Snippets, Book ReviewsKenneth WebbMay 30, 2026In Flanders Fields, Leon WolffComment

In Flanders Fields by Leon Wolff

Snippets, Book ReviewsKenneth WebbMay 30, 2026In Flanders Fields, Leon WolffComment

Snippets

In Flanders Fields

The 1917 Campaign

by

Leon Wolff

Maps drawn by Reginald Piggott

The binding illustration: Scene of Desolation in Château Wood, Ypres, 29 October 1917

Frontispiece: Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig in his headquarters train, 1918.

PRÉCIS OF PREFACED FOR SNIPPETS ARTICLE

Passchendaele. It is now 109 years after the battle drew to a close in the swamp around Ypres. As with the Battle of the Somme, the Passchendaele Campaign represents all that was miserable and futile about the Great War, that which we now refer to as the First World War, and it has haunted successive generations. In 1914 throughout Europe enthusiasm insisted that the war would be over by Christmas. Kaiser Wilhelm was even more optimistic.

His farewell message to his troops boarding their flower-decked trains through cheering crowds to the frontier, gave a solemn assurance that they would be home ‘before the leaves have fallen from the trees’.

Three Christmases later and the leaves had fallen relentlessly in the course of three depressing autumns.

After thirty-one months of stalemate, the battles that had rung up the curtain on the war at the fag-end of that hot summer of 1914 seemed as distant as Malplaquet and Oudenarde, fought by the Duke of Marlborough in those same Flanders fields.

In the spring of 1915 a shell exploding on the Pilken Ridge near Ypres had unearthed an ancient cannon ball. It dated from Marlborough’s wars, and the more literary of the soldiers who marvelled at it might have remembered the words of the garrulous veteran in Tristram Shandy, ‘our armies swore terribly in Flanders.’

Two centuries on they were swearing still.

In 1917 the combatants were bogged down, facing each other in the long line of entrenchments that disfigured the face of France from the mountains of Alsace to the edge of the North Sea.

Beneath the arc of their big guns the Allies and the Germans sat like sullen giants behind defences of concrete, forests of barbed wire and the lethal machine-guns which thwarted repeated attempts to breach them. Not for nothing was the German Maxim machine gun dubbed ‘The Widow Maker’.

Miserable traps of devastating ground had changed hands only to then be recaptured within hours. We speak of yards not miles. We speak of thousands of lives and masses of materials in so doing.

Between July and November 1916 the battle of the sun had claimed almost half a million men killed wound did or missing. They could ill be spared, for they were the volunteers, the spirited young men who had joined up by the 100,000 at the start of the war, in Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. Few of these men were professional soldiers. In every corner of the world they were regarded in the most personal sense as 'Our Boys'.

I précis of part of the Preface to enable us, the family to grasp what our grandfathers and their brothers and uncles (this 21st Century’s ancestors) committed themselves in 1914 and 1915.

Grandad Marshall, mums father, and his two brothers Frederick and Harry or Henry as variously recorded in the 1901 and 1911 Censuses, were all volunteers to the Colours.

Grandad Webb, dad's father and his uncles also did the same.

Our family have always been volunteers.

Both dad and I volunteered to join the Gloucestershire Constabulary as regular constables.

In the Second World War our parents’ brothers both volunteered to join the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, their service ending on 17 April 1943 and on 17 January 1945 respectively.

Notwithstanding their absence, this did not deter me to apply for the Queens Commission in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve (peacetime) for service with what was then a very large Air Training Corps of 33,000 cadets across 850 Squadrons unimaginable today when our standing Army is a mere 77,000 men and women including the Territorial Reserve.

In the air of history there is a distinct awareness of unpreparedness not unlike 1938, and yet our Armed Forces in 1938 if compared to now might be seen today as colossal; our supremacy at sea on a global scale was almost unchallenged.

Source

This edition is published by arrangement with Penguin Books Limited - The Folio Society 2003.

In Flanders Fields was first published by Longmans, Green and Co. in 1958