The Commander in Chief, who was making his advanced headquarters in a railway car, went over to visit General Gough. It was raining heavily. “This was a fine day’s work,” Haig noted in his private journal. “I told Gough to carry out the original plan.”
“Heavy rain fell this afternoon and aeroplane observation was impossible,” he added later. “The going also became very bad and the ground was much cut up. This has hampered our further progress and robbed us of much of our advantage due to our great success.”
The younger officers were doubtful about the quality of this success. After three days of struggling to force men and equipment into machinegun and artillery fire, through mud so deep the wounded often drowned in it, the attack was called off. The Fifth Army was so badly shattered that the attacks on Passchendaele Ridge which followed had to be entrusted to General Plumer’s Second Army. The hoped for breakthrough to the Channel ports was no more spoken of at G.H.Q.
Haig reverted to the old step by step methods which were supposed to be wearing down the German will to fight. By the end of August the British and French had lost seventyfour thousand men on the Flanders front with only occasional gains of a few hundred yards. General Charteris reported a hundred thousand German casualties. The British and American press was completely bemused. On August 25 the London Spectator in its weekly summary proclaimed, “This has been for the Allies the greatest week of the war.”
In spite of what the newspapers printed disillusionment was spreading in England. The wounded men’s stories could hardly be said to gibe with the journalists’ reports. Hospital trains began to be routed into London late at night so that the stretcher cases could be hustled away to hospitals before they were seen.
When the weather improved in mid September the Australians and New Zealanders advanced nine hundred yards along the Memin Road. Twentytwo thousand casualties. Another victory. When someone inquired where the German prisoners were General Charteris replied, “We are killing the enemy, not capturing him.”
A few days later in Polygon Wood on the edge of the Passchendaele Ridge seventeen thousand men were lost with small gains. On October 4, after suffering twentysix thousand casualties, Plumer’s army achieved a slippery foothold on the ridge in front of what was left of Passchendaele village. This was the occasion of the entry in Dawes’ diary about Haig’s splendid offensive. Pershing sent Haig a message congratulating him on this magnificent answer to “weak kneed peace propaganda.”
The rain had started again. On October 9 a new attack was attempted. Once more Plumer’s army was pinned down in the mud by enfilading fire from German pillboxes. ALL HAIG’S OBJECTIVES GAINED was the headline in the New York Times. The London Times had the British troops in sight of Bruges.
“G.H.Q. could not capture the Passchendaele Ridge but it was determined to storm Fleet Street and here strategy and tactics were superb,” was Lloyd George’s scornful comment.
By this time it was taking fourteen hours to evacuate a wounded man. German planes were strafing the bogged British with machineguns. German mustard gas was producing a new type of casualty. Shell shock was the order of the day. Supplies could only be moved up on duckboards. Tanks, trucks, mule trains wallowed in slime. Entrenchments filled with water to the brim. Field guns buried themselves by the force of their recoil each time they were fired.
Only the rats thrived; bloated rats swam through the muck feeding on the dead in the flooded trenches.
“Imagine a fertile countryside,” wrote Gough in justification, “dotted every few hundred yards with peasant farms and an occasional hamlet; water everywhere, for only an intricate system of small drainage canals relieved the land from the ever-present danger of flooding; a clay soil which the slightest dampness turned into clinging mud … Then imagine the same countryside battered beaten and torn by a torrent of shell and explosive … a soil shaken and reshaken, fields tossed into new and fantastic shapes, roads blotted out from the landscape, houses and hamlets pounded into dust so thoroughly that no man could point to where they had stood … and the drainage system utterly and irretrievably destroyed … Then came incessant rain (the wettest August for thirty years). The broken earth became a fluid clay; the little brooks and tiny canals became formidable obstacles, and every shell hole a dismal pond … Still the guns churned this treacherous slime … Every day became worse. What had once been difficult became impossible.”
On October 23 in response to Haig’s urgent request that he do something to relieve the German pressure, Pétain had his General Maistre conduct a small operation against the village of Malmaison a little to the west of the Chemin des Dames. The attack was made with the help of the French light tanks on a ten mile front. In spite of a six day preliminary bombardment the Germans were caught by surprise and lost their last foothold on the Craonne Plateau north of the Aisne. The French took twelve thousand prisoners and two hundred guns and resisted the usual violent counterattacks. Following Mort Homme, Malmaison did more than all Pétain’s pleading to restore the morale of the French Army.
November 6 the occupation of Passchendaele Ridge was announced by Haig’s headquarters as complete. Lloyd George sent him a telegram of congratulation. The Allied newspapers trumpeted the victory. German morale they said was broken: a German general was reported to have called it a disastrous day for the German Army.
After that the fighting in Flanders subsided in drizzle and sleet. Relieved of their onerous duties coordinating the staff work, generals from headquarters visited the front. Lieutenant General Sir Launcelot Kiggell, Haig’s chief of staff, as he looked out over the boggy mess which he was seeing for the first time, is reported to have exclaimed, “Did we really send men to fight in that?”
The German strategists were so pleased by the success of von Hutier’s experiment at Riga that they determined to repeat it. While his armies in Flanders were in their death grapple with the British in the mud around Ypres, von Hindenburg was supervising the formation of a new German-Austrian Army formed to break the stalemate between the Austrians and the Italians in the mountains north of Venice.
Military surprise plus civilian demoralization had been the formula for success in the north. German agents were reporting civilian warweariness and a mutinous spirit among Italian conscripts exasperated by scanty food, and by tales of warprofiteering in the rear, and by the fact that their officers were rarely, if ever, seen in the front line. An army under General Otto von Bulow was readied in the mountains for a sudden push across the valley of the Isonzo.
The Italian Intelligence reported the arrival of German units to the headquarters of their Commander in Chief General Cadorna. General Cadorna was said to have given orders for a defense in depth, but the general in charge of the Italian Second Army was absent from his command and no preparations were made. A serious gap between the defenses of two Italian armies was allowed to remain unfortified. The Germans struck at that gap.