Chapter 346: What is the Price of a Mile?
Rain fell upon the landscape of northwestern Belgium. The sky had been blotted out by the black storm clouds, which were welcomed in a torrential downpour of epic proportions.
The only illumination which could be witnessed by the men huddling under the cover their trenches provided for them was the burning husks of Allied tanks which had tried and failed to push against the fortifications which the German and Belgians soldiers used as cover.
These ruined machines of war lie sunken halfway into the mud beneath them, as the downpour continued to create pools of water throughout the landscape. Turning the now barren and lifeless landscape into a marsh filled with nothing but the drowned corpses of the recently departed.
The charge had failed, miserably so, as the soldiers of the Central Powers bravely stood their ground and obliterated half a million men in the course of a day. And now the sound of guns echoed in the distanced as the counter battery began.
While the King of England had sought for a peaceful resolution to this war, the fighting still waged. And among the dead marshes were soldiers of the British Empire along with those from their French allies alike.
The pitter patter of the rain dropping upon the steel helmets of the allied soldiers who had survived the initial assault was drowned out by the echoes of machine guns and artillery alike.
Their cries, as they were covered in mud and blood, muffled by the symphony of war, as the Germans and Belgians continued to gun down those who were unfortunate enough to still draw breath yet be caught in between a sea of corpses and the enemy lines.
The conditions for the third battle of Ypres, better known by the name of Passchendaele, had come a year earlier than it was supposed to. For three days and three nights, the storm raged without mercy.
Turning the hellish landscape already battered and bruised by years of warfare, into a nightmarish swamp, filled with mud, blood, and the festering disease of rotting bodies.
A land once renowned for its natural beauty had become the most heinous bog ever to be witnessed by men. And the soldiers on both sides dare not rush into the middle of it, for fear that the dead would drag them into its depths by their ankles. To join them forever in eternal agony.
Rain continued to pour, blood still spilled, and bullets maintained their trajectory. All the while the Allied commanders, especially the British Generals who feared that their king would end their empire’s involvement in the war without their chance to earn glory, were ushering their soldiers towards the front line for a second and more bloody assault.
500,000 men had lost their lives in this pitiful and grim hellscape over the course of the last three days. Their bodies left to rot in the bog that lie before them. And now the survivors were being asked to charge once more?
For what? What could possibly justify such a callous waste of human life? All so the Allies could gain a mile? Maybe two? How much was the price of a mile truly worth? Were such pitiful gains valued at the expense of a million men? More?