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Passchendaele: Requiem for Doomed Youth

One hundred years on… The Battle of Passchendaele, fought from July to November 1917, epitomises everything that was most terrible about the Western Front in the First World War. This was the war of attrition at its most spectacular and ferocious. The intervening century, the most violent in human history, has not diluted the power of the images we have from this battle. We commemorate the event, we pin poppies to our chests. But it is almost impossible to understand. Passchendaele: Requiem for Doomed Youth shows how ordinary men on both sides endured this constant state of siege, with a very real awareness that they were being gradually, deliberately, felled. Yet the men never broke. They went over the top when ordered, again and again and again. The commanders saw a soldier as “Normal wastage”. His family knew him as a son, a husband or a brother before he had enlisted. Only the soldiers truly saw each other in those moments. By the end of 1917 each surviving soldier was a different man to the one who had left home; his experiences on the Western Front, incomprehensible to anyone but him.Here, Paul Ham tells the story of ordinary men in the grip of an extraordinary global power struggle. He lays down a powerful challenge to the idea of war as an inevitable expression of human will, and examines the culpability of governments and military commanders in a catastrophe that destroyed the best part of a generation.

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