WORLD WAR ONE IN PICTURES

Artillery on both sides pounded the frontline, creating the crater-strewn no-man's land that stretched between the trenches.

When the wind was blowing in the right direction both sides would let off gas canisters, sending a pungent and potentially fatal cloud over the opposing side's line. While many men died an agonising death, many more were left permanently maimed by chemical attacks.

Rudimentary gas masks were quickly issued to the Tommies in the front line and a bell was quickly rung at the first whiff of a chemical attack.

A British soldier fixes his bayonet as he waits for the whistle which will send him over the top into no-man's land.

Hundreds of thousands of British soldiers perished in no-man's land, ensnared in barbed wire, blown asunder by shells or simply mown down by the raking machine guns mounted on their enemy's trench.

Exhausted soldiers, happy to have survived another risky attack, mark the territory they have wrested from the Germans' grasp. 

Women attend the graves of the war dead as row upon row of crosses stretch in every direction.

Fallen comrades are laid out before burial.

Fallen British soldiers are laid to rest in a mass grave.

A war cemetery in France today.