Annales Gandenses: Annals of Ghent Book

'Passchendaele' is another great book in the collection published by Pen & Sword. Philip Warner has written a great account of this four month epic blood bath of the First World War. My interest of this matter is personal. Grandad was one of the heroes. Like most of these veterans from WWI, there were very few words spoken of those times. One comment of his has always stuck with me, "Passchendaele...what a bloody mud heap." Fortunately for him, for my mother, my sister, myself and my son, Grandad was a victim of mustard gas and therefore got a ticket out to Blighty, and we have all lived to tell the tale. I have followed the progress of his war, through the war diaries of The King's Liverpool Regiment and visited many sites on the Somme and the Ypres salient on the Western Front. The ground around Ypres is today drained and no longer the mud heap it was. However, the metal harvest that is brought out of the ground every year by farmers can be seen in the piles of still deadly shells. Many lost mine workings are still packed with explosives. The town of Ypres still pays tribute, by sounding the last post, every evening at the Menin Gate, and have done so since 1923! Except for a brief interruption through WWII. There were half a million casualties here.
Warner's work is not a military guide, there are better books for this, but it is a historical overview of the campaign from both sides of no-man's land, providing many personal accounts, explaining the tactics and strategies and reasons behind the thinking of the generals who controlled the armies, some fifty miles behind the front lines.