It was for good reason that this corner of Europe had long been known as the Low Countries; the water table is less than two feet below ground in much of Belgium. Haig seems to have given no thought to the way his bombardment would wreck canals and drainage ditches and leave tens of thousands of craters that soon filled with water. "Haig's plans required a drought of Ethiopian proportions to ensure success," comments his biographer Gerard De Groot. The landscape in which the battle unfolded bore no resemblance to the dry, neatly sandbagged replica of a trench that had been constructed in London's Ken-sington Gardens. (A similar trench, no less unrealistic, drew many visitors to a park in Berlin.)
The area around Ypres was covered by mist when the British infantry assault began in the early morning of July 31, 1917. The mist soon turned into almost nonstop rain, the heaviest in some 30 years. Observation aircraft could not take to the sky, weapons jammed, and the clay soil of the watery moonscape of craters became sticky; one officer likened its consistency to cheesecake, another to porridge. Guns could barely be moved, and mules and horses pulling ammunition wagons sank up to their stomachs and had to be dug out. Ambulances carrying wounded soldiers skidded off slippery roads. As summer turned to autumn, the men were reminded that the British soldier's cold-weather greatcoat was not waterproof. It absorbed mud and water like a relentless sponge, adding up to 34 pounds to its weight. As the battle continued, one single day saw 26,000 British casualties. Still Haig pushed on.
"I cannot attempt to describe the conditions under which we are fighting," wrote John Mortimer Wheeler, later a well-known archaeologist. "Anything I could write about them would seem an exaggeration but would, in reality, be miles below the truth.... The mud is not so much mud as a fathomless, sticky morass. The shell holes, where they do not actually merge into one another, are divided only by a few inches of this glutinous mud.... The gunners work thigh-deep in water." Some British artillery pieces dug themselves so deeply into the mud with their recoils that they dropped below the surface; the crew would then put up a flag to mark the spot.
Private Charlie Miles of the Royal Fusiliers carried messages as a runner—a misnomer in this season: "The moment you set off you felt that dreadful suction.... In a way, it was worse when the mud didn't suck you down...[then] you knew that it was a body you were treading on. It was terrifying. You'd tread on one on the stomach, perhaps, and it would grunt all the air out.... The smell could make you vomit." And when shells landed, they blasted waterlogged, putrefying corpses into the air, showering pieces of them down on the soldiers who were still alive.
British, Australian, and Canadian troops inched ever closer to the little village of Passchendaele as newspaper headlines triumphally announced, "Our Position Improved; Heroism in the New Advance" (the Times); "Complete Success in Battle of the Pill Boxes; Haig's Smashing Blow" (the Daily Mirror). But water had filled some shell holes to a depth of over a man's head, and troops joked that it was time to call in the Royal Navy. If a soldier with a heavy pack trudging around a crater slipped or stumbled, or jumped to avoid an incoming artillery round, the muddy water, often already fouled with the rotting bodies of men or horses, might claim him for good.
"From the darkness on all sides came the groans and wails of wounded men," recorded Edwin Vaughn, a 19-year-old lieutenant, in his diary on a rainy night, "faint, long, sobbing moans of agony, and despairing shrieks.... Dozens of men with serious wounds must have crawled for safety into new shell-holes, and now the water was rising about them.... We could do nothing to help them; Dunham was crying quietly beside me, and all the men were affected by the piteous cries." After hours of rain, "the cries of the wounded had much diminished ... the reason was only too apparent, for the water was right over the tops of the shell-holes." Of the more than 88,000 British Empire casualties in the Ypres sector listed on memorials as "missing," no one knows how many drowned. Belgian farmers' plows still uncover their skeletons today.
