…and then a shell burst slick upon the duckboards: so I fell into the bottomless mud and lost the light…
– Siegfried Sassoon, “Memorial Tablet” (1918)1
In 2018, I realised a long-term dream of mine to visit Ireland. I’d been saving for years to go and had a wonderful time bouncing around in Cork, Dublin, Drogheda and Belfast, before I hopped on a plane to France to end my overseas holiday with a Backroads tour: ANZACs on the Western Front. My interest in this tour was two-fold:
- Despite it being about the ANZACs on the Western Front, one of the places we visited was the Memorial to the Wounded and Missing of the Somme, where my great-great grandfather J. A. Byers (killed in action, 1917) is listed. He was a Company Sergeant Major in the Royal Irish Rifles (the Byers family hadn’t yet left Ireland when war broke out in 1914) and my great-grandfather, his son, wrote extensively about how J. A. Byers’ death affected the family and formed part of the eventual decision to immigrate to New Zealand. I wanted to see the memorial and understand more about his man.
- Like most New Zealanders and Australians, much of my education about the first world war had focused on Gallipoli, which was our first (but certainly not out last or our only) campaign as the Australia New Zealand Army Corps. I had only recently learned that Australians and New Zealanders had participated in the big campaigns of the Western Front and was curious to find out more. Given I was going to be in the right part of the world, I decided to take the opportunity to learn more about this part of my countries’ histories.
So off I went.
And the more I saw… and learned… and did…
The more disillusioned I became.
The way I had been taught it, world war one was a glorious affair: it had been about mateship, camaraderie, and (most of all) bravery. There had been awful sacrifices made, of course, but these were not something to dwell on. World War One, and the Gallipoli landing in particular, had been the baptism by fire which brought Australia and New Zealand to the attention of the world, and cemented our place in history.
Standing at Hooge Crater Cemetery, the first of the many war cemeteries run by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, in amongst 5,916 graves (more than 3000 of them unidentified) the foundations of the ANZAC Myth I had swallowed my whole life began to crumble.
Hooge Crater Cemetery, 2018. Photo: My own
It was a beautiful, peaceful sea of white headstones and every few steps was the worst inscription I have ever seen on any grave:
Here lies a soldier of the Great War
Known Unto God
The First World War was a new kind of warfare, where modern artillery really came into its own and the machine gun was used en masse for the first time. New kinds of weapons, such as tanks, were developed and the horse began its slow decline as the principal animal of war. It was this new type of war that created thousands upon thousands of soldiers Known Unto God, because this type of war destroyed the bodies of the fallen. By the time they were collected (if they were discovered at all) the best you could do was bury them quickly, before the shelling started again.
Of course, war has always created mass casualties, but it was the individuality of these graves which hit me. 500 soldiers in a mass grave is easier to swallow (or it was until I went to France and Belgium) than 500 individual graves.
Here lies…
Here lies…
Here lies…
And my disillusionment only continued.
By the time we reached Passchendaele, I was feeling decidedly angry at the Australian and New Zealand education systems. Why had I come away from school thinking these men had made some kind of honourable sacrifice for freedom? All I saw in those cemeteries were men who had been sacrificed for colonialism, imperialism and oppression. World War One, I came to understand, was the last great war of Imperial Europe, when the British, French, Germans, Austrians and Russians still believed they had a God-given right to rule over whosoever they pleased. No one was truly fighting for freedom on those battlefields: they were fighting because their colonial overlords wanted to rule the world.
Our first stop at Passchendaele (now Passendale, although the old spelling is preserved in Australia, New Zealand, Britain and Canada) was Tyne Cot Cemetery. This is where most of the victims of the Battle of Passchendaele, or the third Battle of Ypres, are buried or named in the memorials to the missing. If you’ve already listened to my podcast (available here) you’ll know how deeply Tyne Cot affected me, but I will try and explain it here before I get into what the Battle of Passchendaele was.
Tyne Cot Cemetery
Tyne Cot Cemetery. Photo by author.
