The ground beneath Ypres has become a liquid grave. Soldiers are drowning in mud before they can fire a shot. The Battle of Passchendaele, launched on July 31, 1917, has descended into a nightmare of flooded craters, sinking men, and a landscape that consumes the living and the dead alike.
The British offensive was born of desperation. Germany’s return to unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917 threatened to starve Britain into submission. In April, U-boats sank 860,000 tons of shipping.
The Admiralty warned that unless German submarine bases on the Belgian coast were taken, the war could not continue into 1918. But by May, the first experimental convoys had arrived almost untouched. The submarine crisis was already being solved.
Yet the attack went ahead.
The French army had mutinied after years of slaughter. Russia was collapsing. The British were the only force left on the Western Front capable of attacking.
They chose the Ypres salient, a low-lying bowl of farmland with a high water table and a clay base. The Germans held the high ground at Passchendaele Ridge, 50 meters above sea level. From there, they could see every movement in the valley below.
The British had to take that ridge.
Before the main assault, the British achieved one victory. On June 7, 1917, 19 mines exploded under Messines Ridge, blowing a hole in the German line. The ridge was taken in three hours.
The commander, General Herbert Plumer, wanted to exploit the success immediately. But the commander-in-chief, Douglas Haig, delayed. The main attack was set for the end of July.
For seven and a half weeks, the Germans prepared.
They abandoned continuous trench lines. Instead, they built concrete pillboxes with walls a meter or two thick, each held by a handful of men. Machine-gun positions were sited to cover each other.
Barbed wire was laid not to stop attackers but to funnel them into killing zones. Behind the ridge, Eingreif divisions waited. These were counter-attack units trained to strike when the British had taken ground but before they could dig in.
The Germans knew exactly where the blow would fall.
On the night of July 12, the Germans introduced a new horror. Fifty thousand shells carrying a yellow cross fell on British positions around Ypres. They contained mustard gas, an oily liquid that did not 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 on contact.
It burned the skin, the eyes, the lungs. Men took off their masks, thinking the danger had passed. Hours later, they arrived at clearing stations blind, vomiting, blistered.
The gas stayed in the ground for weeks. Sunlight could make it vaporize. Rain could keep it active.
Fourteen thousand British soldiers were hospitalized in three weeks. Almost eight thousand came from the Fifth Army, the force that would lead the attack. There was no treatment.
The only option was to wash the contaminated men, change their clothes, and wait 46 days for burns to heal.
The British bombardment began on July 16. Over two weeks, 4. 25 million shells were fired from 3,000 guns along an 18-kilometer front.
It was the largest artillery preparation the British had ever attempted. The guns were meant to cut German wire and destroy concrete. The wire was cut in places.
The concrete survived. Pillboxes needed a direct hit from a heavy howitzer, and the British could not see their targets because the Germans held the high ground. The German guns fired back with high explosive and mustard.
British gun crews could not rest. The firing program had to continue.
At 3:50 a. m. on July 31, the infantry climbed out of their trenches into darkness and low cloud.
In the north, the Guards and French pushed forward 3,000 yards. In the center, the British advanced 4,000 yards through the German third position. But on the Gheluvelt Plateau to the south, the advance stopped after 1,000 yards.
German observers on that plateau could see the entire British side of the battlefield. Every attack made afterward would be under fire from guns aimed by men who could see what they were shooting at.
The Fifth Army captured 18 square miles and 5,500 prisoners. But the cost was 27,000 casualties in three days, nearly 3,700 dead. Haig reported the attack as a success.
Then the rain began. It fell for four days straight. August 1917 was one of the wettest in 75 years.
The shell holes filled with water. The drainage ditches, destroyed by shelling, could not carry it away. The battlefield turned into a shallow lake.
Men moved across it on duckboard tracks two planks wide. A soldier carrying 60 pounds of kit who slipped off the boards might never come back up. The mud was like liquid.
Getting a wounded man out took six or eight stretcher bearers instead of the usual four. A three-mile carry took four hours. One party needed 10 hours to move a single man a quarter of a mile.
The water in the shell holes was not clean. The fields had been farmed for centuries with animal and human manure. The soil was full of bacteria that thrive without oxygen.
When shell fragments tore through a man’s uniform, they dragged contaminated cloth into the wound. Gas gangrene set in within hours. The only treatment was to cut out all dead tissue, leaving the wound open.
Even in a hospital, a quarter of cases died.
Men drank from shell holes because their water bottles were empty. Thirst was worse than poison. The rats grew fat on the dead.
Lice in every uniform carried trench fever. And the mustard gas sat in the mud for days. When soldiers came out of the line, their feet were often dead from standing in cold water.
Trench foot had been beaten elsewhere, but here there was no dry ground.
The horses and mules that dragged supplies drowned in flooded craters, still in harness. The roads east of Ypres disintegrated into quagmires. Communication cables could not be buried in a swamp.
Runners were killed. Pigeons carried a third of all messages. Headquarters often had no idea what was happening at the front.
