. Those Canadians nearest the French began to experience burning in their eyes, and coughing, and then inability to breathe; in effect, strangling.
Men in the reserve trenches in the rear were shocked to see thousands of the Algerian and African troops streaming past, eye rolled up white, stumbling, staggering, falling, clutching their throats. Those few who could speak at all were gasping "gaz! gaz! gaz!" On their heels were seen thousands of Germans crossing no-man's-land behind the gas cloud. Even though they were receiving no fire to their immediate front, the Germans were coming on tentatively, staying well behind the cloud. Meantime, the dimension of what was happening stunned those witnessing the pathetic condition of the French soldiers who had managed to escape. As a Canadian artilleryman, described it: "They literally were coughing their lungs out; glue was coming out of their mouths. It was a very disturbing, very disturbing sight."
And that wasn't the worst of it; many of the Frenchmen already lay dead or dying in their trenches because the gas, being heavier than air, naturally settled there and suffocated them on the spot. Many of those who escaped thought that if they just got to fresh air, they would be alright, but that wasn't the case at all. They staggered into dressing stations vomiting and turning blue from suffocation. There the doctors and orderlies waited upon them helplessly, since they had no idea how to treat gas injuries. The gassed men could only gape at the medics pitifully, most unable to speak, staring with terror-filled eyes, coughing greenish-yellow froth and blood. Some of the men died quickly, others took days, their faces and extremities turning from a bluish color to a dark green and finally to black as they drowned in their own fluids. In an effort to find out the cause of their deaths, the doctors performed autopsies on some of the men. What they found was chilling; lungs literally bursting, spongy, and filled with albumin and the vessels of their brains badly swollen.
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One of the points that the Germans pressed particularly hard was Hill 60, where "2,000 British lay dead in an area the size of a large back garden." On May 5, after a stupendous bombardment and massed infantry charge, the Germans finally recaptured it. Among those regiments ordered to retake it were the Royal Irish Rifles. Commanding a company of the RIR was forty-two year old Captain Gerald Achilles Burgoyne, a descendant of the British General "Gentleman Johnny" Burgoyne, who had lost the pivotal Battle of Saratoga during the American Revolution. Captain Burgoyne had been much decorated in the Boer War and was a stern and little-forgiving officer.
Burgoyne and his company were ordered forward after Hill 60 was lost, on "a hot summer day" in which "the larks were singing." Although Burgoyne had been in Flanders since December, and endured all the daily shelling and shooting, this would be his first big fight. As his company got close to the front of Hill 60, they began to see the effects of poison gas: "All the grass and foliage around was bleached white, or a sickly yellow; all brass buttons turned black, and it even affected the bolt action of the rifles, corroding the steel apparently and making them stiff to work. A Major of the Bedfords led us into the trenches. A shell had blown in the left and he suggested we need not visit that part as there was a horrid mess there. I believe there were a number of poor fellows lying dead, horribly mutilated."
Burgoyne and his company occupied a trench designated 47; late that night he was told that his brigade was going to attack and try to retake Hill 60 at 2:30 A.M. His particular job was to recapture and secure the area between the adjoining trench, Trench 46.
So here Burgoyne found himself, in completely strange territory, in pitch-black dark, ordered to attack a place he'd never seen. His reaction was predictable: "So easy, so simple - in the room and over a map!" In his earlier briefing, the general commanding the brigade had informed him "that it was just wasting life to attempt Hill 60 again, as no one could hold it; but, he said, Army Headquarters wanted it re-taken and so he had to do it." Not very inspiring, and a lesser man might have gone berserk, but Burgoyne only recorded, "I often wondered how I'd feel if I was ordered to attack, but to my surprise I just felt a curiosity as to what would happen to me."
At precisely 2:20 A.M. Burgoyne sent a lieutenant and fifteen men to the objective, their hands and pockets full of grenades. Immediately firing opened from the German positions. "Within a few minutes" the lieutenant returned, most of his men killed and himself wounded. "Told me the firing pins jammed in his grenades and he couldn't get them out. Had to make one more bid so I rushed out to the communications trench leading to 46 [which was open ground, since one could not navigate Trench 46 because of the bodies strewn inside it].
