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Clip description
Horse-drawn wagons and trucks move forward in the run-up to the Third Battle for Ypres (also known as Passchendaele), in September 1917. The road heads east from Ypres past Hellfire Corner, a famously dangerous place on the Menin Road. Hessian screens have been erected to make the traffic less visible to German artillery, which pounds the route day and night. Soldiers unload large supplies of shells for the barrage that is to precede the attack. At Hooge Crater, Australian tunnellers and pioneers are busy preparing underground bunkers for the headquarters of the Australian units. The ground is so wet that the dugouts must be continually pumped out by men operating hand pumps.
Curator’s notes
Having failed to break the stalemate on the Western Front in the Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1916, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig conceived another offensive further north around Ypres, in order to relieve pressure on the French armies further south, and to try to drive the Germans back from the Belgian ports. German U-boats were causing havoc with British and American shipping in the Atlantic, and denying them bases on this coast would restrict their offensive ability. The problem for both sides was mud, as these scenes make clear. The low-lying Belgian countryside was drained by a system of canals and channels built up over hundreds of years. The effect of three years of heavy shellfire was to destroy those drainage systems completely. With nowhere to go, the water made the battlefields of Flanders even worse than the Somme. Heavy rain preceded the Battle for Menin Road, which began on 20 September, along a front of eight miles (13 kilometres). For the first time, two Australian divisions fought side by side, in the centre of the attack – the 1st and 2nd Divisions, AIF. Their advance followed an artillery bombardment of extraordinary proportions: at the end of the first day, the British had fired 3.5 million shells onto German pillboxes and fortified outposts during the lead-up. The Germans responded in kind, and it is their shelling that we see in some of these clips.
This was the first major action filmed by the two new Australian cameramen, Frank Hurley and Hubert Wilkins. They had been in France barely a month and had already seen a lot of sporadic action. ‘I am afraid I’m becoming callous to many of the extraordinary sights and sounds that take place around me’, Hurley wrote in his diary of 4 September – just two weeks after he had arrived. He and Wilkins operated from a purpose-built hut just outside ‘the picturesque little village of Steenvoorde’. It was about 25 × 15 feet (7.6 × 4.6 metres), with a darkroom, two living areas and a workroom. The photographic unit consisted of Hurley and Wilkins, Sergeant Harrison (field assistant), Private Martin (darkroom helper), a driver and a batman who also prepared meals. ‘We live like fighting cocks, good and plenty’, wrote Hurley.
On 14 September, Hurley writes that he took cine film of ‘endless streams of men going and coming’ along the Poperinghe-Ypres Road. After taking some stills photographs with Wilkins in the ruins of Ypres, he walked two miles out along the Menin Road without Wilkins ‘to our advanced batteries.’ It was, he wrote:
the liveliest two miles I have ever walked. It is along this way that our supplies and ammunition must go to the Ypres front. It is notorious and being enfiladed by the enemy’s fire is decidedly the hottest ground on the whole front. The way is strewn with dead horses, the effect of last night’s shelling and battered men’s helmets that tell of the fate of the drivers. The Boche was very active around Hellfire Corner and his 5.9s were bursting around there in rare style … The trees along the Menin Road are avenues of shot away stumps and the surrounding lands ploughed up with shells like a sieve. The stench is frightful and even the old-stagers dodge this charnel-like thoroughfare … One lives every moment in anticipation of being blown skywards and to drive down on a limber, racing from shellfire and bumping over a shell-torn road, is keener excitement than even I relish.
On 17 September, he went up the Menin Road again, comparing it to ‘the Valley of Death … It is the most gruesome shambles I have ever seen.’ He visited Hooge, where the first Australian Tunnelling Company was excavating a series of dugouts as headquarters. ‘It is a wretched job as they are working 25 feet below the surface level and most of the time knee deep in mud. From the roof trickles water and mud, which they jocularly term “hero juice” on account of it percolating through tiers and tiers of buried corpses.’ On 19 September, he recounts taking several pictures in Ypres ‘of our forces camped in small dugouts excavated in the surrounding ramparts’.
These diary records accord with many of the images we see here – the excavations at Hooge, as well as the diggers entering their dugouts in Ypres. These pictures were taken on 19 September 1917, the day before the Battle for Menin Road began. Most of these shots are by Hurley. He was the senior cameraman and his diary notes describe many of the scenes we see in this film. His style was also more pictorial than his predecessor Herbert Baldwin or Wilkins himself. The shot at the beginning of this clip is typical – taken from on the road itself, to get closer to the limbers heading up to the frontlines, to increase the sense of drama and immediacy for the viewer. Hurley’s background was commercial photography rather than newspapers. He was known for his daring even before his work in Antarctica, such as standing on the tracks in front of an oncoming train to get the shot he wanted for a postcard. There are still photographs on the AWM website of the men working the pumps at Hooge Crater (see E01396 and E01919).
