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It was exactly 100 years ago that Canadian forces were fighting the final weeks of the Battle of Passchendaele.

It is an easy contender for the single most horrifying mass experience that Canadians have ever undertaken. Even in a war beset with horrors, Passchendaele still occupied an especially nightmarish place in the minds of those who were there.

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Below, photos from an event whose trauma never fully subsided from the Canadian psyche.

Photo by W.O.H. Dodds World War One Photographs/University of Victoria Libraries

It’s disputed whether a British officer truly glimpsed the aftermath of Passchendaele and exclaimed “good God, did we really send men to fight in that?” Nevertheless, the battle is one of the war’s clearest examples of generals sitting in a chateau and moving lines on a map, indifferent to the conditions on the ground. “Let the Germans have it—keep it—rot in it! … It isn’t worth a drop of blood!” said Canadian Corps commander Arthur Currie when told that his soldiers would be next for the Passchendaele meat grinder. Thousands of dead Canadians later, and British Expeditionary Force commander Sir Douglas Haig would whine that the gains of the battle “fell short of what I had wanted to secure before the winter.”