The Battle of Broodseinde, which commenced on October 4th, caught the Germans completely by surprise.  They were amassing for a counter attack and many were caught in the open by the hurricane bombardment which fell upon them. 

 

Lieutenant Roland Draper of the 10th Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, was wounded there.

 

“Our sergeant major came and said, “Shall we try and get a bit forward?” He stood up and bellowed to the lads to get forward and waved to them; blew the old whistle… but course, there was so much row and racket going on.  Fritzie opened up and this sergeant major was killed across my legs.  I reckon the bullet I got in me went through him. 

 

“I was carried back by the lads on a stretcher and every now and then these lads carrying the stretcher would have to dive down because of shellfire and I’d go down BUMP! When you’d been shot in the chest and blood was coming out of your mouth it wasn’t very good for you was it?  But eventually they got down to this Hellfire Corner and they had a terrific crater, what they called Hooge Crater which had been dug under the ground.  They’d got a big dressing station there which you were taken to.  It was all undercover and from there you’d got to be examined and labelled and this, that and the other and then you’d got to go off through Ypres in an ambulance.  They weren’t ambulances like you’ve got today, they were rickety things but still, they managed to get you through with a bit of luck.  And then I went to Poperinghe…”

 

The 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd Australian Divisions together with the New Zealand Division were at the centre of the twelve division attack which followed the bombardment but before they had even left their trenches the men of the 1^st and 2^nd Divisions had come under heavy German bombardment and suffered about one in seven men killed or wounded.  Advancing then straight into a German counter attack they had however, quickly overcome the Germans and captured most of their objectives.  Total British casualties amounted to 20,000 of which 6,400 were Australian.

 

4th October though also marked a day of heavier rain.  It had rained for the previous two days and intermittently since the offensive had begun more than two months earlier, and would continue in similar vein until the 9th when the next push forward would take place.  The constant rain coupled with the shelling had turned the battlefield into a morass which sucked men, animals and material down.  Mud rendered weapons unusable.  Rifles jammed, tanks and guns bogged down; the recoil from heavy artillery driving the guns deeper into the mud.  High explosive shells, so viciously effective when hitting hard earth and scattering shrapnel for yards were simply smothered by the mud and buried. 

 

John Lawson, a corporal with the 15th Cheshire Regiment, described the scene:

 

“It was nothing but waste and water and you never knew what position you were in.  Everything looked the same you see, a hopeless mess.  The trouble was getting from one place to the other.  The communication lines were bad.  Usually there used to be a white tape by the duck boards but half of it would be blown away and half the duck boards would be missing so that you had to guess where you were going.  If you had a good runner that had been on the way before, you were a lot better off.  That’s where a lot of casualties happened, losing touch with the one in front of you.  It was terrible, I shall never forget that as long as I live.  I was real glad to be wounded in a way to get out of it”

 

“The difficulty,” reported the Official Historian in 1948, “was to get the assaulting troops up to the jumping off tapes at all, and in some condition to make an attack.  The chief cause of the great discontent during this period of the Flanders fighting was, in fact, the continuous demands on regimental officers and men to carry out tasks which appeared physically impossible to perform, and which no other army would have faced.”

 

For the truth was that the men who were expected to do the fighting were worn out through exposure and exhaustion and many of them were suffering from trench feet.

 

When the next phase of the battle (The Battle of Poelcapelle) was launched on the 9^th of October, many battalions went in severely under strength, a fact that was to have serious implications when it came to consolidating or holding on to captured positions.  For instance, the Australian 7^th and 9th brigades had been reduced to 800 men and the 6^th to 600 with the result that when they went into action the average strength of the battalions was just seven officers and 150 men. 

 

The Battle of Poelcapelle was only a partial success, blamed by the British on the appalling weather conditions and the state of the ground which made any movement difficult.  However, some small gains were made and even though a further 7,000 men had been lost, Haig decided to push on.

Two days later, on the 11th October 1917 another of Nurse Oliver’s former patients was killed in action.  John Sheridan, who had signed her album after being wounded at Loos on 26th September 1915 with the 12th Northumberland Fusiliers had been a private then.  After regaining full fitness he had been transferred to the 10th Northumberland Fusiliers and then to the 8th Yorks and Lancs.  By now a corporal, it was whilst serving with this battalion that he had been killed, one of 13 battalion fatalities that day. 

