671. The First World War: Blood in the Trenches (Part 1)

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Because from new businesses to new homes and new life chapters backed by generations of hope and ambition, you can see, Tom, why 14 million people trust Lloyd's to help make their dreams a reality based on Lloyd's internal customer data from March 2026. In Flanders Fields, the poppy's blue, between the crosses row on row that mark our place. And in the sky the locks still bravely singing fly, scarce heard amid the gums below. We are the dead. Short days ago we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and were loved, and now we lie in Flanders Fields. Take up our quarrel with the foe, to you from failing hands, we throw the torch, be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders Fields. That's one of the most celebrated of all war poems, and it was written by a doctor, an army officer from Canada called John McCray, and he wrote it during the second battle of EEP in May 1915. And it is the poem that has effectively enshrined the poppy as the symbol of the four million men who fell on the western front during the First World War. And Dominic, it's unusual among First World War poetry, isn't it? But actually, although it laments the deaths of the men in the war, it doesn't actually question the need for the war. It ends with this rousing appeal to the men who are going to be coming up to the trenches presumably to be killed in their turn to take up the torch, to hold it high and to keep faith with those who are already dead amid the mud and barbed wire of Flanders Fields. Yeah, you're right, hi, everybody. It seems unrepresentative of war poetry, because we're used to war poems by Secrets Assoon or Wilfred Owen, that question the futility in the horror of the First World War. And those are the poems that people study in British schools when they're teenagers and they've become emblematic of the war. But actually, in Flanders Fields is probably more representative of what ordinary soldiers at the time thought. You know, we did a big series about the first few months of the First World War. We did an episode about the Christmas truce of 1914. And in those, we discussed how ordinary soldiers very rarely questioned whether they were doing the right thing. They believed, absolutely, I think, they were fighting for principles of justice and they were fighting for their own national survival. And Dominic even poets in the early months and years of the war were capable of of celebrating the need for sacrifice. So the other famous poem that does this is Rupert Brooks, you know, talking about a corner of a field that is forever England, kind of lauding it. Yeah, exactly. And I think at the time, if you'd asked most of the Thomas, do you stand with kind of the Wilfredo and Cifreds as soon anti-war school of poetry or do you stand with Rupert Brook and John McCray, they would say the latter, even though of course, Cifreds as soon Wilfredo and Fortbury bravely themselves. We'll come back to McCray's poem and indeed the battle in which he wrote it, the second battle of a little bit later. But first, let's set out what's coming in this series. So this series is about a single year in the First World War, the year 1915. And it's one of the most colorful, one of the most exciting years of the war. If you think of the First World War as just sort of a muddy, miserable stalemate, you are dead wrong. There's all kinds of drama and we'll be getting into this in this series. So we'll be talking about how Italy got into the war and how it prefigured the rise of fascism. We'll be talking about two of the war's most controversial and colorful stories. So that's the sinking of the ship, the Lucettania. So a Titanic-style story, except the differences in this case, the Lucettania was sunk by a U-boat and this ignites this firestorm of controversy in America. And then in many ways, an equally controversial story, which is the German execution of a nurse or spy, we will discuss which, called Edith Cavill, in Brussels in 1915. And then we'll finish off with two episodes about one of the most dramatic military disasters in all modern history, which is the Allied attempt to seize the approaches to Constantinople. And only that's an episode that is kind of one of the great foundation myths, isn't it, of Australian and New Zealand identity in particular. Completely, it is. So a little gift to our Anzac listeners there. But today, I thought what we would do is we would kick off with the epicenter of the war, which is the Western Front. And specifically, what we'd do is to talk about what it was like for ordinary soldiers told a lot often in their own words. So let's kick off with the withoutlining where we are, where we've got to. So at the beginning of 1915, the First World War has been going on for five months. And it began, as this as we remember, with Austria-Hungary's decision to exact revenge on Serbia for the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who's now slightly been forgotten, I'm sad to say. And this triggered the European alliance system. So Germany piles in on behalf of Austria, Russia, France, and Britain are effectively defending Serbia. And from the very beginning of the war, the central powers that's Austria-Hungary and Germany are massive underdogs, because they have less than half of the total population of the Antont or the Allies as they become known. They've got half the military manpower. They've got far smaller economic resources. They can't win a long war. They know that. So what the Germans do is they gamble on knocking out the Western Allies in six weeks. They charge through Belgium into the heart of France. They're closing in on Paris at the end of August 1914, but they're driven back at the Battle