Now it can be Told

The battle of Flanders began round Ypres on July 31st, with a greater intensity of artillery on our side than had ever been seen before in this war in spite of the Somme and Messines, when on big days of battle two thousand guns opened fire on a single corps front. The enemy was strong also in artillery arranged in great groups, often shifting to enfilade our lines of attack. The natural strength of his position along the ridges, which were like a great bony hand outstretched through Flanders, with streams or "beeks," as they are called, flowing in the valleys which ran between the fingers of that clawlike range, were strengthened by chains of little concrete forts or "pillboxes," as our soldiers called them, so arranged that they could defend one another by enfilade machine-gun fire. These were held by garrisons of machine-gunners of proved resolution, whose duty was to break up our waves of attack until, even if successful in gaining ground, only small bodies of survivors would be in a position to resist the counterattacks launched by German divisions farther back. The strength of the pillboxes made of concrete two inches thick resisted everything but the direct hit of heavy shells, and they were not easy targets at long range. The garrisons within them fought often with the utmost courage, even when surrounded, and again and again this method of defense proved terribly effective against the desperate heroic assaults of British infantry.

What our men had suffered in earlier battles was surpassed by what they were now called upon to endure. All the agonies of war which I have attempted to describe were piled up in those fields of Flanders. There was nothing missing in the list of war's abominations. A few days after the battle began the rains began, and hardly ceased for four months. Night after night the skies opened and let down steady torrents, which turned all that country into one great bog of slime. Those little rivers or "beeks," which ran between the knobby fingers of the clawlike range of ridges, were blown out of their channels and slopped over into broad swamps. The hurricanes of artillery fire which our gunners poured upon the enemy positions for twenty miles in depth churned up deep shell-craters which intermingled and made pits which the rains and floods filled to the brim. The only way of walking was by "duckboards," tracks laid down across the bogs under enemy fire, smashed up day by day, laid down again under cover of darkness. Along a duckboard walk men must march in single file, and if one of our men, heavily laden in his fighting-kit, stumbled on those greasy boards (as all of them stumbled at every few yards) and fell off, he sank up to his knees, often up to his waist, sometimes up to his neck, in mud and water. If he were wounded when he fell, and darkness was about him, he could only cry to God or his pals, for he was helpless otherwise. One of our divisions of Lancashire men -- the 66th -- took eleven hours in making three miles or so out of Ypres across that ground on their way to attack, and then, in spite of their exhaustion, attacked. Yet week after week, month after month, our masses of men, almost every division in the British army at one time or another, struggled on through that Slough of Despond, capturing ridge after ridge, until the heights at Passchendaele were stormed and won, though even then the Germans clung to Staden and Westroosebeeke when all our efforts came to a dead halt, and that Belgian coast attack was never launched.