Hoggart building tribute unit the army IMDB movie about thresholds group classes; -home sessions; phone tips; safety tips; trainer etiquette; products and tools you should be aware of, and MUCH more. Shop here. Employment Opportunities Employment Wanted Please submit job openings via our Employment section. Listings are currently free. Ads are posted the Members Area of the APDT website. They are weary, frightened, bogged down to their knees and the middle of the worst place on earth seven men trying to drag a wounded comrade to safety. This historic photograph has come to epitomise the ghastliness of World War I. Today, a huge copy of it hangs above the Imperial War Museum's dramatic new display of life the trenches. Here we see the sheer nothingness of a landscape devoid of any features, any shelter or, indeed, any life. This was a quagmire which one wrong step could prove as fatal as a bullet. Many died falling into stinking, bottomless craters filled with mud and from which it was impossible to escape. Yet we are not looking at the aftermath of a terrible battle. These were the conditions Flanders exactly a hundred years ago as one of the most infamous chapters of the Great War and, indeed, of modern history began. This weekend, the of Wales and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge head to Belgium to join the Prime Minister and thousands from all over the world whose forebears fought the Battle of Passchendaele. They be marking the centenary of the great push to break through the lines around Ypres. Four months later, after a series of gallant offensives through what regarded as the most atrocious conditions of the war, the battle would end with modest gains and a massive loss of life. The scale of the sacrifice be clear on Monday when the main service of commemoration takes place at Tyne Cot cemetery outside Ypres. This is the largest Commonwealth cemetery the world. No fewer than 11 men lie here, most of them graves with no name. Yet they were just a fraction of the fallen. Britain and her Commonwealth allies would suffer more than 300 casualties here. Nearby, on every night of the year, the Ypres traffic still to a halt at 8 pm as buglers from the local fire brigade honour the dead at the Menin Gate. This magnificent memorial arch honours the names of 54 Commonwealth soldiers who fell hereabouts and have no headstone. Every history class learns about the horror of ‘going over the top' climbing out of a trench and advancing across No 's Land the face of withering fire. Yet this was not how most men died on the Western Front. The greatest killer was artillery, the random executioner which could strike at any minute, the front line or to the rear. It would not only blow men to pieces, but also pulverise the graves of those already buried, hence the huge numbers without a recorded resting place. For Britain, there are two places which have come to define World War I the Somme, northern and Ypres, Belgium. As Churchill said 1919: ‘I should like to acquire the whole of the ruins of Ypres. A more sacred place for the British race does not exist the world.' During the War, Ypres saw terrible fighting and three battles. The last and the bloodiest was Passchendaele, named after the flattened village at the furthest extent of the Allied advance. That scene of those seven men captured by a decorated war photographer, Warwick Brooke, on August 1, near the ruined village of Boesinghe, north of Ypres, might look like midwinter, yet it was actually the height of summer. The constant shelling by both sides had churned the ground into a fetid, corpse-strewn wastescape, while freak downpours, that would continue over weeks, had turned it into a swamp. There is not much as a tree stump, let alone a sign post, to guide these men through the mud. It is almost impossible to imagine what this place must have looked like after another four months of rain, shelling, gas attacks and, at times, vicious hand-to-hand fighting. Did any of the men survive and, if for how We now know that at least one of them made it home. For a hundred years after the event, we can reveal the story of that on the right holding the front of the stretcher and looking straight at the camera. He was Barker, 34, a father of three from Chorley, Lancashire. And, this weekend, his descendants are heading to Ypres to pay tribute to him. ‘He was a lovely, caring but he never talked about what he'd been through,' says his granddaughter, Singleton, 65. ‘All we really knew was that he came home from the war on a Saturday and he was back at work at the Co-op Chorley on the Monday.' a respected figure the community and ardent football fan, and his wife would