Passchendaele: A New History

Nick Lloyd

Viking, £25.00

Review by Tom Devine

SOME might sigh on reading this review. Surely not another book about the Great War? It is true, of course, that during this centenary of the conflict publishers have produced volume after volume which have ranged from low to high quality, boring mediocrity to undoubted and enduring scholarly excellence.

There is indeed something about this war to end all wars which for many still possesses a powerful fascination 100 years after the guns finally fell silent and those who survived the conflict have long since gone to their graves. This is in part because nothing on the scale of slaughter suffered by the armies which fought on either side between 1914 and 1918 had ever been experienced before in human history.

But the conflict also speaks quintessentially of the timeless human experience, of remarkable courage, tenacity, stupidities of governments and authorities, brotherhood in arms and British patriotic loyalties which may already have passed into history. The extraordinary strength of will among the troops which made millions of men 'go over the top', often to certain death, time and time again, is difficult for the present generation to comprehend. The Russians eventually gave up the fight and the French mutinied for a time but British and German soldiers kept at it to the bitter end.

In his new book, the military historian, Nick Lloyd takes us back to Flanders fields and the Battle of Passchendaele, which was fought between July to November 1917. The killing took place a few miles east of the town of Ypres (Wipers to the British Tommies) where the sweeping German advance of 1914 had finally been brought to a halt. Thus it was known to officialdom as the Third Battle of Ypres. So crucial was the Ypres salient to both the British and Germans commands that the ground was fought over time and again but with precious few permanent gains on either side.

When the ferocious struggle at Passchendaele eventually ended in exhaustion for both sides, upwards of half a million German, British, Australian and New Zealand soldiers had been killed, injured or maimed. The British assault on German lines was an attempt to break through to the Channel ports in the north west and so take the bases of the German U-boats which were causing havoc across the Atlantic shipping lanes in the effort to starve Britain into peace negotiations. But the battle, despite some early successes, ended in yet another costly failure and muddy stalemate in the grim list which included the Somme, Arras and Gallipoli. The historian AJP Taylor once wrote, “Third Ypres was the blindest slaughter of a blind war.”

Lloyd has some fresh points to make about the battle. He argues with considerable skill that Passchendaele may in fact have been “a lost victory” which came very close to ultimate success. He has mined the archives “on the other side of the hill” and so provides intriguing new insights into German strategies and reactions to the British onslaught.

The performance of the British leadership both at government and general staff level was normally bereft of inspiration and sometimes guilty of needlessly throwing away the lives of many thousands of brave men. Lloyd quotes with approval the coruscating conclusion of other scholars about “the head of state (David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister), striving to direct grand strategy without the faintest understanding of its guiding principles while his commander-in-chief in the field (the Scotsman, Field Marshall Douglas Haig) had one simple aim, to continue battering at the German war machine until it cracked, come what may”.

Many in the higher command of the British forces had learnt their military trade in late Victorian imperial in faraway places.They were simply not equipped intellectually for the terrible challenges of the new industrialised warfare of heavy artillery, machine guns, trenches and armies of millions of men. They had to learn how to cope on the job. The British Army did learn and by 1918 had become by far the best fighting force in the field. And there were also some very able tacticians among the senior officers, like General Sir Hubert Plumer, the commander of the Second Army, beloved by his men but also capable of fresh and original military thinking. He was an enthusiastic advocate of “bite and hold”, which meant advancing short distances at a time, digging in with fresh reinforcements to await the inevitable German counter attack and then pounding it with heavy artillery fire. It is now recognised as possibly the only way to make any progress in attritional trench warfare.

Yet, for this reviewer, there remain two yawning analytical gaps, not simply in this book but in most of those already published during the commemoration of the Great War. In the first place, how is the remarkable endurance of British and German soldiers over four years of horror to be explained? As already said, Russia eventually gave up the struggle and many French troops were driven to mutiny. The Tommies and Fritzes, however, remained steadfast to the end.

Second, the performance of the German armies was especially extraordinary over the entire four years of war. Granted, Germany was in alliance with Austro-Hungary and Turkey. But there was little doubt which nation was by far the senior partner among the Central Powers. The Germans fought on three fronts for most of that terrible conflict against the British Empire, France and Italy and nearly emerged victorious in their final great push on the western front in 1918. Why so?

Perhaps after all there still remains plenty of scope for more books on the Great War which might attempt to answer these questions and others.