Malcolm MacPhail's Great War Page 11

  Smith and the others were enjoying the comforts of the Canal Bank bunker – thinking about it, I’d been unjustly harsh with my hasty dismissal of the accommodations. But that was prior to my stay at the Grime Inn, otherwise known as Waterloo Farm, where a dry bed – even for officers – was a luxury. Meanwhile, I was more nervous than I cared to acknowledge. The second phase of the attack would begin today.

  Miraculously, it wasn’t raining. There was what is euphemistically called a stiff wind. To anybody other than an Eskimo, it was bloody freezing.

  The attack four days ago, on the 26th, had been touch and go. At 11.30 that morning orders went out to Lieutenant-Colonel Foster of the 52nd to send a company to relieve Shankland, Ellis and the forty-odd men with them on the Spur. Just after one o’clock, the whole battalion was thrown in. The waiting was agonizing.

  Finally, word came; the German defences on the right slope were beaten into submission. They’d been caught from in front and behind. It was exactly as General Hill and I had discussed. Not taking it lying down, the Boche counter-attacked later that afternoon, and into the night. Unprepared for the sheer stubbornness they encountered, they dribbled off each time. The key centre of the attack was secured.

  On the far-right, the 4th Division and the 1st Australians had both been ordered to take Decline Copse astride the Ridge, and the main rail line running north from Ypres to Roulers, which they did. But then, in the sort of comedy pantomime you saw in the movies, with one character saying, ‘Oh, I thought you had it,’ and the other, to laughter, ‘No, I thought you did,’ the Germans, as was their wont, sneaked back in; and that was decidedly not a laughing matter. The 44th Battalion was obliged to do an encore the next night. This time they stayed firmly put. It was the sort of botch-up Banting and I would have resolved in a flash.

  After a day and a half, the casualty list was a lengthy one. The Camerons alone reported more than 300 killed, wounded and missing, roughly half their initial strength. For the 600-odd yards they’d advanced, it was a heavy toll. There weren’t any reliable figures for the German casualties, but I reckoned they weren’t a quarter of ours. Admittedly, we’d taken hundreds of prisoners, but they were alive and largely unharmed. In the mixed-up arithmetic of this war, that probably counted as a draw, so to GHQ it was a victory. I had a tough time seeing it that way.

  My feelings aside, we had graduated from the red line to the blue, our next objective on the deceptively short, but brutally hazardous path to Passchendaele. It reminded me all too much of swimming lessons, and the time I ran home bursting with pride that I was no longer a Tadpole, but a Minnow – not realizing until later that a minnow was rather small as fish go, and getting to a level commensurate with my parents’ ambitions was going to be a tough and lengthy affair.

  Up early this morning, if not by choice then by circumstance, I saw the troops assemble, the barrage thunder, and the attack commence – this time from the shell-marked confines of Bellevue Farm. The 9th Brigade had fitted out one of the German bunkers as a report centre. Other than the names of the fresh units that came in relief, the plan was little altered from four days earlier. You could have criticized that as lacking imagination, were it not for the fact there was no other way to go to get to Passchendaele, a salient detail not lost on our foe.

  On the low marshy land to the left of the Spur, a battalion of the 8th Brigade was to advance through the charmingly, but wildly inappropriately named Woodland Plantation, subdue the strong-points at Furst, Vapour and Source Farms, and push on until they reached another outgrowth of the ridge called the Goudberg Spur. Across the Ravebeek on the right, the terrain widened, and three battalions of the 12th Brigade were to wrestle further along the Ridge, almost to within spitting-distance of Passchendaele itself.

  Once again, I was up to my calves in the muck, in the centre of the advance, straight up the Bellevue Spur. The 49th Battalion from Edmonton was to take the left side of the Spur, and the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, the right. Kindly, the model train adept’s daughter, otherwise known as Princess Patricia of Connaught, had lent the Patricias her name. It was rather a shame the Duke wasn’t here in person to see them in action, I thought.

  It was a little before 7.15 a.m., and together with a signals officer from the Brigade, four runners, and six men carrying a Power Buzzer and accessories, I arrived at Duck Lodge.

