Lucifer's Gate

Sidney Allinson is Canadian news correspondent for Britain’s The Army
Quarterly and Defence. He is the author of The Bantams: The Untold Story
of World War I, Jeremy Kane, and Kruger’s Gold: A Novel of the
Anglo-Boer War.

Ten miles west of Ypres, Belgium, lies the town of Poperinghe, which was
a major troop concentration centre for British Empire forces during
World War I. To reach it and the deadly front line just beyond, hundreds
of thousands of soldiers passed through the portal of Ypres’ battered
city ramparts.

Whence derives the title Lucifer’s Gate, the third novel in David
Clark’s Canadian Army trilogy. The book starts with a supernatural
encounter between Canadian soldiers in 1944 and an apparition dressed in
a mud-caked uniform of the Great War, 25 years before. The ghostly
figure shows the way to rescue a badly wounded casualty, and simply
disappears. Then we get into the story that follows typical Canadian
soldiers who fought and died in the costly battle of Passchendaele
during 1917.

Clark has certainly done his homework, ably describing the hideous
conditions of trench warfare—the squalor, shellfire, rain, mud, and
endless human suffering. He voices the obligatory disdain for British
generals and politicians, and creates long conversations between
familiar historical figures to illustrate their blundering conduct of
the war. But so far as the fictional story is concerned, it is not until
page 45 that we get to meet the novel’s central protagonist, only to
have him leave the story again for a few more chapters. He is vaguely
described and lacks any personality development, so that he and other
lead characters tend to become blurred with each other. Each takes
second place throughout to the factual narrative, which is the book’s
main strength. The contrast between the two themes is all the more
emphasized by the novel’s Twilight Zone-like ending.