The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris

Author:Lindsey Fitzharris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

* * *

It was the autumn of 1917, and there was still no end to the war in sight. Territory was lost, won, and lost again in a deadly tug-of-war. The world’s most powerful armies burrowed deeper and deeper into the earth. Both sides became more efficient at maiming and killing one another. Artillery shells were hollowed out and filled with hundreds of small steel or lead balls. Designed to detonate over the trenches, these shells wrought havoc on the bodies and faces of soldiers whose protective gear was still found wanting.

One victim of this type of shelling was twenty-two-year-old Sidney Beldam, who was seriously injured during the Third Battle of Ypres—better known as the Battle of Passchendaele, after a nearby village that bore witness to the final stages of fighting. After three months, one week, and three days of brutal trench warfare, the Allies finally recaptured the village, but at a terrible cost to human life.

In time, the name “Passchendaele” would come to evoke horrific memories in those who had been there. The Canadian doctor Frederick W. Noyes, who had also been at the Battle of the Somme, described Passchendaele as “the Somme multiplied and intensified ten times over.” It was not only one of the bloodiest battles of the war, it was also one of the muddiest. Rain hammered down on the armies for nearly three months while the fighting raged. The battlefield, pockmarked by some four million bombs and shells that had been deployed during the preliminary barrage, quickly became flooded. One soldier wrote of Passchendaele that “[t]he whole earth is ploughed by the exploding shells and the holes are filled with water, and if you do not get killed by the shells you may drown in the craters.”

Horses, mules, guns, and other equipment sank into deep pockets of mud. Men became trapped where they stood, unable to move or escape—making them easy targets for machine gunners. Others simply drowned. Edwin Campion Vaughan remembered hearing “the groans and wails of wounded men” who had crawled into shell holes seeking refuge, only to realize that these chasms were slowly filling with rainwater. “[T]he water was rising about them and, powerless to move, they were slowly drowning,” he recalled with horror. The next morning, he saw water pouring out over the craters’ edges, which accounted for the silencing of the men’s cries.

Beldam found himself in the midst of this hellish landscape in November 1917. Like so many others, he soon became a casualty. A piece of shrapnel hurtled toward him, slicing through the right side of his face and tearing off a large portion of his nose. Beldam toppled face-first into the mud, and though he may not have felt lucky in that moment, he likely would have choked on his own blood had he fallen onto his back. There he remained for three days, as rats and other vermin scurried over him to nest in the corpses of his comrades—a common sight on the waterlogged battlefield. One soldier

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.