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A HUNDRED years ago the fields of Flanders staged one of the bloodiest, most emotive battles of the First World War… Passchendaele.
After 105 days between July and November 1917, half a million lay dead or wounded so the Allies could gain just five miles of ground.
But it's only thanks to the haunting images of brave official war photographers that we can truly visualise the brutal, inhumane conditions faced by British and Canadian soldiers as they fought the Germans on the Western Front.
One of those photographers was William Rider-Rider, a 28-year-old Daily Mirror photojournalist who captured the horror in some 3,000 incredible pictures during a two-year posting.
Through his lens the bodies of the dead and wounded, the appalling mud, basic weaponry, waterfilled trenches and the bleak, hellish landscape of Belgium and northern France have been recorded for posterity.
Rider-Rider had worked for the Daily Mirror since 1910 and lived with his wife and their young son on a Peabody social housing estate in Westminster, central London.
He enlisted in the Suffolk Regiment but because he wore glasses he was not sent to fight.
Desolation
Instead he became an Army gym instructor and trained soldiers in bayoneting.
However, the Canadian military forces made an official request for him to be transferred to work for their 9th Reserve Battalion.
In June 1917 he was attached to the Canadian War Records Office in France as Canadian Official Photographer, replacing another Daily Mirror cameraman, Ivor Castle.
A month later on July 31, British commander Sir...