novel · by a contemporary
The jesting army
Ernest Raymond (1888–), 1930
Named on the page for Battle of Passchendaele.
machine-read Machine-read (OCR) from a scanned book at the Internet Archive: expect misread words and names. The scan itself is at the library.
draft Matched to the battle automatically; not yet reviewed.
Passages that name the battle; the whole book is at Internet Archive.
31 July – 10 November 1917
Battle of Passchendaele
PASSCHENDAELE I
“ ’Oo’s winning this ’ere Passchendaele battle ? ” asked another voice.
PASSCHENDAELE I
“ Oh, only about half of ’em. The French are mutinying, so we’re carrying on the war in the meantime. That’s what the battle of Passchendaele is about, as far as I can make out.”
PASSCHENDAELE II
those were the city ramparts, and that moat or stream the Yser water ! Think of it ! Ali Britain, warring in France, had sooner or later come out through that gate and clattered over the bridge and trod this pave. All, for was there a brigade that sooner or later didn’t come to do its devoir in the Salient ? The First Battle of Ypres had had to be fed with men, and the Second, and all the following years. Years ! Yes, three years now ; and all the time they had been pouring through the gate — the city clerks of London, the squat little mill-hands of Lancashire, the tough miners of Wales, the tall farm-lads from the Home Counties, the dare-devil giants from Australia — marching neither to victory nor to defeat, but simply into liquid mud, intensive bombardments, gas and bombs ; for the line round Ypres had hardly moved in all the years. Like Verdun, it had held, that was all ; and the enemy did not pass.
THE DEBRIS II
— in the farmhouse and the barns and the tents beyond the midden for the 15th Royal West Essex when they came back from the battle of Passchendaele, not a hundred bayonets strong. Battalion Headquarters had the ground-floor rooms, and the arrested officer, and Tony his guardian, were lodged — one had almost said “ secreted ” — in these rooms upstairs.
Public domain. Text from Internet Archive.