  Some wit had so named it, there naturally being neither a lodge, nor ducks. There was, however, an ominous-looking pill-box squatted across the land, glowering like some imperious medieval regent sitting on his haunches, and surveying his minions in the swamp below. At roughly waist level, thin dark eyes peered out, commanding the approaches. Its massive walls, buttressed by concrete and steel rods, were as the shell marks made clear, impervious to all but the very largest of our shells. As for ducks, the only ducks around here were either in the belly of some fat Fritz, or had flown the coop three years ago. It suggested an innate intelligence evidently lacking in us two-legged creatures.

  To underline my point, a couple of hissing Jennies flew over, doing justice to their name. With their deadly velocity, they had come from the 105mm field guns, and were available in a variety of flavours ranging from high explosive to shrapnel to gas – all much feared by the infantry.

  Unfortunately, we were not the only ones up early; the German artillery crews put in long days as well. By my reckoning, it took them exactly 3 minutes to begin shelling this morning, and they were still at it. If they knew the havoc they wrought, I’m afraid it would have encouraged them to even greater lengths, Germans being as they are.

  Well prepared for the battle, I was packing my own heavy artillery, my .45 calibre Webley revolver. It had the stopping power of a mid-sized freight train; the only drawback being that if you missed the first time, there was a good chance you were already on your behind, so powerful was the kick. Alternatively, you could avoid the whole recoil problem and simply bludgeon somebody. It was a multi-faceted weapon.

  I took it and weighed it thoughtfully in my hand, reassured by its heavy solidness. The company of mopping-up soldiers was still warily circling the bunker. Jaundiced, perhaps, by two and a half years of war, they seemed to me over-cautious. The Patricias had taken Duck Lodge twenty minutes earlier – I’d seen most of that fierce fight, with my own eyes, from Bellevue Farm.

  Inching along, ascending the light incline of the Spur’s right slope, they endured a hail of lead of epic proportions. It was too much for many. From afar, the Patricias advanced as specks, even at the maximum magnification of the Lemaire field glasses I still carried. Pillars of earth from the exploding shells enveloped them. Regularly, a couple of specks remained behind, motionless. As they approached, and I could make out the figures more clearly, their ranks were shattered by a spray of gunfire from the Lodge, the crest of the Spur, and Graf House 500 yards further along – as well as from across the valley.

  I watched the survivors, shooting as they went, throw Mills bomb after Mills bomb. The machine-gun nests encircling the bunker fell one-by-one. Thankfully, the artillery had done its work, and the wire was cut. Finally, as if they’d done it a thousand times before, although it was likely nearer the first, they laid down a fierce fusillade of rifle and Lewis gun fire against the pill-box. With the defenders dazzled by the fireworks, a couple of soldiers slipped unseen up to the grey monstrosity, and pitched grenades through the bunker’s gun slits. Hands held high, a handful of shaken-looking prisoners emerged.

  After that, mopping-up seemed a useless pastime. But there were strict orders. It wouldn’t have been the first time that a strongpoint was taken, and the shock troops moved on, only to discover survivors re-emerging with new fire in their bellies and bullets in their chambers.

  CRACK. The bullet hit me in the side.

  I hadn’t paid much attention when I first saw them, thinking they were corpses. But one of the grey-clad bodies, in a shell hole not 50 yards away, had lifted himself to his elbows. He was glaring down t
he length of a rifle at me.

  Raising my arm with a jolt I fired quickly, oblivious to the recoil, or even where the round went. Screaming, I broke into a mad sprint towards him, my revolver arm extended. My finger pulled at the trigger as fast as the heavy pull would allow. I could see him plainly now, moustache and all. He was fumbling frantically with the bolt of his rifle, cowering at this mad bison tearing down upon him.

  I was almost on him. His bolt was closed again, and he’d regained the composure to aim. The dark round point of his barrel was fixated on my chest.

  A shot rang out. But my momentum kept me going.

  I saw the jagged, finger-sized hole appear in the middle of his helmet. His head sagged, followed by the rest of him. The shot had been mine.

  I slowed to a stop, hands on my knees, panting like I’d run the 100-yard sprint.

  I raised my head and stared at him. He lay inert, in that horrible, awkward posture that is natural only to those who have died a violent death.

