At my parents' house there's a thick brown army ledger. It's the diary of my mother's father, covering seven months of his time on the Western Front in 1917. It was published in the early 1980s under the title Some Desperate Glory, and this year as part of the anniversary of the end of the Great War, I set out to visit some of the places mentioned in the climactic passages of the book. The last days of the diary are filled with depictions of almost unimaginable horror.
Wounded men drown as the shell-holes into which they have crawled fill with water.
Ypres Salient I spent two days wandering the fields of the Ypres Salient in the company of a historian who had the kind of knowledge that can only come from years of obsession. Thanks to him and a trench map of the time, it was in fact surprisingly easy to locate many of the places recorded by my grandfather in those awful days of August. One of the worst passages in the diary is the assault on a big German block-house which the British had named Springfield. It's after this attack that my grand-father's company is reduced to15 men. He remembered playing in the block-house which had measured about 10 metres by10, but it had been dynamited in the 1930's.