There are almost 12,000 graves at Tyne Cot, while the memorials list more than 34,000 men with no known grave. Most of these men (and they are all men buried or remembered in Tyne Cot) died in the four month horror that was Passchendaele, although some of the missing were killed at the nearby Battle of The Somme. When they ran out of room on the Menin Gate to list the dead and missing there, they put the remaining names on the Tyne Cot memorial. If you’ve ever visited the Menin Gate, the fact that they ran out of room for the names should be disturbing to you, and if you haven’t visited the Menin Gate, take it from me that you should also be disturbed. That memorial is huge! More than 54,000 men with no known graves from The Somme, yet they needed more room so had to extend the swelling memorial at Tyne Cot.
The Menin Gate. Photo by author.
But, I digress.
(If it wasn’t clear before, I was deeply disturbed by what I saw on my battlefields tour and this was part of what drove me to set up The Skeptical Historian.)
Returning to Tyne Cot.
Before coming on this tour, I’d never heard of Passchendaele before. I didn’t know that this battle was the deadliest engagement for the ANZACs of the entire first world war, and I certainly didn’t know that it was New Zealand’s worst military disaster to date. I was born and grew up in New Zealand, so I couldn’t help but feel this was something I shouldn’t have been learning for the first time at twenty-five!
It was that sea of graves at Tyne Cot that undid the last thread of the ANZAC myth for me. No more honour, glory and sacrifice: I wanted (needed) to understand the reality of what had happened in these places. How had young men found themselves dead and buried so far from home, in a place no one from Australia or New Zealand (or Canada, or probably even Britain, for that matter!) had ever heard of before their deaths? Why was Gallipoli more important than Passchendaele, The Somme, Arras, Villers-Bretonneux, or the dozens of other conflicts the ANZACs fought in? Where were the stories of the conscripts, the conscientious objectors, the peace advocates jailed for daring to question the non-existent higher purpose of the war? And how did modern Australia and New Zealand create a myth around Gallipoli (which is troubling in itself!) that excluded every other conflict we’d ever fought in?
I don’t have the answers to all these questions, but if you’re reading this now, then get ready. I want to tell you what happened at Passchendaele: what went wrong (plenty), what went right (precious little), how the ANZACs ended up there, and why I think we’ve decided to push it away.
Please don’t push it away any longer.
The ghosts of Passchendaele deserve to be heard.
Passchendaele, 1917
Five Australian soldiers at Passchendaele, 1917. Photo: Frank Hurley.
The idea behind the Battle of Passchendaele was simple: capture the city, and use it as a base to launch attacks on German submarine bases on the Belgium coast. Passchendaele was (and is) relatively close to the coast, but it was also far enough away to be a (relatively) safe staging ground for Allied soldiers.
Map of Belgium, showing the locations of offensives in 1916 – 1917. Map: Geographx
You can see Passchendaele on the map above, close to the orange cross which shows the location of the Third Battle of Ypres (the official name of the Passchendaele engagement). It’s close to the coast, but was also dangerously close to the German front line in 1917 and the Germans were determined to hold onto it for the same reason the Allies wanted to capture it. It was a place from which they could defend their submarines, which they believed would be crucial to them winning the war.
Finding a way to win was critical for everyone in 1917, because the entire Western Front was in a state of stalemate. The Germans were desperate to win the conflict before the Americans started to arrive en masse, while the Allies hoped the arrival of the Americans would revive their depleted troops and give them an edge. Whether or not the arrival of the Americans was key to the Allied victory has been hotly debated ever since 1918, and although troops from the USA did not fight at Passchendaele, I believe their imminent arrival had a small role to play in its conception.
British Commander-in-Chief Sir Douglas Haig (seen as a genius by some and a callous butcher by others) was a believer in old, British military tradition. A man of aristocratic birth, he believed he was a natural officer and born to be a leader of men, and I can’t imagine such a man would have been happy about the idea of Americans arriving on his battlefield. This is pure speculation on my part, but I think it may have been one of the reasons why Haig pushed for an offensive in the Ypres/Flanders area, despite knowing the severe risks. The area was known to have frequent and heavy rains, and was built on reclaimed marshland, meaning bombardment would cause it to return to a bog. When apprised of the risks of a full frontal assault on Passenchendaele, Haig dismissed the reports that such an attack was likely to fail or be a merely symbolic victory, and pushed ahead.
And so began four months of hell for British, Australian, New Zealand and later Canadian Soldiers.
