Take you back to a war now almost forgotton

books:

	• In Flanders Fields: Passchendaele 1917 Leon Wolff Penguin Books, 2001 - 310 pages average customer review:based on 8 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The classic book on Passchendaele

Mr Wolff has captured the complex details and produced a compelling and interesting account of the bitter fighting in Flanders. This book is one of the very best and ranks beside Middlebrook's classic 'First Day on the Somme'. A must read for any World War One buff.

Take you back to a war now almost forgotton

I've read this book twice the last time being over ten years ago and its haunting images of slaughter on the battle are still vivid in my mind. Although I had read All Is Quiet On The Western Front previously, I was not prepared for what I read here- the senselessness of the killing was unimaginable. How in the world could General Haig (the British commander) and Field Marshall Foch (the French commander) send hundreds of thousands of men to their death? If my memory serves me correctly, up to 20,000 allied soldiers died in one month alone.

This is a highly readable history of the battle, one that will captivate your interest and keep you reading until the end. Simply put, this book is hard to put down. Time after time, you ask yourself, how could they keep up this senseless slaughter, asking yourself what compelled these men to obey orders that meant certain death for no gain whatsoever? Certainly the First World War was one of the most senseless and unless wars ever fought, laying the groundwork for even the more destructive Second World War.

When the United States entered the war, it was to General Pershing's credit that he refused to dole out American troops under the command of Haig and Foch. Pershing knew that they too would be used for cannon fodder under European command. Since the Civil War, Americans have been reluctant to give their sons over to such slaughter.

This is a gripping book. Well written and hard to put down, it will take you back to a time and a war now almost forgotten.

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First rate history, superbly written

This edition of IN FLANDERS FIELDS was published as part of Penguin's series of "Classic Military History" and no one should quibble with its inclusion in such a grandiosely named group. As indicated by the title, the book covers only the 1917 Flanders offensive by the British (with a small but equally disastrous contribution by the French), otherwise known as the Third Battle of Ypres or the Passchendaele campaign. But that campaign is emblematic of the senseless slaughter on the Western Front in World War One.

IN FLANDERS FIELDS is written from the perspective of the British, who were responsible for the decision to initiate the 1917 Flanders offensive (rather than wait, for example, for the arrival of the Americans to tip the balance and break the stalemate) and who suffered the most from it in terms of casualties. The story is told at a number of levels: the geopolitical, national politics, civilian government versus top military brass, military tactics and strategy, and front-line soldiering. It is first-rate history. But the most striking feature of IN FLANDERS FIELDS is Wolff's superb writing.

Some examples:

"[At the beginning of 1917 in Britain'] the great masses of tired and depressed ordinary people merely got on with the war * * *. The ignorant saw no reason to doubt. The religious prayed. The poor worked. The Liberals wrung their hands. Few surrendered to thought."

"Gradually the great guns became silent. On the chessboard of Flanders the opening phase had ended. The pawns lay still, filled with forebodings. The grandmasters stroked their moustaches, surveyed the deadlock, and plotted their next moves."

"Haig's own generals wanted him to stop. The politicians had lost their last vestige of faith in his campaign. The morale of his own armies was sinking into the swamps of the Salient. What Haig still hoped to achieve * * * and what he was trying to prove, are perhaps questions more appropriate to a psychiatrist than to the student of military science."

Finally, two anecdotes from a book loaded with instructive vignettes and anecdotes:

By 1917, British front-line soldiers, thoroughly disillusioned but still inexplicably fighting on, took to singing sardonically to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne":
We're here because we're here,
Because we're here, because we're here;
We're here because we're here,
Because we're here, because we're here.

The Flanders campaign became a quagmire literally as well as figuratively because of the geography -- flat terrain, clay soil, and water, water everywhere. When one front-line officer was instructed by a zealous but ignorant commander in the rear to consolidate his advance position, he responded, "It is impossible to consolidate porridge."

Only a few other books that I have read are the equal of IN FLANDERS FIELDS in combining an objective and instructive historical account and excellent, literate writing.

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Superb WW1 book.

In Flanders Fields is the most readable World War One book I have yet come across; infinitely more so than Ian Ousby's Road to Verdun which, although starting promisingly soon gets bogged down in academic pontificating. The Road to Flanders, as the title suggests deals with the conflagration that took place there in the autumn of 1917 - also known as he Third Battle of Ypres - when the British Army tried once again to break the stalemate on the western front and push the Germans out of Belgium and away from strategic ports.
In Flanders Fields focuses on three key players - British Army Commander-in-Chief, Douglas Haig; his nemesis British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and mud.
The October offensive against the German lines was an unmitigated disaster and many historians have attempted to put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the Field Marshal Haig. This is understandable - Haig pressed ahead with his scheme despite the warnings from generals both French and British and the disapproval of the British government. Bur as you read this book you will see that there were other factors that played their part: internal bickering, vanity, bad weather, indecision, false promises, lax security (the British plans were published in advance the newspapers), and No Man's Land where the mud was so deep soldiers and mules drowned by the dozens.
In Flanders Fields is really well written - as well as depicting the whole event clearly, Wolff actually manages to bring the whole event to life and takes us into the meeting rooms and the pages of secret diaries. Entertaining but not for the easily depressed. I recommend this as a first-class introduction to anyone interested in finding out more about World War 1

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The Limits of Endurance in a Cruel War

This is one of the most authentic and grim accounts of fighting on the Western Front during the Great War. After three years of constant artillery bombardment, the no man's land between the lines had been reduced to an impassable quagmire. Time and time again, British soldiers were ordered to march through this waist deep treacle as German machine guns raked the men crawling through the mud. Advances of a few hundred yards were hailed in propagandistic despatches as great victories. Thousands of lives were squandered in the process of trying to advance through mires. Ninety years after the guns were silenced, farmers continue to find corpses and skeletons of soldiers who were lost in action. The locals refer to this as occurrence as "the harvest of the bones."

Given the gross ineptitude of command leadership of the British Army, it is nothing short of a miracle that the Central Powers did not prevail in the First World War. The American entry into the conflict on behalf of the Allies served to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. In retirement, Field Marshal Alexander Haig was subject to a tacit blackballing by the British military and political establishment.

A personal aside: my late father was a friend of a gentleman who was related to John McCrae, the poet who wrote "In Flanders Fields." McCrae died on the Western Front.

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