Total war
The death toll is still difficult to comprehend: an estimated eight million soldiers were killed and millions more were maimed, in a war that transformed the way nations fought each other.

The mother of invention
It seems absurd in hindsight but, in mid-1914, military experts expected the major offensives of World War I to be led by cavalry charges. They could not have been more wrong. By the winter of 1914, a continuous line of trenches ran 450 miles from the Belgian coast to Switzerland. Moreover, this line didn't substantially shift until the summer of 1918.

1914: The War Revolution examines how the nature of conflict changed on the Western Front, largely as a result of technological advances such as the machine gun, barbed wire and tinned food.

Far-flung field
Nearly a million British and Commonwealth soldiers were killed in World War I. Almost 300,000 have no known grave. Professor Margaret Cox is determined to make a difference. Using modern forensic techniques, she helps the Ministry of Defence identify some of the dead.

In a UKTV History premiere, Body Hunt - The Search for the Unknown Soldier, we follow Professor Cox's team as they focus on a car factory near Arras. The investigators uncover a mass grave containing 20 skeletons apparently buried arm-in-arm. If these soldiers can be identified, their relatives will be informed and the soldiers honoured with a military funeral - almost a century after their ultimate sacrifice.

Never forgotten
Tragically, the killing didn't stop in 1918. The 20th century was the bloodiest mankind has known. Millions died in scores of conflicts, leaving behind millions of grieving loved ones.

War Grave is harrowing but utterly compelling. People who have lost someone close to them in the major conflicts since 1914 stand next to their graves and share their stories. Letters, diaries, old photos, music and even favourite films help to build up a picture of the lives so cruelly cut down by war.

Doomed invasion
When the Allies landed on the Gallipoli peninsula in 1915, the Turks were waiting. The disastrous campaign led to 250,000 Allied casualties and the man in charge almost lost his job. That man was Winston Churchill.

Gallipoli - The First D-Day recalls the horrors of an invasion doomed from the start, as descendents of the soldiers tell their shocking stories of military incompetence and stubborn heroism. Twenty-nine years later, Churchill remembered Gallipoli when planning D-Day. The result was a spectacular success but the lessons had been learned the hard way.

The King's business
Britain entered the First World War on August 4, amid a huge wave of patriotic fervour. Young men enlisted in droves, eager to take the King's shilling. The concept of a muddy, bloody death in the trenches had not yet been born.

In 1914 - Killing Fields, part of the fascinating People's Century series, survivors of the trenches tell how the optimism turned to squalor, death and horror.