Days to Remember by John Buchan — Read

The Third Battle of Ypres was in many ways the sternest battle ever fought by British troops. It was not a defence, like the two other actions fought at Ypres, but an attack. It was an attack against the success of which the very stars in their courses seemed to fight. Everything -- weather, landscape, events elsewhere on the front -- conspired to frustrate its purpose. It was undertaken too late and continued too long; but both errors were unavoidable. All the latter part of it was a struggle without hope, carried on for the sake of our Allies at other parts of the line. To those who fought in it, the Third Battle of Ypres will always remain a memory of misery and horror.

The British scheme for the summer of 1917 was an offensive against the enemy in Flanders, in order to clear the Belgian coast and turn the German right flank in the West. It was a scheme which, if successful, promised the most far-reaching results; but to be successful a beginning must be made as early as possible in the summer, when the waterlogged soil of Flanders became reasonably dry. But the whole plan was altered for the worse at the beginning of the year. The first stage, the Battle of Arras, began too late and, through no fault of the British Command, lasted too long. It was not till June that Sir Douglas Haig was able to begin operations in Flanders and make his preliminary attack upon Messines, and it was not till the end of July that the great battle was begun in the Ypres Salient. By that time the revolution which began in Petrograd in March had broken up the Russian armies and prepared the way for the triumph of Bolshevism; Russia was in ruins, and Germany was moving her troops rapidly from the East to the West. The battle was, therefore, a struggle against time -- against the coming of enemy reserves and of the autumn rains.