Battle scene comparisons

When I was backpacking around the World War 1 battle scenes a strange thing happened, I started to compare the time it took me to travel a certain distance with the time it took the soldiers in WW1 to travel the same distance.

It wasn’t just about time, it was also about lives. Wherever I went I started to wonder how much it had cost in lives to go as far as I had just done.
This wasn’t a conscious thing, it wasn’t part of the travel itinary, something that I had planned to happen. It just happened.

World War 1 battle

It really started when I was on a train heading for Ypres, a town in Belgium which is at the heart of the World War 1 battlefields. More precisely, it started when the train arrived at a town called Menin, which is just a few miles from Ypres.
Just after Menin the train started to pick up speed, and I saw that this was because we were going down a gradient.
Dring World War 1 Menin was held by the German army, and Ypres was held by the British army. So the train was traveling over what had been the`no-mans-land’ between the two armies. The British had to advance up the gradient which the train was now descending. Within a few miles of Ypres, the American and French armies were in position.
The train was probably traveling at 60 miles an hour, so it was traveling at about one mile a minute.
How long did it take the two armies to travel that distance, and how much did it cost in British and German lives?