  Only then did I think to look to my own wound. I felt it on my right, and I looked down expecting to see a large, dark, expanding blot staining my trench-coat. But I didn’t. Dropping the Webley, I ripped open my coat, and rashly clutched at my side, desperate to find where I was hit.

  My hand came away with my respirator, pierced through the goggle and the cloth at the back, by a bullet. I began to laugh.

  ‘Sir, are you alright?’ It was a soldier from the Patricias who stood beside me.

  I looked at him, my face glowing warmly from the run, and the adrenaline, and I smiled, stupidly. ‘Yes, I’m fine. Just glad to be here,’ I said.

  ‘That was very brave, sir.’ He looked at me with an expression of undisguised awe on his face.

  I smiled again, ‘Thanks,’ I said, unable, or perhaps unwilling, to dispel his admiration as the unvarnished truth surely would have. ‘Help me turn him over, would you?’

  Dispassionately, we went through the pockets of the man who single-handedly almost ended my campaign, and my life. He was a sergeant, from the 465th Regiment.

  He was not what you’d call a crack shot, by any stretch. The 465th were one of the three regiments of the 238th Division, equivalent to one of our brigades. I knew full well the 238th Division had replaced the battered 11th Bavarians not long before. His papers revealed nothing of interest. So, we left him, one body amongst far too many, and not one I’d be mourning.

  I scooped up my Webley, and opened the 6-round cylinder, more out of morbid curiosity than any well-ingrained soldierly instinct. It was empty. I whistled softly and then walked over to the pill-box.

  The pill-box was a place of horror. As I entered the outer chamber I was met with a scene so shocking that, in the time it took my eyes to adjust to the darkness, it shattered the detachment that comes from being surrounded by death in a place like this. Tens of bodies and their parts were strewn about. A large pool of blood, not yet dry, lay in the middle. Every surface of the room seemed to exhibit traces of the bloodbath. Suddenly, I saw a body move, and I shuddered. Inexplicably, I was moved more by a sign of life, than by its absence.

  Before I could say a word, two privates picked the soldier up, and began gingerly moving him outside to be treated. I turned to escape to the open, if not the fresh air of the Ypres Salient.

  As the last of the bodies was removed, a private of the Patricias, who was standing around outside, began talking in a loud voice, to no one in particular, ‘And to think, I could have been at the Lekkerboterbeek, by now,’ he said. The Lekkerboterbeek was an objective of the 5th Canadian Mounted Rifles on our far left – he must have seen it on a map. I hoped there was a punchline coming. Quizzically, I looked at him.

  ‘Roughly translated, that’s the Yummy Butter Creek,’ he explained, sensing correctly that none of his audience had a clue what he was rambling on about. ‘My parents were Dutch,’ he added. It was a biographical detail that he shared widely, I presumed, lest someone think he was German.

  I smiled wanly, and there were a few tepid laughs.

  There was nothing here remotely resembling butter. I couldn’t imagine it was any different a thousand yards to the northwest at the Lekkerboterbeek. Unless perhaps it was the mud. That shared an oddly similar consistency to soft butter. If you’d lost both sight and smell, and were therefore blissfully unware of its vile brown putridness, a weak comparison could be made.

  Come to think of it, though, I was largely inured to the stench of the air. Whether my stomach could handle the fresh stuff was another matter. I saw the signals officer and his men working feverishly to set up the Power Buzzer. Curious, I moved over.

  Modern war was fast becoming a war of technology. I hoped that at twenty-eight I didn’t automatically disqualify for this brave new era; I definitely had some catching up to do, if the last few weeks were any indication.

  ‘Lieutenant, how does that work, exactly – the Power Buzzer?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s quite a neat gadget, actually,’ he replied. ‘In the absence of cables, it’s obviously impossible to send any wires or telephone traffic. At least not without one of those new-fangled wireless sets they have at Brigade, right?’ He glanced briefly over at me, seemingly for confirmation, though it might just have been to see if I was pulling his leg with my query.

  I shrugged affirmatively.

