Quotes About Passchendaele

From his fieldstone house near Vicht, furnished with a potbelly stove and a brass bed in the living room, Hemingway rambled about in a sheepskin vest that "made him bulk bigger." Sometimes on request he ghost-wrote love letters for young GIs, reading his favorite passages to fellow journalists. He would memorably describe the Hürtgen as "Passchendaele with tree bursts," but not even a Hemingway could quite capture the debasement of this awful place.

The total of British dead and wounded at Passchendaele, officially the Third Battle of Ypres, is in dispute, but a low estimate puts the number at 260,000; most reckonings are far higher.

I died in hell. They called it Passchendaele.