[The following is in regards to a famous battle of the Great War, called the Third Battle of Ypres, also popularly known as the Battle of Passchendaele. It was characterized by a type of mud that made the fighting conditions some of the worst in the war.]
On 4 August a British battery commander, the future Lord Belhaven, wrote of “simply awful [mud], worse I think than winter. The ground is churned up to a depth of ten feet and is the consistency of porridge… the middle of the shell craters are so soft that one might sink out of sight… there must be hundreds of German dead buried here and now their own shells are re-ploughing the area and turning them up.”
Bonus:
Here are a couple of images that help to show what the conditions looked like in person:
Source:
Keegan, John. "The Breaking of Armies." The First World War. New York: A. Knopf :, 1999. 361. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Farndale, p. 204.
Further Reading:
Battle of Passchendaele / Third Battle of Ypres / Flandernschlacht / Deuxième Bataille des Flandres
I have read some horrific accounts of Passchendaele. Some of them talk about people trapped in craters filled with stagnant water, remnants of shell explosions and decomposing bodies. Most of the time they left them in there because they were either unable to retrieve them under fire, or fell in themselves trying to pull people out.
The result of this was listening to the cries of the people stuck in the craters when fighting stopped on a night. Unimaginable.