  ‘Right,’ he said, reassured. ‘Well, the Power Buzzer can send a signal for a relatively short distance through the ground, from two metal probes. That’s what’s underneath those two wires, there,’ he said, pointing. ‘We’ll be transmitting with Morse code to our reporting centre at Bellevue Farm, who will then re-transmit it to Brigade HQ. The only problem is that the Germans can overhear it, if they’re close, and if they’re listening. So it’s best to keep the messages short, or better yet, encrypt them. Until the engineers get a cable up here, and that hopefully won’t be long, it’s a good temporary measure, and a lot better than the signal lamps or the runners, for sure.’

  I shook my head in wonder, but he seemed to suspect I was being critical about the pace of the engineers. ‘They do their best, sir. It won’t be more than a few hours.’

  ‘No, I agree, they’re doing their best. They deserve medals, all of them,’ I said. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to follow in their footsteps.

  Aside from the obvious sanitary issues, the problem with being at Duck Lodge was that I had the impression I hadn’t a clue what was going on, an impression I soon discovered was entirely accurate. That the Patricias were held up by the massive pill-box 500 yards forward, smack in the middle of the critical high ground near the hamlet at Meetcheele was obvious, but little else. The rest of the offensive could have been playing out in Namibia for all I knew. Every so often a tidbit of news would trickle in. Assessing how the Patricias were doing, let alone the 49th, was agonisingly drawn out. I could almost sympathise with our information-starved commanders.

  That left us in the “Advanced Brigade Reporting Centre” broadcasting appeals for stretcher-bearers, something I wouldn’t have thought necessary given the Corps Commander’s infamous casualty estimate of two weeks earlier.

  Finally, at 9.24 a.m. – we noted the time for the log – a runner came in brandishing a message. Seeing me first, and noting my pips, he handed it over without a word. The Patricias had taken the Meetcheele pill-box!

  ‘Send: CREST OF HILL TAKEN. LARGE PILL-BOX SURRENDERED. OUR MACHINE GUNS ESTABLISHED,’ I ordered one of the signallers, with excitement in my voice, repeating verbatim the contents of the message. There was no denying it was a crucial breakthrough. That pill-box held up the entire advance on the Bellevue Spur.

  A half-hour later, a scout sergeant by the name of Mullin, who I only afterwards learned captured the pill-box single-handedly, passed through with confirmation. He was en route to Waterloo Farm to report the details.

  By lunchtime I’d largely regained my hunger, following the morning’s suspense, and the initial shock of seeing Duck Lodge. That was a good thing, to
o, as the Boche had considerately left a well-stocked pantry and plenty of fresh water – the latter, perversely, was a real collector’s item in the water-logged Salient. Looking at the bounty of edibles I could only dream what German rations looked like before the blockade.

  Not wishing to tempt fate, or my constitution, I took a thick chunk of bread and a good length of sausage, and some water, and went outside to eat. The sausage was of a sort I was unfamiliar with, but it smelled delicious.

  It was a decision I promptly reconsidered at the sound of a Hissing Jenny. Say what you might of Duck Lodge, it had the undeniable merit of possessing 5-foot thick walls. In the midst of another bombardment that gave it a certain magnetic attraction to those of us fond of our own skin. Retiring to a rough table in one of the inner rooms, I was savouring a mouthful of the garlicky sausage when my mind – in one of the circuitous deviations it is prone to – wandered to GHQ, and the Château de Beaurepaire. Haig was surely well into the port and cigars at this hour, I thought sourly. I savagely ripped away another mouthful of bread with my teeth.

  My reputation to the contrary, I was never particularly happy looking busy when I wasn’t, and the feeling of being distinctly under-employed grew by the hour. At last I decided to venture out. I wanted to see what I could make of the 4th Division’s progress, opposite us, on the main ridge line. Perhaps I might get a vague impression how the overall attack was faring. Looking through the slits of the bunker was as illuminating as trying to read a book through a keyhole. One thing I did know, a burst of machine-gun fire in my direction from Crest Farm, or thereabouts, would not be a positive sign. Optimist that I am, I kept my head low, and my hopes high.

  Steel helmet or not, I was relieved by the absence of lead in the air, and even more by the sight of men moving around, and beyond, that strongpoint guarding the gates to Passchendaele. The initial reports of it falling appeared to be correct. The soldiers I saw had to be ours; there was less chance of Germans running around in the open there, than of the German empire adopting the Union Jack.