The Bloody Fields of Flanders

It is the last day in July here in the District They Call Columbia. We had a break in the heat and humidity hell; yesterday as I was running errands I actually had to remind myself, “Self—it’s only 70 degrees. Roll your windows down.” And I could leave my patio door open most of the day and actually listen to the birds chowing down at the feeders.

But as the heat index rises to its customary triple digits, I’m casting my thoughts back to fields in Flanders, where one hundred years ago today, the Third Battle of Ypres began. Perhaps to distinguish it from the others, this one is known as Passchendaele, and it lasted from 31 July to 10 November, 1917.

By summer of 1917, the fields around Ypres were already a grotesque, ghastly charnel house. That part of Belgium is basically a thin strip of soil spread over clay. Nearly three years of artillery bombardment combined with repeated rain storms had churned Passchendaele into a god-awful potage of mud, in which the bodies and bones of men and animals churned to the surface and then roiled back into the soup. Trenches flooded, foodstuffs rotted and men and rats went mad.

Imagine, if you will, being one of those soldiers, peering warily over the top of your trench and seeing a vast expanse of that grey-brown churning mass, and knowing you were being ordered to climb over the parapet, in your woolen uniform and carrying your rifle, pack and other combat essentials (60 pounds' worth), and wondering how many yards you’d make it before the mud grasped your legs and pulled you down, making you an easy target for German machine guns. It is a fact that both men and horses drowned in it, although not always immediately. For more than three months.

In the end, the British had gained roughly five miles of territory, and suffered around 275,000 casualties. The math works out to just over ten men per foot of ground.

A few years ago I walked those fields around Ypres, and visited the endless cemeteries maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. They are beautiful places now, but even so, I was grateful to know that I had a hotel room with a bath and clean sheets to return to at night. If you think too hard about what it looked like a hundred years ago, you won’t sleep at all.

I’ve written before about the confluence of art and history, using artistic media to shorten the distance to the past. We’ve seen several instances of it during the centenary of the First World War: the Lights Out commemoration on 4 August 2014 of the declarations of war; the “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red” installation at the Tower of London—one ceramic poppy for each British and Commonwealth soldier killed in the four years of war; the haunting appearance last year of men dressed in World War I kit at train stations in cities around England—each representing a British soldier who died on that first day, 1 July 1916.

This time, a Dutch artist sculpted a British soldier out of Passchendaele mud, and installed it in Trafalgar Square last week. You can see in his drooping shoulders and the expression on his face how bone-weary he is.

But then, through artificial rain, the soldier has been slowly disintegrating; in a few days, he’ll be just a pool of mud. It seems the most fitting depiction of this particular battle we could see.

A second artistic commemoration of Passchendaele is this pipers lament, known as “The Bloody Fields of Flanders”. “Bloody”, in this case, can be taken to mean both covered in blood, and as an intensive modifier, along the lines of “fucking”. Either way it would be accurate.