ITV - Great Battles of the Great War (1999) Part 3 Ypres The Salient

For four years, from 1914 to 1918, World War I raged across Europe's western and eastern fronts after assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria ignited the war. Along the 1915 Gallipoli campaign, the savage combat on the Western Front in France and Belgium came to define modern warfare. The Western Front evokes images of mud-spattered men in waterlogged trenches, shielded from artillery blasts and machine-gun fire by a few feet of dirt. This iconic setting was the most critical arena of the Great War, a 400-mile combat zone stretching from Belgium to Switzerland where more than three million Allied and German soldiers struggled during four years of almost continuous combat. It has persisted in our collective memory as a tragic waste of human life and a symbol of the horrors of industrialized warfare. The great set-piece battles of the World War One - Gallipoli, the Somme and Messines/Passchendaele - are explored in this landmark series which combines unique archive footage with carefully researched location photography, transporting the viewer back to the exact spot where so many momentous events occurred.

Part 3 Ypres The Salient

In 1917 this Belgian city was to become infamous as the centre of the greatest killing ground of the entire war. Here, in a sea of freezing mud, poisonous gas, a constant rain of high explosive and hail of machine gun fire brought hideous carnage as General Haig gambled his army in an attempt to take the high ground of Passchendaele Ridge. Straddling the French-Belgian border, the flat, wet and muddy landscape surrounding the small Belgian city of Ypres was the scene of three great battles between 1914 and 1917. It culminated in the final battle known as 'Passchendaele' - in a blood-letting that matched The Somme in desperation and losses. But while the rolling, intimate landscape of The Somme makes it easy to recognise features that would have been familiar to the troops, it's not hard to see why the men who fought over the featureless landscape of Flanders often drowned in a sea of mud. Of the million British soldiers who died in the Great War, most of them died here. Ypres became synonymous with killing on a grand scale and became a place of special dread for all who were sent there.

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