Letters From the Trenches: A Soldier of the Great War (10 page)

For the rest of July, through August and into September, the battalion tramped around Flanders from billet to billet. There were short periods supporting the line, but mainly
there was training, drill, and more drill and training. Soldiering in the Great War, as all soldiering, would seem to have consisted of short intervals of unbelievable terror separated by periods
of utter boredom and pointless movement.

At this point we can pause to celebrate Harry’s thirtieth birthday on 28 August 1917. The card from Willie and Connie (in Ethel’s handwriting) is impressive, but it raised some real
concerns when I came across it. It could hardly have survived the battlefield, or even just the general wear and tear of active service, in such excellent condition. On the other hand, if Harry
was, as I then believed, home on leave at around the time of his birthday, he might have been given the card and then left it with Ethel for safekeeping when his leave ended and he returned to the
front. This was, I thought, a reasonable theory, and would explain how the card came to survive. But it simply wasn’t true. I later found out that Harry did not have any leave in the summer
of 1917.

In the entire ninety-six days from 10 June to 15 September, the 9th Battalion, the York and Lancaster Regiment spent sixty-seven days ‘housekeeping’ and training, fourteen days
moving – either marching or by lorry, four days allocated as rest days, and only ten days in the line or in direct support. In addition, on several nights some men of the battalion, including
Harry, were allocated to working parties and sent forward to the front line, and sometimes into no man’s land, to improve the defences or to patrol. These were unpleasant and dangerous jobs,
as Harry mentions in his letter to Kate of 14 July.

We cannot learn too much from the two letters written in this period. Harry spent a few days in the line. He spent some time in reserve and some far behind the lines. He was sent forward to work
on the trenches. These are bald facts – his letters, being so infrequent, are not helpful in fleshing out his story. Yet, reading the letters in conjunction with the war diary entries, it has
proved possible to get some sort of picture of his experiences.

Meanwhile, as Harry and his battalion were tramping around Western Flanders, the war continued. Specifically, in the Ypres sector it continued with a battle that ranks with the Somme as a byword
for the horrors of the fighting on the Western Front: Passchendaele...

Throughout August and September 1917, the Third Battle of Ypres, usually referred to as Passchendaele, was in full flow. The main offensives in August took place to the east and north-east of
the city of Ypres. The focus of the attack – or rather, series of attacks – was along a line that can be traced running eastwards through the modern locations of Pilkem, Langemark,
Poelkappelle and Passendale. For the time being, however, Harry’s battalion was spared. During this period, the 9th York and Lancasters were with the rest of Second Army in the sector to the
south of the city, and therefore not engaged in the major offensives.

July had been a fine month. The good weather meant that preparations for the next phase, the next assault in Haig’s plan, were able to continue. On the 16th an intense bombardment of the
enemy lines to the north of Ypres started up. The shelling focused on a small rise known as Pilckem (Pilkem) Ridge, about three miles (5km) north of Ypres. In the next two weeks, the British guns
fired over 4 million shells. (To get an idea of the scale of the bombardment, that works out at an almost unimaginable average of more than three shells every second for fourteen days and
nights.)

The aim, of course, was to destroy the German defences in preparation for the assault. Yet once again the deep, well-prepared, strongly built and well-stocked dugouts effectively protected most
of the defenders. Worse for the attackers, the Germans had developed the use of mutually supporting, machine-gun equipped pillboxes. The bombardment proved unable to destroy them, any more than it
could destroy barbed-wire entanglements.

All was set for the offensive to begin on 31 July, and at 3.50 that morning the attack on Pilckem Ridge duly got under way. The weather had changed dramatically since Messines, however. From the
start, fortune certainly did not favour the Allied attackers. Dawn on the 31st brought torrential rain that continued without respite for the next four days. The rain was to play a major role in
the campaign, for what lay ahead, although no one yet knew it, was the wettest August-to-November period in that part of Flanders on record. The delay after Messines, from two weeks to seven, was
to prove critical.

