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Agincourt to Passchendaele - a very muddy business
Oddly enough, it was at a similar time of year, autumn, that an English army led by King Henry V faced French soldiers on a battlefield in Agincourt in 1415, and Lieutenant-General Sir Alexander Godley’s Anzac corps prepared to capture Passchendaele Ridge in Belgium in 1917. Both battles, 502 years apart, became urgent because of approaching winter and were coloured by the impact of heavy rain and its resultant intractable mud.
These two famous military encounters were smaller parts of bigger campaigns. The Battle of Agincourt was the most famous military escapade of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, spanning the years 1337 to 1453. It had floundered for a while but the young Henry soon kick started it back into action. Henry’s goal on that historic St Crispin’s Day[1], October 25th 1415, was to re-ignite that age-old English claim to the French throne with his modest army crying “God for Harry, England, and Saint George!”
Capturing Passchendaele Ridge was the last of eight[2] military encounters that comprised Third Ypres.[3] The struggle for the Ridge was called the Second Battle of Passchendaele. Third Ypres, in its entirety, would become more popularly known as Passchendaele,[4] and its eight battles took place between July 31st and November 10th 1917. Confusing? Right! You see, there were five Battles of Ypres but we are mainly concerned with the last of the eight battles which comprised Third Ypres.
Passchendaele holds romantic and tragic connotations in equal measure; a name we associate with wasted heroism and doomed youth; hapless generals and political chess with young lives; the toxic essence of World War One. After First Ypres and Second Ypres the British had gained a peninsula into German occupied Belgium but the German army had the advantage of the high ground. So, why did Passchendaele happen at all and why has it gone down in history as one of the worst and needless tragedies on the Western Front of World War 1?
For Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, Third Ypres had two objectives. The first objective was to chase the German Army from the entire Belgian coastline. Success was imperative because the Germans were using the Belgian port towns they held to launch their ships for North Sea action against the British Royal Navy, and launch their U-boats to sink British, and indeed United States, merchant vessels.
The second objective was to disrupt the railway line that carried German freight and troop trains from the Belgian port towns to Flanders. Achieving these objectives meant getting close enough to both targets to successfully launch artillery attacks. Both targets lay beyond Passchendaele Ridge.
Unfortunately, Lieutenant-General Sir Alexander Godley had failed to win the sixth and seventh battles of Third Ypres - Poelcappelle and First Passchendaele - and this scuppered the plan to remove the Germans from the Belgian coastline. Now the only hope in minimising German domination on the Western Front was to concentrate on capturing Passchendaele Ridge to get at that railway line in what would be the eighth and final battle of Third Ypres. The low lying ground surrounding the ridge was susceptible to flooding and Haig must have at least appreciated that the level of rainfall would affect the proceedings and the outcome. The thousands of beleaguered troops certainly knew that, “One false step could see soldier and beast alike swallowed up, with little hope of rescue.” [5]
Just like Henry V was troubled by the approaching winter as he marched towards Calais for much needed supplies, Field Marshal Haig also desperately needed some kind of success before winter set in, hence his order on October 26th to take the ridge, this time with Canadian forces. They advanced slowly because of the mud and the German poison gas but they eventually climbed to Passchendaele Ridge and reached dry land to prepare for a second offensive which started on October 30th and by November 6th, the village was in Canadian hands. On November 10th a final assault was launched on the rest of the ridge bringing the Third Battle of Ypres, also known as the ‘Battle of Mud’ to an end.
For Henry V, it was a case of defeat followed by victory. With an army severely weakened by dysentery and lack of food, he was intercepted by the French while trying to get to English-held Calais for supplies, so it was a much weakened English army that fought at Agincourt; it was also outnumbered; estimates vary – perhaps 20,000 French, to 7,000 English. For Haig it was more of a mixed bag; the first seven battles of Third Ypres being a jumble of minor success and wholesale carnage. Thousands of exhausted ANZAC troops had already been killed in the First Battle of Passchendaele, hardly any ground was gained and they did not succeed in taking Passchendaele. But is wholesale carnage regarded as defeat? It depends on your definition of a military outcome; do you measure it in lives lost or territory gained?
