Belgian mud streaked with red

Press, 20 January 1979, Page 17

Belgian mud streaked with red

They Called it Passchendaele. By Lyn Macdonald. Michael Joseph. 253 pp. $15.70. (Reviewed by Oliver Riddell) Passchendaele. The name rings down the decades. Now it is a quiet, neat, little Belgian village with shuttered houses on either side of the road. Below the ridge on which it sits, and stretching away to the south, is a brisk, green landscape of neat farms. Clearly visible five miles away is the thriving market town of Ypres. It is of this stretch of five miles, from July 31 to November 16, 1917, that Lyn Macdonald has written. It took a million men exactly 99 davs and three hours to cover it. It cost the British, French, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand units engaged more than 250,000 men to cover the distance. About 200,000 Germans were lost resisting them. But it is not only the numbers who died in this holocaust which have caused Passchendaele’s name to live on. It is also how they died, and the memory of the Passchendaele mud. “From horizon to horizon a cratered wasteland of mud stretched as far as the eye could see . . . the shell craters now lay lip to lip, separated only by the slimy bridges of mud that snaked around their edges. The pitted surface of the ‘Salient’ was like a mammoth sponge, heavy with mud and water. Here and there, swollen by rain, dammed and diverted by the exploding earth, streams had pushed their way

through the crumbling banks of the craters and linked a score into deep impassable lakes of liquid mud. On most of them, as the exhaust of a car leaves an iridescent smear on a puddle, a film of red streaking the surface told all too clearly the fate of the men who had collapsed, wounded, into the morasse. Often, a bubble would form and burst with a great sough as the air was expelled from some bloated, long-dead, body held in the mud below. For there were bodies everywhere . . .” Lyn Macdonald interviewed more than 600 survivors of the three-month-long holocaust. Over 60 years, time has largely healed the scars on the landscape, but it has not healed the scars of the men who lived through it. Their stories are ghastly. Taken all together, the reader comes to realise how incredibly lucky they were, and felt themselves to be, to have lived through it. It seemed impossible at the time that anyone could live. Even after 60 years the anguish of a soldier, whose mule was wounded where his leg would have been had he been sitting astride and not walking behind it, is painful. He was so nearly invalided out, but had to stay. It seems a miracle that the troops did not mutiny en masse. A few did. of course, but not even the brutal severity of First Field Punishment for drunkenness out of the line could make these men mutiny as the French did in 1917 and the Germans did in 1918.

“They marched me into a field and twice a day for 28 days I was strapped up against the waggon wheel of a General Service limber for an hour in the morning and an hour at night. My wife wrote out: ‘What’s happened? My money's stopped.’ They did that. They stopped your pay and your wife’s allowance immediately you went on to punishment.” It seemed to the colonial troops that the. British Army was obsessed by discipline. They would never had stood for it. There were cases where Australian troops, incensed by the sight of a man undergoing First Field Punishment, cut him loose again and again, and threatening the M.P.s with loaded rifles, dared them to truss him up again. A great many British officers shared the opinion of the colonial troops. Lyn Macdonald sums up the difference between the two components of the Anzacs: “The New Zealanders grumbled, but put up with the discipline. With the Australians it was quite a different matter. They didn’t have the least intention of being pushed around and they did their best to make sure that nobody else was pushed around either.”

New Zealand features prominently in the book. But it is very fortunate that Gunner B. O. Stokes and Private W. Smith lived long enough to tell their experiences. On these two, the whole role of the New Zealand troops rests. And Private Smith did not live to see the book published. Their thousands of comrades have been well served. In fact, in terms of space and quality, the New Zealand troops have been better served than any of the other combatants. Gunner Stokes, still alive in Auckland, and the man who (quite by accident) laid the New Zealand wreath at the' sixtieth anniversary of Passchendaele, can be proud of his contribution The book is lavishly illustrated. The illustrations are of those among the 600 whose reminiscences are published. This makes the book unusual among war histories, because it gives it the tone of being about individuals — not about wars, campaigns, battles, strategies or This book gives the clearest picture of what Passchendaele was like for individuals that I have ever read. There may be better expositions of the battle, but none about the individuals who were so incredibly lucky as to survive. (Oliver Riddell, of “The Press” Wellington office, recently toured World War 1 battlefields in Western Europe, including Passchendaele.) .