A significant by-product of the intense shelling and the rain – indeed, a significant factor in the battle – was the mud. (When I wrote earlier that the battle was in ‘full
flow’, I used the wrong words. This battle did very little ‘flowing’. The mud made almost any progress virtually impossible.) The ancient drainage systems of the area, some of
them natural and some dating back to the Middle Ages, had been badly affected, and often destroyed, by the shelling, with the result that the whole battlefield, which was originally drained
marshland, became a quagmire. Losses through this period mounted steadily, not just to enemy action. Untold numbers of men, unable to escape the mud through wounds or the enormous weight of
equipment, simply sank into the morass and drowned. Many were never found. Men, horses, mules, field guns, limbers, wagons, lorries – the mud claimed victims wherever there was no solid
footing.

Yet despite the rain and the mud, and the intact defences, the first day saw most objectives taken, although at a heavy cost. The Allies incurred 15,000 casualties on the first day, a figure
that had risen to around 32,000 by 2 August (with twelve VCs being won), for a gain of about one and a quarter to two miles (2–3kms). Against such losses, the capacity of the Rugeley training
camp, 12,500 men, begins to seem quite modest.

On 1 August, the London
Times
reported:

The famous picture included here, taken on the same day as
The Times
’s report, shows a stretcher party struggling through the mud. Seven men to carry a single
casualty, where normally two stretcher-bearers would suffice.

The rain continued, the conditions worsened and the attack, after the first two days, ground to a halt. Yet despite these problems, the enormous losses and the serious doubts expressed by his
staff, Haig steadfastly insisted that the operation should continue until the objectives were met. He even ignored General Gough’s plea that operations in the conditions were impossible. For
ever the optimist, Haig believed that the major breakthrough was always imminent.

CHAPTER 6

MID-SEPTEMBER 1917 ONWARDS

T
HE PACE OF WAR SHIFTED
noticeably for Harry’s battalion. From the middle of September 1917, the lead role in the Passchendaele offensive passed
from the Fifth Army to General Plumer’s Second Army. Harry’s battalion was in the 23rd Division, part of that army. The troops who had ‘enjoyed’ such success at Messines
Ridge moved into the line. Plumer’s offensive started on 20 September. We can follow the war diary entries and Harry’s letters to get a picture of the reality of those events for the
ordinary soldier.

Harry gives a very low-key description of some intense action. The war diary’s description and the casualty figures give a much fuller picture:

The ‘ATTACK DAY’ in the war diary is a different operation to the ‘raid’ that Harry refers to in his letter to Jack. A Company suffered twenty-two casualties, whereas
Harry refers to B Company ‘going over’ in a raid and losing one man killed and two wounded. At any one time there might be several operations going on simultaneously within the
battalion.

Plumer’s offensive on 20 September set three objectives for the assault, each marked with a series of coloured lines on the trench maps issued to the attacking units and supporting arms.
The sequence was Red, Blue, then Green Lines, with the Blue Line close to Polygon Wood on the Menin Road.

Tough times on the 20th and 21st. Most of the battalion would have spent the night digging trenches, only to spend the next day under heavy shellfire. B Company in the front line would have been
pleased that the job had been finished during the previous night.

On the 21st, Harry’s C Company was sent to strengthen the front line when the enemy counter-attacked. The ‘heavy shelling’ mentioned in the war diary may have been responsible
for Harry’s ‘slight wound in the face with shrapnel but not much’. By now we have learned that he is not a man to make a fuss. As to the German counter-attack, the war diary
remarks laconically, ‘Enemy did not reach our lines.’ The attackers were beaten off. Some of the German troops would have been shelled as they advanced. The normal routine for a
front-line unit, on spotting an enemy attack, was immediately to call for artillery support to try to break up the attack at an early stage. If, on the 21st that had not been completely effective,
then it is quite possible that Harry’s Lewis-gun team would have put their training to use, with some effect.