"Everywhere was an air of desolation. Not a house was to be seen, as far as the horizon. Only the bare, terribly scarred plain, over which a cataclysm seemed to have passed. It was as if life could never return to these killing fields. In a flooded trench, corpses of Germans, their stomachs grotesquely bloated, floated in slushy water. Here and there were bodies buried in the mud with only an arm or a leg showing above the surface. Macabre faces appeared, blackened by their long stay on the ground. Everywhere I looked, all I could see was corpses covered in a shroud of mud. The morale of my troops was shaken by the slaughter at Passchendaele." Pvt. Arthur-Joseph Lapointe, Quebec 22nd Regiment, CAF, Belgium
The Battle of Passchendaele was one of the bloodiest operations of World War I. During the summer and fall of 1917, Allied troops fought through endless rains and across fields of deep mud to capture the small town. Over half a million men were killed or wounded on both sides. Passchendaele is also infamous for being one of the muddiest battles of the war, with many soldiers and war horses literally drowning in the liquid mud produced by the heavy artillery and rain. Something to think about #reality #ww1 #war #stayzero #zerofoxtrot