How then, did Henry V walk away victorious with only several hundred English deaths compared to thousands of French fatalities? Firstly, the battle took place on a ploughed field after days of heavy rain. The field quickly turned into a mud-bath, not the most conducive for hand-to-hand combat. Here’s what happened: the English army was mainly comprised of English and Welsh longbowmen (archers) who wore little or no armour, and they were supported by a much smaller number of armoured knights. Conversely, the French army had more heavily armoured knights who fought on foot and horseback supported by fewer archers. These knights were the cream of the French nobility and a fully armed knight on a fully armed charger was going nowhere in a wet and muddy field. As Michael Prestwich[6] explains in his medieval warrior’s manual, no self-respecting knight would be without all of the latest accoutrements. By the time you donned the aillettes[7], bacinet[8], couter[9], cuirasse[10], cuisse[11], gauntlet[12], gorget[13], greaves[14], hauberk[15], poleyn[16], sabaton[17], spaulder[18] and vambrace[19], not to mention your war horse’s armour, you were looking at about 110 pounds of heavy metal; that’s 50kg or a lean medieval man!
What those English archers lacked in body armour was more than compensated for in shrewdness; they employed the clever trick of placing rows of stakes in front of them to offset the impact of charging French cavalry. But many of the heavily armoured and mounted French knights were unable to charge forward in the slippery mud; they sank into the mud and some even drowned. Those who did manage to charge succumbed to the archers’ stakes. As these weighed down knights floundered in the mud Henry’s archers rained a sea of lethal arrows on them. When the archers ran out of arrows they grabbed any weapons to hand and finished the job. Now move forward 502 years and try to picture Germans on the high ground looking down on mud trapped Allied troops.
As with Agincourt in 1415, Passchendaele in 1917 became a swamp. The heavily armed French knights at Agincourt sank in the mud just like many of the tanks at Passchendaele. The horror of being an injured soldier in either battle, unable to extricate yourself from swampy mud quickly enough to avoid the onslaught of arrows or bullets – or indeed, before you drowned – has been harrowingly captured by so many eyewitness accounts. In Passchendaele countless artillery bombardments had destroyed the drainage systems of the region which merely compounded the flooding caused by rain. The craters made by the Allied shelling filled with water. These effectively became outdoor swimming pools that advancing soldiers could not hide in and injured soldiers helplessly drowned in.
Jehan de Wavrin, a Flemish knight, watched the proceedings at Agincourt from the French line. Both his father and brother were killed in action. This is how he saw it. He describes the French being so weighed down with armour in a rain-soaked, quagmire that “… they could not support themselves or move forward. In the first place they were armed with long coats of steel, reaching to the knees or lower, and very heavy, over the leg harness, and besides plate armour also most of them had hooded helmets; wherefore this weight of armour, with the softness of the wet ground, as has been said, kept them as if immovable...” [20]
The vagaries of mud also feature prominently in the memoirs of Allied soldiers from Third Ypres. Driver Arthur Stratton of the New Zealand Divisional Ammunition Column, NZEF asks: “…what chance had our infantry to get out of that mud and climb that bare hill against machine-gun fire? It was just pure murder.”[21] Siegfried Sassoon captures the treachery of navigating shell blasted and waterlogged ground more poetically in Memorial Tablet:
I died in hell -
(They called it Passchendaele). My wound was slight,
And I was hobbling back; and then a shell
Burst slick upon the duck-boards: so I fell
Into the bottomless mud, and lost the light.
