The Wet Flanders Plain

<p><i>The Wet Flanders Plain </i>was first published in 1929 - also the year of, inter alia, Remarque''s <i>All Quiet on the Western Front</i>, Graves''s <i>Goodbye to All That</i>, and Hemingway''s <i>A Farewell to Arms</i>. Henry Williamson''s book stands alongside those works as a classic of the Great War.<br> 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.<br> ''<i>The Wet Flanders Plain</i> emerges from the mass of War books as the most beautiful and the most terrible.'' <i>Outlook</i></p>