"The parapet which the brigadier so casually said we were to knock down loomed some eight feet high, very solid. What could I and three or four men have done, had we got up to it? My sergeant-major joined me. 'Come on you...' he yelled, but there was no one to come on. I nearly cried with vexation. I was so sure we could have done it, and had promised the brigadier."
Suddenly, everything turned to chaos. The main attack had started and firing broke out all along the front, including "some 17 machine guns in [trench] 46." Burgoyne saw a flash and something hit him in the eye. He put his hand to his face and "found I was bleeding like a stuck pig." He decided to go back to the dressing station and have it attended, and then return. He took two of his men with him, "one hit in the head, another with his hand blown off."
When Burgoyne got to the dressing station a phone message came from his orderly saying that of his fifteen men he had sent to take the German position, six were dead and five were wounded. Suddenly Burgoyne broke down. "My nerves were all on edge and just this rotten little wound brought all the winter hardships to a head and made me really break down."
The doctors sent Burgoyne back to England; the wound in the eye was not very serious but he was suffering from something quite new to warfare, a phenomenon doctors had only recently begun to diagnose in the men. They classified it as "neurasthenia," first catalogued in the 1850s to describe the sometime mental derangement of railroad-wreck survivors. The soldiers had a better name; they called it "shell shock."
In 1914 there were fewer than 2,000 such cases in the British Army. In 1915 the number had grown into the tens of thousands and accounted for nearly 10 percent of all battle casualties. No one in the medical profession had seen anything like it. In past wars, battles had usually lasted a short time, a few hours or at most a day or two, and high explosives had only recently been developed. But now men were being ordered for days and weeks on end into battle areas where shells were almost constantly exploding and there exposed to all the horrors of the trenches, seeing men like themselves being blown into pieces or shot to rags on a daily basis. Tennyson's spirit of the Light Brigade, "Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or die," might have some application to men riding bravely into artillery fire in a single cavalry charge, but it was irrelevant to men laid open to days, weeks, and months to such carnage. It was something the human mind was not equipped to handle; these men were being asked to do things that every instinct told them were unreasonable and unsafe. They did them anyway, but in a large number of cases the nerves, at some point, simply snapped.
Shell shock could take many forms: sometimes the men's motor systems just gave way, the legs or the arms would not work anymore. Sometimes their minds went blank and they could only sit or stand zombielike. Others had convulsions and had to be strapped down. Hallucinations were common and many men became incontinent. Trembling or shivering was one prevalent sign, with men clawing at their mouths and slobbering. Some went blind, some went deaf, some went dumb. Historian Denis Winter reported that sixty years after the war, in the 1970s, he visited an old veteran still confined to a mental hospital, "a man whose memory is perfect... up to 1917. Thereafter he can remember nothing. An explosion had wiped the recording mechanism from his life and hospitalized him from that day to this."
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Second Ypres had cost the Allies more than 70,000 casualties and the Germans about half that amount - a combined 100,000 men shot down for less than three miles of real estate. About the best thing that came out of it for the British was the propaganda value of a poem. It was no ordinary poem. It became easily the most popular poem of the war, and after the war as well, and when it was published it swept through England and the far-off Americas like a prairie fire. It was titled, "In Flanders Fields."
The poem was written by a Canadian, a physician, forty-three year old Major John McCrae, a medical officer with the newly arrived Canadian Division. As a pastime, McCrae, like so many young men of his time, wrote poetry, and was quite good at it. He had served as an artillery officer in the Boer War with a Canadian regiment and when the war with Germany broke out he again volunteered his services.
On May 2, at the height of the second Battle of Ypres, a friend of McCrae's, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, was killed. Helmer had been a popular figure in the brigade, and his death was mourned by many. The artillery shell that killed him literally blew him to bits: his remains had to be collected in sandbags and then placed in an army blanket in such a way as to resemble a human form. In the midst of booming guns, McCrae conducted the burial service himself, then went to sit on the step of a field ambulance.
Those who were present recorded that the sky was full of larks; that the poppies for which Flanders is renowned were beginning to bloom in the fields and sprout between the crosses in the growing military cemeteries. McCrae took out a pad and pencil and within twenty minutes had penned one of the immortal poems of the war.
