Disaster at Passchendaele - October 12

To begin, Freddy Declerck, our entirely superb world war one guide, showed us the battlefield from the perspective of the New Zealand soldiers who had had to run up it from bottom to top as seen in the first photograph.

This quote from the Flanders 1917 website describes the conditions they faced and the results.
“Shoulder to shoulder with the Australians, the men of the New Zealand Division began their attack in gales and driving rain, faced with a morass of mud, uncut barbed wire up to 13 metres deep, an erratic and ineffectual artillery barrage to protect them and withering machine-gun fire. Slowed by the weather and struggling through thick mud, they died in their hundreds.

In four hours on the morning of October 12, 1917, New Zealand suffered a casualty toll of 60% of those who took part - 3,296 men of whom 1,190 were killed. It took two and a half days to clear the New Zealand wounded from the battlefield.”

He then took us up and showed us the view from the top down .... all so quiet and serene on our 21st century day.

And making it all the more real was the fact that we had a father and son traveling with one of the girls in the choir and they had lost family on the battle ground in front of us on that day.