When it comes to Passchendaele, Benjamin Franklin’s observation, “there never was a good war or a bad peace” could not be more apt. For the sake of so few kilometres, total Allied and German casualties exceeded 850,000. To compound the tragedy from the Allied perspective, the village of Passchendaele was in German hands again after the spring offensives of 1918. While the Battle of Agincourt only lasted a day and the English fatalities were only in the low hundreds, that “happy few”[22] that “band of brothers”[23] at least did not have to suffer the indignity of witnessing France’s repossession of all English territory in France during their lifetime.[24]
As Third Ypres continued environmental factors proved crucial. Andrew Macdonald[25], in his excellent book that makes military history very accessible, explains: “If the month of October saw anything like its average rainfall of 75 millimetres, the heavily shelled and flood-prone ground would quickly become a morass that was difficult for infantry to traverse[26].” But average rainfall, as if things weren’t bad enough, would be overtaken by unseasonably heavy rainfall. In the five days before the Battle of Poelcappelle 30 millimetres of rain fell. This made preparations for attack, especially hauling artillery guns into position, almost impossible. Unsurprisingly then, this battle did not bring the Allies any closer to Passchendaele Ridge. When Haig realised this Godley was obliged to renew his attack on Passchendaele (called First Passchendaele) in ever worsening weather conditions. Thirteen thousand fatalities later, First Passchendaele would be regarded as one of the lowest points in Third Ypres.
Unlike Henry V, the last of the great medieval warrior kings, the more remote Godley did not move among his men and roll his sleeves up for action. If he had done so, he would have experienced the problems first hand and perhaps taken more appropriate action. Even Shakespeare’s King Henry V buys into the ‘man of the people’ image as he portrays Henry disguised as a commoner mingling with his troops the night before battle. Godley only visited the battlefield once - on October 15th. According to Macdonald “Godley’s account of this visit is bald of detail, simply stating that he visited senior divisional officers and twice had to seek shelter from hostile shellfire.” [27] Interestingly, Sergeant William Wilson, who accompanied Godley, described the scene as an “awful nightmare, a hideous reeking swamp seething with living (and dead) beings.” [28] One can only guess how Godley would have described the field at Agincourt after that fateful battle or what he might have said to his men before battle, if he had a megaphone loud enough for them to hear him from well behind the lines. He was never going to pull off a: “Once more unto the breach,”[29]
Macdonald argues that it is too simplistic to blame the failures at Poelcappelle and First Passchendaele on the rain and mud alone, or on the desk-bound generals in charge of strategy. “Factors such as doctrine, training, experience, command style, personality, decentralised command, operational tempo, the military hierarchy, staff work, and the artillery-infantry-engineering relationship all figured in the final outcome in the hell that soldiers of 1917 knew as Passchendaele.” Notwithstanding, there is no getting away from the mud of Agincourt or Passchendaele, the main concern of this essay, a tragic sticking point for so many soldiers: mere fodder in the selfish power games of European royal families. Indeed, King George V did pay a morale-boosting visit to Flanders shortly before Third Ypres in July 1917, the same month that he changed his very German family name from “Saxe-Coburg-Gotha” to a very British “Windsor”.
Perhaps Godley and his superior, Haig, were playing schoolboy pranks the day the Battle of Agincourt was covered in class. Had they forgotten that heavy metal sinks in swampy mud? Were they too proud to learn lessons from the French who eventually booted England out of France, albeit in the 15th century?
A is for Agincourt, a victory of sorts. For Henry V it was a case of do or die in the world of armour and arrows and arcane codes of chivalric behaviour. For Haig and Godley, the suicidal insanity of doing battle in a cratered swamp 502 years later will always be mired in controversy.
Footnotes
[1] The feast day of the Christian saints Crispin and Crispinian, twins who were martyred c. 286.
[2] The 8 stages of Third Ypres were:
[3] First Ypres occurred October-November 1914. Second Ypres occurred April-May 1915. Fourth Ypres occurred April 1918. Fifth Ypres occurred September-October 1918. Ypres was the name of a nearby Flemish town
[4] The Third Battle of Ypres is called the Battle of Passchendaele after the First and Second Battles of Passchendaele. These were the last two phases of Third Ypres.
[5] Hamilton, R. (2014). The Great War: Unseen Archives. Atlantic Publishing.
[6] Prestwich, M. (2010). Knight: The Medieval Warrior’s Manual. London: Thames & Hudson.
