A hundred interviews with World War One veterans, recorded before their generation disappeared, anchor this episode's account of the Battle of the Somme. Most of the men on camera had never told their stories on film before or since, and by the time this series was made all of them were dead, so the footage functions as the last direct testimony of that war. The episode follows the 1916 offensive from its planners' hopes of a quick breakthrough to the stalemate it became, with veterans describing the noise, the waiting in trenches, and the aftermath of an advance that cost roughly 150,000 lives on the Western Front by November. Loved ones of soldiers add their own recollections alongside the men who fought, filling in what the veterans could not or would not say themselves. The interviews are plain and unstaged, shot in ordinary rooms decades after the war, and the narration steps back to let their accounts of heroism and loss carry the episode.