One
of our divisions of Lancashire men--the 66th--took eleven hours in
making three miles or so out of Ypres across that ground on their way
to attack, and then, in spite of their exhaustion, attacked. Yet week
after week, month after month, our masses of men, almost every
division in the British army at one time or another, struggled on
through that Slough of Despond, capturing ridge after ridge, until the
heights at Passchendaele were stormed and won, though even then the
Germans clung to Staden and Westroosebeeke when all our efforts came
to a dead halt, and that Belgian coast attack was never launched.
Sir Douglas Haig thinks that some of the descriptions of that six
months' horror were "exaggerated." As a man who knows something of the
value of words, and who saw many of those battle scenes in Flanders,
and went out from Ypres many times during those months to the Westhoek
Ridge and the Pilkem Ridge, to the Frezenburg and Inverness Copse and
Glencourse Wood, and beyond to Polygon Wood and Passchendaele, where
his dead lay in the swamps and round the pill-boxes, and where tanks
that had wallowed into the mire were shot into scrap-iron by German
gun-fire (thirty were knocked out by direct hits on the first day of
battle), and where our own guns were being flung up by the harassing
fire of heavy shells, I say now that nothing that has been written is
more than the pale image of the abomination of those battlefields, and
that no pen or brush has yet achieved the picture of that Armageddon
in which so many of our men perished.
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