50.9°N 3.0°E Western Front Passchendaele (Third Ypres)
Briefing
From July to November 1917 the British offensive in Flanders bogged down in a swamp of shell-cratered mud churned by the heaviest rains in decades, where wounded men drowned where they fell. After half a million casualties on both sides the village of Passchendaele was taken — and the name became a byword for the futility of trench warfare.
Books Covering This Event (3)
The War in Books: Passchendaele
Mud, rain and hundreds of thousands of casualties, seen through a poet and a psychiatrist’s ward.
Passchendaele is the battle that made mud into a moral category. Shelling had already destroyed the drainage of the Flanders lowlands when an exceptionally wet August, and then a wet October, turned the ground into a swamp in which men and horses could drown. The name has since come to stand for the idea that the war’s commanders kept fighting long after the reasons had gone, though historians still argue over how far that judgement is fair and what the offensive achieved.
Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War is the book that stays with its readers. Blunden served at both the Somme and Ypres, and his memoir is quiet and precise, with a poet’s attention to the landscape being destroyed around him. Pat Barker’s Regeneration comes at the same war from another direction. Set in Craiglockhart war hospital, where Sassoon and Owen met, it asks what the fighting did to men’s minds, and what it meant to cure them only to send them back. John Keegan’s The First World War gives the operational account. Read Keegan to understand what the offensive was for, then Blunden and Barker for the cost, which is the part that has outlived the argument.