To the fear of drowning was added a new horror. The Germans had begun using mustard gas. Aside from its faint smell and the yellow color of the blisters it raised on a man's skin, this powerful toxin had nothing to do with mustard. Extremely concentrated, it did not require cumbersome canisters; a small amount was merely added to a high-explosive shell. Moreover, soldiers could fall victim without breathing it, for the chemical easily penetrated clothing, producing bloody blisters up to a foot wide. Troops who unknowingly sat on contaminated ground later found the huge blisters all over their buttocks and genitals. Since the compound was slow-acting, it might be six or eight hours before a man realized he had been stricken. The worst off were soldiers who had breathed droplets in the air, for their blisters were internal, gradually swelling to seal throats and bronchial tubes fatally shut, a process that might take as long as four or five weeks. Writhing, gagging patients sometimes had to be strapped to their beds. Horses and mules also succumbed to mustard gas by the thousands, but for them at least, death, by a handler's bullet, was mercifully quick.
Haig finally called a halt to the fighting in November 1917 after his soldiers seized a last piece of ground less than five miles from where they had started in July. More than 15,000 Canadians were killed or wounded in the concluding spasm of combat to capture the village of Passchendaele—which had been scheduled to be taken on the fourth day of the offensive, months before. It was such a patently meaningless sacrifice that, raging about it afterward at a meeting in London, Canadian Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden strode up to Lloyd George, seized his lapels, and shook him.
In the sanitizing language of newspapers and memorial services, these Canadians, and all the British Empire troops who lost their lives in the three-and-a-half-month battle, were referred to as the "fallen." But in the mud of Passchendaele, falling dead from a bullet wound was only for the lucky: "A party of 'A' Company men passing up to the front line found ... a man bogged to above the knees," remembered Major C. A. Bill of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. "The united efforts of four of them, with rifles beneath his armpits, made not the slightest impression, and to dig, even if shovels had been available, would be impossible, for there was no foothold. Duty compelled them to move on up to the line, and when two days later they passed down that way the wretched fellow was still there; but only his head was now visible and he was raving mad."
Early gas masks, here worn by Russian officers.
Practicing for the great cavalry charge that never came.
The British government's 1914–1918 propaganda campaign, much of it secretly financed and the work of supposedly independent civic groups, was the largest and most sophisticated the world had yet seen.
A still from the documentary film The Battle of
the Somme: a soldier carries a dying comrade.
Passchendaele, the battle that cost British forces more than
260,000 dead and wounded: the first day, July 31, 1917 (below),
September (opposite top), October (opposite bottom).
Stephen Hobhouse: from Eton and
Oxford to solitary confinement.
Joseph Stones: shot at dawn.
Albert Rochester, radical in uniform: Why
should each officer have a personal servant?
A family of show-trial martyrs. From right: Alice Wheeldon,
her daughters Winnie and Hettie, a prison wardress.
John S. Clark: from circus animal tamer
to underground antiwar activist.
What generals on both sides feared: pacifists (at Dartmoor, Devon, above) and
fraternizing soldiers (Russians and Germans on the Eastern Front, below).
19. PLEASE DON'T DIE
As DIRECTOR OF INFORMATION, John Buchan oversaw the expansion of the most sophisticated propaganda operation the world had yet seen. It produced a torrent of patriotic materials, including paintings and drawings by special war artists sent to the front, pictorial magazines, boys' adventure stories portraying the Germans as bloodthirsty barbarians, cards for cigarette packs, and a "Ger
man Crimes Calendar" with a new atrocity for each month. Telegrams put an upbeat twist on the latest war news for the press at home and abroad. One bureau turned out leaflets dropped from balloons over the German trenches. Lecturers were dispatched everywhere, from industrial districts in England threatened by the influence of antiwar radicals to the United States—where speakers were instructed to avoid the touchy subject of Ireland. Every American Catholic priest found himself receiving a monthly letter of war news from a supposedly independent committee of Catholics in Britain. American editors, reporters, and congressmen were welcomed on their arrival in London by a new Anglo-American Society Buchan started, and could enjoy VIP tours of the front in France while housed in a nearby château. Like his patron Milner, Buchan welcomed the colonies and dominions to the great struggle, and saw to it that films poured out with titles like Canadians on the Western Front and New Zealand Troops in France. One short film in 1917 even celebrated the black work battalions sent from South Africa; it showed Africans doing traditional dances and madly scrambling for a coin tossed to them by a laughing white officer. To reinvigorate popular support for the war, a fleet of 20 movie projector trucks, called "cinemotors," toured Britain showing films on the sides of buildings. Brass bands, celebrity speakers, and the occasional large artillery piece were all available to serve as attractions for rallies, while an airplane might swoop down and drop leaflets onto the crowd.
