The first to be uncomfortable with these 1917 battles was our war correspondent and later official historian, C.E.W. Bean. Poor Bean – he has come to be blamed for so much in the memory and historiography of World War I. In 1917, he was heavily burdened: not just a war correspondent, he was involved in collecting the documentation of Australia’s war experience in London and in many other activities as well. He just could not focus on these battles. Soon after they were fought, when he could pay them some attention, he didn’t like what he saw. In particular, what he saw was the overwhelming application of technology to battle. At Messines, the major part of the victory was won when a series of gigantic mines were exploded under the German front line; in an instant, their defences were destroyed. For the September battles, enormous amounts of artillery had to be employed. For example, at Menin Road (September 20), three and a half million shells were used in the bombardment, for an advance of just 1,250 metres. At Polygon Wood (September 26) and Broodseinde (October 6), similarly prodigious number of shells were involved for comparable distances gained. At this rate it would be a long road to Berlin.

The German defences being assailed were formidable. In the Ypres Salient, the Germans had not only built linier defences; they had also scattered hundreds of concreted pillboxes housing machine gunners or artillery pieces, or both. To give the infantry a decent chance of getting forward, whole areas rather than just lines had to be bombarded – hence the prodigious amount of shells used. Bean realised this, as Haultain-Gall makes clear. (He could have been clearer about the type of defences attacked – the strongest ever encountered by Australian troops, stronger even than those of the Hindenburg Line, overcome by the Australian Corps in 1918.) Bean thought this type of warfare too mechanical for his taste, and found little scope for the tales of heroism and the ‘unique’ form of Australian individualism that litter other volumes of his history. The author notes that Bean’s antipathy to these battles carried over into his twelve-volume Official History (1921–43), where Messines gets a miserly 100 pages and Passchendaele a skimpy 265. This may be compared with the much smaller Gallipoli campaign, which receives nigh on 1,000 pages, or the brief Battle of Pozières, which has more than 400. Bean could not write these battles out of the Official History, but he could certainly write them down.

There was a postwar attempt to rehabilitate the Flanders Battles. Haultain-Gall has a particularly interesting chapter on the Australia-wide tour of Will Longstaff’s painting The Menin Gate at Midnight. As the author demonstrates, the pictorial attempt misfired. The Menin Gate depicted was an Imperial memorial that commemorated all soldiers who fought in the Salient (British, Canadian, Indian, New Zealand, as well as Australian). The ghostly figures around the gate are actually British ghosts, and the inscription on the gate reads in part ‘Here Stood the Armies of the British Empire 1914–1918’. The viewing public was on to this; while many were moved by the painting, few thought it depicted a particularly Australian war theme. Certainly, it never brought the Flanders experience into the mainstream of Australian commemoration of World War I.

In other chapters, the author shows how in the interwar years Passchendaele faded further in Australian memory. Few visited Flanders; the author contends, tellingly, that if it was remembered at all, it was as the nadir of the war.

And so it has continued to this day. Haultain-Gall is particularly good on the awkward place Passchendaele still holds in memory of the Great War. It lacks the dash and glamour of the Gallipoli Peninsula, it was not our first experience of the Western Front, and it did not involve the notable actions of 1918 where we can tell ourselves that we saved the day almost single-handedly when the Germans attacked in March and April, and how we triumphed, again almost single-handedly, when General Monash won the war at the Battles of Amiens and at the Hindenburg Line. One of the explanations of this is certainly the mechanical nature of the 1917 battles. The other, advanced by Haultain-Gall, is the enormous casualties in Flanders (almost 40,000) for the small amount of ground gained. Another, I suspect, is that neither Corps Commander of Australian troops (Birdwood and Godley) had any great recognition factor with the Australian public, except for Birdwood when he was at Gallipoli. Perhaps another reason was the lack of a palpable British villain to condemn. General Plumer, who commanded the Second Army, of which the Australians were a part, actually worked out a way of at least subduing those formidable German defences in the Ypres Salient. Certainly, he went on with the battle for too long, and the last two Australian actions (Poelcapelle and the First Battle of Passchendaele) were conducted in frightful conditions of mud and slime for which the entire battle is remembered, but this makes him an ambiguous character rather than an out-and-out villain. In any case, Haig is always available to attach blame for these last two actions.

These days, as Haultain-Gall remarks, visiting the scene of the Flanders battles is still not on the regular Australian pilgrimage trail. Amiens and the Somme can be encompassed in a day-trip from Paris. Ypres, though, is easier to reach from London. That is perhaps why the ceremony under the Menin Gate each night remains a British rather than an Australian ritual (though on the ninetieth anniversary of Passchendaele, this Australian at least was selected to lay the wreath).

This book is a significant addition to any Great War library. Matthew Haultain-Gall makes his case with detailed research and a clear writing style. The illustrations are well chosen and well captioned. If Passchendaele is to return to Australian collective memory of World War I, it will perhaps be because of a Belgian academic.