So what could have been done? There were new forms of attack. Gas worked immediately, but only at the surprise stage. Underground explosions had some effect in certain sectors. The development of tanks and planes was going to work in the end, but took years. Treating the whole thing as a massive siege to starve the enemy out had seemed promising and U-boats were the best shot at that, but it was U-boats that brought the USA into the war. Open a new front as Winston Churchill insisted? The Dardanelles campaign looked good on the world map, but pretty silly on the smaller scale as it landed troops at the bottom of cliffs with no water supply. It is still arguable that it might have worked with more experienced troops and better leadership, which is what it never had. I'd like to think that I would have perceived that defence was feasible and defended pending technological developments, but the generals did not think this was an option in terms of morale.

By the road just outside Ypres is yet another cemetry where once stood the field hospital where John McCrae wrote the poem, "In Flanders Fields". This, of course, unlike the bitter brilliance of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen later in the war, was not an anti-war poem at all. It urges men to take up the baton and see the thing through to the end in the name of the fallen. Which they did — surely the only real option. Incidentally, I have believed for decades that it begins, "In Flanders fields the poppies grow . . . ", but actually it is blow, not grow.