Proven
psychological disorders
‘dugout disease’
post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD)
post-war
shell shock
windiness (sheer terror)
wound shock
Pugsley, Christopher
Queen’s Royal Surrey Regiment
Quicke, Runner
Rapallo
rats
Ravebeek Valley
Rawlinson, General
defence of Passchendaele
Red Cross
Redmond, John
regimental aid posts
Reitinger, Oberleutnant Eugen
religion
The Reluctant Tommy: Ronald Skirth’s Extraordinary Memoir of the First World War
Remarque, Erich Maria
Remy Siding
Reninghelst
Repington, Charles à Court
Réthonvillers
returning soldiers
German
revisionist historians
revolvers
Luger
Webley
Rex, Horace (‘Horrie’)
Richthofen, Manfred von (Red Baron)
rifles
.303 short-magazine Lee Enfield (SMLE)
German 7.92-millimetre Mauser Gewehr
Riga
Ritter, Gerhard
Rivers, Dr William
Robbins, Simon
Robertson, Captain Clement
Robertson, General Sir William ‘Wully’
Calais conference (1917)
Flanders Plan
resignation
War Policy Committee, appearance before
Robertson, Private James Peter
Robinson, Perry
Rollestone
Romania
Rome conference (1917)
Rothermere, Lord
Roulers
Rowland, Peter
Royal Flying Corps (RFC)
Royal Fusiliers
Royal Garrison Artillery
Royal Irish Rifles
Royal Military College, Sandhurst
Royal Naval Division
Royal Navy (RN)
naval blockade
Royal Scots (1st of Foot)
Royal Sussex Regiment
Runciman, Walter
Rupprecht, Crown Prince
Russell, Sir Andrew
Russia
armistice
revolution in
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Russian Army
Sage, Private Thomas Henry
Saint Eloi
Saint Julien
Saint Julien–Poelcappelle road
Saint Yves
Salisbury
Sanctuary Corner
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Sandhurst
Sassoon, Siegfried
Saxons
Scheele, Reserve Oberleutnant
Scheer, Admiral Reinhard
Scherpenberg
Schlieffen, General Count Alfred von
Schlieffen Plan
Schmidt, Unteroffizier Ludwig
Schorbakke
Scobell, Brigadier General
Scottish soldiers
Highlanders
memorials
Scots Guards
uniforms and equipment
Scroll Back Test
Seabrook, Clarrie
Seabrook, Fanny (née Isabel Ross)
Seabrook, George
Seabrook, Jean
Seabrook, Keith
Seabrook, Theo
Seabrook, William
Second World War
The Secret War
self-inflicted wounds
sexual attraction
Shankland, Lieutenant Robert
Shaw, Private A. T.
Sheffield, Gary
shell shock
Shiels, Jock
shock troops
shrapnel
Shrapnel Corner
Shrewsbury Forest
Siegfried Line see Hindenburg Line
Skinner, Surgeon-General Bruce
Skirth, Corporal John Ronald
Skirth, Ella
Sloggett, H. R.
Smith, Fred
Smith, Maggie
Smith, Private W.
Smith-Dorrien, General Horace
Smuts, General Jan
Sobbe, Major Freiherr von
social change
social reform
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soldiers’ effects
Somme
casualties
Haig’s interpretation
Offensive
South Africans
culture
unity of command concept
Southampton
Soviet Union
Soyer Farm
Spanbroekmolen
Spears, Brigadier General Edward
Spring Offensive
SS King Edward
Steenbeek Canal
Stirling Castle
Stokes, Wilfred
Stolz, Unteroffizier Paul
Storm of Steel
stretcher bearers
Supreme War Council
Talbot House
tanks
Cambrai, at
Messines, at
Third Ypres, at
Tanner, Reverend E. Victor
Taylor, Lieutenant F.
