The series continues the real-life stories of Reg Evans (Daniel Mays), shot in the face in the trenches, as he undergoes pioneering plastic surgery – and of Alan Lloyd (Matthew McNullty), who has swapped life with his new wife and baby son for the battlefields of Ypres and the Somme. But it also explores war on the Home Front – through the diaries of fashionable celebrity cook and restaurateur Hallie Miles (Alison Steadman) and suffragette Kate Parry Frye (Romola Garai), as they see the old Edwardian world crumble around them, opening up ever more opportunities for women, as ever more men – including their own loved ones – and sent to fight and die at the Front.