The Wet Flanders Plain

The Wet Flanders Plain was first published in 1929 – also the year of, inter alia, Remarque's

All Quiet on the Western Front, Graves's

Goodbye to All That, and Hemingway's

A Farewell to Arms. Henry Williamson's book stands alongside those works as a classic of the Great War.

In 1928 Williamson revisited the battlefields of Flanders and Northern France in the company of a fellow veteran. He wanted to 'return to my old comrades… to the brown, the treeless, the flat and grave-set plain of Flanders – to the rolling, heat-miraged downlands of the Somme – for I am dead with them, and they live in me again.' He hoped to rid himself of the 'wraiths' of the war. Whether or not he succeeded, he produced an unforgettable testament.

'

The Wet Flanders Plain emerges from the mass of War books as the most beautiful and the most terrible.'

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