General Gough

Stretcher-parties wading through the morass sometimes took six hours to bring in casualties. Left: near Boesinghe, 1 August 1917 (from Chris McNabb’s Passchendaele 1917)

Drowning in mud and blood

29 July 2017 9:00 am

George Orwell’s suggestion that the British remember only the military disasters of the first world war is certainly being borne…

Harry Farr, a soldier with the 1st Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment, was executed for cowardice, aged 25, in 1916 when he refused to fight, despite almost certainly suffering from shell shock

The shocks and shells of the Somme

30 April 2016 9:00 am

In the final months of 1914, medical officers on the Western Front began seeing a new kind of casualty. Soldiers…