Marching was most of it. The British Army ran a sixteen-day cycle — eight days in the front line, four in reserve, four in a rest camp a few miles back — and a battalion walked between every one of those places. When the army was short of men the cycle broke and units stayed up for thirty days at a stretch, but the shape held: you went in, you came out, you walked both ways. One study of a single unit found 250 days in the front line out of 1,167, about a fifth of its war. The other four-fifths were spent somewhere else, and getting there.

Put him beside the 1914 man in full kit and you can read two years off them. That one has a soft cap and everything he owns on his back; this one has a steel helmet and is travelling light — pouches, entrenching tool, water bottle, the SMLE slung with the bayonet already fixed. No large pack. He is not marching to another country, he is marching up the line, which is a shorter walk to a worse place. In a diorama he is the man arriving: bring him into a trench section to relieve the sentry on watch, who has been waiting for him.

W. Britain model 23077. 1/30 scale (approximately 60mm), matte-painted metal. Single foot figure marching on a sculpted groundwork base. Supplied in a clamshell pack.