Haig himself never went to Passchendaele, so he never experienced the conditions first hand. However, many of his staff did and he was regularly advised, in the strongest possible terms, to call off the assault and order a retreat. However, he was intoxicated by the faltering German resistance and began to inflate their casualty figures to justify continuing the attack. In September he claimed that German losses at Passchendaele exceeded the British by more than 100%, although his own reports showed British casualties were significantly higher than those of the Germans.7 While it was true that the Germans were steadily losing their grip on the city, which the Canadains eventually wrested from them in November 1917, the huge cost to the Allies made the victory utterly worthless.
But it was the appalling conditions as Passchendaele, more than anything else, which saw it remembered with horror by the survivors. As anticipated, the bombardment destroyed the drainage systems Passchendaele and Ypres relied on and the area became a swamp, which was then saturated by the endless, heavy autumn rains which set in as the battle dragged on. This mud was so deep and so thick that men and horses actually drowned in it! Men trapped in the quagmire begged their comrades to shoot them before they could sink, and rescue attempts often ended in the deaths of the rescuers themselves. Rather than try and describe this horror, I have put together this collection of images and diary entries from Australia, Canadian, New Zealand and British war memorials, which illustrate these conditions better than I ever could.
A warning to my readers before you proceed any further, these are original photographs and diary entries taken and made during wartime: they are distressing, disturbing, and some contain images and references to deceased persons. If you would prefer not to view these images, please scroll down to But We Forgot to read the next part of this article.
Passchendaele: The Men Who Were There
British stretcher bearers struggle in mud up to their knees to carry a wounded man to safety. Photo: https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205193365
So, just as we were coming up to Minty’s Farm, the shells started falling all around. We got a slashing there all right. As we were struggling up to it one of the boys got hit with a huge shell fragment. It sliced him straight in two. He dropped his rifle and bayonet and threw his arms up in the air, and the top part of his torso fell back on to the ground. The unbelievable thing was that the legs and the kilt went on running, just like a chicken with its head chopped off! One of my boys – I think it was his special pal – went rushing after him… I shouted him back and he was wild with me because he wanted to help his pal. He couldn’t realise that he was beyond hope. – The diary of Lieutenant Jim Annan, Royal Scots Regiment, Passchendaele 19172
British troops use mules in an attempt to get supplies up to the front line as Passchendaele. Photo: https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C54930?image=1
I saw seven gassed men dying out behind a dressing station. They were in convulsions and black in the face and throat. Buckets of blood-specked foamy sort of jelly was coming from their mouths. The doctor and orderlies attending them wore gas masks. The poor gassed beggars kept grabbing at things and I saw one man grab at his own hand and smash his fingers out of joint. One man tore his mouth nearly back to his ear trying to pull the gas out of his throat. And as each man died, they threw buckets of mud over their heads and shoulders. Been far kinder to have smothered them before they died, not after. – The diary of Private Edward Lynch, Australian Imperial Force, Passchendaele 19173
British soldiers attempting to haul an abandoned German gun through the mud at Passchendaele, October 1917. Photo: https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C1120
Two soldiers, believed to be New Zealanders, walk past a captured German pillbox at Passchendaele, October 1917. Photo: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/new-zealands-blackest-day-at-passchendaele
The very first trip back on the morning of the twenty-fifth, the day before the first attack, I heard someone nearby calling for help. I dodged round a shell-hole and over a few hummocks before I saw him. It was one of our infantryman and he was sitting on the ground, propped up on his elbow with his tunic open. I nearly vomited. His insides were spilling out of his stomach and he was holding himself and trying to push all this awful stuff back in. When he saw me he said, ‘Finish it for me, mate. Put a bullet in me. Go on. I want you to. Finish it!’ He had no gun himself. When I did nothing he started to swear. He cursed and swore at me and kept shouting even after I turned and ran. I didn’t have my revolver. All my life I’ve never stopped wondering what I would have done if I had. – Private Reginald Le Brun, Canadian Machine Gun Corps, recalls 24 October 1917 at Passchendaele.4
Unidentified dead soldier at Passchendaele. Photo: https://www.worldwar1centennial.org/index.php/articles-posts/2970-wwrite-weekend-update-for-august-6th-this-week-s-writerly-news-from-the-u-s-centennial-wwi-site.html
But We Forgot
If you’ve ever been to any commemoration ceremony, you’ll be familiar with the phrase “Lest We Forget”. It reminds us to remember those soldiers, non-combatants and service animals who have lost their lives in, during, or as a direct result of conflict. We are constantly told to remember, remember and remember our war dead; for most Australians and New Zealanders, this is not difficult when it comes to Gallipoli, or to other famous ANZAC battles of the first world war.
