Battle of Passchendaele

Lord Lexden Excerpts

Thursday 19th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Black of Brentwood, to whom we are indebted for this debate, summarised the course of a truly terrible battle and the reasons why it must be held firmly and for ever in the public memory with his customary clarity and skill in his opening speech, which others have described quite rightly as most moving and powerful. The third Battle of Ypres came to be known at once by the name of the final ridge conquered at the end of it with huge loss of life. It is not difficult to argue that this final attack should never have been attempted; indeed, that was the view of the Canadian general who, in reluctant obedience to orders, led the assault. As my noble friend Lord Black remarked, a few months later that hard-won ridge was quietly evacuated without a German in sight.

Passchendaele: it is as if providence itself decreed that that should be the name to ensure that this terrible battle would reverberate powerfully down the years, stirring feelings of pride and outrage generation by generation—pride in the wonderful courage of our forebears fighting in defence of freedom; outrage that they should have been called upon to endure so much wretchedness and agony because of the battle’s flawed strategy and tactics for which both generals and politicians bore responsibility, each indecently seeking to pass the blame to the other when held to account.

In this year of commemoration, as the noble Lord, Lord Hutton, reminded us, we must also remember the formidable German forces ranged against Douglas Haig’s great Army. They too suffered most grievously in the same dreadful conditions. A British pilot flying over the battlefield said:

“It’s just not conceivable how human beings can exist in such a swamp, let alone fight in it”.


Our opponents were also caught in that ghastly swamp. Nick Lloyd’s new history of Passchendaele, published a few months ago, to which my noble friend Lord Black referred, is the first study in English to make full use of German archives, and it provides a superb account of the battle on both sides. He writes:

“the German soldier had to cope with the perils of seemingly endless drumfire, poison gas and low-flying aircraft … Even the best units could be reduced to a shambling, lice-ridden bunch of stragglers after a few days on the battlefield”.

The well-worn defence of appallingly high First World War casualty rates is that important military lessons were learned from them which assisted our ultimate victory in 1918. It is not obvious that Douglas Haig progressed to victory by absorbing useful lessons along his bloodstained path. He adopted more or less the same tactics at Passchendaele as he had a year earlier at the Somme—with better artillery but in much worse weather.

“It was the Somme all over again, except that a Somme battle fought knee-deep in marsh was so much the worse”,


wrote one officer who took part in both. A Private Carter recalled that,

“the ground very much resembled that of the Somme, every yard being churned up by shells, the only difference was that many of the holes were a good deal bigger”.

Should not a fearful question lurk at the back of the mind when comments by the combatants are read today: how would I have acquitted myself in those frightful circumstances? It is a question that goes to the very heart of the matter and should induce great humility in us, as other speakers have mentioned.

Then, as now, Douglas Haig had many critics. In 1917, they were lead in Cabinet by the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. His dynamism and originality stood in stark contrast to Hague’s stubborn stolidity. The Welsh wizard was completely opposed to a long, large-scale campaign in Flanders in 1917. Lloyd George argued against Haig’s ambitious plans for a decisive breakthrough in the War Cabinet which he himself had created. At any point during the long battle he could have brought it to a halt. Why did he not?

Lloyd George later gave a number of reasons. Haig, a highly political soldier, cultivated newspaper proprietors. He enjoyed strong support within the Conservative Party, known almost universally at the time as the Unionist Party, on whose votes Lloyd George’s coalition Government depended. Nearly 20 years later, in a long section of his war memoirs, Lloyd George furiously denounced Haig’s conduct of the battle while insisting that he had not been in a sufficiently strong position to dismiss a commander in whom he had no confidence. By and large, historians have been unimpressed. His latest biographer, Roy Hattersley, our own Lord Hattersley, writes that, “had Lloyd George done what he knew to be right, he would almost certainly have succeeded in imposing his views on policy either by insisting on a change of strategy or making a change in the high command”.

Those who look to historians for a final, definitive verdict on Passchendaele will continue to be disappointed. More than 50 years ago the distinguished Tory historian, Robert Blake, later a Member of this House, wrote that, “Historians will long argue as to whether Passchendaele on balance weakened most of the British or the German Army. If there had been no Passchendaele, would the British have been better able to withstand the German offensive of spring 1918 or would the Germans have been in a better position to exploit their early successes and perhaps roll the British Army into the sea? No clear answer”, Lord Blake concluded, “has been, perhaps ever can be, given to this question”.

What can be said with some certainty is that neither the British Prime Minister nor the British commander-in-chief served our long-suffering soldiers well while this terrible battle raged 100 years ago. How different everything would have been if we had had a Wellington.