[7] Shoulder pieces
[8] Pointed battle helmet with visor
[9] Elbow protector
[10] Breast and back plate
[11] Thigh piece
[12] Armoured glove
[13] Neck protector
[14] Shin protector
[15] Coat of mail
[16] Knee piece
[17] Armoured boot
[18] Shoulder piece
[19] Arm protector
[20] Wavrin, Jehan de, Chronicles, 1399-1422, trans. Sir W. Hardy and E. Hardy (1887); Keegan, John, The Illustrated Face of Battle: a study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme (1989). Found in http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/agincourt.htm
[21] MacDonald, A. (2013). Passchendaele: The Anatomy of a Tragedy. Auckland: HarperCollinsPublishers.
[22] Henry V by William Shakespeare. Act 4 Scene 3 Line 60
[23] ibid
[24] Regained everything but Calais in 1453
[25] MacDonald, A. (2013). Passchendaele: The Anatomy of a Tragedy. Auckland: HarperCollinsPublishers.
[26] Ibid Page 52
[27] MacDonald, A. (2013). Passchendaele: The Anatomy of a Tragedy. Auckland: HarperCollinsPublishers.
[28] ibid
[29] Henry V by William Shakespeare. Act 3 Scene 1 Line 1
Suggested reading - these books are all available in the public library
Gardner, B. (Ed.). Up the Line to Death: The War Poets 1914-1918. 1964. Methuen.
Hamilton, R. The Great War: Unseen Archives. 2014. Atlantic Publishing
Macdonald, A. Passchendaele: The Anatomy of a Tragedy. 2013. HarperCollins
Prestwich, M. Knight: The Medieval Warrior's Manual. 2010. Thames and Hudson
Useful websites where you can access further information
http://www.greatwar.co.uk/ypres-salient/index.htm
https://www.awm.gov.au/military-event/E104/
http://www.cwgc.org/
Duffy, M. (2009). Battles - The Third Battle of Ypres, 1917. http://www.firstworldwar.com/battles/ypres3.htm (14 July 2016)
Trueman, C.N. (2015). The Battle of Passchendaele. http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/world-war-one/battles-of-world-war-one/the-battle-of-passchendaele/ (14 July 2016)
Agincourt to Passchendaele - a very muddy business
Oddly enough, it was at a similar time of year, autumn, that an English army led by King Henry V faced French soldiers on a battlefield in Agincourt in 1415, and Lieutenant-General Sir Alexander Godley’s Anzac corps prepared to capture Passchendaele Ridge in Belgium in 1917. Both battles, 502 years apart, became urgent because of approaching winter and were coloured by the impact of heavy rain and its resultant intractable mud.
These two famous military encounters were smaller parts of bigger campaigns. The Battle of Agincourt was the most famous military escapade of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, spanning the years 1337 to 1453. It had floundered for a while but the young Henry soon kick started it back into action. Henry’s goal on that historic St Crispin’s Day[1], October 25th 1415, was to re-ignite that age-old English claim to the French throne with his modest army crying “God for Harry, England, and Saint George!”
Capturing Passchendaele Ridge was the last of eight[2] military encounters that comprised Third Ypres.[3] The struggle for the Ridge was called the Second Battle of Passchendaele. Third Ypres, in its entirety, would become more popularly known as Passchendaele,[4] and its eight battles took place between July 31st and November 10th 1917. Confusing? Right! You see, there were five Battles of Ypres but we are mainly concerned with the last of the eight battles which comprised Third Ypres.
Passchendaele holds romantic and tragic connotations in equal measure; a name we associate with wasted heroism and doomed youth; hapless generals and political chess with young lives; the toxic essence of World War One. After First Ypres and Second Ypres the British had gained a peninsula into German occupied Belgium but the German army had the advantage of the high ground. So, why did Passchendaele happen at all and why has it gone down in history as one of the worst and needless tragedies on the Western Front of World War 1?
For Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, Third Ypres had two objectives. The first objective was to chase the German Army from the entire Belgian coastline. Success was imperative because the Germans were using the Belgian port towns they held to launch their ships for North Sea action against the British Royal Navy, and launch their U-boats to sink British, and indeed United States, merchant vessels.
The second objective was to disrupt the railway line that carried German freight and troop trains from the Belgian port towns to Flanders. Achieving these objectives meant getting close enough to both targets to successfully launch artillery attacks. Both targets lay beyond Passchendaele Ridge.
