They Called it Passchendaele: Story of the Third Battle of Ypres and of the Men Who Fought in it
Language: English
Pages: 268
ISBN: 0333360672
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A retelling of the story in the words of the men who fought in Passchendaele. It captures not only their bravery and terror in the face of battle, but also the details of their daily lives and the spirit of humour and comradeship that kept them going.
plank with the cross-strut just behind your shoulders. The cross was wedged into the tunnel so that you were lying at an angle of forty-five degrees with your feet towards the face. You worked with a sharp-pointed spade with a foot-rest on either side above the blade, and you drove the blade into the clay, kicked the clay out, and on to another section, moving forward all the time. With the old broad-bladed pick we could only get forward at best six feet on every shift, but when the clay-kicking
Now, leaping, stumbling, slithering between the churned-up craters, dodging the bursting shells as he went towards the real Kitchener’s Wood on the breast of the Pilkem Ridge, Booth could see not the faintest resemblance, try as he might, between the practice and the real thing. Nevertheless, on one of those days of practice attacks in the summer sunshine, Sir Douglas Haig himself had given them his blessing. The soldiers advancing towards the tapes that represented the enemy lines in the
casualty-lists were read with horror, but in the spirit of the times they only served to stiffen the resolve of a nation in mourning. For these were not casualties of the regular army of professional risk-takers which, in any event, now hardly existed. They were the volunteers, ‘Our Boys’ who such a few short months ago had marched off, wreathed in beams of enthusiasm, to do their bit, and ‘Our Boys’ must not be said to have done their bit in vain. If they had died to protect Ypres, then Ypres
ground, but the men were all loaded with picks and shovels down their backs, carrying bombs and ammunition and everything under the sun, and they were dropping like ninepins. You don’t see a man going down. All you notice is that he’s gone – half a dozen of them gone, and you know they’re not funking it because they would go ahead if they could. It was criminal, because there weren’t enough of us. That’s how I felt as I went over, angry. I sent a message back by signalling lamp for
arranged for the Prime Minister and his party to visit them. Is it possible that he had also, perhaps unconsciously, planted the idea in the Prime Minister’s head that Gough was to blame for the slow progress of the campaign in Flanders? Whether or not he had done so, Lloyd George had formed precisely that opinion and he made it clear that he had done so by an act of omission, which Gough interpreted as a studied insult. I saw him through my window in La Louvie Chateau walking past the door