The Battles of French Flanders

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.

With military historian Norm Christie as our guide, we explore the battlefields, cemeteries and monuments of the First World War. The men who fought tell their stories, and we discover how the naive, amateur soldiers of 1914 became, by 1918, perhaps the most feared, efficient and deadly Allied fighting machine on the Western Front: the "Canadian Corps."
FOR KING AND EMPIRE tells the stories of ordinary Canadians who fought extraordinary battles during the First World War. Six episodes represent a turning point in the Great War: Ypres, the Somme, Vimy, Passchendaele, the Battles of the Last Hundred Days, and the Legacy of the War.