OTAGO TO FORE
THE earth being massively rent by 19 underground mines remains one of the enduring signposts of the Battle of Messines in June 1917, a battle in which New Zealand played a spearhead role in dislodging the Germans from strategic positions.
It was a breakthrough victory in the First World War pattern of stalemate trench warfare, although it was a brief campaign with limited aims.
The simultaneous explosions just before dawn on June 7 registered on a seismograph on the Isle of Wight and were said to have been heard by the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, at his home in Walton Heath, in Surrey.
But soldier John A. Lee crouched in a trench waiting to go over the top and didn’t know about them.
Dunedinborn Lee reached for pen and paper soon after the battle which he described as ‘‘this ironmongery Donnybrook’’.
Lee wrote to the London paper produced for New Zealand troops, Chronicles of the NZEF, and said in his typically pungent way: ‘‘Some coon with a vivid imagination has written to the papers averring that he heard the mines go up at 3am . . . I was crouched under our parapet trembling ever so little at the knees and although I felt the earth tremble, I never knew until a full day afterwards that the noise was due to anything other than guns.
‘‘There was a warning order, a brief silence and then a blinding flash, and a hell of a noise.’’
New Zealand’s official war correspondent, Malcolm Ross, whom Lee did not hold in high regard, may have been the ‘‘coon’’ Lee meant, but Ross wrote about the flash of the explosions rather than their noise.
‘‘We were faced with the most enthralling sight that I had yet seen in war,’’ he wrote.
‘‘A great mine went up in vast masses of earth and smoke and lurid red flame . . . in quick succession other mines, five or six in number, heaved themselves skyward with awesome effect, making the ground rock and quiver as if stricken with a great earthquake.’’
Another New Zealand participant, Ormond Burton, wrote of ‘‘a muffled roar like thunder’’ and then the long roll of the guns took over.
The mines and the relentless artillery allowed the Allied soldiers to move almost unmolested up the MessinesWytschaete ridge which the Germans had held since early in the war, giving them a commanding strategic position in the Ypres area.
The British commander in chief, Sir Douglas Haig, decided removing the Germans from their advantageous position was a necessary prelude to the greater battle yet to come, Third Ypres, which encompassed Passchendaele.
The attack went according to plan — an unusual event.
As Lee put it, ‘‘If anyone stopped a bullet or a piece of old iron that morning crossing No Man’s Land, then his luck was certainly out.’’
He wrote that almost as soon as they reached the first line of German trenches, they saw German soldiers running away, their hands in the air. ‘‘These were some of the catch of the Otago boys, who went on ahead of us and took the town proper.’’
Lee, seldom short of descriptive words, said the artillery blew the place full of holes and then, for want of a better target, ‘‘had blown some of the holes away.’’
The dreaded barbed wire, roll upon roll of it to stop infantrymen, had also been blown away or, in Lee’s colourful phrasing, ‘‘there wasn’t enough wire left to hold a man’s strides up.’’
According to Lee, the Otago soldiers, being at the objective first, led the way in taking prisoners, but not so much for the sake of removing the enemy from the field. Souvenirs were the aim.
‘‘Mr Hun, making virtue of necessity, was digging deep into his pockets and producing with apparent alacrity such articles as gladden the New Zealanders’ hearts,’’ Lee wrote. ‘‘Binoculars, pistols, medal ribbons, rings — anything from a button to a bayonet.’’
Lee’s touch was not as light when he wrote his 1937 novel based on his war experience, Civilian Into Soldier.
Lee’s hero, John Guy, a thin disguise for himself, at Messines was ‘‘callous and not yet cool.’’
After tripping on wire, ‘‘Guy’’ was up and away: ‘‘On, for he was free from all hurt and all ache, he was drunken with the killing lust, as merciless and as efficient as the barrage.’’
Although deemed a success, the New Zealanders still suffered at Messines. The New Zealand Division commander, General Sir Andrew Russell, anticipated that once the Germans regrouped after being routed, they would begin a fierce artillery counterattack on the ridge.
Russell sought permission from his British superiors to withdraw troops from Messines and mount a new defensive line with machine guns and artillery. But permission was denied.
The expected counterattack occurred.
Russell later wrote to the Minister of Defence, Sir James Allen: ‘‘I regret very much that we were not allowed to thin out and reduce the number of men left on the ridge after we had won it.
‘‘Had we been allowed — as I proposed — our losses would have been considerably smaller with the same result.’’
Messines became a costly success. Casualties totalled about 3700, of whom about 700 died.
Ross wrote a poem about the battle and its outcome:
From out the smoky pall of
battle strife,
The Ridge looms grey, but
with uncertain line,
And all its stricken fields are
brown. No green remains; Our dead lie thickly in the
broken town
All strangely still and quiet,
unheeding now
The thunder of the conflict
they have won.
Both Burton and the Australian correspondent, Charles Bean, wrote of how attackers in wartime can be engulfed by hysteria and, as Bean said: ‘‘With death singing about their ears, they will kill until they grow tired of killing.’’ But there could also be compassion. Towards the end, Lee and a divisional runner, according to his Chronicles account, came across a wounded German in a dark dugout ‘‘and decided to salve him.
‘‘We washed his wound, put him in the open, fed him, gave him a drink of water, and erected a tin shade for him.
‘‘We reckoned we would have been Huns ourselves had we left this maimed exponent of frightfulness to suffer. But we were true to the profesh. We cut off a button each for a souvenir.’’
Lee was awarded a Distinguished Conduct Medal for gallantry at Messines. In March 1918, he was wounded and had his left arm amputated. He was later a successful author and member of Parliament, ejected from the Labour Party over policy differences. He died in 1982.