“The whole surface of the ground consisted of nothing but a series of overlapping shell craters, half full of yellow, slimy water. Through falling into these ponds hundreds upon hundreds of unwounded men lost their lives by drowning.
"Hundreds of thousands of British troops fought through the slough . . . slept in mud-holes. When they squelched along, they were shot down into the slush; if wounded they were drowned in the slime; but the survivors still crept and dragged onward for 4 months, with their rifles choked with Flemish ooze . . . A tragedy of heroic endurance enacted in mud, and the British Press rang with praises of . . . the Commander-in-Chief!"
A "highly placed officer from H.Q." on his first visit to the battle front burst into tears and cried; "Good God. did we really send men to fight in that?" — Lloyd George, War Memoirs, pp. 2208-11.
[From an article "What newspapers did not tell", Socialist Standard. January 1937.]
No comments:
Post a Comment