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A sudden gleam had shone on that dark autumn which had seen the bitter victory and the appalling losses of Passchendaele, and then the gleam vanished, and the winter closed in, and there was nothing for the British Army but to turn its steady mind to the Russian break-down and to the ever-growing certainty of a German attack, fiercer and more formidable than had ever yet broken on the Allies.
I went through Ypres scores of times afterward, and during the battles of Flanders saw it day by day as columns of men and guns and pack-mules and transports went up toward the ridge which led at last to Passchendaele. We had big guns in the ruins of Ypres, and round about, and they fired with violent concussions which shook loose stones, and their flashes were red through the Flanders mist.
The Germans would never have got back Passchendaele if the Canadians had been left there; and it was bad business trusting to those Portuguese at the Lys River. But that is no reason why you or anyone should go about proclaiming the war is lost.
Why were they kept up there while "nothing was doing"? Why were they not sent south to give a hand to the lads who were daily fighting a stubborn retreat against avalanches of German reserves? The Passchendaele sector remained unusually quiet; little strafing occurred from either artillery, with the exception of a sunset entertainment organised daily for the benefit of ration parties and reliefs.
The capture of Vimy Ridge, key to the whole Arras position, after months of careful preparation, the hard-fought struggle for Lens, and toward the close of the year the winning of the Passchendaele Ridge, at heavy cost, were instances of the increasing scale and importance of the operations entrusted to Currie's men.
The weight of their equipment was continually thrown in the wrong place. Their wet clothing dragged them back, their packs got twisted and cut into their shoulders. Claude and Hicks began wondering to each other what it must have been like in the real mud, up about Ypres and Passchendaele, two years ago.
There it was told that the Division was about to take part in an attack on Passchendaele, but the weather conditions were so bad that, after an attack by one of the other brigades in the Division, the offensive was finally abandoned. The Battalion then held the shell crater line in front of Langemarck for a few days at the beginning of November, sustaining a considerable number of casualties.
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.
One flotilla bombarded the railroad between Ypres and Roulers, near Passchendaele, tearing up the track for several hundred yards. German bivouacs in the region of Longueval, west of Combles, also were shelled from the air, and German organizations on the Brimont Hill, near Rheims, served as targets for French birdmen.
A respirator of special type was taken from a German aviator in April, 1918, after the fighting at Passchendaele. But the war gave us no direct evidence of the successful use of gas and war chemicals from aircraft. This, however, is no criterion as to its eventual importance.
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