The Great War by Les Carlyon

Author:Les Carlyon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2014-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

29

The Menin Road

September came, the last three weeks of the fourth summer of the war that – despite what Haig was saying – seemed without end. Gough no longer made bold attacks, merely a niggle here and a parry there. These weeks were like a brief waking in a nightmare. The rain stopped, the sun rose in a golden orb each morning over Passchendaele Ridge and by noon the air was warm and balmy. Birds could be heard singing, hope amid the ruins. Here and there a blackened stump of a tree put out a single green leaf in a show of defiance. The ground mostly dried up and the sun baked a thin crust on it, so that wagon wheels sometimes produced puffs of dust. The shell holes still stank but the water in them had retreated to shallow puddles. The British soldiers who had fought in August knew this was all a tease; the newly arrived Australians didn’t think the place too bad. It was certainly good weather for flying. Soldiers on both sides stood and watched specks spitting at each other in the skies. Manfred von Richthofen was up there in his red Fokker; so too was Hermann Goering, a twenty-four-year-old who had grown up near Nuremberg, a city that one day would have another significance for him. Some Germans during the first week of September thought that the British had abandoned their offensive.

They were wrong: lack of resolution had never been one of Haig’s vices. Nevertheless the nature of his offensive had changed. By mid-September it was six weeks old. Like the Somme, it had started out as one thing and become another. It was no longer, in the first instance, about taking the Belgian ports. It was about taking the heights, the Gheluvelt Plateau, all 150 feet of it. It was not now so much about Gough, who would still command on the northern front, as about Plumer, who would be careful and limit his advances to a distance where his artillery could protect his infantry. Plumer didn’t see the Belgian ports or cavalry galloping through gaps, just the little ridges and pillboxes that had to be taken on either side of the Menin Road. He saw artillery ladder maps and just 1500 yards ahead: that was how far he intended to advance in a day, no more. Third Ypres now had the characteristics of a grinding match.

Two days before Plumer began what would be called the battle of the Menin Road, Bonar Law, the Conservative leader, wrote to Lloyd George, who was in Wales and unwell. Bonar Law said he had told Robertson that he [Bonar Law] had lost all hope of Haig’s offensive succeeding. He believed that Robertson agreed with him. Bonar Law felt that Haig could renew his attack any time. Therefore it was time for Cabinet to decide whether the offensive be allowed to continue.

PLUMER’S SCHEME, WHICH the Prime Minister and Bonar Law knew little of, was rather like his plan for Messines, except that he brought even more artillery to the battle.

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