Paschendale vs. Passchendaele

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IronDuke

Ancient Mariner
This has been bugging me since Dance of Death was released.
The song about the infamous WWI battle (aka 3rd Ypres) has been labeled "Paschendale", while every history book I've ever seen spells it as "Passchendaele".

To complicate things, the villiage on the site of the battle now goes by the name "Passendale".

Obviously, someone has goofed here. It is quite uncharacteristic of Maiden to do something like this.....

If there's a Belgian out there who can clear this up, I'd be in his/her debt.
 
I looked into this already, Mr. Duke. The British history books list the battlefield as Paschendale, as do the British reports (according to Dr Jean-Guy Lalande, PhD European History, StFX university). Adrian, who grew up in Britain, would have called it that.

As Canadians, we of course get the French spelling which was likely put into our books during Trudeaumania.
 
I've seen photocopies of contemporary accounts of the battle, most spell it "Passchendaele".

Let's just get over the entire subject and change the song name to "3rd Ypres"

...tell the world of 3rd Ypres

Not exactly the same ring to it, I guess.
 
So the people know the truth
Tell the world of Third Ypres


You're right.
 
It's just one of those things where people in different countries spell it different ways. It's probably due to the fact that Paschendale is in Belgium; you've got three major nations (of the old world, anyway), which all speak different languages, surrounding it. Kind of expected. Strange the way Maiden wrote about Paschendale instead of the Somme, which is the most documented battle of WWI. Maybe it had too few syllables [!--emo&:unsure:--][img src=\'style_emoticons/[#EMO_DIR#]/unsure.gif\' border=\'0\' style=\'vertical-align:middle\' alt=\'unsure.gif\' /][!--endemo--]
 
Raven said:
It's just one of those things where people in different countries spell it different ways. It's probably due to the fact that Paschendale is in Belgium; you've got three major nations (of the old world, anyway), which all speak different languages, surrounding it. Kind of expected. Strange the way Maiden wrote about Paschendale instead of the Somme, which is the most documented battle of WWI. Maybe it had too few syllables [!--emo&:unsure:--][img src=\'style_emoticons/[#EMO_DIR#]/unsure.gif\' border=\'0\' style=\'vertical-align:middle\' alt=\'unsure.gif\' /][!--endemo--]
Click to expand...

Maybe he could have said, "Tell the world of the Somme". If you hum the tune of, "Tell the world of Paschendale", you can just remove the 'of'' and use it as part of 'world'. Then, you can swap 'Paschendale' with 'of the Somme'.
 
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