Four hundred and fifty rounds a minute. Seven and a half rounds every second. One London inventor built the Maxim machine gun in 1884 after a friend joked he should help Europeans "cut each other's throats with greater facility."

Thirty years later, that joke had built the Western Front.

This episode traces the machine gun from Hiram Maxim's workshop to the beaten zones of the Somme to the Canadian Corps' own mastery of the weapon by 1918, when the same gun that built the trenches helped tear them open again.

Featuring Raymond Brutinel, the Edmonton newspaperman who talked his way into commanding Canada's first mechanized fighting force, the war diary of the 49th Battalion (Edmonton Regiment) and five Canadian veterans in their own voices: Charles Skeates, Leonard Wood, Colin Bond, Allan "Spike" Smith, and James MacLeod.