A Storm in Flanders

by Winston Groom

"The Ypres Salient in Belgian Flanders was the most notorious and dreaded place in all of World War I - probably of any war in history. It was said that you could smell the battlefield miles before you reached it - a fetid odor of death. It was where the poppies grew in Flanders Fields while a million men lived like animals in slimy underground trenches and from 1914 to 1918 slaughtered one another with such consistency that even on "quiet days" casualties ran into the thousands.". "A Storm in Flanders is historian Winston Groom's history of the four-year battle for Ypres. As the engagement degenerated into relentless attrition, the salient became a gigantic corpse factory where hundreds of thousands of men - including Americans - died for gains that were measured in mere yards. To break the stalemate, the high commands on both sides over the years debuted and refined some of history's most terrifying weapons and tactics: poison gas, flamethrowers, tanks, stupendous underground mines,