To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [161]
"I cannot attempt to describe the conditions under which we are fighting," wrote John Mortimer Wheeler, later a well-known archaeologist. "Anything I could write about them would seem an exaggeration but would, in reality, be miles below the truth.... The mud is not so much mud as a fathomless, sticky morass. The shell holes, where they do not actually merge into one another, are divided only by a few inches of this glutinous mud.... The gunners work thigh-deep in water." Some British artillery pieces dug themselves so deeply into the mud with their recoils that they dropped below the surface; the crew would then put up a flag to mark the spot.
Private Charlie Miles of the Royal Fusiliers carried messages as a runner—a misnomer in this season: "The moment you set off you felt that dreadful suction.... In a way, it was worse when the mud didn't suck you down...[then] you knew that it was a body you were treading on. It was terrifying. You'd tread on one on the stomach, perhaps, and it would grunt all the air out.... The smell could make you vomit." And when shells landed, they blasted waterlogged, putrefying corpses into the air, showering pieces of them down on the soldiers who were still alive.
British, Australian, and Canadian troops inched ever closer to the little village of Passchendaele as newspaper headlines triumphally announced, "Our Position Improved; Heroism in the New Advance" (the Times); "Complete Success in Battle of the Pill Boxes; Haig's Smashing Blow" (the Daily Mirror). But water had filled some shell holes to a depth of over a man's head, and troops joked that it was time to call in the Royal Navy. If a soldier with a heavy pack trudging around a crater slipped or stumbled, or jumped to avoid an incoming artillery round, the muddy water, often already fouled with the rotting bodies of men or horses, might claim him for good.
"From the darkness on all sides came the groans and wails of wounded men," recorded Edwin Vaughn, a 19-year-old lieutenant, in his diary on a rainy night, "faint, long, sobbing moans of agony, and despairing shrieks.... Dozens of men with serious wounds must have crawled for safety into new shell-holes, and now the water was rising about them.... We could do nothing to help them; Dunham was crying quietly beside me, and all the men were affected by the piteous cries." After hours of rain, "the cries of the wounded had much diminished ... the reason was only too apparent, for the water was right over the tops of the shell-holes." Of the more than 88,000 British Empire casualties in the Ypres sector listed on memorials as "missing," no one knows how many drowned. Belgian farmers' plows still uncover their skeletons today.
To the fear of drowning was added a new horror. The Germans had begun using mustard gas. Aside from its faint smell and the yellow color of the blisters it raised on a man's skin, this powerful toxin had nothing to do with mustard. Extremely concentrated, it did not require cumbersome canisters; a small amount was merely added to a high-explosive shell. Moreover, soldiers could fall victim without breathing it, for the chemical easily penetrated clothing, producing bloody blisters up to a foot wide. Troops who unknowingly sat on contaminated ground later found the huge blisters all over their buttocks and genitals. Since the compound was slow-acting, it might be six or eight hours before a man realized he had been stricken. The worst off were soldiers who had breathed droplets in the air, for their blisters were internal, gradually swelling to seal throats and bronchial tubes fatally shut, a process that might take as long as four or five weeks. Writhing, gagging patients sometimes had to be strapped to their beds. Horses and mules also succumbed to mustard gas by the thousands, but for them at least, death, by a handler's bullet, was mercifully quick.