How an absolute phrase with a passive perfect participle works

IN last week’s column, I did a quick review of the participle and absolute phrase to lay the groundwork for answering this admittedly knotty question: How does an absolute phrase using a passive perfect participle work to modify a sentence?

This question was asked by Baklis, a member of Jose Carillo’s English Forum, after he came across this sentence in my 2005 book English Plain and Simple: “The three-week war having been won with a terrible loss of lives, the victors entered the vanquished national capital with a sense of unease.” Here, I classified the modifying phrase “the three-week war having been won with a terrible loss of lives” as an absolute phrase using a passive perfect participle.