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It is now almost 98 years to the day since the stubborn intransigence of an English field marshal and the vacillating weakness of a British prime minister sent two members of my family to their deaths and a third to hospital with serious wounds.
While the jury is still out on whether their sacrifices contributed to Germany's eventual defeat, the effect on three Australian households was terrible and immediate.
In Toowoomba Annie [aka Beatrice Pascoe], the wife of Private John May Pascoe, became an instant widow when her husband was killed during the attack on Polygon Wood on September 26, 1917.
John's death, at 45, left six children under the age of 16 without a father.
At Woodstock, near Cowra, Jane Goodacre lost her only son, Albert, on October 6, 1917. The 20-year-old, who had needed written permission from his father to enlist, was mortally wounded during the Battle of Broodseinde on October 4, 1917. He took another two days to die.
Ernest Pascoe, 38, was John Pascoe's brother. He fought alongside his sibling and best mate at Polygon Wood and was badly shot up the same day John was killed. Ernest, also a father of six children under 16, was married to Minnie Pascoe and lived in Chinchilla, Queensland.
Both Pascoe men were farmers. Albert Goodacre would have been one if he had made it home.
Polygon Wood and Broodseinde were part of the war within a war fought by two opposing armies of almost 1 million men each the historians call Third Ypres or Passchendaele.
The field marshal who had connived for years to stage a Ragnarok among the Flanders poppy fields was court favourite, Sir Douglas Haig; the British commander-in-chief.
The prime minister who should have stopped it but wouldn't or couldn't was David Lloyd George.
Both Haig and Lloyd George had achieved greatness by white anting better men and both put more effort into avoiding a similar fate than they did into their "day jobs".
Going by their actions, the pair regarded John, Ernest and Albert, and millions of others, as nothing more than history's blunt instruments; spear carriers whose role was to kill and be killed while perpetuating the myth their leaders were infallible.
While Haig and Lloyd George's better informed and more compassionate contemporaries, including Winston Churchill and Charles Bean, stopped short of describing the loss of almost 500,000 men from both sides at Third Ypres as a waste, possibly out of respect for the families, later generations did not.
The battle was, in the words of historian A. J. P. Taylor, "the blindest slaughter of a blind war". He said it was fought in near impossible conditions and that the Allied gains were soon sacrificed to "shorten the line" when the Germans launched their offensive in 1918.
"Haig bore the greatest responsibility," Taylor concluded. "[But] some of the Flanders mud sticks to Lloyd George, the man who lacked the supreme authority to forbid the battle."
The British prime minister, who ultimately brought the carnage to an end by denying Haig the reinforcements he needed to stay in the field, also judged it a failure.
"During the whole battle we recovered less ground, we took fewer prisoners, we captured fewer guns [about one quarter] than we did in the despised Nivelle offensive, and that with nearly three times the casualties we sustained in that operation, which was always alluded to by the [General] Staff as a failure," Lloyd George said.
"So much for the bovine and brutal game of attrition on the Western Front."
Leon Wolff, writing in In Flanders Fields, noted this uncharacteristic honesty did not go down well.
"[Lloyd George] came quite close to saying publicly that the British Army was incompetently led and that the Third Battle of Ypres had been a needless bloodbath ... nor was it much solace for those back home who had lost their young men in Flanders," Wolff wrote.
It was an obvious and self-serving attempt by the Welshman to shift the blame for a campaign he had initially supported onto Haig's shoulders alone.
Joan Beaumont, in Broken Nation, comes close to concurring with Lloyd George and another writer, J. P. Harris, who said: "Haig had done proportionately very much more damage to his own army than to the Germans."
"On balance, it seems that the situation for the Allies was less favourable at the end of Third Ypres than it had been at the beginning of 1917," Beaumont wrote.
These high falutin' strategic considerations would have been well beyond the ken of John and Ernest Pascoe and the Goodacre boy when they made their way north past the Menin Gate's shattered lions to the front line in September and October 98 years ago.
They would have been preoccupied with wading through waist-deep mud to confront barbed wire, machinegun nests, German pill boxes and the ever-present danger of poison gas.
