It is with thankfulness that one can record to-day with what I believe will prove to be the capture of Passchendaele, the northern crown of the ridge which made a great barrier round the salient of Ypres and hemmed us in the flats and swamps. After an heroic attack by the Canadians this morning, they fought their way over the ruins of Passchendaele and into ground beyond it.
If their gains can be held, the seal is set upon the most terrific achievement of war ever attempted, and carried through by British arms. Only we out here who have known the full and intimate details of that fighting, the valour and the sacrifice which have carried our waves of men up those slopes, starting at Messines and Wytschaete at the lower end of the range in June last, crossing the Pilkem Ridge in the north, and then storming the central heights from Westhoek to Polygon Wood through Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood, from Zonnebeke to Broodsende, from Gravenstafel to Poelcappelle, can understand the meaning of to-day╒s battle and the thrill at heart which has come to all of us to-day because of the victory.
A Prize of Blood.
For at and around Passchendaele was the highest ground left to the Germans on the ridge looking down across the sweep of the plains into which the enemy had been thrust, where he has had camps and has dumps. From this time hence, if we are able to keep the pace, we shall see all his roads winding like tapes below us and his men marching up them like ants and the flash and fire of his guns and all the secrets of his life, as for three years he looked down on us and gave us hell.
What is Passchendaele? As I saw it this morning through the smoke of gunfire and a wet mist it was less than I had seen before a week or two ago, with just one ruin there ╤ the ruin of its church ╤ and a black mass of slaughtered masonry and nothing else, not a house left standing, not a huddle of brick on that shell-swept height. But because of its position as the crown of the ridge, that crest has seemed to many men like a prize for which all these battles of Flanders have been fought, and to get to this place and the slopes and ridges on the way to it great numbers of our most gallant men have given their blood, and thousands ╤ scores of thousands ╤ of British soldiers of our own home stock and from overseas have gone through fire and water ╤ the fire of frightful bombardments, the water of the swamps, of the ╥beeks╙ and shell holes, in which they have plunged and waded and stuck and sometimes drowned.
To defend this ridge and Passchendaele the enemy has massed great numbers of guns and incredible numbers of machine-guns and many of his finest divisions. To check our progress he devised new systems of defence, and built his concrete blockhouses in echelon formation, and at every cross-road and in every bit of village or farmhouse; and our men had to attack that chain of forts through its girdles of machine-gun fire, and after a great price of life they have mastered it.
Hindenburg╒s Order.
The enemy may brush aside our advance as the taking of a mud patch, but to resist it he has at one time or another brought nearly a hundred divisions into the arena of blood, and the defence has cost him a vast sum of loss in dead and wounded. Over all this ground the young manhood of Germany has spent itself. It was not for worthless ground that so many of them died and suffered great agonies and fought desperately and came back again and again in massed counter-attacks, swept to pieces by our guns and our rifle fire.
A few days ago orders were issued to his troops. They were given in the name of Hindenburg. Passchendaele must be held at all costs, and if lost must be recaptured at all costs. It seems likely that Passchendaele has been lost to the enemy to-day. If so, and if we have any fortune in war, it will not be retaken.
Work Before the Win.
The Canadians have had more luck than the English, New Zealand, and Australian troops who fought the battles on the way up with most heroic endeavour, and not a man in the army will begrudge them the honour they have gained, not easily nor without the usual price of victory, which is some men╒s death and many men╒s pain.
For several days the enemy has endeavoured to thrust us back from the positions held round Crest Farm and on the left beyond the Paddebeek, where all the ground is a morass. The Naval Brigade, who fought there on the left on the last days of last month, had a very hard and tragic time. It was grim stoicism in holding on to exposed outposts ╤ small groups of men under great shell-fire ╤ which enabled the Canadians this morning to attack from a good position. A special tribute is due to two companies of British infantry, who with Canadian guides worked through a large plantation, drove a wedge into enemy territory and held it against all attempts to dislodge them. Heavy German counter-attacks were made during the past few days to drive us off Crest Farm and the Meetcheele Spur, but they only made a slight lodgement near Crest Farm and were thrust back with great loss to themselves.
Meanwhile there was the usual vast activity on our side in making tracks and carrying railways a few hundred yards nearer and hauling forward heavy guns out of the slough in which they were deeply sunk and carrying up stores of ammunition and supplies for men and guns. All this work by pioneers and engineers and transport men and infantry was done under infernal fire and in deep mud and filth.
A Glorious Dawn.
