FIGHT FOR PASSCHENDAELE. DESPERATE DEFENCE.
From PHILIP GIBBS. WAR CORRESPONDENTS’ HEADQUARTERS, FRANCE, Tuesday.
It is with thankfulness that one can record to-day what I believe will prove to be the capture of Passchendaele, the crown and crest of the ridge which made a great barrier round the salient of Ypres and hemmed us in the flats and swamps. After a heroic attack by the Canadians this morning they fought their way over the ruins of Passchendaele and into ground beyond it. If their gains be held the seal is set upon the most terrific achievement of war ever attempted and carried through by British arms. Only we out here, who have known the full and intimate details of that fighting, the valour and the sacrifice which have carried our waves of men up those slopes, starting at Messines and Wytschaete at the lower end of the range in June last, crossing the Pilkem Ridge in the north, and then storming the central heights from Westhoek to Polygon Wood, through Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood, from Zonnebeke to Broodseinde, from the Gravenstaiel to Abraham Heights, from Langemarck to Poelcapelle, can understand the meaning of to-day’s battle, and the thrill at the heart which has come to all of us to-day because of the victory. For at and around Passchendaele is the highest ground on the ridge looking down across the sweep of the plains into which the enemy has been thrust, where he has his camps and his dumps, where, from this time henceforth, if we are able to keep the place, we shall see all his roads winding like tapes below us, and his men marching up them like ants, and all the secrets of his life, as for three years he looked down on us and gave us hell.
A COSTLY POSITION.
What is Passchendaele? As I saw it this morning, through the smoke of gunfire and a wet mist, it was less than I had seen before a week or two ago, with just one ruin there – the ruin of its church – a black mass of slaughtered masonry and nothing else; not a house left standing, not a huddle of brick on that shell swept height. But, because of its position as the crown of the ridge, that crest has seemed to many men like a prize to which all these battles of Flanders have been fought, and to get this place and the slopes and ridges on the way to it, not only for its own sake, but for what it would bring with it, great numbers of our most gallant men have given their blood, and thousands – scores of thousands – of British soldiers of our own home stock and from overseas have gone through fire and water, the fire of frightful bombardments, the water of the swamps, of the beeks and shell-holes, into which they have plunged and waded and stuck – and sometimes drowned. To defend this ridge and Passchendaele, and the crest of it, the enemy has massed incredible numbers of machine-guns, and many of his finest divisions. To check our progress he built his concrete blockhouses in échelon formation, and at every cross road and in every bit of village or farmstead, and our men had to attack that chain of forts through its girdles of machine-gun fire, and, after a great price of life, mastered it. The weather fought for the enemy again and again on the days of our attacks, and the horrors of the mud and bogs over a wide sweep of country, belongs to the grimmest remembrances of every soldier who has fought in Flanders. The enemy may brush aside our advance as the taking of a mud patch, but to resist it he has at one time or another put nearly a hundred divisions into the arena of blood, and the defence has cost him a vast sum of loss in dead and wounded.
CANADIANS’ LUCK.
A few days ago orders were issued to his troops. They were given in the name of Hindenburg. Passchendaele must be held at all costs, and if lost must be recaptured at all costs. It seems likely that Passchendaele has been lost to the enemy to day. If so, and if we have any fortune in war, it will not be retaken. The Canadians have had more luck than the English. New Zealand, and Australian troops, who fought the battles on the way up with most heroic endeavour, and not a man in the Army will begrudge them the honour which they have gained, not easily, nor without the usual price of victory, which is some men’s death and many men’s pain. For several days the enemy has endeavoured to thrust us back from the positions held round Crest Farm, and on the left beyond the Paddebeek, where all the ground is a morass, the Naval Brigade, who fought there on the left on the last days of last month, had a very hard and tragic time, but it was their grim stoicism in holding on to exposed outposts, small groups of men under great shell-fire, which enabled the Canadians this morning to attack from a good position. A special tribute is due to two companies of British infantry, who, with Canadian guides, worked through a large plantation, drove a wedge into enemy territory, and held it against all attempts to dislodge them.