All three were in 1 Anzac and their presence in the same corps and in the same place represented a remarkable reunion that brought the curtain down on an intergenerational family drama that had begun when one Pascoe brother cleared off with another Pascoe brother's wife more than 30 years before.
That story begins with Mark Wills Pascoe, the first of my line to emigrate from Cornwall, who arrived here in 1858 with his wife, Johanna. They prospered and, by the late 1870s, owned a farm, a flour mill and a sawmill at Neville near Blayney. Along the way they'd had heaps of babies, Mark had inadvertently killed his 14-year-old son with a bullock whip, he'd dabbled in politics and they had helped found and build the local Methodist church.
In 1878 Mark sponsored his mother, Jane Pascoe, who at 69 is believed to have been the oldest person to emigrate in that period, and various siblings, their spouses and children to come out from Cornwall. More than 30 people arrived on five separate ships in the space of 18 months from 1877 to 1879.
Despite the best of intentions it all went to hell in a handcart. Mark's relationship with Johanna went south, at least in part because her firstborn son had died at his father's hand, coupled with the fact Mark may have been paying a bit too much attention to his pretty young sister-in-law, Mary.
Within the space of a few years Mark and Johanna had separated. He sold everything up and headed north with Mary, his youngest brother, Charles', wife, and her young sons. Mary was 16 years younger than Mark and 18 years younger than Johanna. Mark's children, who were mostly full grown, remained in Neville with their mother.
Mark and Mary finally settled in Toowoomba where they married, apparently bigamously as Mary's husband, Charles, was still alive, in 1903.
Two of Mary's and Charles' sons, John May Pascoe and Ernest Pascoe, stayed with them until Mark's death in 1908 and Mary's in 1909.
John and Ernest, both with six children under 16, went on to enlist in the AIF, joining the 31st Battalion in 1915 and 1916. It was this decision that brought them to Polygon Wood on September 26, 1917.
At the time of the battle John was with the 5th Australian Division, 8th Infantry Brigade, 6 reinforcements/31st Battalion.
This was part of 1 Anzac, then a unit of the British Fifth Army.
Ernest was also in the 8th Infantry Brigade but with 9 reinforcements/31st Battalion.
Another member of 1 Anzac on the Ypres Salient was 20-year-old Albert Goodacre. His mother, Jane Pascoe, was the daughter of Mark and Johanna Pascoe.
Jane was John and Ernest's first cousin. Albert would have been their second cousin.
Albert, according to the World War One nominal roll, fought at Third Ypres as part of the 1st Australian Division, 1st Infantry Brigade, 1st Battalion. He is listed as being with the 53rd Battalion on his Australian Army records however.
It's weird to think they could have walked past each other and never realised the connection. While it may seem a queer twist of fate a family torn apart by a love triangle four decades earlier was reunited in death and suffering on the same battlefield in France, it is quite likely many such coincidences occurred.
Third Ypres remains one of the most significant military engagements in Australian history for reasons other than the fact that while not an outright defeat, it was far from a victory.
This battle marked the first time 1 and 2 Anzac Corps had fought side by side on the same battlefield. There had never been so many Australian soldiers, at least 60,000 given there were four divisions of Australian infantry plus their artillery, in the once place before.
The action also exceeded anything that had gone before, including Gallipoli, in terms of its intensity, the conditions under which the men fought and overall casualties.
Australian war photographer Frank Hurley, who advanced with the Diggers on the Western Front, wrote this vivid description: "Another shell killed four and I saw them die, frightfully mutilated, in the deep slime of a shell crater ... The battlefield was littered with bits of men, our own and Boche, and literally drenched with blood ..."
There were 38,000 Australian casualties in Flanders in just eight weeks (18,000 killed or missing) compared to about 26,600 (8141 killed or missing) over eight months at Gallipoli.
There would have been few families in Australia who were not represented by a father, son, brother, uncle or cousin at this three-month long war within a war in south-western Belgium.
The waste of life was staggering. Thirty-five Australians died for every metre of ground the Diggers seized from the enemy.
For decades to come all you had to do to explain the loss of a loved one was to utter a single world: Ypres, a universe of pain and heartbreak in four consonants and a single vowel.