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Keeley Donovan discovers how grand country houses came to the rescue. She’s at eighteenth century Wrest Park in Buckinghamshire – one of the first to be transformed from a private stately home into a hospital. As Keeley finds out, it wasn’t just the rooms transformed into wards, it was society which was transformed too. Women from all walks of life emerged from behind hearth and home to become nurses under difficult and often grisly conditions, the pioneers of the Royal College of Nursing and the life-savers we recognise today.  

Jules Hudson and his Labrador Teddy are off to Cosford to investigate the role played by thousands of dogs. From ratters in the trenches or ferrying medicines, man’s best friend didn’t let us down in wartime. Jules discovers some of the heroic deeds performed under enemy fire and Teddy is put through his paces to discover if he has what it takes to be a modern military dog.

Find out more about the role of animals during war

Jules reveals his top 5 favourite forts in the British landscape.

Nature has performed military miracles for us too. Paul Martin finds out how spiders helped us win the First World War and caterpillars helped to develop tanks. From the medical secrets of moss to how sycamore seeds have enhanced drone technology, the natural world has always been on our side.

Matt Baker takes to the saddle in the Isle of Wight to meet former jockey and broadcaster Brough Scott to discover the remarkable story of one of the First World War’s most remarkable horses.  Warrior more than lived up to his name – known as the horse the Germans couldn’t kill.

In the Gloucestershire village of Slimbridge, Margherita Taylor helps the community get ready to remember their fallen. Of the 150 men who went to war, twenty three died in the First World War: two of them just boys of eighteen. Margherita hears some of the heart-breaking stories of those young soldiers and learns how it affected village families and rural life. Primary schoolchildren tell Margherita why they think it’s important to remember and she helps place specially-made sculptures in the graveyard to commemorate some of the soldiers who laid down their lives. And for one village farmer, who lost two of his family in the Great War, seeing the statues of his great uncles for the first time has a profound effect.