BLOOD BATH 100 YEARS PAST

Artillery fire 100 rounds to mark the centenary of the end of the
battle of Passchendaele

Exhibition in Belgium commemorate horrific battle of World war 1.

Late in ''The Beauty and the Sorrow,'' the Swedish historian Peter Englund's biographical tapestry of  20 lives upended by World War I-

We meet an American surgeon called Harvey Cushing, who sails to Belgium in the summer of 1917. In a damp tent to the west of this ancient market town, he operates on hundreds of Allied soldiers-

Borne to the field hospital in ambulances caked with mud. He has experience with military surgery, but these casualties are far worse than he has ever even.

Each night, after an exhausting day of operation, he scrubs blood and brain from his hands.

He has little information from the front, only the daily stream the maimed and shellshocked. 

But in late October a colleague drives him through Ypres, whose medieval cloth Hall lies in ruins, and out to the forward line near the village of Passchendaele.

What he sees stupefies him. The landscape has rotted into a moonscape of grays, gashed by tranches and pock-marked by craters.

Mines vomit soil to the sky, and horses and airplanes parts lie tangled in the omnipresent mud, among mutilated men.

Ypres and Passchendaele, Cushing writes in his diary, are where earlier ideals of  military glory  die for good.

The war in Flanders has shown the debility of civilization, and divulged the ''barbarian behind your starched and studded shirt front.''

Today this northwest region of  Belgium, called the  Westhoek, or the Western Corner, is a region of  small-scale industry, broad fields, tidy houses.

A hundred years ago, during the  Batlle of Passchendaele [also known as the Third Battle of Ypres] it was the netherworld.