The Welsh At Passchendaele

Table of Contents:
This detailed work brings together the personal experiences, poignant stories, vivid accounts and photographs of soldiers who fought at the Battle of Passchendaele (Third Battle of Ypres) which lasted from 31 July to 10 November 1917 in the battalions of the Welsh regiments and their supporting detachments, as well as those men of Welsh origin who served in other regiments. The word 'Passchendaele' has become a byword for the death and suffering of the Great War. A remorseless slog by Allied soldiers up towards the village itself, through mud, rain, cold, and dead bodies, it was the most horrific of battles. By the time the fighting in this sector paused on 10 November 1917, hundreds of thousands of men on both sides had been killed or wounded. The landscape was scarred and desolate, and the men who fought there and survived would never forget the experience.

Review :
In 2016 Jonathan Hicks published The Welsh at Mametz Wood to coincide with the centenary of that bloody engagement. Now, in 2017 he has given us a sequel, The Welsh at Passchendaele 1917, which follows the Welsh regiments in what is known to military historians as the Third Battle of Ypres. The book uses the same format as its predecessor, with chapters narrating various phases of the campaign, together with briefer accounts of the fate of many of the participants, illustrated with thumbnail photographs of individual soldiers, most of them long disappeared in the mud and chaos of that savage affair. The scale of Passchendaele (in reality three separate engagements) was extraordinary, as some of Hicks’s statistics suggest. The British force consisted of 3,091 artillery guns, 9 divisions, 136 tanks, and 406 aircraft. Some 4,280,000 shells were fired by the artillery, including 100,000 gas shells (it wasn’t only the Germans who used gas). General Hermann von Kuhl described what it was like to be on the receiving end: ‘The whole Flanders earth moved and appeared to be in flames. It was no drum fire any longer; it was as if Hell itself had opened. What were the horrors of Verdun and the Somme in comparison with this giant expenditure of power?’ Casualties were on an appropriate scale. The British lost 244,000 men and the Germans 400,000. In the mud and chaos an extraordinary number of them have no known grave: in one encounter, out of 115 men of the South Wales Borderers killed, the bodies of 99 were never found. Hicks quotes extensively from letters of condolence to families, written by officers and chaplains. Many of these are formulaic: death was ‘painless’, ‘instantaneous’, the deceased was an exemplary soldier, etc – well intended words meant to console, as no doubt were the medals returned to grieving relatives. How many, I wonder, reacted like the woman who in her bitterness flung her dead husband’s medals with their colourful ribbons into the coal bunker? War on this scale creates huge logistical problems, and Hicks has chapters on the Royal Artillery, the Royal Engineers, the Tank Corps, the Army Service Corps, the Royal Flying Corps and the Field Ambulance Brigades which reflect this. As in The Welsh at Mametz Wood, significant chapters are devoted to first-hand accounts by participants; how the press reported the campaign; and – especially interesting – an account of German soldiers’ experience which, if anything, was more appalling than that of the British. When giving brief accounts of individuals, Hicks provides background information about their lives before the war. Most of them are of course young men in their late teens and early twenties, men plucked from a wide variety of backgrounds, with promising careers or humdrum jobs – but all with their lives before them, until they were engulfed by the barbarism and folly of the ‘Great War’. As a military historian, Hicks adopts a strictly impartial narrative approach to Passchendaele, and readers are left to draw their own conclusions about this titanic event, as no doubt they will.