Passchendaele

Requiem for Doomed Youth

Paul Ham

$45

Hardback

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English

WILLIAM HEINEMANN
03 October 2016

History; European history; 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000; First World War; War & defence operations

Passchendaele epitomises everything that was most terrible about the Western Front. The images of this four-month battle, fought from July to November 1917, are unforgettable: blackened tree stumps rising out of a field of mud, corpses of men and horses drowned in shell holes, terrified soldiers huddled in trenches awaiting the whistle.

The intervening century, the most violent in human history, has not disarmed these pictures of their power to shock. At the very least they ask us, on the 100th anniversary of the battle, to try to understand what happened here. Yes, we commemorate the event. Yes, we adorn our breasts with poppies. But have we truly understood? Have we dared to reason why? What happened at Passchendaele was the expression of the 'wearing-down war', a war of pure attrition at its most spectacular and ferocious.

Paul Ham's Passchendaele: Requiem for Doomed Youth shows how ordinary men on both sides endured a constant state of siege with a very real awareness that they were being gradually, deliberately, wiped out. Yet the men never broke: they went over the top when ordered, again and again and again. And if they fell dead or wounded, they were casualties in the 'normal wastage', as the commanders described them, of attritional war.
Only the soldier's friends at the Front knew him as a man, with thoughts and feelings. His family back home knew him as a son, husband or brother, before he had enlisted. By the end of 1917, he was a different creature: his experiences were simply beyond their powers of comprehension.

The book tells the story of ordinary men in the grip of a political and military power struggle that determined their fate and foreshadowed the destiny of the world for a century.

Passchendaele lays down a powerful challenge to the idea of war as an inevitable expression of the human will and examines the culpability of governments and military commanders in a catastrophe that destroyed the best part of a generation.

By: Paul Ham
Imprint: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
Country of Publication: Australia
Dimensions: Height: 241mm, Width: 164mm, Spine: 55mm
Weight: 912g
ISBN: 9781864711448
ISBN 10: 1864711442
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 03 October 2016
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Paul Ham is the author of 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: The Untold Story of the Sandakan Death Marches, was published in 2012 and was shortlisted for the 2013 Prime Minister's Literary Award for History. His last book was 1914: The Year The World Ended. 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.