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90th anniversary of the battle of Passchendaele
Ninety years ago, the battle of Passchendaele claimed the lives of around half a million soldiers on both sides, and came to symbolise the full horror of warfare on an industrial scale.
The battle of Passchendaele was in fact a series of battles, fought across fields that had become a potentially deadly quagmire of liquid mud.
A massive bombardment of German lines combined with heavy rain created appalling conditions.
The journalist Philip Gibbs, writing in 1923, described the battles fought here as "the most awful, the most bloody... the most hellish heavy rains fell, and made one great bog in which every crater was a deep pool...they were like lakes in some places, filled with slimy water and dead bodies."
It's hard to imagine those scenes now. The fields below Tyne Cot cemetery are now planted with potatoes and sweetcorn in this quiet, rural corner of Belgium.
The BBC

