No man's land had no standard width. Across the Western Front it usually ran between 100 and 300 yards and averaged around 250. At Cambrai it was over 500. After the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line in March 1917 it stretched past a kilometre in places. At Guillemont it was fifty yards. At Vimy Ridge, thirty. And at Zonnebeke the British and German front lines were about seven yards apart. Same war, same ground, and the distance a man was ordered to cross varied more than a hundredfold depending on where he happened to be standing.

This is a bare slab of shelled earth — craters, churned mud, splintered timber, a strand of loose wire — and it is 13 inches deep, which at 1/30 works out at roughly eleven yards of real ground. So at Zonnebeke, this single piece would have covered the whole gap with a couple of yards left over. At the average 250 yards, you would need about twenty-three of them. That distance between one and twenty-three is the honest measure of the thing, and it is why no man's land works best as a diorama foreground rather than the whole diorama: put the watcher on the lip behind it, send the officer and his men out across it, and set the aid post further back for whoever gets returned.

W. Britain model 51017. 1/30 scale (approximately 60mm), matte finish. Single-piece scenic base measuring 11″W × 13″D × 3.4″H. No figures are included. Boxed.