Unfortunately, Lieutenant-General Sir Alexander Godley had failed to win the sixth and seventh battles of Third Ypres - Poelcappelle and First Passchendaele - and this scuppered the plan to remove the Germans from the Belgian coastline. Now the only hope in minimising German domination on the Western Front was to concentrate on capturing Passchendaele Ridge to get at that railway line in what would be the eighth and final battle of Third Ypres. The low lying ground surrounding the ridge was susceptible to flooding and Haig must have at least appreciated that the level of rainfall would affect the proceedings and the outcome. The thousands of beleaguered troops certainly knew that, “One false step could see soldier and beast alike swallowed up, with little hope of rescue.” [5]
Just like Henry V was troubled by the approaching winter as he marched towards Calais for much needed supplies, Field Marshal Haig also desperately needed some kind of success before winter set in, hence his order on October 26th to take the ridge, this time with Canadian forces. They advanced slowly because of the mud and the German poison gas but they eventually climbed to Passchendaele Ridge and reached dry land to prepare for a second offensive which started on October 30th and by November 6th, the village was in Canadian hands. On November 10th a final assault was launched on the rest of the ridge bringing the Third Battle of Ypres, also known as the ‘Battle of Mud’ to an end.
For Henry V, it was a case of defeat followed by victory. With an army severely weakened by dysentery and lack of food, he was intercepted by the French while trying to get to English-held Calais for supplies, so it was a much weakened English army that fought at Agincourt; it was also outnumbered; estimates vary – perhaps 20,000 French, to 7,000 English. For Haig it was more of a mixed bag; the first seven battles of Third Ypres being a jumble of minor success and wholesale carnage. Thousands of exhausted ANZAC troops had already been killed in the First Battle of Passchendaele, hardly any ground was gained and they did not succeed in taking Passchendaele. But is wholesale carnage regarded as defeat? It depends on your definition of a military outcome; do you measure it in lives lost or territory gained?
How then, did Henry V walk away victorious with only several hundred English deaths compared to thousands of French fatalities? Firstly, the battle took place on a ploughed field after days of heavy rain. The field quickly turned into a mud-bath, not the most conducive for hand-to-hand combat. Here’s what happened: the English army was mainly comprised of English and Welsh longbowmen (archers) who wore little or no armour, and they were supported by a much smaller number of armoured knights. Conversely, the French army had more heavily armoured knights who fought on foot and horseback supported by fewer archers. These knights were the cream of the French nobility and a fully armed knight on a fully armed charger was going nowhere in a wet and muddy field. As Michael Prestwich[6] explains in his medieval warrior’s manual, no self-respecting knight would be without all of the latest accoutrements. By the time you donned the aillettes[7], bacinet[8], couter[9], cuirasse[10], cuisse[11], gauntlet[12], gorget[13], greaves[14], hauberk[15], poleyn[16], sabaton[17], spaulder[18] and vambrace[19], not to mention your war horse’s armour, you were looking at about 110 pounds of heavy metal; that’s 50kg or a lean medieval man!
What those English archers lacked in body armour was more than compensated for in shrewdness; they employed the clever trick of placing rows of stakes in front of them to offset the impact of charging French cavalry. But many of the heavily armoured and mounted French knights were unable to charge forward in the slippery mud; they sank into the mud and some even drowned. Those who did manage to charge succumbed to the archers’ stakes. As these weighed down knights floundered in the mud Henry’s archers rained a sea of lethal arrows on them. When the archers ran out of arrows they grabbed any weapons to hand and finished the job. Now move forward 502 years and try to picture Germans on the high ground looking down on mud trapped Allied troops.
As with Agincourt in 1415, Passchendaele in 1917 became a swamp. The heavily armed French knights at Agincourt sank in the mud just like many of the tanks at Passchendaele. The horror of being an injured soldier in either battle, unable to extricate yourself from swampy mud quickly enough to avoid the onslaught of arrows or bullets – or indeed, before you drowned – has been harrowingly captured by so many eyewitness accounts. In Passchendaele countless artillery bombardments had destroyed the drainage systems of the region which merely compounded the flooding caused by rain. The craters made by the Allied shelling filled with water. These effectively became outdoor swimming pools that advancing soldiers could not hide in and injured soldiers helplessly drowned in.
