By the time Alfred H Mendes was sent to Ypres, Belgium in October 1917, the young rifleman had fought for over a year in the Great War.'The Ypres Salient was a marsh of mud and a killer of men. Walking from Poperinge to the Salient, an area in which countless men, the flower of Britain and Germany, lost their lives, an area into which countless shells plunged destroying whatever tree, plant, bush, or grass there was and left behind a moon-like desolation, many shell craters as traps for sucking in live men and drowning them,' he wrote inthe Autobiography of Alfred H Mendes, 1897-1991. Above, men carry a fellow soldier at Ypres sometime in 1915
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