Passchendaele. Say it out loud and it already sounds like an ending. Ask most people what they know about it and you’ll get the same handful of words back: mud, futility, generals who didn’t know when to stop. And there’s truth in that shorthand, but it undersells what the place actually was. This wasn’t ordinary mud.
Three years of shelling had pulverized the drainage system of that stretch of Flanders into nothing, and then the rain came and never really stopped, so the battlefield itself turned into something closer to a swamp built entirely out of shell craters, each one deep enough to drown a man in, and plenty of them did exactly that. Soldiers on both sides wrote about the smell more than almost anything else, the reek of gas and rot and turned earth that never left you even after you’d been pulled out of the line.
Duckboard tracks were the only dry ground for miles, single-file paths a few inches wide, and stepping off one in the dark, under fire, with sixty pounds of kit on your back, could be the last mistake you ever made. This was the ground six hundred men of the Edmonton Regiment’s 49th Battalion were ordered to cross, uphill, toward a village that had already been reduced to a smear of brick dust on a map.
This episode walks into that ground properly, the way Tim Cook and G.W.L. Nicholson walked into it, the way Lyn MacDonald walked into it when she sat down with the actual veterans decades later and just let them talk. At the center of it is a young 49th Battalion runner named Hughie John McDonald, whose job that October might have been the single worst assignment in the entire First World War, out of the relative shelter of a shell hole and back into the open, again and again, carrying messages across ground that killed men for the crime of standing up.
Along the way you’ll also meet Cecil Kinross, Henry Norwest, and Sergeant Chester Owen McGowan, another 49th Battalion runner whose own service file turned up its own quiet, hard-won story. And woven through it all, nineteen real voices: Canadian veterans recorded for CBC’s “In Flanders Fields” in January of 1965, most of them never named, all of them finally getting a little more of their due. Six hundred men of the 49th went forward that morning. A hundred and forty-five were still standing when the sun went down.
This is their ground, and their names, brought back one more time.
Where memory endures, valour lives on.
Want to hear more of Hughie John McDonald’s story? Check out my book, “The Endurance of Private Hughie John McDonald: A Runner’s Bravery in the Great War,” part of myGreat War Series, and go back to Episode 5 for the conversation with his grandson John McDonald.
Sources
Books – Lyn MacDonald, They Called It Passchendaele – Tim Cook, Shock Troops – G.W.L. Nicholson, Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War: Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1919 – Samantha McCrea, The Endurance of Private Hughie John McDonald: A Runner’s Bravery in the Great War (Great War Series, October 2025)
Archival records – CEF personnel file, Pte. Hughie John McDonald, Reg. No. 812200 (service record and pay ledger) – CEF personnel file, Sgt. Chester Owen McGowan, Reg. No. 101605 (service record, medical examination form, and casualty/promotion ledger card) – London Gazette, Victoria Cross citation for Cecil John Kinross – “The Forty-Niner” — 49th Battalion (Edmonton Regiment) honours and awards history
Audio – CBC, “In Flanders Fields,” episode 10, broadcast January 17, 1965 (19 clips used throughout this episode)
Institutional sources – Veterans Affairs Canada – Canadian War Museum – Vimy Foundation – Loyal Edmonton Regiment Museum, “Billy’s Own” regimental history pages
