Passchendaele epitomizes everything most terrible about the Western Front. This battle was fought from July to November 1917, during the worst year of the war for Allied morale: images of blackened tree stumps rising out of a field of mud, corpses of men and horses drowned in shell holes, fraught soldiers huddled in trenches awaiting the whistle.
The intervening century, the most violent in history, has not disarmed these pictures of their power to shock. At the very least they ask us, on the 100th anniversary of the battle, to try to understand what happened here. Yes, we commemorate the event. Yes, we adorn our breasts with poppies. But have we understood?
What happened at Passchendaele was pure attrition, a ‘wearing down’ war at its most concentrated and ferocious. Paul Ham’s Passchendaele: Requiem for Doomed Youth shows how men on both sides endured, with a very real awareness that they were being gradually, deliberately, wiped out.
Yet neither side broke. The British, Anzac and Canadian forces went over the top, again and again, to their likely doom. The Germans were ordered to sit in the path of this storm of steel. And if they fell in such combat, they became, as the commanders described them, casualties in the ‘normal wastage’.
The soldier’s family remembered him as the son, husband or brother before he had enlisted. By the end of 1917 he was a different creature: his experiences on the Western Front were simply beyond their powers of comprehension.
The book tells the story of ordinary men in the grip of a political and military power struggle that foreshadowed the destiny of the world for a century. Passchendaele lays down a powerful challenge to the idea of war as an inevitable expression of the human will, and examines the culpability of governments and military commanders in a tragedy that destroyed the best part of a generation.