The Wood Beyond

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A Meditation for Remembrance Sunday

by Andrea Pollinger

Passchendaele was not so much an exercise in modern warfare as an experiment in mass suicide.

The contemporary equivalent would be to devastate an area of several thousand acres with a tactical nuclear weapon, then send in a force of unprotected men to occupy it. This, I am assured by men who did National Service in the fifties, was a tactic actually rehearsed by the British Army at that time, suggesting that little has changed, and the men at the top always want to fight today's wars according to yesterday's technology. Central to the tactical thinking of World War One, such as it was, stood the proposition that if you could punch a hole in the enemy line and send cavalry galloping through, then everyone would be home for Christmas … or New Year … Or Easter.. or. .

In fairness to Haig it should be said that his strategic plan for Third Ypres was more modest. His intention was to drive the enemy back to a line beyond Bruges and thus cut the U-boat supply line from Bruges to Ostend.

Initially there was supposed to be a simultaneous naval assault on the coast, but when the Admiralty decided this did not suit their convenience, Haig decided to go ahead, perhaps believing that the missing marine element would be supplied by his choice of battleground, basically an area of marshland which not even a complex system of drainage ditches and dykes had been able to reclaim for anything other than bog pasturage. No sensible farmer was going to sow seed on this land. But donkey Haig, having learned nothing from the ineffectiveness of the huge preliminary bombardment on the Somme a year earlier, sowed it with shells for ten long days.

This time not only did the long bombardment give the Germans plenty of warning of the attack, it also breached many of the dykes and dammed most of the ditches. And it started raining. Even a general might have been expected to notice that. And the general of an army that had been bogged down, literally and figuratively, in Flanders for nearly three years might have been expected to have gathered a little bit of intelligence about the terrain. But, standing aloof in giant ignorance, Haig ordered the attack to be pressed, and kept on pressing it for three long months, across marshland, in heavy rain, with ditches blocked and dykes destroyed, and the whole devastated landscape pitted with shellholes like the surface of the moon, except that here was no dry volcanic dust but mud; thick, cloying, drowning, sucking mud. .