When the great war poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote those haunting words “I died in hell. They called it Passchendaele” it was in part the mud of the battlefield he was recalling.

Intense shelling destroyed the drainage and the heaviest rains in 30 years turned the fields into a muddy quagmire, swallowing men whole and making progress near impossible.

One hundred years on from the start of the three-month battle that would claim the lives of as many as half a million troops, a sculpture of a soldier made from that same mud has evoked the awful conditions endured by those men.