Last night the enemy increased his fire as though he guessed his time was at hand, and all night he flung down harassing barrages and scattered shells from his heavies and used gas shells to search and dope our batteries, and tried hard, by every devilish thing in war, to prevent the assembly of troops. The Canadians assembled, lying out in shell craters and in the deep slime under this fire, and though there were anxious hours and a great strain here and there, the spirit of the men was not broken, and in a wonderful way they escaped great losses.
It was a moist, soft night with a stiff wind blowing. The weather prophets in the evening had shaken their heads gloomily and said, ╥It will rain beyond all doubt.╙ But luck was with our troops for once, and the sun rose in a clear sky. There was a great beauty in the sky at daybreak, and I thought of the sun at Austerlitz and hoped it might presage victory for our men to-day. Beneath the bank of clouds, all dove-grey like the wings of birds, the sun rose in lake of gold, and all the edges of the clouds were wonderfully gleaming.
Up to the Front.
When I went up over the old battlefields this glory gradually went out of the sky, and the clouds gathered and darkened in heavy grey masses, and there was a wet smell in the wind which told one that the prophets were not wrong about the coming of rain. But the duck-boards were still dry, and it made walking easier, though any false step would drop one into the shell crater filled to the brim with water of vivid metallic colours or into broad-stretching bogs churned up by shells that flung up waterspouts after their pitch into the mud. The German long-range guns were scattering shells about with blind eyes, doing guesswork at the whereabouts of our batteries, or perhaps firing from aeroplane photographs to wipe out the windings of our duck-board tracks and railway lines. For miles around and along the same track where I walked single files of men were plodding along, their grey figures silhouetted where they tramped along the skyline with their capes blowing and their steel hats shining. Every few minutes a big shell burst near one of these files. Always when the smoke cleared the line of men seemed unbroken, and they did not halt on their way.
The wind was blowing gustily, but all this grey sky overhead was threaded with aeroplanes ╤ our birds ╤ going out to the battle. They flew high in flights or singly at a swift pace, and beneath their planes our shells were in flight from heavy howitzers and long-muzzled guns whose fire swept one with blasts of air and smashed against one's ears with hammer strokes.
Out of the wide wild desert of these battlefields there rose a queer beast, monstrous and ungainly as a mammoth in the beginning of the world╒s slime. It was one of our sausage balloons getting up for the morning╒s work. Its big air-pockets flapped like ears, and as it rose its body heaved and swelled.
Watching the Fight.
It was beyond the line of German ╥pill-boxes╙ captured in the fighting on the way to the Steenbeck that I saw Passchendaele this morning. The long ridge to which the village gives its name curved round black and grim below the clouds right round to Polygon Wood and the heights of Broodseinde. Our men were already on the crest, and beyond the fangs of broken trees in the valley I saw the village on the heights. There was not much to see ╤ only that tattered ruin of a church, like the remnant of the Cloth Hall at Ypres, and not so big. Below the ridge all our field guns were firing, and the light of their flashes ran up and down like jack o╒ lanterns with flaming torches.
Far behind me were our heavy guns, and their shells travelled overhead with a great beating of the wind. In the sky around was the savage whine of German shells, and all below the Passchendaele ridge monstrous shells were flinging up masses of earth and water, and now and then fires were lighted and blazed and then went out in the wet smoke. The Canadians had been fighting in and beyond Passchendaele. They had been fighting around the village of Mosselmarkt, on the Goudberg spur. It was reported they had carried all their objectives and were
consolidating their defences for the counter-attacks which were sure to come.
In the Village.
The enemy had put a new division into the line before our attack ╤ a division up from Champagne, and, judging from the prisoners taken to-day, a smart and well-disciplined crowd of men. But they did not fight much as soon as the Canadians were close upon them. The Canadian fighting was chiefly through shell-fire, which came down heavily a minute or so after our drumfire began, and against machine-gun fire which came out of the blockhouses in and around Passchendaele, from the cellars there, and other cellars at Mosselmarkt.
I believe the Canadians on the right were the first to get near Passchendaele church. Wounded men say they saw the Germans running away as they worked round the church. On the left the Canadians had farther to go, but wave after wave of them closed in and got into touch with their right wing. The enemy╒s machine-gun fire was very severe, especially from a long-range barrage, but it is believed there was little hand-to-hand fighting in Passchendaele, and that the men who did not escape surrendered and begged for mercy.
I have no knowledge of any counter-attack, but it was reported quite early in the morning that there were masses of Germans packed into shell-holes on the right of the village, and others have been seen assembling on the roads to the north of Passchendaele. The Canadians believe they will hold their gains. If they do, their victory will be a fine climax to these long battles in Flanders, which have given us all of the great ridge but some outlying spurs.
