British soldiers pushing an ambulance through the mud. A mounted horseman is on the road ahead.
Helping an ambulance through the mud.Official PhotographDaily Mail War PicturesReverse:Passed by CensorHeavy rains have often made the British front a quagmire, and our 'Tommies' have had to put their shoulders to the wheels of ambulance and other wagons.Official War PhotographsCrown Copyright Reserved.Series 6 No. 45
"In No Man's Land the wounded still lay in the mud. Their shouting and sobbing kept everyone's nerves on edge. Those in shell holes generally drowned there. Slowly they slipped down the muddy banks into the water below, too weak to hold themselves up. Their feeble whispers could not be heard by comrades passing by. As time went on No Man's Land thus became converted into a vast limbo of abandoned dead and dying. Each shell hole with blood on its water usually meant another corpse entombed below."
Excerpt from Leon Wolff's In Flanders Fields, the 1917 Campaign on the horrendous conditions in which men lived and died in British general Douglas Haig's Flanders campaign. The Battle of Poelcapelle, yet another British attack in the Third Battle of Ypres, was fought on October 9, 1917 with less preparation than its predecessors. Men drowned in mud from which they could neither extricate themselves, nor be extricated.
In Flanders Fields, the 1917 Campaign by Leon Wolff, page 230, copyright © 1958 by Leon Wolff, publisher: The Viking Press, publication date: 1958
1917-10-09, 1917, October, Poelcapelle, the Battle of Poelcapelle, Second Battle of Flanders, British medical corps