 

It is probable that John Sheridan was killed while the battalion was relieving the 2nd Warwicks  in front of Polygon Wood.  The relief had begun on the 10th and was not completed until the following night and whilst the battalion war diary does not go into great detail about the hand-over it does ominously state, “Enemy snipers very active.” Or maybe he was simply blown to pieces by a shell.  Certainly his body was never identified and he is commemorated on the Tyne Cot War Memorial at Passchendaele.

Like Frederick Heasman and Charles Bristow, Private William Barbin had travelled from Australia to fight unknown Germans and like Albert Smith from Canada, he would return to his homeland in a far poorer state of health than he had left it in.

 

Barbin was 21 years old when he enlisted at Charleville, Queensland, Australia in October 1916.  He was assigned to the 42^nd (Queensland) Infantry Battalion and a little over two months later found himself on board the troop carrier Demosthenes bound from Sydney to Plymouth.  By the time the ship docked on 3^rd March 1917, Barbin had already spent four days in the ship’s hospital.

 

The 42nd battalion formed part of the 11th Australian Brigade of the Third ANZAC Division, a division which had trained in England for six months and then been introduced to a then relatively quiet sector of the line at Armentieres. 

 

Barbin had been taken on strength on 13th July 1917, just after the 3rd Division had lost over 4,000 men at Messines and the 4th Division, already mauled from actions at Bullecourt in April and May that year had lost a further 2,677 men.  On the opening day of the Ypres offensive, the 3rd Division had suffered 550 casualties in a single brigade in a feint attack but it had not been called upon to take further part in the action until the battle of Broodseinde Ridge on October 4th.

 

The objective now though was the line just beyond the village of Passchendaele.  Passchendaele, or what was left of it, stood on the highest part of the main ridge and the 3rd Australian Division was charged with the responsibility of taking it.  The assault would take place on October 12th and would be made by the 9th and 10th Brigades.  Nevertheless, Barbin was still a casualty; admitted to the 28th Field Ambulance with guns shot wounds to the fingers of his right hand.  It would be a while though before he would find his way to Beechlands and it would be trench feet and not gun shot wounds which would be the cause of his admission there.

 

His entry in Nurse Oliver’s album would be a mis-remembered combination of two cloyingly romantic couplets of the time but nevertheless his sentiments were clear.

 

Private Robert Vinton, another soldier soon to experience the solitude of Beechlands, was also a casualty on the 12th October.  Serving with the 10th West Yorkshire Regiment he had enlisted in December 1915 and was wounded in action, even though, like Barbin, his Brigade had not actually taken part in the attack on that day.

 

Twenty Five year old Claude Ireland, a Chailey man serving with The Army Service Corps but attached to the 56th Field Ambulance (18th Division) of The Royal Army Medical Corps was killed in action the following day.  A native of Burgess Hill, Sussex, and the eldest son of parents living at North Common, Chailey, he had been home on leave only six weeks before and had been on active service for three years. 

 

In battle conditions and with up to sixteen men required to carry a single stretcher through the wastelands of Passchendaele, it was little wonder that non-combatants also fell victim to shell and rifle fire.  Lance Corporal Arnold Marshall, serving with the 8th Kings Royal Rifle Corps of the 14th (Light) Division, had first hand experience of that while he was at Passchendaele:

 

“I had to go down the line again that night for another practice to bring the new lot up for the night after.  I set out at ten o’clock at night to go over the top and I got a packet. There’d been a sniper and he’d killed our captain [and] I was hit three times by this sniper.

 

“The first time I just passed out because I had concussion.  There was a little hole in my tin hat where the bullet had gone in and a great big hole where it had come out; I could put my fist through it.  I tried to bring that back home but someone pinched it from me when I was in hospital.  As I say, I was knocked out and I must have been out about an hour.  I came to again and I crawled on my tummy how we’d been taught and I could see a great big shell hole.  I’d got partially over into it when he fired again and hit me in the hip.  I went down into the shell hole and they could see all this from where I’d come from.