Taylor, Second Lieutenant Richard H.
telegrams to families
Terraine, John
Territorial Force (Territorial Army)
Thiepval memorial arch
Thiepval Ridge
Third Battle of Ypres
aircraft, use of
artillery bombardment
casualties
ground battle
High Command ignorance of conditions
media representations
misinformation
preparations for October offensives
preparations for September offensives
tanks, use of
Tibbits, Craig
Till, Geoffrey
Tower Hamlets
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
Treaty of Paris (1856)
trench foot
trenches
communication
corpses in trench walls
crawl
discomforts of life in
fire
friendships
reserve
warfare
Ypres German trench system
Trieste
Triple Entente
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Turkey
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‘unity of command’
Valenciennes
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Victoria Cross
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Voss, Werner
Walters, Colonel
war aims
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war of attrition
blame, questions of
material attrition
modern justifications for
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War Cabinet
war crimes
war industries
exempt professions
Germany
luxury goods
war poetry
War Policy Committee
war songs
Ware, Major General Fabian
Warner, Sergeant Oscar
The Waste Land
Waterloo Farm
weather
Wellhausen, Vizefeldwebel
Welsh Guards
Wendler, Reserve Leutnant
&nbs
p; Wervik
Western Front
Westhoek
Westroosebeke
wheel punishment
Wiemes, Leutnant
Wiest, Andrew
Wijtschatebogen (Wijtschate Salient)
Wilhelm Stellung (‘Wilhelm Position’)
Wilkinson, Colonel Alex
Wilkinson, Sidney
Williams, Lieutenant H. R.
wills
Wilson, General Sir Henry
Wilson, Woodrow
Winter, Jay
Winterbourne, George
The Wipers Times
wire
destruction of
Ypres trench system
Wolff, Leon
women
German, protesting food shortages
letters from the front
medical personnel
returning soldiers, and
seeking news of loved ones
suffragettes
working in war industries
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Woodward, Oliver
Worcestershire Regiment
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Germans
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treatment of
Württembergers
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Yoxall, Captain Harry
Ypres
Fifth Battle (Fifth Ypres)
First Battle (First Ypres)
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military relevance
Second Battle (Second Ypres)
Third Battle (Third Ypres) see Third Battle of Ypres
Ypres–Comines railway
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Ypres Salient
artillery statistics
terrain
Ypres–Staden railway
Ypres–Zonnebeke–Passchendaele road
Yser
Yser Canal
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Zeebrugge
zeppelins
Zillebeke
Zimmer, Reserve Leutnant
Zimmermann, Arthur
Zimmermann Note
Zonnebeke
Zonnebeke Ridge
Zonnebeke Road
By 1917, the British ‘shell famine’ was broken. Factories like this munitions plant in Nottinghamshire produced millions of heavy rounds for a war in which artillery would inflict about 70 per cent of casualties. Women did most of the work.
THE PRINT COLLECTOR/GETTY IMAGES
The British and Empire forces detonated nineteen enormous mines before the Battle of Messines in June 1917, creating huge craters – and instant mass graves for thousands of German soldiers, the prelude to the rout of the enemy.
GALERIE BILDERWELT/GETTY IMAGES
Hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers marched past the ruins of Ypres, on their way to the frontline. Here, men of the 1st Anzac Corps pass the wreckage of the city’s thirteenth century Cloth Hall and cathedral, in the heart of the most bombed place on the Western Front.
LT. ERNEST BROOKS/IWM VIA GETTY IMAGES
British troops preparing to attack during the Flanders Offensive. Waves upon waves would be thrown at the German lines during Third Ypres, as part of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig’s ‘wearing down’ war.
POPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGES
British troops advancing through a gas cloud during Third Ypres. The Germans were the first to use mustard gas, on 12 July 1917; the Allies soon followed. The new gas was more likely to cause excruciating pain than kill you.
THE PRINT COLLECTOR/GETTY IMAGES
A tank graveyard in the Flanders quagmire in August 1917. Unable to advance in the hellish conditions the early tanks were easily incapacitated, and spent the remainder of the war sinking into the mud.
ULLSTEIN BILD VIA GETTY IMAGES
Bringing forward the heavy guns to protect the infantry was critical. But as the weather worsened, it proved a nightmarish struggle. Here, Allied troops heave a 15-inch ‘heavy’ into place.
POPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGES
Australian troops wearing gas masks in an advanced trench at Garter Point, as they prepare for the Battle of Passchendaele, 27 September 1917.
IWM 205193863
‘How it happened …’ An infantryman tells his comrades of the day’s exploits, safe in their dugout for the night. Their grinning faces reveal another side to the war, the extremely close friendships of men ordered daily to risk their lives.
AWM P08577.004
Exhausted Australian troops walk along a duckboard through the remains of Chateau Wood after the Battle of Passchendaele, 29 October 1917, in which they were ordered into battle without artillery protection, with catastrophic results.
