From Bapaume to Passchendaele 1917 by Philip Gibbs.

Publisher: William Heinemann, London, 1918, first Edition. Very good hardback, no jacket. Green cloth boards have some marks, rubbing and bumping. Book seller's stamp and inscription to ffep. Two fold out maps in good condition, one has repaired tear at edge. Pages are tanned with some foxing and chipped edges. One page has a tear in the margin and p185 has the corner torn off but text is not affected. 384 pages, illustrated. 1917.

I suppose that a century hence men and women will think of that date as one of the world's black years flinging its shadow forward to the future until gradually new generations escape from its dark spell. To us now, only a few months away from that year, above all to those of us who have seen something of the fighting which crowded every month of it except the last, the colour of 1917 is not black but red, because a river of blood flowed through its changing seasons and there was a great carnage of men. It was a year of unending battle on the Western Front, which matters most to us because of all our youth there. It was a year of monstrous and desperate conflict. Looking back upon it, remembering all its days of attack and counter-attack, all the roads of war crowded with troops and transport, all the battlefields upon which our armies moved under fire, the coming back of the prisoners by hundreds and thousands, the long trails of the wounded, the activity, the traffic, the roar and welter and fury of the year, one has a curious physical sensation of breathlessness and heart-beat because of the burden of so many memories. The heroism of men, the suffering of individuals, their personal adventures, their deaths or escape from death, are swallowed up in this wild drama of battle so that at times it seems impersonal and inhuman like some cosmic struggle in which man is but an atom of the world's convulsion.

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