Except, of course, Passchendaele.
Our worst fight; the bloodiest conflict we endured; the most terrible, dreadful fight of the war…
That nobody remembers.
Why?
It’s difficult to pin down exactly, but I think it is because one cannot wrest meaning or purpose from the futile horror of Passchendaele. This was apparent even in 1917, and many of the official histories of the war, written at the time, gloss neatly over it. If Gallipoli (1915) was the first test of the ANZACs, then those battles of Pozières (1916), Amiens and Villers-Bretonneux (1918) were proof of the ANZAC Spirit – these last three are less well known than Gallipoli, but still relatively famous in their own right. Gallipoli was a catastrophic defeat (of course), but it was our first attempt, so our failure could be excused, but the others were victories to some degree, especially in Villers-Bretonneux.
Passchendaele was a symbolic victory, which came at a high cost, and did not fit with the narrative the official war historians were trying to create, especially Charles Bean. Bean was the official war correspondent for Australia from 1914 – 1918, and followed the ANZACs, and later the AIF (Australian Imperial Force) from the start of the war to the end. He founded the Australian War Memorial, as both a museum and place of remembrance, and very nearly wrote Passchendaele out of history.
Sources disagree on whether this was a deliberate omission by Bean, or whether he simply had less time to devote to Passchendaele and the conflicts of 1917, as planning for what would become the Australian War Memorial had taken precedence. While he was not known for exaggeration as a writer (he had been a journalist for many years before taking up the post of official war correspondent), modern readings of his work indicate that he was actively trying to create a character that would be well recieved back home. Bean’s ANZAC was a hyper-masculine infantryman, who charged fearlessly forward for King and Country; he was a proud larrikin, with a justifiably high opinion of himself, and easily the most loyal soldier you’d ever meet.
This kind of fictionalised portrayal worked well in the stories of Gallipoli, which was an infantry-led campaign, and in those battles mentioned above, which also relied heavily on the infantry. It fitted less easily into the Battle of Passchendaele, which was dominated by pillbox fighting, heavy artillery, and mud which made it nearly impossible for infantrymen to walk, let alone charge forward in a blaze of glory! The horrible stories of men drowning in the mud (I know I keep going on about it, but it is something which comes up again and again in the sources), tanks and heavy weaponry being abandoned, and deadly illnesses sweeping through the soldiers were not stories the army wanted going home either. So, rather than deal in any real way with these facts, or even record them, Bean gave them a perfunctory mention and moved onto what he felt were more glorious things.
Because of this, the history of 1917 relied almost entirely on the accounts of the men who were there. Many of the survivors of Passchendaele, quite understandably, were reluctant to talk about their experiences, and very few people wanted to hear them anyway. The national character of Australia and New Zealand was being forged on the back of mythical stories like Bean’s “history” and any stories which contradicted that were being brushed aside.
And so we forgot.
We forgot that war is a horrible, bloody, ungodly affair which causes nothing but death, destruction and suffering. Instead, we told lies about glorious young men who created a nation as they charged up the beaches of Gallipoli in 1915, burying the story of the suffering in 1917 like the men buried alive in the mud.
But this is your opportunity to do something about that.
World War One is not a byword for Gallipoli, it was a conflict which spanned the globe. Australians and New Zealanders were among many nations who fought and died for the misplaced idea that imperial rule was the way of the world. The loss of an entire generation of young men, dead and wounded (physically and mentally), is not something to remember with pride: we need to reflect deeply on why we have created a national character forged in the blood of our youth.
No sense of meaning or purpose could be wrested from the mudfields of Passchendaele, so we left it out of our story, but how did we come to a point of creating meaning and purpose from wholesale slaughter?
These are questions I don’t have an answer to; but next time eschew the gaudy parade and the politician’s congratulatory speeches, and take a moment to remember.
The men of Passchendaele didn’t die to be forgotten.
