LOST GENERATION
“It was mud, mud, everywhere: mud in the trenches, mud in front of the trenches, mud behind the trenches. Every shell hole was a sea of filthy oozing mud. I suppose there is a limit to everything but the mud of Passchendaele – to see men keep on sinking into the slime, dying in the slime – I think it absolutely finished me off”
Bombardier JW Palmer
100 Summers
Andy Farr, 2017, Oil and Acrylic on Canvas 150 x 370cm
'I died in hell, they called it Passchendaele'
Siegfried Sassoon
At 3.50am on 31 July 1917, the Third Battle of Ypres, known as Passchendaele, began when 2,000 Allied guns opened up on German lines. The troops had to advance over ground that rapidly turned into a quagmire, shells having already destroyed the area’s network of drainage ditches.
The attacks would continue sporadically, against the advice of those on the ground and often in atrocious weather, until November. Men were repeatedly ordered towards impossible objectives against overwhelming odds, with the result that little was gained at a huge cost.
By the end of the three-month long campaign, more than 500,000 men from both sides are thought to have been injured or killed.