‘the sight that greeted me was so horrible that i almost lost my head’
Describing one attack at Passchendaele, Lieutenant Alan Thomas said: “We passed over no-man’s-land, thick with broken wire, and into the enemy’s lines. The trenches, as we expected, were deserted. Instead of meeting Germans, we were greeted with their gunfire. Black high explosive shells burst overhead with that cracking, wrenching noise that blew the breath out of your body. But they did small damage. Now and then a piece of metal hurtled by with a zip and buried itself in the earth.
“Sometimes spent machinegun bullets came moaning through the air. For the rest, we moved forward without hindrance. The advance was beginning to look like a walkover.
“During the whole of the next day the vast activity continued. Men, guns, lorries, mules, cyclists, staff cars, and all the paraphernalia of an army on the move filled in the scene for miles and miles around us.
Rumours flew from mouth to mouth. There was talk of a breakthrough, and when the cavalry came up, passing within a few hundred yards of us, on their way to Monchy, we really believed that a gap in the line had been made and that the enemy’s flank was about to be turned. As the horsemen passed us we cheered them on their way.”
But later on, Lt Thomas was called to a staff meeting as worrying rumours of a counterattack began to circulate.
He said: “As we turned the bend of the road, I stopped. The sight that greeted me was so horrible that I almost lost my head.
“Heaped on top of one another and blocking up the roadway for as far as one could see lay the mutilated bodies of our men and their horses. These bodies, torn and gaping, had stiffened into fantastic attitudes. All the hollows of the road were filled with blood. This was the cavalry.
“Nothing that I had seen before in the way of horrors could be even faintly compared with what I saw around me now. Death in every imaginable shape was there for the examining.
“I walked up the hill, picking my way as best I could and often slipping in the pools of blood, so that my boots and the lower parts of my puttees were dripping with blood by the time I reached the top. Nor, I discovered on my way up, were all the men and animals quite dead. Now and then a groan would strike the air – the groan of a man praying for release. Sometimes the twitch of a horse’s leg would shift the pattern of the heaped-up bodies.”