Robert J. Parker

There’s never been an accurate movie about combat in World War One. I suspect if there was, people would walk out. The best I can come up with is a movie about a later war; I expect most everybody has seen Saving Private Ryan. So image the visceral initial scene at Omaha Beach, with the Rangers dying in the hail of machine gun bullets. Now add artillery, bodies disintegrating as large caliber shells detonate left and right and behind and before. Now image it’s pouring rain, nonstop, with everybody in mud up to their knees – but it isn’t pure mud, it’s mixed with the debris of men and animals who have been shredded – liquefied – by explosions and bullets. Now imagine that going on for four months. That was Passchendaele in 1917.

Robert Parker does a pretty good job of evoking this in print. It starts slowly; the first third of the book is background: the first three years of the war, the equipment of the armies, the terrain in Flanders, capsule biographies of Douglas Haig and his subordinate generals, and the rationale for the offensive. The French Army had collapsed – mutinied – in the aftermath of the disastrous Nivelle Offensive. The British (including Australians, New Zealanders, and Canadians here) thought an offensive of their own would take pressure off the French and allow them to regroup and reorganize. Douglas Haig – as he had done earlier at the Somme – was delusional about the capabilities of his army and the Germans; he was convinced the Germans were on the verge of collapse, and one more big push would punch through the lines. Massive artillery preparation would cut the German barbed wire and infantry accompanied by tanks would punch through the dazed defenders, allowing the following cavalry to sweep up the German flanks. There would be a simultaneous offensive along the Channel, and the Royal Navy would land troops in Belgium behind the German lines and half the German army would be surrounded and surrender. It didn’t work out that way.

The artillery preparation merely churned the already flooded ground into an impassable morass and warned the Germans an assault was coming. The tanks bogged down in mud before they even got to the front. The Germans held all the high ground – well, high for Flanders – and their artillery had registered on every road in the area; they had even registered on their own fortifications, so if the British captured a strongpoint German shells would rain down on it. And it rained almost nonstop. Parker quotes numerous letters and diaries from the troops involved, on both sides, and they have a hard time finding words to express the horror of it all. I found the most evocative quotes came from a senior officer taking a tour of the battlefield; the officer looked over the carnage and said “My God, do we actually expect men to fight in this?”. His guide replied laconically, “Oh, it’s much worse further up, sir”.

Parker’s writing is clear and easy to follow, although the most evocative parts are when he quotes participants. Endnotes organized by chapter. An appropriate selection of photographs. A short bibliography. The maps seem rather sketchy but you can tell what’s going on. For more, see Passchendaele: The Untold Story; Back to the Front; and A Storm in Flanders.… (mehr)