No conflict of the Great War excites stronger emotions than the war in Flanders in the autumn of 1917, and no name better encapsulates the horror and apparent futility of the Western Front than 'Passchendaele'. By its end there had been 275,000 Allied and 200,000 German casualties. Yet the territorial gains made in four desperate months were won back by Germany in only three days the following March.

The devastation at Passchendaele, the authors argue, was neither inevitable nor inescapable; nor perhaps was it necessary at all. Using a substantial archive of official private records, much of which has never been previously consulted or exploited for a work of this kind, Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson provide the fullest account of the campaign yet published.

The book examines the political dimension at a level which has hitherto been absent from accounts of 'Third Ypres'. It establishes what did occur, the options for alternative action, and the fundamental responsibility for the carnage. Prior and Wilson consider the shifting ambitions and stratagems of the high command, examine the logistics of war, and assess what the available manpower, weaponry, technology and intelligence could realistically have hoped to achieve.

Most powerfully of all, they explore the experience of the men on the ground in the light - whether they knew it or not - of what was never going to be accomplished.