1918 The last act, Barrie Pitt

At the moment of midnight, December 31st, 1917, a group of young officers stood in a camp overlooking the Ypres battlefiel. Snow mantled the ground, covering the ugly detritus of war, but as one of the young officers, the poet Edmund Blunden, was to write: "... the sole answer to unspoken but importunate questions was the line of lights in the same relation to Flanders as at midnight a year before. All agreed that 1917 had been a sad offender. All observed that 1918 did not look promising at its birth". Yet 1918 not only held promise; it was to see the end of the war which in its first three years of carnage had enervated the souls of those nations which had so confidently begun it.