Jehan de Wavrin, a Flemish knight, watched the proceedings at Agincourt from the French line. Both his father and brother were killed in action. This is how he saw it. He describes the French being so weighed down with armour in a rain-soaked, quagmire that “… they could not support themselves or move forward. In the first place they were armed with long coats of steel, reaching to the knees or lower, and very heavy, over the leg harness, and besides plate armour also most of them had hooded helmets; wherefore this weight of armour, with the softness of the wet ground, as has been said, kept them as if immovable...” [20]
The vagaries of mud also feature prominently in the memoirs of Allied soldiers from Third Ypres. Driver Arthur Stratton of the New Zealand Divisional Ammunition Column, NZEF asks: “…what chance had our infantry to get out of that mud and climb that bare hill against machine-gun fire? It was just pure murder.”[21] Siegfried Sassoon captures the treachery of navigating shell blasted and waterlogged ground more poetically in Memorial Tablet:
I died in hell -
(They called it Passchendaele). My wound was slight,
And I was hobbling back; and then a shell
Burst slick upon the duck-boards: so I fell
Into the bottomless mud, and lost the light.
When it comes to Passchendaele, Benjamin Franklin’s observation, “there never was a good war or a bad peace” could not be more apt. For the sake of so few kilometres, total Allied and German casualties exceeded 850,000. To compound the tragedy from the Allied perspective, the village of Passchendaele was in German hands again after the spring offensives of 1918. While the Battle of Agincourt only lasted a day and the English fatalities were only in the low hundreds, that “happy few”[22] that “band of brothers”[23] at least did not have to suffer the indignity of witnessing France’s repossession of all English territory in France during their lifetime.[24]
As Third Ypres continued environmental factors proved crucial. Andrew Macdonald[25], in his excellent book that makes military history very accessible, explains: “If the month of October saw anything like its average rainfall of 75 millimetres, the heavily shelled and flood-prone ground would quickly become a morass that was difficult for infantry to traverse[26].” But average rainfall, as if things weren’t bad enough, would be overtaken by unseasonably heavy rainfall. In the five days before the Battle of Poelcappelle 30 millimetres of rain fell. This made preparations for attack, especially hauling artillery guns into position, almost impossible. Unsurprisingly then, this battle did not bring the Allies any closer to Passchendaele Ridge. When Haig realised this Godley was obliged to renew his attack on Passchendaele (called First Passchendaele) in ever worsening weather conditions. Thirteen thousand fatalities later, First Passchendaele would be regarded as one of the lowest points in Third Ypres.
Unlike Henry V, the last of the great medieval warrior kings, the more remote Godley did not move among his men and roll his sleeves up for action. If he had done so, he would have experienced the problems first hand and perhaps taken more appropriate action. Even Shakespeare’s King Henry V buys into the ‘man of the people’ image as he portrays Henry disguised as a commoner mingling with his troops the night before battle. Godley only visited the battlefield once - on October 15th. According to Macdonald “Godley’s account of this visit is bald of detail, simply stating that he visited senior divisional officers and twice had to seek shelter from hostile shellfire.” [27] Interestingly, Sergeant William Wilson, who accompanied Godley, described the scene as an “awful nightmare, a hideous reeking swamp seething with living (and dead) beings.” [28] One can only guess how Godley would have described the field at Agincourt after that fateful battle or what he might have said to his men before battle, if he had a megaphone loud enough for them to hear him from well behind the lines. He was never going to pull off a: “Once more unto the breach,”[29]
Macdonald argues that it is too simplistic to blame the failures at Poelcappelle and First Passchendaele on the rain and mud alone, or on the desk-bound generals in charge of strategy. “Factors such as doctrine, training, experience, command style, personality, decentralised command, operational tempo, the military hierarchy, staff work, and the artillery-infantry-engineering relationship all figured in the final outcome in the hell that soldiers of 1917 knew as Passchendaele.” Notwithstanding, there is no getting away from the mud of Agincourt or Passchendaele, the main concern of this essay, a tragic sticking point for so many soldiers: mere fodder in the selfish power games of European royal families. Indeed, King George V did pay a morale-boosting visit to Flanders shortly before Third Ypres in July 1917, the same month that he changed his very German family name from “Saxe-Coburg-Gotha” to a very British “Windsor”.
