REVIEW BY PATRICK MERCER
Stand on any part of the battlefield of Passchendaele and you will be struck by how unremarkable it looks. Gentle slopes are topped by woods, while hedges, villages, and small towns pepper the area, which is easily flooded by streams and becks. There is one outstanding feature, however: the handful of concrete blockhouses that still exist, more than a century after the end of the First World War.
These crumbling strongpoints hint at the sheer numbers of troops who struggled over this compact battlefield during the Third Battle of Ypres between July and November 1917. Where one might expect a company to deploy, a brigade was used, or a division rather than a battalion. But, despite the preponderance of manpower and artillery, the success of manoeuvres and breakthroughs were measured in yards rather than miles.
Into this new type of war were thrust commanders who had no experience of such things. Nor could they have. In its title, Nicholas Ridley’s Far from Suitable? Haig, Gough and Passchendaele: a reappraisal names two of the crucial architects of what was described by the military historian Sir Basil Liddell Hart as a campaign ‘so fruitless in its results, so depressing… a synonym for failure – a name black bordered in the records of the British Army’.
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