In the summer of 1917, young men from cities and towns and villages across Britain and its massive empire found themselves waiting, as soldiers I want to do, in trenches around the city of Iperra in Belgium. There was a massive attack in the offing, and these young men would fight

and many would die as soldiers are wont to do. Some carried postcards from home, pictures of loved

ones, a small cake baked by a mother or sister.

The men joked with one another, they lit cigarettes in the drizzle, they sure tried not to think about

what the next whistle would mean.

The battle that followed was the third battle of EPR.

We call it Passiondale today.

It opened on the morning of the 31st of July 1917,

when British and Imperial forces, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and others,

with support from the French, attacked the German army.

The main assault went in after about two weeks of bombardment.

More than four million shells were fired.

It's very difficult for me to describe the landscape that they advanced over.

It's hard sometimes to even call it land escape. Even before the hundreds and thousands of tons of explosives that had been poured onto that

ground that summer, that terrain was smashed. It was devastated. It was dead.

The landscape in that part of Belgium has always been a liminal space on the edge of Europe.

For centuries, the sea and the land have battled for supremacy

and fought themselves to a kind of swampy's tailmate.

In more recent centuries, clever human engineers had drained it,

but what human hands can build

and dig out, they can certainly destroy. In 1914, in 1915 and 16, explosives, shovels,

and the boots of millions of men and undone the work of those drainage engineers. Ditches were

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