Buchan and his staff soon saw that despite the tank's embarrassingly ineffective battlefield debut the previous year, the public was hungry for a high-tech wonder weapon. The tracked behemoth was a huge success on the movie screen, attracting a total audience estimated at 20 million to a mid-1917 documentary on tank warfare. Paradoxically, it was only later that year that Britain fought the first real tank battle, at Cambrai, France, where the lumbering machines advanced several miles before the usual bungling set in and a German counterattack regained most of the captured ground.
The tank's greatest victory so far, however, was not on the battlefield but at home. While Cambrai was still raging, a "Trafalgar Square Tank Bank" began doing a booming business selling war bonds. The Cold-stream Guards band played as celebrities addressed the crowd from atop the tank, and hundreds of people lined up to buy bonds through an opening in a side turret. Ninety percent of the visitors, it was claimed, had never bought a war bond before, so tanks were dispatched by train to 168 towns and cities throughout England, Scotland, and Wales. "Tank Banks" altogether sold £300,000,000 (some $17 billion in today's dollars) worth of war bonds, the authorities declared. In impressive testimony to the importance of the new weapon on the home front, some tanks were even recalled from France for this mission.
Although no one could have told it from his work or his public persona, 1917 was a bad year for Buchan, for his younger brother and two close friends were killed in combat within days of one another. Yet his immense productivity never slackened; he seemed to write books with as little effort as other people make dinner-table conversation. His wide circle of readers, he learned, included Grand Duchess Olga of Russia, the oldest daughter of the recently deposed Tsar. The family was now imprisoned in a house in the remote Siberian city of Tobolsk, and from there she wrote to Buchan that she, her sisters, and their father had greatly enjoyed his latest spy novel.
A novel he began writing in mid-1917, Mr. Standfast, was full of the usual secret agents athletically foiling mysterious German plots. But, reflecting a year that had seen strikes, the upheaval in Russia, and a stronger antiwar movement, Buchan had his familiar hero Richard Hannay infiltrate radical trade union circles in Glasgow, where he finds most Scottish workingmen to be loyal imperial patriots. One character in the book is a conscientious objector who, in the end, takes a noncombatant role in the army, and swims a river under heavy fire to deliver a vital message before dying of his wounds.
The same year, another well-known literary protagonist returned to action: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, capitalizing on all the spy paranoia, brought Sherlock Holmes out of retirement. In "His Last Bow," Holmes skillfully infiltrates the spy ring of the sinister Von Bork, Germany's top clandestine agent in England on the eve of the war. Conan Doyle was another of those convinced that, for all its horrors, the conflict was a healthy purgative, a purification by fire. Looking ahead, Holmes says, "There's an east wind coming, Watson.... Some such wind as never blew in England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it's God's own wind, none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared."
In Belgium, the wind was cold and bitter indeed. The total of British dead and wounded at Passchendaele, officially the Third Battle of Ypres, is in dispute, but a low estimate puts the number at 260,000; most reckonings are far higher. Haig ceaselessly trumpeted Passchendaele as a triumph, but few agreed. "We have won great victories," Lloyd George said as the battle ended, in a remarkably frank speech that hinted at his impotent frustration with Haig. "When I look at the appalling casualty lists I sometimes wish it had not been necessary to win so many."
On other fronts, the war was going even worse. In late October came disastrous news from northern Italy: German and Austrian troops had broken through at Caporetto, sweeping forward some 80 miles after a surprise attack in fog and rain. The demoralized Italians, choking in inadequate gas masks, lost more than half a million men killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.