of the Man, and they fill all the way back to the chalklands of the River Aine in Eastern France. And there they literally dig in, and they dig the first line of defensive trenches. By the end of 1914, beginning of 1915, these lines of trenches stretch all the way from the English channel in the north through Flanders through Eastern France to the Swiss border. That's about 450 miles. This is the Western front. And very, very roughly, the British are guarding the bit in the north. So that's from the channel down through Flanders to the French town of Amiens, and the French are handling everything to the south of that. And what they're basically trying to do is to push the Germans even further back, so out of France and out of Belgium. But this is a military challenge, the like of which has never been seen in history, because it's very difficult to push people back when they have machine guns, trenches, and barbed wire, which give the defenders a massive advantage. So basically if you attack, you end up dying. That's that's the issue. And there have kind of been hints of the challenge that the Allies might face in doing this, hadn't that, in the American Civil War first, and then the war fought between the Russians and the Japanese in the early 20th century. And there was the occasional military strategist who would kind of write a book about this and say an industrial war is going to be horrific. But by and large, military strategists, the top brass in the various armies of the competence in the First World War, before the outbreak of the war, had not thought that that was going to be an issue. They had thought that it was going to be a kind of massively mobile combat. And so really no plans have been drawn up with how to deal with this eventuality. Not at all. And actually the story of the next four years is they're actually figuring out that they were wrong. So as we'll see when we will come in the next episode, who one of many extravagantly misstasio generals who has written a sort of little pamphlet about offensive doctrine and about how you win wars through dash and vigor and charging forwards, which is General Codona, the Italian Supreme Commander. I mean this is very common. And actually the story of the First World War is these guys realize that they were completely and utterly wrong. And they're basically they're going to have to figure out a way to break the enemy defenses. And in experimenting, they will kill hundreds of thousands of their own men. I mean this is the tragedy of it. And it's why their cast is kind of the donkeys leading lions and all that. But to be fair to them, I mean it is a massive, massive problem without an obvious answer. I mean they're not killing hundreds of thousands of people just for the fun of it. None of them know what to do. Exactly, so we, I think we alluded in a previous series. Lord Kitchener, great British kind of war hero here at the Burwar and whatnot, great moustache. Great moustache, goes to see the trenches at the end of 1914. He says, this is not war as I understand it. This is something different. I do not know how you break this barbed wire and machine guns and stuff. Anyway, what was it actually like then to live in the trenches in 1915? What did it look and feel like? We know more about this than any previous war. We're very fortunate because so many of the survivors told their stories to things like the Imperial War Museums or a history archive. And there were a series of brilliant literary memoirs. And one of the most celebrated of all those literary memoirs, quite rightly, is Robert Graves' book, Goodbye to all that. So Robert Graves, very well known, of course, I Claudius. So great kind of classical scholar. Some quite outlandish ideas, I think, about classical mythology, Thomas. Yeah, he's a big fan of the Mother Goddess. But his memoir, Goodbye to all that, is a fantastic, fantastic window into the experience of the war. So to give you a sense of Robert Graves, he was born into a fairly wealthy Anglo Irish family in 1895. He went to Charterhouse, one of the great public schools. And Dominic, didn't he have a German name? Kind of a bit like the Royal Family. I don't know if he changed it. He did, his name was Robert von Ranker Graves. But he dropped the von Ranker. Quite about it. He did, he quite about it. So he's a very accomplished person, Robert Graves. He wrote poetry. He boxed at a very high level. He was a very classical scholar. He won an exhibition to Oxford. And then just 11 days into the war, he is commissioned as a junior officer in the Royal Welsh fuseliers. So he's very patriotic. He wants to join up. And he's finally sent to the front in May 1915. And I thought it would be interesting to make the journey with him, as it were. So his war narrative opens with him arriving by boat at La Arve in France with six other young officers in the Welsh fuseliers. And his first memory, he says, as soon as we arrive, we're accosted by numerous little boys pimping for their sisters. I take you to my sister. She very nice. Very good, jigger jigger. Not much money, very cheap, very good. I take you now. Plenty of champagne for me. I mean, he didn't go to Charterhouse to do that kind of thing. Not at all. I don't know, because he doesn't explicitly say that he didn't take them up on their offer. But he implies that he didn't, because they were too busy. This is the man who wrote Iclaudia, I suppose. So maybe he did. So he and his fellows are told they're going to be attached, not to their own regiment, but to a different regiment, the Welsh regiment. And they've got to head up the line with their men. And Robert Graves, he's not yet 20 years old. So he's 19. And he is told, this is going to be your platoon of 40 men. Now, the vast majority of these men are working class. So