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By Root 1170 0

on Glasgow Green and attempting to start soviets, Charlotte Despard still treasured her infrequent meetings with her brother. "He is, I think, dearer to me than anyone else," she wrote, and every time they met was "a day to be written in red letters." John French's diary for 1917 records a drop-in visit to the Despard Arms, her teetotal pub for soldiers, perhaps the only one of her manifold activities uncontroversial enough for him, as commander in chief of the Home Forces, to be seen visiting. As always, money flowed through French's hands too easily, so Charlotte once again gave him a loan. The two shared a loss this year when one of their sisters, a volunteer nurse on the Balkan front, was killed by a piece of shrapnel.

The field marshal was still frustrated, as he later put it to a friend, that "I was driven out of France ... at the instigation of Haig.... Nothing that can ever happen to me could compensate for the loss of 1916 and 1917 and half of 1918 in the field." Instead, he had to content himself with traveling up and down Britain inspecting troops, training bases, coastal defenses, and antiaircraft batteries, pinning medals on chests and visiting wounded soldiers in their bright blue hospital garb. Gradually he managed to insinuate himself as a confidential military adviser to Lloyd George—a position that allowed him to spread any anti-Haig gossip that came his way. This he did so energetically that the King summoned him to Buckingham Palace for a dressing-down. When French made a visit to the Western Front, Haig refused to receive him, and when the secretary for war invited both men to dinner in London, French refused to come. To his mistress, Winifred Bennett, he wrote plaintively, "I do so want to hear the guns again!"

There were plenty of guns to be heard, more than 3,000 of them firing off more than four million shells, as Haig's artillery began the customary bombardment before the battle that today is usually known by the name of the tiny village that was one of its first objectives, Passchendaele. At each major British attack on the Western Front, some new element had fed the perennial hope of a breakthrough. At Loos it was the unprecedented size of the attacking force and the first British use of poison gas. At the Somme it was the weeklong artillery bombardment that was supposed to pulverize the German trenches. At Passchendaele? No new strategy or weapon of any sort distinguished this attack. In the end, what separated Passchendaele from the great paroxysms of bloodshed that preceded it was one gruesome fact no one had planned for: in addition to falling victim to German fire, thousands of British soldiers, nowhere near the sea, drowned.

It was for good reason that this corner of Europe had long been known as the Low Countries; the water table is less than two feet below ground in much of Belgium. Haig seems to have given no thought to the way his bombardment would wreck canals and drainage ditches and leave tens of thousands of craters that soon filled with water. "Haig's plans required a drought of Ethiopian proportions to ensure success," comments his biographer Gerard De Groot. The landscape in which the battle unfolded bore no resemblance to the dry, neatly sandbagged replica of a trench that had been constructed in London's Ken-sington Gardens. (A similar trench, no less unrealistic, drew many visitors to a park in Berlin.)

The area around Ypres was covered by mist when the British infantry assault began in the early morning of July 31, 1917. The mist soon turned into almost nonstop rain, the heaviest in some 30 years. Observation aircraft could not take to the sky, weapons jammed, and the clay soil of the watery moonscape of craters became sticky; one officer likened its consistency to cheesecake, another to porridge. Guns could barely be moved, and mules and horses pulling ammunition wagons sank up to their stomachs and had to be dug out. Ambulances carrying wounded soldiers skidded off slippery roads. As summer turned to autumn, the men were reminded that the British soldier's cold-weather