Against all this, the capture of a muddy, ruined village or two in Flanders seemed little to brag about. "For the first time," the war correspondent and novelist Philip Gibbs later wrote, "the British Army lost its spirit of optimism, and there was a sense of deadly depression among many officers and men with whom I came in touch. They saw no ending of the war, and nothing except continuous slaughter." Men joked bitterly about where the front line would be in 1950. One officer calculated that if the British continued to gain ground at the pace so far, they would reach the Rhine in 180 years.
It was during the autumn of 1917 that the British army experienced the nearest thing to a mutiny on the Western Front: six days of intermittent rioting by several thousand troops at the big supply and training base in Étaples, France, in which a military policeman killed one soldier. Amid protest meetings the red flag briefly flew, and one rebel was later tried and executed. Rates of desertion and drunkenness rose, and the army increased the ratio of military police to other soldiers. "Reinforcements ... shambled up past the guns with dragging steps and the expressions of men who knew they were going to certain death," wrote one veteran about the mood around Ypres in October. "No words of greeting passed as they slouched along; in sullen silence they filed past one by one to the sacrifice." Haig, as usual, tolerated no dissent. When a brave colonel told him that further fruitless attacks would leave no resources for an offensive the next spring, Haig turned white with anger and said, "Col. Rawlins, leave the room."
As more rain fell in November, Haig's thoroughly undistinguished chief of staff, Lieutenant General Sir Launcelot Kiggell, made a rare trip forward. Approaching the battlefield at Passchendaele, he saw from his staff car for the first time the terrible expanse of mud, dotted with water-filled shell holes. Reportedly—although his defenders deny this—he said, "Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?" and then burst into tears. Shortly afterward military doctors judged him to be suffering from nervous exhaustion. He was bundled off to a low-stress but dignified post as troop commander and lieutenant governor on the Isle of Guernsey.
***
In Russia, over the night of November 6–7, 1917, the moment that the Allied governments had been dreading for months finally arrived. The Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd, occupying telegraph stations and key official buildings and storming the Provisional Government's headquarters—the Winter Palace, on whose balcony the Tsar and Tsarina had received the ecstatic cheers of patriotic crowds on the outbreak of war some three years before. Now the city's streets were filled with worker
s marching under triumphant red banners and jubilant revolutionary soldiers whose long greatcoats were crisscrossed with bandoliers.
Within days, to underline its commitment to peace instead of diplomatic business as usual, the new regime made public the secret treaties Russia had signed with the other Allied countries that it found in government files. These revealed the territorial gains all were hoping for. There were, for instance, detailed plans for dismembering the Ottoman Empire and parceling it out—either outright or as nominally independent states—among Russia, Italy, France, and Britain. As the Allied powers claimed they were fighting a war for freedom, these documents produced shock around the world—and, in some quarters, lasting fury. The Arabs Britain had urged to rebel against their Turkish masters had expected to rule themselves after the war, not to be the puppets of anyone.
An informal truce quickly made its way across much of the Eastern Front: photographs show German and Russian troops fraternizing in no man's land in their heavy winter coats, the Germans in brimmed army caps, the Russians in fur-lined shapkas, and larger groups of men from both sides together in rows, standing and kneeling as if members of a single sports team posing for a portrait. In a Europe exhausted by the war, who knew how easily the revolutionary example might spread?
Without Russia, Alfred Milner feared, the Allies might not be able to defeat Germany. And the spread of revolution could prove a more dangerous enemy to the established order than the Germans. Why, he wondered, should Britain and France not settle their differences with Germany—and then partition Russia among themselves? Britain's share, it hardly need be said, would include the central Asian parts of the Russian Empire that adjoined Persia and Afghanistan, strategic borderlands to India. If Germany was willing—and also willing, of course, to withdraw from France and Belgium—there were many interesting ways in which Russia could be divided. For a full year to come, Milner quietly but doggedly promoted this idea. There is no clear evidence that he or anyone else ever approached the Germans, and his proposal apparently never moved beyond the realm of confidential talk within the British government, but it bears a strange resemblance to the world of abruptly shifting superpower alliances that George Orwell would later imagine in 1984.