Letters From the Trenches: A Soldier of the Great War (13 page)

Once again, the casualties are recorded without comment. These losses would have been considered ‘normal’ for three days in the front line at a time of much activity.

From 21 October, the battalion moved away from the front line and returned to rest, recuperation and routine training. Harry’s letter to Jack a few days later sums up his experiences and
adds some pleasant personal details. We get a picture of the comradeship and sharing that were so valued among the soldiers, and we can see that winning a medal was not high among his priorities.
Willie’s mug figures again, and we learn that Harry, clearly, had been enjoying married life before the war interfered. At the end of the month, two of the top brass visited for inspections.
On the 29th the divisional commander, Major-General Babington, inspected the battalion. Two days later, the Commander-in-Chief, Sir Douglas Haig, inspected the brigade. I would guess that it was
Babington who spoke to C Company, rather than Haig himself.

The letter is undated, but by referring to the battalion war diary it is possible to date it with some confidence to 27 October – the day on the rifle range.

Almost certainly the Lewis gun No.1 and No.2 were awarded their Military Medals for the action on 30 September. Without their names and a specific mention in the war diary, however, it has not
been possible to uncover any citation. I would also have liked to have been able to identify the pillbox that seems to have been taken with a flamethrower, or possibly phosphorus grenades (P
bombs), but, without a specific date, it proved impossible. The Australians cleared many pillboxes on the road to Passchendaele.

On the day after Harry wrote to Jack, a brief entry in the war diary signalled an enormous change for him and his comrades.

The Passchendaele offensive as a whole lasted from 31 July to 10 November. Despite the fine spell in September, what is chiefly remembered about the battle (or series of
battles, really), other than the enormous casualties, is the misery of fighting in mud and water. The area to the north of the Menin Road had been a marsh before ever the battle started. The
bombardment and the rain simply combined to produce a morass of almost impassable mud.

After five months of heavy fighting, Canadian troops finally took the village of Passchendaele on 6 November. By then, the once substantial village had been reduced to a smear of rubble and
brick dust in a sea of mud and shell holes. The cost had been immense. The Allies had sustained almost half a million casualties, while the Germans reported just over a quarter of a million men
killed or seriously wounded. For the Allies, a gain of around five miles (8km), capturing the high ground around Ypres, had cost 140,000 lives. Yet despite this cost in lives and the suffering of
the troops, the Allies were forced to withdraw from the high ground just four months later, virtually back to their original line.

This ‘last-push-to-achieve-a-breakthrough’ philosophy permanently damaged Haig’s reputation. The huge losses to achieve little of any importance, and his determination to
persist with the offensive in such terrible conditions, were unforgivable.

There are many accounts of Passchendaele by those who survived it. The overall German commander in the sector, General Erich Ludendorff, shows nothing but admiration for the men of both
sides:

More succinct, but no less telling, is a line from the war poet Siegfried Sassoon, who served on the Western Front as an officer of the Royal Welch Fusiliers:

CHAPTER 7

THE JOURNEY TO ITALY

A
FTER A VERY UNPLEASANT
time in or close to the front line, Harry’s battalion moves away to regroup and reorganize. The war diary for the last
three days of October reports the arrival of three separate drafts, totalling 220 soldiers, replacing casualties, which need to be absorbed into the unit. After being relieved in the front line on
20 October, the battalion spends a day in Brewery Camp ‘cleaning up’ before moving by train to Wizernes, a training camp in France some thirty miles (48km) west of the front line at
Ypres. For the next three weeks, they spend their time cleaning, training and generally sorting out in the relative calm of the Wizernes training area.

The war diary for the period has some interesting entries:

As early as 28 October, the 23rd Division, along with four other British divisions, had received orders to prepare to move to an unknown destination. It is these orders that would have triggered
the recall of personnel. At that date, five divisions would have totalled well over 50,000 men. Their departure from the front would have put more pressure on the remaining troops in the
sector.

Field Marshal Haig inspected the division at Leulinghem, near Wizernes, on the 31st. It is a widely held view that Haig never actually saw the front line in all his time as Commander-in-Chief on
the Western Front. His entire appreciation of the state of the soldiers under his command and the conditions they were enduring was based entirely on reports from his staff. His own assessment of
the Passchendaele offensive, reported near the end of the last chapter (see
here
), was a condensed version of reports he had received. Harry’s letters make no mention of his
inspection.

The war diary continues:

This ‘block entry’ covering nine days mentions the commanding officer heading off for leave in England for just three days. Most of that time would have been spent travelling. Two
more drafts, of 95 and 50 soldiers, joined, making a total, in three weeks, of 270 new men to be absorbed into the battalion.

The story of Acting Lance-Corporal Worthington is intriguing. What did he do to earn three years’ penal servitude? (Which may well have been a softer option than the Flanders trenches
– perhaps a reason why the sentence was suspended and he returned to duty in the front line.) What did he do to earn his Military Medal? Sadly, the war diary gives no other details.

As intense as the fighting was in Flanders, there was a serious problem further to the south and east, in a different theatre of operations. In north-east Italy, the Austro-Hungarian Army,
supported by German units and with its High Command bolstered by German commanders and advisers, had broken the resolve of the Italian Army at Caporetto and its troops were advancing, virtually
unopposed, across the Venetian Plain.

Italian losses were enormous: 11,000 men were killed, 20,000 wounded and 275,000 taken prisoner; additionally, 2,500 guns were captured by the Austrians. Between 24 October and 9 November 1917
the Austro-Hungarian and German forces advanced more than 100 miles (160km) in the direction of Venice. They were only stopped at the Piave River, where the Italians (supported by French and
British forces) established a new defensive line. Luckily for the Allies, the Austro-Hungarian support systems could not sustain such rapid progress, and it became necessary for the advancing army
to pause to consolidate. The advance was halted by 10 November, as the 9th York and Lancasters set off from Flanders towards this fresh and very different theatre. On that day, the 23rd Division
began the lengthy move by rail to Italy. The battalion war diary gives bare details of the journey:

From the limited details in the war diary, the train seems likely to have taken the troops, via Paris, south along the route of the current high-speed train (TGV) track, through Lyons, down the
Rhône Valley to Arles. It would then have turned east and followed the coastline to Marseilles, Cannes and Nice, and on to Italy. The train would have crossed the border into Italy just west
of Ventomiglia and then passed through Genoa and Cremona before arriving at its destination, Mantua, which lies about seventy-five miles (120km) west-south-west of Venice. The march to Ceresa was
only about three miles (5km) and, after five days on the train, should have presented no problems.

The total distance travelled was about a thousand miles (1,600km). Five days’ travel gives an average progress of 200 (320km) miles each day, or a mean speed of around 8 miles an hour
(13kph) over the whole distance. This would be a reasonable rate of progress for such a train. British troop trains aimed to carry a battalion (normally 1,000 men) and all its kit in two trains,
with a target track speed of 25mph (40 kph). (The French adopted a different approach, using one large train, travelling at half that speed.) We know from the war diary that the battalion was split
between two trains. A steady speed of 25 miles an hour would, with a few lengthy stops, translate with little difficulty to a 12mph average, close enough to the battalion’s average speed over
the whole journey. It seems ironic that they should have taken, for part of the journey, what would become a route of the French TGV, which currently boasts average speeds of 175mph (280kph).