Pudding-related: A Storm in Flanders: The Ypres Salient, 1914-1918 - Tragedy and Triumph on the Western Front

[Doug Millison]

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/202/living/The_horror_in_Flanders_fields+.shtm
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BOOK REVIEW
The horror in Flanders fields
By Stephen W. Sears, 7/21/2002

A Storm in Flanders: The Ypres Salient, 1914-1918 - Tragedy and Triumph on
the Western Front
By Winston Groom
Atlantic Monthly, 276 pp., illustrated, $27.50

[...]  The armies had by now settled into the grim pattern of trench
warfare we associate with the First World War, and Groom is very good at
describing the constant terrors of this species of warfare. These terrors
were compounded at Ypres by water - water falling endlessly from the sky
above, water welling up endlessly from the earth below. Between battles
there was the everyday ''wastage'' in the trenches, sometimes 1,000 men a
day. Then there was the smell of this warfare: ''What people most
remembered about the Salient was the smell, the ever-present odor of
rotting humans, horses, mules, rats, and food mixed with the stench of
excrement, lingering poison gases, the repulsive aroma of quicklime used to
decompose the dead, and the acrid stink of high-explosive artillery
shells.'' Such terms as ''trenchfoot'' and ''shell shock'' had to be coined.

The Third Battle of Ypres, in 1917, was a seemingly endless series of
battles, put under this rubric for convenience. It witnessed a new level of
horrors. Mustard gas, deadliest of the poison gases, and flamethrowers were
introduced by the Germans. British engineers perfected the technique of
mining. With his fine eye for detail, Groom relates the story of Lieutenant
Geoffrey Cassels and his company of Welsh miners. Ordered to tunnel under
the German works and plant a mine, Cassels ignored the army's gunpowder and
requisitioned 3,500 pounds of ammonal, a superior explosive used back in
the Welsh mines. His requisition kicked around a puzzled headquarters for a
time, and somehow ended up at the Royal Army Medical Corps. Back came the
reply: ''Ammonol [sic] is a compound drug extensively used in America as a
sensual sedative in cases of abnormal sexual excitement.'' No doubt the
Quartermaster Corps wondered about the need for this by a company of Welsh
miners, especially 3,500 pounds of it. But in due course it was all
straightened out, and ammonal became standard issue for the British mining
efforts.

Third Ypres is best remembered, in Britain and in the British Army, for the
Battle of Passchendaele. This village east of Ypres was the target set by
Douglas Haig for his implacable effort to turn the Germans' flank and
finally break the Western Front stalemate. Passchendaele defies rational
description, simply because it was utterly irrational. Groom applies to it
three words - ''mud,'' ''gunfire,'' and ''rain,'' used in any sequence. It
is hard to imagine the literature of war, any war of any period, containing
anything worse than Passchendaele.

At the close of the battle - which restored the salient back to about where
it was in 1914 - Haig's chief of staff visited the battlefield for the
first time. It was, writes Groom, ''an almost indescribable sea of mud
littered with the bloated, rotten carcasses of artillery horses, smashed
guns and wagons, and other detritus of war.'' Seeing this, the staff man
blurted out, ''Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?''

His guide, just back from the fighting, said simply, ''It's worse further
on up.''

Stephen W. Sears is the author of ''Chancellorsville'' and ''Controversies
& Commanders.'' His history of the Gettysburg campaign will be published
next year.

This story ran on page D5 of the Boston Globe on 7/21/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.