Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front. Richard Holmes
reached Winchester Farm after a struggle. It was an Advanced Aid Post, and was like a slaughterhouse. The RAMC corporal asked us to take a blind Gloster down to Habnor Farm, he was an old chap and seemed to know what was up with him, it was very pathetic.
Creature comforts and curiosity helped keep Bullock going. He became more cheerful when a ‘B Coy chap … daft with fear’ bolted and abandoned his pack after a shell half-buried them. ‘We dug ourselves out and went through his pack,’ he wrote. ‘Found 200 Woodbines.’ Things were even better when he was out of the line a few days later, guarding some prisoners. ‘Helped prisoners raid truck of rations,’ he wrote. ‘Applied for transfer to R[oyal] F[lying] C[orps]. Some hopes.’102
Gunner Aubrey Wade, a Royal Field Artillery signaller, crossed the Steenbeek on
a bridge, composed of a compact mass of human bodies over which I stepped gingerly. I was not at all squeamish, the sight of dead men having long lost its terror for me, but making use of corpses, even enemy corpses, for bridge-building purposes seemed about the limit of callousness. The Major said nothing, but stopped to light his pipe on the farther bank of the stream.103
When he got back to the gun-line he saw a sight as characteristic of the artillery battle as widespread lines of men were for the infantry.
A few yards away the guns were incessantly firing, their barrels red-hot, their breechblocks jamming and having to be opened with pickaxes for the next round; the gunners, faces blackened with oil-splashes and smoke, mechanically slamming home the shells and staring sore-eyed through the sights.104
But his spirits lifted as soon as his battery came out of the line.
What did it matter that we were rotten dirty and crawling with lice, that we had not shaved for weeks, that our socks were all in one with our feet and boots, that our clothing stank of cordite and gas and mud, and that we were desperately tired, haggard with fear and nervous with kittens from incessant shell-fire?105
A bath, clean clothes and a visit to the fleshpots of St-Omer proved remarkably restorative. He visited the infamous ‘No. 4’, purely, he assures us, as a spectator. It was
easily as large as the average ‘boozer’ … a wide, thickly carpeted staircase of perhaps half a dozen steps, at the foot of which stood the proprietress of the place, a middle-aged, shapelessly fat woman, with black hair greased down over her forehead … Her skirt terminated half-way to her knee, and was raised still higher as she slipped small bundles of notes into her bulging stocking; the ‘customers’ paying before they ascended the staircase. On a short landing at the head of the stairs were ranged the women and girls whose bodies could be purchased, as the varicose-veined proprietress announced, for the price of fifty francs in one hand …106
One of Haig’s motives for bringing Passchendaele to a conclusion was that Sir Julian Byng, who had taken over 3rd Army when Allenby was sent off to command in the Middle East after the failure of Arras, had produced a plan to attack the Hindenburg line at Cambrai. Brigadier General Hugh Elles, commanding the Tank Corps, and his energetic chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel J. F. C. Fuller, wanted the chance to let their tanks loose on more favourable ground than Flanders. And Brigadier General Hugh ‘Owen’ Tudor, commander Royal Artillery of 9th Division, had developed a technique of marking artillery targets without the need for pre-battle registration by fire which all too easily gave the game away. Gun positions were precisely surveyed, and the development of flash-spotting and sound-ranging meant that German batteries could also be plotted with accuracy. Although Tudor met with considerable opposition he was backed by Byng, whose plan for a large-scale tank ‘raid’ embodied this ‘new artillery’ which would make surprise possible.
Two of 3rd Army’s corps, supported by 378 fighting tanks and more than 1,000 guns, achieved total surprise when they attacked west of Cambrai on the morning of 20 November 1917. They captured 7,500 men and 120 guns, and pushed more than three miles on a six mile front. In comparison with what had been going on at Ypres, it was indeed a famous victory, and the church bells in England were rung for the first time in the war. But yet again it proved impossible to sustain early promise. Over half the tanks were out of action after the first day, and the fighting focused on a long and bitter struggle for Bourlon Wood. When the Germans counterattacked on 30 November, diving in hard against the shoulders of the salient, they came close to enveloping many of the defenders, but an attack by the Guards Division recaptured Gouzeaucourt and stabilised the situation. In all both sides lost around 40,000 men at Cambrai, and if the British retained part of the Hindenburg line at Flesquières they had lost ground to the north and south. It was a thoroughly unsatisfactory end to a grim year.
There was never much doubt as to what would happen in early 1918. On 11 November 1917 Ludendorff met a select group of advisers at Mons to elaborate plans for the coming year. Their discussions were overshadowed by the knowledge that American entry into the war would eventually change the balance of forces on the Western Front. Although a peace treaty was not to be formally signed till March 1918, Germany could capitalise on Russia’s effective departure from the war by shifting still more troops to the west. In the first months of 1918 the Germans would still enjoy quantitative superiority, and the development of ‘storm-troop’ tactics for the rapid advance of lightly-equipped infantry supported by a swift and savage bombardment would give them a qualitative edge too. Ludendorff was not only convinced that Germany must attack, but that she must attack the British. Victory over the French might still leave Britain in the war, now with the might of the United States at her elbow and able to continue her naval blockade.
Ludendorff’s staff developed several plans, many with suitably Wagnerian names. In the event he decided to use three variants of ‘Michael’, attacking the British from Cambrai to the south of the Somme. The main weight of the blow, which comprised seventy-four divisions attacking on a front of fifty miles, would fall on 5th Army in the south, its front recently extended by taking over more line from the French, taking the British front down to the River Oise. The British army was overextended and short of men. On 1 March 1918 Haig’s infantry was just over half a million men strong, constituting only 36 percent of his total strength instead of the 46 percent it had made up six months before. In January he warned the government that the next four months would be ‘the critical period of the war’. He was not wrong.
The Germans attacked on the foggy morning of 21 March 1918 behind a bombardment of unprecedented weight and ferocity: over 3 million shells were fired in three hours. Lance Corporal William Sharpe of 2/8th Lancashire Fusiliers recounted the effect of the shelling on the young soldiers under his command:
My section included four youths just turned 18 years, who had only been with our company three weeks and whose first experience of shell fire it was and WHAT an experience. They cried and one kept calling ‘mother’ and who could blame him, such HELL makes weaklings of the strongest and no human nerves or body were ever built to stand such torture, noise, horror and mental pain. The barrage was now on top of us and our trench was blown in. I missed these four youths, and I never saw them again, despite searching among the debris for some time.107
When the German infantry loped forward on the heels of the barrage they made good progress on 5th Army’s front, moving like wraiths through the lightly-held forward zone and slipping between the strongpoints of the battle zone. As the front was penetrated, so sinews of command and control were cut and men were fighting blind. Gunner J. W. Gore, behind the line with the administrative echelon of a heavy trench-mortar battery, recorded:
Mar. 21st. Got up and found the attack had started with thousands of gas shells. About mid-day we were told to get all maps and papers ready for burning. The road full of walking wounded and ambulances coming down the line. We made plenty of tea for the poor chaps on the road … Later Bombardier Cartwright came down. He had his jaw tied up and tried to mumble as best he could with what seemed to be