“In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row,/That mark our place…” The poem “In Flanders Fields,” by Canadian military surgeo“In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row,/That mark our place…” The poem “In Flanders Fields,” by Canadian military surgeon John McCrae (1872-1918), is one of the best-loved works of literature to come out of the First World War, with its haunting evocation of the Allied dead speaking to the living from beyond the grave. And as so much of the worst of the fighting on World War I’s Western Front took place in those flat soggy fields of northern Belgium, it is appropriate that historian Leon Wolff drew upon the poem for the title of this thorough and thoughtful history of the 1917 Battle of Passchendaele.
Wolff, an American historian, served with the U.S. Army Air Corps during the Second World War, and writes perceptively about these events of the First World War. Against a background of seemingly endless war – massive attacks that inflicted innumerable casualties while causing no movement in the battle lines; demoralization among the serving soldiers and disillusionment at home – a series of decisions culminated in the battle that is variously called either Passchendaele or the Third Battle of Ypres.
The British commanding general, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, approached the campaign in a spirit of doctrinaire inflexibility. He seemed to believe that he could blast through German lines that had held in place for three years, and make his way to the English Channel, with relatively little effort. And considerations of national pride seemed to play a disproportionate role in Haig’s strategic and tactical planning: “All this he intended to accomplish almost solely with British troops. He had little interest in the co-operation, then or eventually, of French or American forces. The Third Battle of Ypres was to be Britain’s day of glory, and his plans for the conduct of this offensive were already complete” (p. 50).
Wolff makes clear that Haig, in his inflexibility, failed to take into account that the Germans might resist more stubbornly than he anticipated. He neglected to consider how the landscape of Flanders – flat, muddy, flood-prone, with clay soil that, when wet, clings like quicksand to soldiers’ boots – might interfere with his plans for a quick and decisive attack. And his nationalist unwillingness to wait for the imminent arrival of the Americans, with their fresh troops and vast resources, would cost a great many British and Commonwealth soldiers’ lives.
To be sure, there were phases of the battle that seemed to go promisingly for the Allies. The Battle of Messines in June of 1917 began with the explosion of nineteen massive mines that the Allies had dug under the German lines. Wolff’s description of the mine attack on the German-held Messines Ridge – an event that may remind U.S. readers of the Petersburg Mine Assault from the American Civil War – shows his talent for evocative, almost Homeric description of combat:
A few seconds before 3.10 some of the heavy guns rearward began to fire. Then each of the nineteen land mines exploded almost in unison. The earth quaked, tumbling and staggering the British soldiers as they rose in awe to see the rim of the hated ridge burst skyward in a dense black cloud, beneath which gushed nineteen pillars of flame that lit the Salient with the red glare of hell. The pillars fused into greater mushrooms of fire that seemed to set flame to little clouds above. Then, a moment or two later, the long roar of nineteen explosions blended and reverberated into one long blast that stunned even the British troops, awakened the countryside, rolled through Flanders and northern France, hurtled the Channel, and was heard in London by Lloyd George, awake in his study at Number 10 Downing Street. (p. 100)
In the aftermath of Messines, with demoralized, broken Germans surrendering by the hundreds, it might have seemed that Haig would get his lightning victory after all. But as the Passchendaele battle proper got underway in August, Wolff makes clear, Allied gains turned out to be decidedly modest, no matter what an ordinary Londoner might gather from reading The Times. And the infamously bad rain of Flanders began to set in in earnest, creating a daunting prospect for even the most avid Haig supporters like General John Charteris: “Four days and nights it rained, and even Charteris, with a humility and despair uncommon for him, writes in his diary: ‘Every brook is swollen and the ground is a quagmire. If it were not that all the records in previous years had given us fair warning, it would seem as if Providence had declared against us'” (p. 150).
And the rain continued, as did Allied attacks and German counterattacks all along the Ypres salient. August wasted on into September and October, and thousands and thousands of soldiers died. By 7 October, the Allies had suffered more than 200,000 casualties in three months of fighting, and British generals Sir Herbert Plumer and Sir Hubert Gough called for a halt to the campaign. Yet Haig insisted on continuing with the campaign, even though, “By any normal standard, the campaign was over. Haig certainly knew that proper preparations, rested troops, and full artillery coverage were no longer possible. His armies were groping and floundering” (p. 200). That Haig insisted upon continuing with the same inflexible plans for his grand offensive, under circumstances that guaranteed that the already horrific Allied casualties would increase, may be, in Wolff’s reading, the most damning indictment of his lack of generalship.
As support for Haig’s campaign waned, both within the British Government and among the British people, a final attack, by Canadian troops on 6 November, took the village of Passchendaele, and enabled the Allies to say that they had gained some ground. But the Allies, Wolff makes clear, had had to destroy the village in order to save it: “The Canadians, smoking cigarettes and trailing their rifles as they walked over the site, could hardly grasp that it had once been a town….Not one building remained, other than the feeble remnant of the church. Not one brick stood on another….Passchendaele was effaced from the earth” (p. 253).
I read In Flanders Fields while traveling in Belgium. Driving between northern France and the city of Ghent, I noted that the landscape is indeed singularly flat, just as Wolff describes, and I know that I would not want to be assigned the task of leading a battle there. All the same, it is an outrage that someone in the Allied command could not sense that the small gain of territory at Passchendaele was not worth the vast human cost. The reader finishes In Flanders Fields with a sense of admiration for the valour of the ordinary soldiers of the Allied forces, and with an equally strong sense of outrage at the inflexibility of the senior officers who mis-led those good soldiers toward death....more
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