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