In September, the weather dried. The ground firmed. Plumer took over the offensive and introduced a new tactic: bite and hold.
He picked small sections of the German line, hit them with overwhelming artillery, and sent infantry no more than 1,500 yards forward. They dug in. Fresh waves passed through.
The guns moved up. The cycle repeated.
At Menin Road on September 20 and Polygon Wood on September 26, the British and Australians took their objectives and held them against German counter-attacks. The cost was horrific. The Australian 5th Division lost 3,000 to 5,500 men at Polygon Wood.
To take a pillbox, soldiers had to run up to it, fire through the slits, and toss bombs inside. Sometimes defenders surrendered while others kept firing. When an Australian was killed by a shot from an upper floor after a surrender, the troops bayoneted every prisoner.
The army had no mercy for men who broke under the strain. Shell shock was not considered a wound. It was a crime.
Soldiers were executed for refusing to go forward. Sergeant John Wall, a veteran since 1912, was shot on September 6. Private Herbert Morris, 17, was shot on September 20.
On October 4, 1917, 12 divisions attacked Broodseinde Ridge. The Germans had planned their own attack on the same ground for the same morning. Their barrage fell on the Australians as they waited to jump off.
One in seven was hit before the attack started. They took the ridge anyway. Five thousand prisoners were taken.
The German official history called October 4 a black day. The German command began planning a withdrawal that would have abandoned the Belgian coast. But the rain started again on October 7.
The mud returned. The guns could not be moved. The creeping barrage fell short or was swallowed by the mud.
The wire in front of Passchendaele Ridge was uncut. On October 9, the Australian 2nd Division was driven back to its start line after 1,200 casualties. The day cost 12,000 across the front.
Tanks were sent up the only road that could bear their weight. The lead tank was knocked out. Others tried to go around and sank.
Six tanks piled into each other. German artillery destroyed them one by one. The wrecks blocked the only supply road.
It took a week to clear them with gun cotton. No tank was used in the Ypres sector again.
On October 12, the New Zealand Division attacked Bellevue Spur. The wire was uncut. The guns were too far back.
The New Zealanders reached a belt of intact wire on an open slope. The German machine guns had been positioned to create that bottleneck. Men who reached the wire were shot on it.
Men who did not were pinned in water-filled shell holes. Eight hundred forty-three New Zealanders died in the first four hours. The wounded were left on the slope for days.
The German artillery stopped firing to let stretcher parties work.
General Godley called it a very good day’s work. He did not mention the uncut wire or the failed barrage.
The Canadian Corps was brought up to take the village. Commander Arthur Currie told Haig the place was not worth it. He estimated 16,000 Canadian casualties.
He was overruled. The final count was 15,654. Currie refused to attack until the ground could support his men.
For two weeks, his engineers built plank roads and tram lines in full view of German gunners. Hundreds were killed building the roads for the attack.
On October 26, October 30, November 6, and November 10, the Canadians advanced in short bites. On November 6, the 27th Battalion from Winnipeg entered what was left of Passchendaele. There was no village.
Just brick dust and mud. The men could not tell it from the rest of the ground.
The cost of the entire battle is unknown. Estimates range from 240,000 to 448,000 British Empire casualties. German losses range from 217,000 to 400,000.
The two armies counted differently. The British counted lightly wounded. The Germans did not.
The official historian added 30 percent to German figures. No one knows the true number.
In April 1918, the Germans launched their spring offensive. The Passchendaele salient became a trap. Plumer ordered it abandoned.
The withdrawal began on April 15. The Germans walked back into the village on April 16. One hundred days of fighting, a quarter of a million casualties, given up in two days.
The ground was retaken in September 1918 in a matter of days.
Forty-two thousand bodies were never recovered from the battle. Ninety thousand were never identified. The Menin Gate carries 54,896 names of men with no known grave.
Tyne Cot carries nearly 35,000 more. At Tyne Cot Cemetery, 12,000 graves hold seven in ten unknowns.
The Chinese Labor Corps, 96,000 men recruited from Shandong, were kept in fenced camps identified by numbers. After the war, they were not sent home. They were ordered to dig up the dead and clear the battlefield.
They lifted unexploded shells and re-buried bodies. Nearly 2,000 of them died in Europe. The last did not leave until 1920.
The ground has not finished. One and a half billion shells were fired on the Western Front. A quarter to a third failed to explode.
In Flanders, the soft clay preserved them. Every year, the Belgian army’s disposal unit collects 200 to 250 tons of unexploded munitions. Many are chemical shells.
Mustard gas does not decay. Since 1918, about 360 people have been killed in the Ypres area by old shells, 500 injured. Two construction workers died in 2014.
DOVO has lost 23 of its own men.
The dead still come up. A farmer plows deeper. A builder digs foundations.
Bones appear. Sometimes a shoulder title, a set of boot nails. A name can be put to a man who has been one of the 90,000 for a century.
It happens most years. He is rebured with a service. His family is told four or five generations later.
That part of this battle is still running.