- Sassoon, S., ‘Memorial Tablet’, The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, London, 1918, http://ww1lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/item/9660, (accessed 25/04/2023) ↩︎
- ABC, ‘Diaries and Footage’, Days in Conflict 1917, Australia, 2017, https://www.abc.net.au/ww1-anzac/passchendaele/diaries-and-footage/, (accessed 22/04/2023) ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
Sources
Primary Sources
ABC, ‘Diaries and Footage’, Days in Conflict 1917, Australia, 2017, https://www.abc.net.au/ww1-anzac/passchendaele/diaries-and-footage/, (accessed 22/04/2023)
Brooke, J., ‘The Battle of Passchendaele, July – November 1917’ [photograph], https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205193365, (accessed 23/04/2023)
Hurley, F., ‘Five Australians, members of a field artillery brigade, passing along a duckboard track over mud and water’ [photograph], https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C1119, (accessed 23/04/2023)
Metcalf, G., ‘The Injured and the Dead’ [photograph], https://www.warmuseum.ca/firstworldwar/objects-and-photos/photographs/battles-and-fighting-photographs/the-injured-and-the-dead/?back=149, (accessed 23/04/2023)
Sassoon, S., ‘Memorial Tablet’, The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, London, 1918, http://ww1lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/item/9660, (accessed 25/04/2023)
Turnbull, A., ‘Untitled’ [photograph], https://teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/34129/passchendaele-offensive-october-1917, (accessed 23/04/2023)
Unknown Australian, ‘An abandoned enemy gun, near Hannebeek, in the Ypres Sector, being removed by members of the 39th Battery of Australian Field Artillery’ [photograph], https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C1120, (accessed 23/04/2023)
Unknown Australian, ‘A typical illustration of the difficulties encountered in the Ypres Sector in Belgium’ [photograph], https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C54930?image=1, (accessed 23/04/2023)
Unknown Photographer, ‘Unititled’ [photograph], https://www.worldwar1centennial.org/index.php/articles-posts/2970-wwrite-weekend-update-for-august-6th-this-week-s-writerly-news-from-the-u-s-centennial-wwi-site.html, (accessed 23/04/2023)
Secondary Sources
Abbott, K., & Forster, M. (ed), Shell-Shocked: Australia After Armistice, Canberra, ACT, 2008
Australian War Memorial, ‘Charles Bean’, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, ACT, 2022, https://www.awm.gov.au/about/organisation/history/charles-bean, (accessed 29/04/2023)
Canadian War Museum, ‘Passchendaele’, Canadian War Museum, 2023, https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Passchendaele (accessed 23/04/2023)
Commonwealth War Graves Commission, ‘Tyne Cot Cemetery’, Commonwealth War Graves Commission, United Kingdom, Commonwealth War Graves Commission, 2023, https://www.cwgc.org/visit-us/find-cemeteries-memorials/cemetery-details/53300/tyne-cot-cemetery/, (accessed 23/04/2023)
Commonwealth War Graves Commission, ‘Tyne Cot Memorial’, Commonwealth War Graves Commission, United Kingdom, Commonwealth War Graves Commission, 2023, https://www.cwgc.org/visit-us/find-cemeteries-memorials/cemetery-details/85900/tyne-cot-memorial/, (accessed 23/04/2023)
Foot, R. & Roy, R. ‘The Battle of Passchendaele’, Encyclopedia Briannica, 2019, https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Passchendaele, (accessed 23/04/2023)
Geographx, ‘Map showing the northern part of the Western Front in 1916 and 1917’ [picture], https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/97732746/the-battle-of-passchendaele-new-zealands-militarys-darkest-day, (accessed 26/04/2023)
Hutchison, M., ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, Inside Story, Brisband, QLD, Inside Story, 2021, https://insidestory.org.au/all-quiet-about-the-western-front/, (accessed 23/04/2023)
Ministry for Culture and Heritage, ‘New Zealand’s “Blackest Day” at Passchendaele’, NZ History, Wellington, Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2021, https://nzhistory.govt.nz/new-zealands-blackest-day-at-passchendaele, (accessed 23/04/2023)
Summers, S., British and Commonwealth War Cemeteries, Oxford, UK, Shire Library, 2010
Tibbitts, C., ‘Rain and Mud: the Ypres – Passchendaele Offensive’, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, ACT, 2007, https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/blog/rain-mud-the-ypres-passchendaele-offensive, (accessed 26/04/2023)