As the land of the Great War has been reclaimed for housing, industry, and agriculture in the hundred or so years since the War ended, there's very little of the battlefields left for us to see. One exception to this, however, is in the area around the small village of Messines, to the south of Ypres.
The fields are dotted with peaceful fishing lakes, which belie the ferocity in which they came into creation. The Messines offensive in 1917 was arguably the most significant British military success of the Great War until the fighting at Cambrai. 950,000lbs of explosives detonated, killing over 10,000 German soldiers and changing the geography of this part of Flanders forever.
Many of these mines were down to the work of one man and the 250th Tunnelling Company. Major Cecil Cropper was a force of nature whose iron will and determination helped produce the most enormous manmade explosion ever seen until the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. We hear about the challenges of digging in Flanders, and possibly the most remarkable story of survival of the whole of WW1,
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