E W Hornung

Society

Guides in the Dead-Hole

• 12 July 2007

From The New Statesman 30 June 1917 In 1914, the medieval town of Ypres in Flanders was a quiet backwater admired for its Gothic Cloth Hall, Grand’ Place and cathedral. Then in the 1914-1918 Great War, Ypres was turned into a mass killing field. Despite state censorship, this vivid report, published on the eve of the July 1917 Passchendaele offensive (in which more than half a million soldiers were killed or seriously injured in less than four months), hints at the relentless barbarism. Selected by Robert Taylor