In Flanders Fields
In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
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Soldiers of both sides periodically went on leave to their home countries, a profoundly surreal experience, to be sure. One day they were in the slime, filth, and frightfulness of the trenches and the next could be walking the streets of London or Cologne, sitting at a sidewalk cafe or in their families' living rooms. As can be imagined, going back to the war was especially hard, but they did it anyway.
One of the things that depressed and fascinated soldiers most was the sense of the never-endingness of the war. They had been at it now, hammer and tongs, for three years; they had been told time and again by their commanders - at Loos, at the Somme, at Vimy, at Arras - that their next "big push" was going to break the Germans' backs. Now they were hearing it again at Ypres. One officer did the math on his own. He calculated that at the rate of British success in pushing the Germans back thus far, it would take 180 years to reach the Rhine.
The casualty rate was such that a man could scarcely hope to escape unscathed. Death, permanent crippling, or capture were the only things that could keep him from being sent back into the line. In some divisions, by the end of the war, the casualties were two and a half times the authorized strength. (The Royal Naval Division, for instance, at full strength numbered some 19,000 men. By war's end, it had suffered 47,953 killed, wounded, and missing.)
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Every man at Poelcappelle had his tale to tell. A particularly chilling one comes from Sergeant T. Berry, of the Rifle Brigade: "Tea was all we had that night at Poelcappelle. There was no chance of getting rations up. We'd been in the attack, come back to support, and then we were going to attack again. We were just crouched in shell holes waiting, and there was this one little chap. He made tea all night long, and kept nipping out and getting water out of flooded ground behind us and heating it up as best he could. Every half hour he would say, 'There you are, Tommy, a drop of tea.' It wasn't very hot, but it kept us going. The next morning when it got light he looked over the side where he'd got the water and it was a bleeding shell hole, and there was a dead Jerry in it and blood floating all around. We'd had that and all in our tea. We seemed to have no ill-effects, and we had other things to worry about.
"We heard screaming coming from another crater a bit away. I went over to investigate with a couple of the lads. It was a big hole, full of mud and there was a fellow of the 8th Suffolks in it up to his shoulders. So I said, 'Get your rifles, one man in the middle to stretch them out, make a chain and let him get hold of it.' But it was no use. It was too far to stretch, we couldn't get any force on it, and the more we pulled and the more he struggled the further he seemed to go down. He went down gradually. He kept begging us to shoot him. But we couldn't shoot him. Who could shoot him? We stayed with him, watching him go down in the mud. And he died. He wasn't the only one. There must have been thousands up there who died in the mud."
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The day that Passchendaele fell, General Haig's chief of staff, Lieutenant General Launcelot Kiggell, went forward to see the battle area for the first time. Nearing Ypres in his big Rolls-Royce staff car Kiggell was first amazed, then dismayed, and finally horrified at the breathtaking morass where the battle had taken place: an almost indescribable sea of mud littered with the bloated, rotten carcasses of artillery horses, smashed guns and wagons, and other detritus of war. He is reported to have broken into tears, crying out, "Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?" His companion, an officer who had been in the battle, told Kiggell, "It's worse further on up."
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It has been almost impossible for either side to calculate exactly the losses, due to the sheer enormity, and the means of casualty reporting during the war. One arrives at a figure of approximately 350,000 British casualties versus approximately 335,000 for the Germans - horrific losses, but just about equal. The Battle of Ypres in 1917 enriched the Flanders earth with the corpses of some 228,000 Englishmen and Germans, not to mention about 20,000 French, all in an area not much larger than Manhattan Island. By contrast, the Allied cemeteries in France, from D Day in 1944, the Normandy Invasion, till the end of the Second World War, contain the graves of approximately 10,000 American soldiers.
Mere numbers and statistics of course can never tell the story of Flanders. On both sides men fought and died for four long years in conditions that can only be described as subhuman and, to a man, they were degraded by it. It has been argued, persuasively, that all war is dehumanizing and degrading; that may be so, though if it is, then what further adjectives can be found to describe what those soldiers endured in the squalor of Flanders Fields? The search for "why" and "how" remains elusive and any effort to reason it out is to fashion a mirror of hell itself. Yet these were humans, civilized humans, men who in normal circumstance, as John McCrae pointed out in his poem, "lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and were loved." A truly sobering thing would be a glimpse of what was actually going on in their minds during the fighting. That would not only be sobering, it would be perfectly frightening.
