by Paul Ham
‘Known unto God’: here lie the remains of three unidentifiable Australian soldiers, probably blown apart by a direct hit. By the war’s end, tens of thousands of soldiers would be buried in anonymous graves.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
11,956 soldiers are buried at Tyne Cot, Passchendaele, the world’s largest Commonwealth cemetery (below), the walls of which bear the names of 34,857 men whose bodies were never found or identified, such as these members of the Black Watch (above).
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
The German nation felt the terrible weight of a war that killed two million of its men. Here the Grim Reaper, on the cover of the German magazine Simplicissimus, sits on a pile of corpses in Flanders and despairs: ‘You people stop … I can’t take anymore.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to thank a few people without whose commitment to this book I could not have written it. They are: my agent, Jane Burridge; my publisher, Alison Urquhart; and my editor, Kevin O’Brien. Three researchers were helpful in gathering the reins of an epic that spans several continents, and I’m grateful for their work: Glenda Lynch in Australia, Simon Fowler in Britain and Elena Vogt in Germany. Veterans’ families similarly gave their time and interest at short notice, and I’m particularly thankful to Kristie Harrison and Dorothy Hind. War memorials and museums were patient and attentive to my requests, especially the staff at the Imperial War Museum in London, the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, and the Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917 in Zonnebeke, Flanders. Finally, I’d like to thank Shane Munro and Adam Courtenay for their interest and suggested source material. And my friends Nathalie Hoornaert and Claus Arschoot, who run B&B Noja, the best B&B in Ypres, for their wonderful hospitality.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Ham is the author of 1914: The Year the World Ended (2013), Sandakan: The Untold Story of the Sandakan Death Marches (2012), Hiroshima Nagasaki (2011), Vietnam: The Australian War (2007) and Kokoda (2004). Vietnam won the New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Australian History and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Prize for Non-Fiction (2008). Kokoda was shortlisted for the Walkley Award for Non-Fiction and the New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Non-Fiction. Sandakan was shortlisted for the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for History. His most recent book, 1914, won the 2014 University of Queensland Non-Fiction Book Award. A former Sunday Times correspondent, with a Master’s degree in Economic History from the London School of Economics, Paul now devotes most of his time to writing history. He lives in Paris and Sydney with his family.
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Version 1.0
Passchendaele: Requiem for Doomed Youth
ePub ISBN 9781925324662
First published by William Heinemann in 2016
Copyright © Paul Ham 2016
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
A William Heinemann book
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Ham, Paul, author
Passchendaele: requiem for doomed youth/Paul Ham
ISBN 978 1 92532 466 2 (ebook)
Ypres, 3rd Battle of, Ieper, Belgium, 1917
Youth and war
World War, 1914–1918 – Youth
War – Psychological aspects
940.431
Cover photograph by Frank Hurley, courtesy of the Australian War Memorial, AWM E00833
Cover design by Adam Yazxhi/MAXCO
Maps by Alicia Freile, Tango Media Pty Ltd
Ebook by Firstsource
* Ebook sources refer to the location number (‘loc.’) on a standard Kindle or Kindle for Mac.
