Now It Can Be Told

country into one great bog of slime. Those little rivers or “beeks,” which ran between the knobby fingers of the clawlike range of ridges, were blown out of their channels and slopped over into broad swamps. The hurricanes of artillery fire which our gunners poured upon the enemy positions for twenty miles in depth churned up deep shell-craters which intermingled and made pits which the rains and floods filled to the brim. The only way of walking was by “duckboards,” tracks laid down across the bogs under enemy fire, smashed up day by day, laid down again under cover of darkness. Along a duckboard walk men must march in single file, and if one of our men, heavily laden in his fighting-kit, stumbled on those greasy boards (as all of them stumbled at every few yards) and fell off, he sank up to his knees, often up to his waist, sometimes up to his neck, in mud and water. If he were wounded when he fell, and darkness was about him, he could only cry to God or his pals, for he was helpless otherwise. One of our divisions of Lancashire men⁠—the 66th⁠—took eleven hours in making three miles or so out of Ypres across that ground on their way to attack, and then, in spite of their exhaustion, attacked. Yet week after week, month after month, our masses of men, almost every division in the British army at one time or another, struggled on through that Slough of Despond, capturing ridge after ridge, until the heights at Passchendaele were stormed and won, though even then the Germans clung to Staden and Westroosebeeke when all our efforts came to a dead halt, and that Belgian coast attack was never launched.

Sir Douglas Haig thinks that some of the descriptions of that six months’ horror were “exaggerated.” As a man who knows something of the value of words, and who saw many of those battle scenes in Flanders, and went out from Ypres many times during those months to the Westhoek Ridge and the Pilkem Ridge, to the Frezenburg and Inverness Copse and Glencourse Wood, and beyond to Polygon Wood and Passchendaele, where his dead lay in the swamps and round the pillboxes, and where tanks that had wallowed into the mire were shot into scrap-iron by German gunfire (thirty were knocked out by direct hits on the first day of battle), and where our own guns were being flung up by the harassing fire of heavy shells, I say now that nothing that has been written is more than the pale image of the abomination of those battlefields, and that no pen or brush has yet achieved the picture of that Armageddon in which so many of our men perished.

They were months of ghastly endurance to gunners when batteries sank up to their axles as I saw them often while they fired almost unceasingly for days and nights without sleep, and were living targets of shells which burst about them. They were months of battle in which our men advanced through slime into slime, under the slash of machine-gun bullets, shrapnel, and high explosives, wet to the skin, chilled to the bone, plastered up to the eyes in mud, with a dreadful way back for walking wounded, and but little chance sometimes for wounded who could not walk. The losses in many of these battles amounted almost to annihilation to many battalions, and whole divisions lost as much as 50 percent of their strength after a few days in action, before they were “relieved.” Those were dreadful losses. Napoleon said that no body of men could lose more than 25 percent of their fighting strength in an action without being broken in spirit. Our men lost double that, and more than double, but kept their courage, though in some cases they lost their hope.

The 55th Division of Lancashire men, in their attacks on a line of pillboxes called Plum Farm, Schuler Farm, and Square Farm, below the Gravenstafel Spur, lost 3,840 men in casualties out of 6,049. Those were not uncommon losses. They were usual losses. One day’s fighting in Flanders (on October 4th) cost the British army ten thousand casualties, and they were considered “light” by the Higher Command in relation to the objects achieved.

General Harper of the 51st (Highland) Division told me that in his opinion the official communiqués and the war correspondents’ articles gave only one side of the picture of war and were too glowing in their optimism. (I did not tell him that my articles were accused of being black in pessimism, pervading gloom.) “We tell the public,” he said, “that an enemy division has been ‘shattered.’ That is true. But so is mine. One of my brigades has lost eighty-seven officers and two thousand men since the spring.” He protested that there was not enough liaison between the fighting-officers and the Higher Command, and could not blame them for their hatred of “the Staff.”

The story of the two Irish divisions⁠—the 36th Ulster and 16th (Nationalist)⁠—in their fighting on August 16th is black in tragedy. They were left in the line for sixteen days before the battle and were shelled and gassed incessantly as they crouched in wet ditches. Every day groups of men were blown to bits, until the ditches were bloody and the living lay by the corpses of their comrades. Every day scores of wounded crawled back through the bogs, if they had the strength to crawl. Before the attack on August 16th the Ulster Division had lost nearly two thousand men. Then they attacked and lost two thousand more, and over one hundred officers. The 16th Division lost as many men before the attack and more officers. The 8th Dublins had been annihilated in holding the line. On the night before the battle hundreds of men were gassed. Then their comrades attacked and lost over two thousand more, and one hundred and sixty-two officers. All the ground below two knolls of earth