Passchendaele

Today is a hundred years to the day of the battle of Third Ypres, better known as Passchendaele.

My grandfather lost his brother here.  His name are on the memorial at Queens Park.

The British and Commonwealth army fought in the fields of Belgium, that due to all the shelling destroying the drainage and heavy raining turned the battleground into a muddy bog that people drowned in.


Australian gunners on a duckboard track in Château Wood near Hooge, 29 October 1917. Photo by Frank Hurley





Below is a famous poem by Siegfried Sassoon about Passchendaele - less than a minute long.

Spare a moment listen to it and remember those who gave their lives for their town and country.



Lest we forget.

RIP.

It's beyond our comprehension, the hell so many endured.

So many people are complaining about so much, and so little, nowadays, that I doubt they can truly appreciate the suffering the soldiers went through. Consider the number of lives lost in just 3 months, almost 500,000, and its truly staggering.

Unbelievable suffering that required suitable, sober recognition today, but our newspapers almost all chose to focus on Kate and her clothes, to adorn their front pages, to the exclusion of more fitting images.

Hell on earth for so many young men who sacrificed their lives. Lest we forget.

For centuries generals would send soldiers straight into the face of death because they were considered dispensible and head on attack was thought to be "honourable".  My maternal grandad was mustard gassed and my paternal great grandad was shot all because the generals couldn't come up with a better strategy than sit in trenches until you were told to go over the top and charge the machine guns. A waste of a generation of young men but it is some small consolation that the old guard who ran the army because of birth rather than talent were to a large extent stopped, although there's still a bit of that even today.