YPRES

My wife visited Ypres in Belgium recently and brought me back a book about the conflict in Flanders during the First World War. The Ypres salient was the site of three major battles, in 1914, 1915 and 1917, none of which achieved much apart from the wholescale killing and maiming of vast quantities of human beings. The waterlogged landscape around the mediaeval cloth town was churned up by rain and shellfire into a vast sewer of rotting corpses, poison gas, blood and excrement. There were odd successes, such as the (literal) destruction of the Messines Ridge by mining. But the overwhelming impressions were ones of stupidity and futility.

One should not perhaps judge the generals too harshly; developments in armaments technology meant that nobody in August 1914 could have foreseen what would happen. But what is staggering is that millions of ordinary soldiers - on both sides - put up with what was literally hell on earth. Was it pride in one's country or simply a desire not to let one's comrades down? With the recent deaths of the last survivors of the First World War, we shall probably never really know.

Walter Blotscher