Bleak colours

The Daily Mail has published retouched photos of the battle at Passchendaele. Even the drab colours imagined by those who altered the original black and white pictures serve to make the subject matter all the more real to the modern viewer. What a nightmare that must have been to survive in, let alone fight through. (ht:sda)

Lieutenant-General Currie inspected the muddy battlefield and protested that the operation was impossible without heavy cost; and that he would not fight under the command of Fifth Army. He was overruled (but came under Second Army), and so began careful and painstaking preparations for the assault. In a series of attacks beginning on October 26, 20,000 men under heavy fire inched their way from shell-crater to shell-crater. Then on October 30, with two British divisions, the Canadians began the assault on Passchendaele itself. They gained the ruined outskirts of the village during a violent rainstorm and for five days they held on grimly, often waist-deep in mud and exposed to a hail of jagged iron from German shelling. The total of attackers killed came to 4,028 by November 11. Currie's estimate of 16,000 casualties proved frighteningly accurate; in fact there were 15,654 for this period in the Salient. Passchendaele had become a Canadian Calvary. [Babbler's emphasis]

I don't mean to minimize what the individual losses mean to those touched by our current casualties, because if yours is the loved one lost, the numbers are meaningless to you. But from a national standpoint, we've gone from being undeterred by almost 16,000 in two weeks to being largely demoralized by 67 in five years. Not the soldiers doing the fighting, mind you, but the rest of us back home.

Makes you stop and think, doesn't it?