Soldiers Were Swallowed Up by Mud in the Battle of Passchendaele
Combat in WWI was a horrific and brutalizing experience for the millions of unfortunates who endured it. The experience was extra horrific and brutalizing for those who fought in the 1917 Battle of Passchendale, as unusually wet weather conditions transformed the terrain into a sea of mud deep enough to completely swallow soldiers.
The battle was fought in Flanders, a low lying Belgian coastal region where the water table lies near the surface. The area is often muddy, but relentless rains in 1917 enhanced its muddy norms, and artillery churned the ground and made it even muddier. Thousands of beasts of burden perished from exhaustion while dragging gun carriages and wagonloads through the mire, and moving a gun a few hundred yards could take over six hours. It often took six men or more to stretcher a casualty over the muck, and men stumbled through gluey mud that sucked the boots from their feet.
The combatants stopped thinking of those in enemy uniforms as the true foe: that honor went to the ankle deep, calf deep, thigh deep, waist deep or deeper and all-devouring mud. The wounded and dying were swallowed up entire, and fit men were buried when sodden trench walls collapsed around them. Soldiers feared the mud even more than they feared the enemy.
As one British officer described conditions: ” Covered with mud, wet to the skin, bitterly cold, stiff and benumbed with exposure, cowed and deadened by the monotony of 48 hours in extreme danger and by the constant casualties among their mates, they hung on to existence by a thin thread of discipline rather than by any spark of life. Some of the feebler and more highly strung deliberately ended their lives.”
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources & Further Reading
Australian War Memorial – Rain and Mud: The Ypres-Passchendaele Offensive
Encyclopedia Britannica – First Battle of the Marne
Encyclopedia Britannica – World War I: The US Entry Into the War
First World War Encyclopedia – Q-Ships
Hastings, Max – Catastrophe, 1914: Europe Goes to War (2014)
Japan Times, May 9th, 2017 – Japan’s Little-Known, But Significant, Role in WWI
New York Times, June 28th, 2016 – Franz Ferdinand, Whose Assassination Sparked a World War
Owlcation – World War 1 History: The Dutch-Belgian Wire of Death
Smithsonian Magazine, November 1st, 2011 – Sabotage in New York Harbor
Spark Notes – World War I: The War in the Air
Time Magazine, December 24th, 2014 – Christmas Truce, 1914: What Really Happened
ThoughtCo – The Black Hand: Serbian Terrorists Spark WWI