Mud

Fighting every inch of the way: the Italian Campaign of 1943

30 September 2023 9:00 am

When Allied forces landed at Salerno on 9 September, they expected an easy run to Rome. But the intelligence proved dangerously faulty, as James Holland explains

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…