Fresh off the boat, Canada's amateur soldiers march straight to the most dangerous sector on the Western Front: the "bulge" in the Allied line around the Belgian city of Ypres. Germany launches the first mass poison gas attack in history.

On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 60,000 British soldiers fall before Canadian troops are ordered in. Tanks are used in battle for the first time.

On Easter Monday, Canadians sweep to victory in a brilliantly planned attack on Germany's formidable fortress on Vimy Ridge. Their reputation as elite troops is confirmed, but at the cost of 21,000 dead, wounded and missing.

n midsummer, British commander Sir Douglas Haig launches a disastrous three-month offensive from the city of Ypres, resulting in a quarter of a million of his soldiers killed, wounded, or drowned in mud. To turn a failure into a "great victory," he orders the Canadians to take the ridge and village of Passchendaele.

A great German offensive in France and Belgium In the spring of 1918 puts an Allied victory at risk. In August, the Allies strike back, spearheaded by the Canadian Corps, which wins seemingly impossible victories at Arras, the Canal du Nord, and Cambrai, driving the Germans out of France over a period of 100 days.

In the 1920s along the old Western Front, men turn to the gruesome task of exhuming and reburying hundreds of thousands of bodies. While Canadians argue over the cost of memorials to their soldiers, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis plunge the world back into war. Many of the men who fought the First World War live to see their sons die in the Second.