Passchendaele

“…It was the last ball of the over. The blacksmith glared at the umpire…took another reef in his belt, shook out another inch in his braces, spat on his hand…grasped the ball tightly in his colossal palm and…marched off…over the brow of the hill. At last, after a long stillness, the ground shook, the grasses waved violently, small birds arose with shrill clamours…and the blacksmith, looking more like Venus Anadyomene than ever, came thundering over the crest…It was the charge of Von Bredow’s Dragoons at Gravelotte over again.”

- Tonie And Valmai Holt

In writing what is probably the funniest story of an English village cricket match in his wonderful book, England, Their England, A. G. Macdonell seems to have been intoxicated with delight, his imagination seeking both absurdity and reality within a world of schoolboy fun. It was a world where to be English meant Empire, King and Country, cricket, villages and football. Macdonell had the idea for the book when sheltering with a fellow Gunner Subaltern in a bunker on Passchendaele Ridge during the battle in 1917. It would have allowed them both to forget the world of mud — mud which swallowed alive soldiers and animals alike and through which, despite appeals to stop, the British Commander, General Haig, for week after week sent his men to attack the Germans at the top of the ridge.

Below the ridge, a rough semicircle like a cup-less saucer broken in half, lies the city of Ypres. Since 1914 the Germans had been trying to come down to the middle and to take the city, while the British held on to it and the perimeter around it, known as the Ypres Salient, and stopped them. They never took Ypres.

Something had to be done. But 1917 was a year of mixed fortunes for the war effort of both sides. There was a German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line, leaving behind a belt of destruction with poisoned water supplies and ruined buildings akin to that of Sherman’s March to the Sea in the American Civil War in 1864.

In April the Canadians had success at Vimy Ridge but immediately after that French General Nivelle fought, and lost, a disastrous and costly battle at the Chemin des Dames, which led to widespread mutinies. Then, capping these events, the Germans’ use of unrestricted submarine warfare was causing ever greater hardships at home in Britain.