Download Passchendaele: Requiem for Doomed Youth AudioBook Free

From Paul Ham, victor of the NSW Premier's Reward for Australian History, comes the storyplot of standard men in the hold of a politics and military electric power struggle that determined their destiny and has foreshadowed the destiny of the world for a century. Passchendaele epitomises everything that was most bad about the Western Front. The photos never sleep of this four-month challenge, fought from July to November 1917, the most detrimental year of the conflict: blackened tree stumps increasing out of an field of dirt, corpses of men and horses drowned in shell openings, terrified soldiers huddled in trenches awaiting the whistle. The intervening hundred years, the most violent in human history, hasn't disarmed these pictures of their power to shock. At least they ask us, on the 100th anniversary of the challenge, to see and also to try to understand what happened here. Yes, we commemorate the function. Yes, we adorn our chest with poppies. But have we seen? Have we comprehended? Have we dared to reason why? What happened at Passchendaele was the appearance of the 'wearing-down conflict', the conflict of real attrition at its most amazing and ferocious. Paul Ham's Passchendaele: Requiem for Doomed Youth shows how standard men on both sides endured this constant state of siege, with an extremely real awareness that they were being gradually, intentionally, wiped out. The men never broke: they travelled over the top, when ordered, over and over and again. And if they fell deceased or wounded, they were casualties in the 'normal wastage', as the commanders referred to them, of attritional conflict. Only the soldier's friends at the front end recognized him as a guy, with thoughts and feelings. His family back home recognized him as a child, husband or brother, before he had enlisted. By the end of 1917 he was another type of creature: his encounters on the Western Forward were simply beyond their capabilities of comprehension. The audiobook explains to the storyplot of standard men in the hold of a politics and military electric power struggle that determined their destiny and has foreshadowed the destiny of the world for a century. Passchendaele lays down a robust challenge to the idea of conflict as an inevitable appearance of the man will, and examines the culpability of government authorities and military services commanders in a catastrophe that ruined the best part of a generation.

Category: Classics