A storm in Flanders : the Ypres salient, 1914-1918 : tragedy and triumph on the Western Front /

In many ways, the four-year slaughter in Belgian Flanders is representative of the most horrifying aspects of World War I. It was there that the futility of trench warfare was "perfected," as the daily meat grinder chewed up thousands of lives to gain a few yards of real estate. It was there that the destructive power of new weapons--including poison gas, flamethrowers, and airplanes--was fully realized. Groom is best known as the author of Forest Gump (1986), but he has also written extensively on military history. In this moving and oddly inspiring chronicle, Groom captures the absurd waste and sickening brutality of a conflict that had no redeeming moral purpose. Groom pulls no punches as he conveys an atmosphere of hell on Earth, made all the more outrageous by the political blunders of men ensconced safely behind the lines. Yet Groom, a Vietnam veteran, finds true nobility in the ordinary soldiers who fought in Flanders, both killers and killed, who managed to remain decently human under intolerable conditions. This is an important and brilliantly written work that is a vital addition to twentieth-century history collections. --Jay Freeman

Groom wrote Forrest Gump, but this is no whimsical novel. Here, he studies World War I's infamous Battle of Ypres. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A somber portrait of early modern war in one of its most hellish manifestations. Best known for the novel Forrest Gump (1986), Groom is also a seasoned writer on historical subjects (Shrouds of Glory, 1995, etc.). The present study brings us little that other histories do not-Stanley Weintraub's recent Silent Night, for instance, focuses on the famed Christmas truce of 1914, while John Keegan's The First World War gives extensive coverage on the Ypres Salient-but it relates the terrible events of four years with fluency and sometimes unpleasant vividness. From Groom we learn that a single 1917 battle along the Belgian front "enriched the Flanders earth with the corpses of some 228,000 Englishmen and Germans, not to mention about 20,000 French, all in an area not much longer than Manhattan Island." He adds that we still do not have an accurate number of total deaths in the Ypres area, and that statisticians can only posit the true, and staggering, extent of the bloodshed. All those corpses over four years lent the trenches on both sides an infernal aspect, which Groom evokes with well-chosen quotes from the combatants: a Canadian soldier relates that the "whole salient had an odor beyond description," which does not stop Groom from doing his best to describe the smells, sights, and sounds of a battle that seemed to go on forever. (Another Canadian soldier, John Macrae, wrote the poem "In Flanders Fields," the Ypres front's best-known literary monument.) Groom's account, full of detail and the smell of gunsmoke, is expertly paced and free of dull stretches, unlike more technical studies of the Ypres Salient: he knows just when enough is enough, when it's time to pull his lens from close-ups of hand-to-hand fighting and exploding Germans up to the big picture of Ypres in the overall context of WWI. A fine narrative that will be of much interest to students of military history.