Haig was still smarting at the way Lloyd George had bullied him into taking a subordinate position to Nivelle during the preparations for Nivelle’s great fiasco.
At dinner the talk was mostly about guns and the difficulty of keeping them supplied with ammunition. The British averaged a piece of artillery to every twentyfive yards of front and still the Germans outgunned them. Haig spoke disparagingly of Nivelle’s plan. He had felt from the beginning it was no go. “His remarks,” noted Pershing, “entirely confirmed the belief I had long since held that real teamwork between the two armies was almost totally absent.”
After dinner they drank coffee on the lawn under the trees. Pershing noted that nothing disturbed the quiet of the place save the sound of distant guns “wafted in from the front by the evening breeze.” Harbord, whom Haig described as “a kindly soft looking fellow with the face of a Punchinello,” noted that the guns sounded to him like an artillery battery rumbling across a high bridge, punctuated by explosions of blasting in a quarry.
The British Commander in Chief, for all his aplomb, must have sat listening to their roar with a certain trepidation. The sound meant that the preliminary bombardment had already started for the great offensive he was planning, to offset the French disasters and to roll the Germans back from the Channel coast. He was already unpopular with the politicians in Lloyd George’s cabinet. His reputation hung on the success of this offensive. When the generals retired to their respective quarters at eleven the artillery was still pounding the night sky.
Pershing noted that the theory of winning by attrition, with isolated attacks on various fronts, “which was evidently the idea of the British general staff,” did not appeal to him. “Moreover their army could not afford the losses in view of the shortage of men which they themselves admitted.”
On Sunday while General Haig was attending the Church of Scotland service, listening devoutly to the Reverend George Duncan preaching to the text out of St. Paul “By hope are we saved,” the Americans were visiting the Royal Flying Corps, and discovering how little they knew about military aviation. Major General Trenchard, now fortyfive, who admitted that he had only been flying for five years, was in command. He carried Pershing and Harbord off their feet with his cheery enthusiasm as he showed them around the repair shops and salvage shops, and the rooms where watchmakers were adjusting flight chronometers, or where tailors were cutting linen for wing coverings, or where wireless specialists were tinkering with their machines. The British were working on the problem of supplying oxygen to their pilots. Their ceiling was already twentyfive thousand feet.
“We went to the squadron airdrome where dozens of the planes are stabled,” wrote Harbord, “and famous pilots were all about us, slight, modest, handsome English boys nearly all of them … Many were working around their machines painting devices on them etc., hovering over them as one might rub off a much prized race horse.” A flier took his plane up to show General Pershing how he could loop the loop and spin down in a nose dive. “Scarcely anything during this visit impressed me more with our unpreparedness,” noted Pershing.
That night they dined again with Sir Douglas at his château in the company of the Reverend George Duncan, the Archbishop of York, a Bishop Gwynne, and the Imperial Chief of Staff, Sir William Robertson, another Scot who was somewhat of a marvel in the British Army because he’d started life as a stable boy and worked his way up from the ranks.
Neither Pershing nor Harbord, in their accounts of the weekend, remarked on a certain tenseness that must have been in the air due to the strain of great decisions pending. They may have heard a few remarks in conclusion of an earlier conversation between Sir Douglas and the Archbishop on the need for amalgamation of the various churches in the United Kingdom. Sir Douglas had suggested a great Imperial Church. He believed Church and State would have to unite “and hold together against those forces of revolution which threaten to destroy the State.” But of the indecision in the British cabinet they heard not a word.
Though the Americans got no inkling of it, Robertson, on his way to an interallied military conference, was bringing Haig the formal though reluctant approval by Lloyd George’s cabinet of the offensive for which he had already started the artillery preparation.
The terrible butcher’s bill at Arras had alarmed Lloyd George, who was, furthermore, trying to get together forces to stiffen the Italian front. In spite of the Italian General Cadorna’s successes against the Austrians he suspected things might go wrong there at any moment. The delay in obtaining approval, for what he considered his most important operation of the war, exasperated Haig. Only in his private diary did he express his feelings.
“After dinner we discussed the situation”—Haig and Robertson—“he agreed with me as to the danger of sending forces to Italy. I urged him to be firmer and play the man; and if need be resign should Lloyd George persist in ordering troops to Italy against the advice of the General Staff. I also spoke strongly on the absurdity of the Government giving its approval now to operations after a stiff artillery fight had been going on for three weeks … I requested to be told whether I had the full support of the Government or not.”
The next morning, after one of the buffet style breakfasts they were becoming accustomed to with their British friends, the Americans drove, along roads encumbered with convoys of trucks moving supplies up for the coming offensive, to the Flanders front. Airplanes were busy overhead keeping German reconnaissance out of the sky. The roar and grinding of trucks never stopped, but it was occasionally blotted out by the thunder of nearby batteries of great naval guns.
Flanders was in a rare spell of dry weather. Vehicles moved under a pall of chalky dust. Faces, uniforms, guns, trucks were coated with it. Dust filled men’s eyes, caked their lips. “Belgium,” wrote Harbord, “for we were in that unfortunate kingdom, looked badly and tasted worse.”
At Fifth Army headquarters they were greeted with enthusiasm. The Fifth Army, under General Gough, was cast for a leading role in the coming show. The Americans were shown, with some pride, a large scale model in high relief of the terrain to be captured in the first three days. From photographs taken from airplanes the enemy’s entrenchments had been reconstructed. The scale was large enough so that men could walk around in them. Beyond some indication of the shattered buildings of Ypres, and its canal that had to be crossed on treacherous bridges, were the German lines bending back to Messines, on their flank, which the British had captured that June.
The British artillery had already pounded the trenches along the swampy Steenbeeke River to dust, but beyond were the heights, merely comparative in that flat land, from which the Germans dominated this Ypres salient so desperately held at such bloody cost by the British since the first weeks of the war. On the heights were the remnants of the villages of Gheluvelt and Passchendaele. From Passchendaele the railroad ran due north to Bruges, where the submarines nested in protected pens, and to the Channel ports which were the campaign’s objective.
It was a most interesting morning for the American officers. When they lunched with General Gough at his headquarters they found him in good spirits and “true to his Irish blood, most hospitable, jolly and friendly.” During lunch he entertained his guests with the skirling of bagpipes. All through the meal an Irish band, with pipes and drum, walked back and forth in front of the house playing “The Campbells Are Coming,” “The Harp that Once through Tara’s Halls” and other martial airs.