Canadian machine gunners near Passchendaele, sunk in the mud, await the final order to attack the village, which they overran in November 1917. The Canadians earned nine Victoria Crosses for the loss of 16,000 men during the final push.
PAUL POPPER/POPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGES
Dead and wounded lie in a dugout railway bedding between Tyne Cot and Passchendaele, 12 October 1917. Photographers were often unable to distinguish the living from the dead in the groups that scattered the battlefields of Flanders.
Stretcher-bearers knee deep in mud carry a wounded soldier out of No Man’s Land. Both sides tended not to fire on stretcher parties, but showed less restraint during the final battles.
LT. J W BROOKE/IWM VIA GETTY IMAGES
Two Canadian wounded, both heavily bandaged, one with face and hands almost completely obscured, in a motor ambulance during the Battle of Passchendaele. The terrible wounds to the face and brain forged the development of modern plastic surgery and neurosurgery.
IWM 205194734
Stretcher-bearers resting behind a concrete pillbox near Zonnebeke during the fighting at Passchendaele. Stretcher teams worked in relays over the worst of the terrain. Maori bearers often did away with the stretcher and carried men out on their shoulders.
AWM E01204
In this famous photo of the battlefield the wounded are laid out at an aid post, awaiting evacuation. Rays of sunlight break through the clouds that shed torrential rain for most of August and October, turning the battlefield into a quagmire.
NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA, AN24574133
Tommy and Fritz share a smoke in No Man’s Land: fraternisation was common among soldiers who grew to respect their opponents often more than their own commanders.
Prime Minister David Lloyd George would remember Passchendaele as the ‘most futile and bloody fight ever waged in the history of war’ – one that he did nothing to stop when he had the power to do so, despite his later claims.
CENTRAL PRESS/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander-in-chief on the Western Front. During several battles of Third Ypres, he ordered his armies to attack across fields of mud, in pouring rain, knowing they faced huge losses.
CENTRAL PRESS/GETTY IMAGES
Haig meets Lloyd George, then Minister of Munitions, in France on 12 September 1916, during the Somme. Their relationship soon soured and they came to loathe each other, imperilling the Allied cause. In 1917, appalled by the losses, Lloyd George would try to transfer command of the British army to the French.
PHOTO12/UIG VIA GETTY IMAGES
Accused of being a ‘butcher’ in recent decades, Haig returned to Britain after the armistice a war hero. Hugely popular, he would devote the rest of his life to serving veterans and their families. In later years, his reputation would never recover from Passchendaele.
HARLINGUE/ROGER VIOLLET/GETTY IMAGES
General Herbert Plumer – ‘Old Plum’ – led the Brit
ish and Anzacs to victory at the Battle of Messines. A champion of the ‘bite and hold’ tactics that almost broke the German lines, Plumer was reputed to be one of the better generals on the Western Front.
General Hubert Gough led the first attack of the Flanders Offensive, which ended in stalemate and his Fifth Army stalled in the mud. The Dominions would refuse to serve under him, such was his reputation for needless wastage of lives.
CHRONICLE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
On the agony in Flanders in 1917 German commander Erich Ludendorff, general of the infantry, would later write: ‘the horror of Verdun was surpassed … It was mere unspeakable suffering’.
HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, Kaiser Wilhelm and Ludendorff (left to right) study their maps. The war would destroy the German empire, forcing the Kaiser into exile. His most senior commanders later fell under the sway of the lance corporal turned politician, Adolf Hitler.
AWM H12326
Commander of the Anzacs, the British General William Birdwood proved popular with his men, donning the slouch hat and making an effort to understand their subversive spirit.
AWM P03717.009
The Australian General John Monash challenged his superiors’ decision to keep attacking in October 1917, when heavy rain made progress impossible. Overruled, he could do little more than reinforce his field ambulance before the attack.
CHRONICLE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Fiercely protective of his men, the rotund General Sir Arthur Currie (centre), commander of the Canadian Corps, also tried to resist orders to send thousands of Canadians to certain death at Passchendaele.
CHRONICLE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Theo, a friend, Keith and George Seabrook (left to right) rest before battle in Flanders, 1917. All three would die in a single action, 20–21 September. Their mother would never accept the official account of the ‘disappearance’ of George, whose body was never recovered.
Mrs Anne Alsop, of Winchelsea, Victoria, one of thousands of mothers who received an official letter after the war, notifying her that the remains of her son, Fred (inset), twenty, were unrecoverable and that his name would be inscribed on a monument.