Paul Gross's film Passchendaele opened this weekend, but when the 90th anniversary of the battle was marked in 2007, Canada had a limited presence at the ceremonies -- especially compared to the attention lavished on Vimy several months earlier.

The Globe and Mail's Doug Saunders offered this perspective on Passchendaele -- to me, a synonym for "senseless slaughter;"  Canada would suffer 16,000 casualties -- in a July 12, 2007 article:

"When countries make monuments to battles, they don't put them in the places where the best fighting was done or the most people died - they usually pick the ones that can offer inspiring lessons for the wars being fought today," said Franky Bostyn, curator of the Belgian-run Passchendaele museum, which contains reproductions of the battle's putrid dugouts and trenches.

The Passchendaele victory is considered by many to be Canada's bravest and most skillful military success, and also the country's most tragic. It won Canadians the largest number of Victoria Crosses for bravery and established a reputation for the Canadian corps as the toughest and most successful storm troopers in the war.

Vimy Ridge has long been used as a propaganda point by Canadian governments, just as the largest and more bloody Canadian role in Passchendaele, Arleux, Fresnoy, and Hill 70 have been played down. Vimy is the site of a park and a Canadian-funded monument that serves as a shrine to Canadian sacrifice.

Historians point out that there is a clear reason for this: Vimy offers the lesson that military sacrifice is worth it in the end. Passchendaele offers another, potentially relevant lesson: that military endeavours are enormously wasteful if they serve no greater end.

"I think that the lesson of Passchendaele is that when you enter a war, there have to be clear objectives - and in the heat of fighting, when you are losing many lives, it is very dangerous to lose sight of those objectives." Mr. Bostyn said. "It's a lesson that's being forgotten in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Less than a year after the Passchendaele victory, in which about 5,000 Canadians died, the hill was surrendered without a fight to the Germans, the British leaders having realized it had no strategic value.

"I think it's important that Canada has a presence here. We had a presence on the battle field 90 years ago. It's the low point; it doesn't get any worse than this - this is the bog of mud and bodies. It's hard to imagine 16,000 casualties to capture a tiny target," said Tim Cook, the National War Museum historian who designed the interpretive display.

"Within the context of the war, this is what the Canadians were called upon to do; this is what they did. It tempered Canada - we went through something terrible and we came out the other side. It nearly ruined us and it caused crises that lasted for decades. But in its own way, as much as Vimy, it shaped us as a nation."

If you get a chance, go to the National War Museum in Ottawa and check out the Passchedaele exhibit. Many Canadian soldiers simply drowned in the mud if they slipped off the boardwalks in the trenches. The vista one sees is a flat, muddy, utterly devastated wasteland.

I found this on a web page:

I died in Hell
(they called it Passchendaele) my wound was slight
and I was hobbling back; and then a shell
burst slick upon the duckboards; so I fell
into the bottomless mud, and lost the light

... Siegfried Sassoon

Here's a Wikipedia entry on Passchendaele, and the DFAIT page.