It was a lesson hard-learned in the mud and blood of Flanders: How thousands of lives can be thrown away for nothing. But now, more than 100 years later, horror scenes that echo one of the First World War's bloodiest battles are once again playing out on European soil. Vladimir is pouring Russian troops into the maw of Ukrainian machine-guns in the town of Bakhmut, with troops charging across a muddy hell-scape pock-marked with shell holes and strewn with the corpses of their own comrades, under the wail of artillery fire and into 's trenches.It is hauntingly reminiscent of The Battle of Passchendaele, when in 1917 Allied troops were forced to fight the Germans in mud sometimes chest deep, slogging uphill for four months under withering fire at a loss of almost 300,000 men, only to cede it back the following year without firing a shot.
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