Perhaps Godley and his superior, Haig, were playing schoolboy pranks the day the Battle of Agincourt was covered in class. Had they forgotten that heavy metal sinks in swampy mud? Were they too proud to learn lessons from the French who eventually booted England out of France, albeit in the 15th century?
A is for Agincourt, a victory of sorts. For Henry V it was a case of do or die in the world of armour and arrows and arcane codes of chivalric behaviour. For Haig and Godley, the suicidal insanity of doing battle in a cratered swamp 502 years later will always be mired in controversy.
Footnotes
[1] The feast day of the Christian saints Crispin and Crispinian, twins who were martyred c. 286.
[2] The 8 stages of Third Ypres were:
- Battle of Pilckem Ridge July 31st to August 2nd
- Battle of Langemarck, 1917 August 16th to August 18th
- Battle of the Menin Road Ridge September 20th to September 25th
- Battle of Polygon Wood September 26th to October 3rd
- Battle of Broodseinde October 4th
- Battle of Poelcapelle October 9th
- First Battle of Passchendaele October 12th
- Second Battle of Passchendaele October 26th to November 10th
[3] First Ypres occurred October-November 1914. Second Ypres occurred April-May 1915. Fourth Ypres occurred April 1918. Fifth Ypres occurred September-October 1918. Ypres was the name of a nearby Flemish town
[4] The Third Battle of Ypres is called the Battle of Passchendaele after the First and Second Battles of Passchendaele. These were the last two phases of Third Ypres.
[5] Hamilton, R. (2014). The Great War: Unseen Archives. Atlantic Publishing.
[6] Prestwich, M. (2010). Knight: The Medieval Warrior’s Manual. London: Thames & Hudson.
[7] Shoulder pieces
[8] Pointed battle helmet with visor
[9] Elbow protector
[10] Breast and back plate
[11] Thigh piece
[12] Armoured glove
[13] Neck protector
[14] Shin protector
[15] Coat of mail
[16] Knee piece
[17] Armoured boot
[18] Shoulder piece
[19] Arm protector
[20] Wavrin, Jehan de, Chronicles, 1399-1422, trans. Sir W. Hardy and E. Hardy (1887); Keegan, John, The Illustrated Face of Battle: a study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme (1989). Found in http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/agincourt.htm
[21] MacDonald, A. (2013). Passchendaele: The Anatomy of a Tragedy. Auckland: HarperCollinsPublishers.
[22] Henry V by William Shakespeare. Act 4 Scene 3 Line 60
[23] ibid
[24] Regained everything but Calais in 1453
[25] MacDonald, A. (2013). Passchendaele: The Anatomy of a Tragedy. Auckland: HarperCollinsPublishers.
[26] Ibid Page 52
[27] MacDonald, A. (2013). Passchendaele: The Anatomy of a Tragedy. Auckland: HarperCollinsPublishers.
[28] ibid
[29] Henry V by William Shakespeare. Act 3 Scene 1 Line 1
Suggested reading - these books are all available in the public library
Gardner, B. (Ed.). Up the Line to Death: The War Poets 1914-1918. 1964. Methuen.
Hamilton, R. The Great War: Unseen Archives. 2014. Atlantic Publishing
Macdonald, A. Passchendaele: The Anatomy of a Tragedy. 2013. HarperCollins
Prestwich, M. Knight: The Medieval Warrior's Manual. 2010. Thames and Hudson
Useful websites where you can access further information
http://www.greatwar.co.uk/ypres-salient/index.htm
https://www.awm.gov.au/military-event/E104/
http://www.cwgc.org/
Duffy, M. (2009). Battles - The Third Battle of Ypres, 1917. http://www.firstworldwar.com/battles/ypres3.htm (14 July 2016)
Trueman, C.N. (2015). The Battle of Passchendaele. http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/world-war-one/battles-of-world-war-one/the-battle-of-passchendaele/ (14 July 2016)