 

“They sent a couple of stretcher bearers down to fetch me out, they could see I was knocked out.  They got down to me and asked if I could walk.  I said I’d try to and the three of us set off to company headquarters where we were supposed to be going.  We set off and then suddenly the moon came out and all was bright again and the sniper hit all three of us.  I was hit again through the left hand, one of the stretcher bearers was hit in the calf and the other one in the hip and he died.”

 

If the assault towards Poelcapelle had been futile, that against Passchendaele had been doomed from the start.  The ground conditions had made it almost impossible to bring the guns up and get them into their allotted positions and those artillerymen who did manage to somehow man-handle their weapons to where they were supposed to be were completely exposed to counter-battery fire as they were unable to dig protective pits in the sodden earth.

 

“Conditions,” reported the Official Historian, “were lamentable… the battleground was littered with wounded who had lain  out in the mud among the dead for two days and nights; and the pillbox shelters were overflowing with unattended wounded whilst the dead lay piled outside.”

 

One patrol of Australian infantry had managed to reach the outer edges of the village which it found deserted but the battle failed totally in its objectives of capturing Passchendaele.  Men bunching on the firmer ground while they were advancing had been easy targets for the Germans and others had been picked off whilst stopping to give assistance to their pals who, often up to their armpits in mud, were slowly drowning. 

 

13,000 officers and men became casualties in the attack on Passchendaele Ridge, the equivalent of a division of troops, and the cost to the 3^rd Australian Division was 35 men for every yard of ground taken.

 

With the Australian divisions an exhausted force, Haig turned his attention to the Canadians and one final assault against Passchendaele.  The Second Battle of Passchendaele was launched, in rain, on October 26th and dragged on until November 10th when the Canadians finally secured what was left of the village and consolidated the line. 

 

Lance Corporal Stan Brown, a Regular Army man who had fought with the 1st Leicesters, at Mons was back in Belgium with the 1st South Staffords (7th Division) after having been wounded and the Second Battle of Passchendaele was to be his final contribution to the war effort.

 

“To get to Passchendaele it was like going through Hell.  Everybody broke up and scattered and I don’t know why we should have gone down the main road but that was our problem.  All along the tops of the banks of the road were people coming away wounded and we were still going down the blooming main road!  We got bashed to hell and we got gassed up there as well.   It was a hell of a mess.  I got hit in the hand and again in the leg.  I reckon it was shrapnel.  There were only about forty of the battalion that came out of Passchendaele, I should think two thirds of them got wounded getting there.”

 

The Canadian Corps suffered nearly 16,000 officers and men killed, wounded or missing, bringing the total British casualties for the campaign to nearly 70,000 men killed and over 170,000 wounded.

 

Robert Mearns Hobbs, poet, artist and part-time actor in the Beechlands pantomime was killed in action near St Jean, Ypres, nearly three weeks after the Passchendaele offensive had closed.  After his spell at Beechlands during the winter of 1916/17 he had been posted back to the Cameronians’ depot and subsequently posted to the 1st Battalion.  By mid November, the battalion was being transported by bus to Ypres where it had attempted to set up camp.  Heavy shelling though had forced them to move to a new camp in the Potijze area and then the battalion had moved into the Passchendaele sector itself.

 

The British campaign might have been over but the area was still unhealthy.  Bombardier William Hegarty of the Royal Garrison Artillery expresses the relief of those men who managed to emerge from the area unscathed.

 

“I think we stayed up on the Passchendaele front till a bit before Christmas and then we were moved out.  We cheered the first tree we saw which had leaves on it because we were so used to seeing these stumps of trees all round the Passchendaele area.  Someone said, “look there’s a real tree” and everybody cheered. Then a bit later on we saw an old peasant woman all draped in black and someone said, “There’s a woman” and we cheered her.  You can see the relief it was after getting out of the Passchendaele area.”

 

Robert Hobbs was killed on November 28th, one of three Cameronians from the 1st battalion killed that day.  He was 22 years old.  The battalion war diary for the 28th mentions shelling by the Germans and carrying parties for the 2nd Royal Welch Fusiliers being out at night but there is no mention of individual casualties.

 

News of his death however, must have filtered back to Chailey for under his poem, The Hospital Way, which he had written a year earlier, Nurse Oliver had simply written, “Killed in France, 28th November 1917”.