Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Surviving Passchendaele – just
A century ago, on September 20, 1917, the 1st SA Infantry Brigade stormed the Frezenberg Ridge in Ypres, Belgium. Among them was my great-uncle, writes
AS A CHILD visiting relatives in Durban during the 1960s and early 1970s, I have a distant memory of my old Uncle Will, a World War I veteran crippled for life by a spinal battle injury. At seven or eight , I can just recall an old smiling man in a wheelchair.
In time, I would read and re-read his detailed and explicit 1962 war autobiography: We Band of Brothers: Reminiscences from the 1st SA Infantry Brigade in the 1914-18 War.
George William Warwick, called Will by his family, had, at the age of 17 years and five months, volunteered in August 1915 for the 1st SA Infantry Brigade then being raised for service in Europe. His motivation was driven by the powerful social context then of serving king and country, which British South Africans felt with intensity.
Warwick epitomised his patriotism by saying: “We could not understand how anyone with a particle of manhood could not sign up.”
Warwick joined the brigade’s 4th Battalion – the SA Scottish. As part of a schools tour last year to the World War I France and Belgium battlefields, I was able to observe for the first time the location where my great-uncle had once fought, where his body had been broken by a piece of hot, flying metal. Across this picturesque green and well-watered countryside of farms was the soil that a century ago comprised a vast mud-swamp hell, the target of countless artillery shells during the Menin Road engagement phase of the Third Battle of Ypres; the final phase best remembered/ immortalised as Passchendaele.
This fight, stretching over several months, has drawn the wrath of many historians for its pointlessness: 70 000 lives lost among British and Dominion forces including Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, beside those of the SA Brigade.
After the 1916 Somme disasters, British Field Marshall Douglas Haig had long contemplated plans to seize the Ypres salient, from where a new offensive could be launched to break the German line.
Despite wide- spread 1917 mutinies within the desperate French Army, rendering them temporarily unreliable, Haig was convinced the British Empire forces should and would succeed. The Flemish ridges east of Ypres had been occupied by German troops since October 1914.
The southern part of the salient was seized in June 1917 by British, Australian and New Zealand troops, but the centre – called the Flanders Position by the Germans – remained Haig’s chief objective.
Despite British Prime Minister Lloyd George’s fears of incurring catastrophic Somme-like casualties, with soldiers increasingly difficult to replace, he found little support from other politicians overwhelmed by Haig’s logic and assurances.
After all, the field- marshal was the professional soldier and his argument rested securely on the premise that in the wake of the collapsing Russian front, the rapidly reinforcing German Army had to be attacked and beaten.
The terrain was described by a British officer as “churned up to a depth of ten feet” and the “consistency of porridge”, ”the middle of the shell craters being so soft that one might sink out of sight”.
Beneath this watery, sludge-like landscape lay buried thousands of corpses and unexploded artillery shells.
Amid this quagmire, the Germans had fortified their front line with a network of concrete pillboxes sited to cover each other with their firing apertures marking all points, supported by interlocking machine-gun posts, while German artillery covered both battleground and the Menin Road where British and Dominion troops were moving along.
Considerable other German fortifications and men lay further back, ready to be employed in a counter-attack.
The South Africans’ objective was to seize the Frezenberg Ridge east of Ypres, part of a second phase whereby British forces had already attacked in the broader area and been partforced back.
Such was a component of Haig’s “bite and hold” strategy where, in a battle of attrition, ground would be secured in stages, while German fighting resolve would supposedly weaken.
Before the attack, Warwick’s platoon waited in reserve within an old waterlogged German trench, shared with three dead Germans with faces “a curious green colour”, their bodies “seem to have been mummified by the gas or explosion that killed them”. Beyond here were “duckboard tracks” – miles of wooden planks nailed together which comprised the only practical means of crossing the deep mud and water.
On Thursday, September 20, 1917 at 5am, the British artillery bombardment began and, in the dark lit by exploding shells, Lance- Corporal Warwick led his nine-man section forward; his men walking in file in hope that a single machine-gun burst would not kill them all.
There was no mercy for any German observed en route; Warwick fired at two on the ground who might still have been alive. Having advanced some distance, he ordered a halt to align with other sections; then, on rising to continue, observed that Private Pinder behind him was not moving. Warwick relates how he “cursed him roundly” only to discover that Pinder and seven other section members had been killed by an unseen German machine gun.
With remaining section member Private Thompson, Warwick continued towards their target, a German pillbox called “Borry Farm”, but en route encountered a concrete hole which appeared to lead towards a pillbox “some dis- tance away”.
Warwick called down for any German to surrender and receiving no response, threw in a smoke grenade followed by a hand grenade. He then walked about 13m when a piece of shrapnel shattered his spine; he would never walk again.
After much suffering and illness, several times to the point of death, Warwick returned to Durban in 1918 to a highly emotional greeting from his mother and father whom he had not seen for three years.
Warwick’s paralysis below the waist was virtually total; he was only vaguely aware of urination and emptying his bowels.
Once, when inserting a metal catheter, a nurse did so with such clumsiness that he was left in blood-soaked sheets; Warwick described feeling no pain but angrily wrote “that permanent damage was done”.
Warwick gave no hint as to what he understood thereby, but it was the spinal injury that ensured he would never have children, but he went on to marry a fellow Sunday school teacher, Marjorie Leadbetter, in 1926 who assiduously cared for him during the many difficult years ahead.
Absolutely determined to walk again, Warwick endured a variety of army and civilian medical rehabilitation efforts – some bordering on the ridiculous. One family story was that his younger brother Charles, my grandfather, at Warwick’s request, threw him into the Durban public pool in the hope that to avoid drowning he would his overcome his paralysis. But alas, Warwick discovered he could keep himself afloat and even swim well using just his arms.
Warwick’s greatest resource during his difficult and painful life was a strong Christian faith; he decided on training for ordination in the Presbyterian Church, studied at Edinburgh University and served Natal congregations in Dannhauser, Vryheid and the Bluff, until finally retiring to South African Legion veterans cottages in Durban. He died in 1973, aged 75. It was with a mixture of fascination and incredulity that I viewed the Ypres battlefields and with more than a touch of pride and sadness at several monuments acknowledging the 1st SA Brigade, not least the 9th Scottish Division Memorial near the Frezenberg Ridge where the SA Scottish and Brigade are specifically honoured.
These men from Durban, Johannesburg, Cape Town and elsewhere achieved their objectives that day, but at the cost of 1 258 casualties, 263 of whom were killed, each like Uncle Will with his own tragic story, but a drop in the ocean regarding the calamitous loss of life overall in 1914-18.
But alongside this mass tragedy, infinitely perpetuated, is the honour which Warwick and others gained, responding to a cause in the context of their time greater than any individual, viewed through their brotherhood of courage against commonly faced extreme adversity.
Today, my son carries his great-great uncle’s name and learns about him as someone to be proud of within of our family and its historical cultural identity.
● Warwick teaches history at Bishops.