Passchendaele: requiem for doomed youth. Paul Ham. 2016.

Passchendaele epitomises everything most terrible about the Western Front. This battle was fought from July to November November 1917, during the worst year of the war for Allied morale: images of blackened tree stumps rising out of a field of mud, corpses of men and horses drowned in shell holes, fraught soldiers huddled in trenches awaiting the whistle.

What happened at Passchendaele was pure attrition, a ‘wearing down’ war at its most concentrated and ferocious. Paul Ham’s Passchendaele: Requiem for Doomed Youth shows how men on both sides endured, with a very real awareness that they were being gradually, deliberately, wiped out.

The book tells the story of ordinary men in the grip of a political and military power struggle that foreshadowed the destiny of the world for a century. Passchendaele lays down a powerful challenge to the idea of war as an inevitable expression of the human will, and examines the culpability of governments and military commanders in a tragedy that destroyed the best part of a generation.