PASSCHENDAELE-
SIR,—Passchendaele is the MYTH of the Battle of Third Ypres. There were a number of British in- fantry attacks in Third Ypres and almost the same number of German counter-attacks. Many of the British attacks were successful and made over ground so dry that the main trouble (apart from death and disorganisation of battle) was the dust arising from bombardment; and flies. Very few fighting in these attacks and counter-attacks, or in France or Bel- gium in the summer and early autumn of 1917, knew of Passchendiele except as a distant village on the remote skyline to the east. The names on soldiers' lips were those of the battles (if one except the pre- liminary assaults on the Messines Ridge, June 7-14) for Pilckem, Langemarck, Menin Road, Polygon Wood, Broodseinde and Poelcapelle.
These battles, progressing (sometimes) towards the Staden-Westroosebeke-Passchendaele ridge, over- looking the Plain of Flanders, were fought by troops with feelings made the more hollow by subconscious awareness of far greater casualties in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and the Battle of Arras and Hindenburg Line in the first half of 1917. Somme casualties (British, which included all overseas troops) from July 1 to November 19, 1916, were about 420,000. At Arras, from April 9 to May 4, 1917, the casualties were about 150,000.
At the 'highly successful' battle of Messines, prelude to. Third Ypres, which took place from June 7 to 12, 1917, the British casualties were about 24,500. Now for the Passchendaele MYTH, July 31 to Novem- ber 10, 1917! The British casualties were 238,313. Not 600,000 as some have said; not the 400,000 said to have been mentioned by Lloyd George; but 238,313. And for the first time in the war the Ger- man losses exceeded those of the British. • Third Ypres was fought upon slightly rising ground, said (after it was over) to be a 'reclaimed swamp,' a `deadly morass,' lying under sea-level, so that water arose when trenches were dug below eighteen inches.' This was more or less true of 'Wipers' in the old days of 1915-17, when our trenches lay in the lower ground, overlooked by the Germans, who had everything under observation by their gunners. It seemed to be true after early October, 1917, when autumnal rains fell and filled shell-holes as close to one another as cells in a bees' comb. It was true—the flooded effect—when the final attacks of Third Ypres were made on October 12 and 26; again on November 6 when Passchendaele ridge and the village-rubble site was captured by the Canadian Corps. As it was true, apparently, when someone from GHQ, seeing the derelict battlefield when the fighting was over, wept and made a piteous remark. All around that general officer extended a dark morass, the wind puckering the watery wastes, until recently faint with cries coming out of shattered transport, while rain lashed across •the black nihilism of the old battle wastes, wailing through the wreck- age of tilted and sky-gaping tanks, and .gusts of wind slashed the corners of ground-sheet capes across the cheeks of men going to the outpost line, or coming down, staggering, some to be blown sitting into the mud. But it was no worse than the Somme in November, 1916; except spiritually. And therein, in the spirit of man, lies the myth! By November, 1917, the French, German and British soldiers had had more than enough. There had been big mutinies in May, 1917, in the French Armies. There had been a small mutiny among the British, at Etaples, starting at the Bull Ring, in autumn, 1917. The spirit of this fatigue, despair and loneliness, felt later with Celtic sensibility by Lloyd George, and rpany writers still later, finally focused itself psychically on Passchendaele. The name itself, with its remotely mental associations with the words passion and dale, twisted backwards, daele, like many a body bent backwards by shell-blast left to rot in the mud. Passchendaele rang then, as it rings now to some of us, like a reverse of Debussy's Cathedrale engloutie. But that Sir Douglas Haig and his staff were insensitive to the sufferings of the troops, oblivious of meteorological reports, etc., is doubted by at least one who served in that time in France and Belgium.—Yours faithfully,
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