this is your classic example of kind of cross class collaboration in the trenches. You know, they did not go to Charterhouse. And as he says in his book, many of them are either wildly too old or too young. So he says, Fred Prosa, a painter in civil life who admitted to 48 was really 56. David Davis, a collier, a minor, who admitted to 42 and Thomas Clark, another collier who admitted to 45, were only one or two years junior to Prosa. And the oldest of these men is a guy called James Burford, his another minor. Burford gives himself away because he's confused by the safety catch on his rifle. He says, what's this? And then he says to Graves, you know, I haven't fired a rifle. So say 1882. And Graves said, didn't you fight in the Burwo? And he says, no, I tried to re-enlist, but they told me I was too old, sir. That was 14 years ago. I had been an old soldier when I was in Egypt. My real age is 63. So he's like Corporal Jones in Dad's Army. Exactly he is, yeah, with his experience in Africa. But then five of them are too young. So you're meant to be 18, but over the course of the war about a quarter of a million younger boys lied about their age to fight in the British army. And five of these guys are in Graves's platoon. One of them is only 15. And he keeps four classic teenagers. He keeps falling asleep on duty. Oh, leave me alone. Which is a kind of capital offense, but Graves always, you know, excuses it or whatever. So teenage lion. Exactly. So they're loaded onto this troop train bound for the front. And they're heading to Bitun, which is the railhead, which is the end of the line. And that's near Francis, Northeastern border, just south of Calais. And it takes them 25 hours on this train, very boring. They play cards to pass the time. And they finally arrive. It's nine o'clock at night. They are, and I quote, hungry, cold, and dirty. And on the platform, the guy who's going to guide them to the front is waiting for them. A little man says Robert Graves in Filthy Carkey. He's going to take them on foot to the trenches, which are about six miles away. We marched through the unlit suburbs of the town. We were all intensely excited of the noise and flashes of the guns in the distance, says Graves. And that's an amazing phrase, isn't it? Intensely excited. So at this point in Graves's career, perhaps kind of more generally in the parabola of public reactions to the war, it's still seen as exciting. Of course, well, I mean, it would be exciting. But they're not to go to war for the first time, you're 20 years old, or in the case of James Berford, you're 63. Maybe you're speaking for yourself there. Well, then, don't forget, they're going voluntarily. These aren't, these are not people who are being conscripted. These are people who have chosen, who have elected to go to do their bit. Yeah, I guess that's true. They are nervous, though. Graves notes that they're singing hymns to keep their spirits up. The Welsh always sang when they were a bit frightened and pretending they were not. They kept them steady, he says. We marched towards the flashes, and we could soon see the flare lights curving over the trenches in the distance. The noise of the guns grew louder and louder, then we were among the batteries. So this is the kind of artillery batteries. At this point, they see their first kind of enemy action as it were. German shell flies towards them. It lands 20 yards away. And as it explodes, they all throw themselves to the ground. There's an explosion, and then the hits kind of tinkling, which is the sound of the little bits of shell casing falling down, buzzing down all around, as Graves says. And one of the sergeants says, "Riley, they cause them the musical instruments." And they all get up, and they trudge on, and they get a village called Combra, which is about a mile from the trenches now. And here they're led into this ruined house, which had previously been a chemist's shop. And here, there are people waiting. They give them their gas mask, their respirators. They give them their field dressing, so the kind of bandages and stuff. And they are given a little bit of something to eat, so bread, bacon, rum, and bit of stewed tea sickly with sugar. And then once they've finished that, the guide leads them on again. It's still very dark, by the way. They're led into these woods, east of the village, and they go through the woods, and then they see an opening, and this is the beginning of the trench network. And they go down into this long, deep trench, which has been cut in the kind of clay of the soil. And Graves gets his torch out as they're walking to see what it's like. And he realises, his switches are not always straight away, 'cause he realises to his horror, that they are walking on live field mice and frogs that have a carpet of them. They've all fallen into the trench and couldn't get out again. And I guess you can tell from that that this is still the early stages of the war, because you still have wildlife in the trench system. And you have trees, so, you know, by 1916 and 1917, that wood would have just become shattered trees done. - Yes, exactly. So by now, I mean, he's pretty tired. They've been on the road a long time. He's carrying, they're all carrying these heavy kit bags, and they've hung everything else on their belts. He's got on his belt. Revolver, field glasses, compass, whiskey flask, wire cutters, periscope, and a lot more. He's struck by how wet and how slippery the trench is. They can hear the hiss of rifle bullets coming at them. And actually, somebody says to him at what point, there's no point in ducking if you hear a bullet. 'Cause if you can hear the bullet, it means it's gone by you. So it will kill you before you hear it. So if you hear it, no point, you know, you're fine. Anyway, they trudge down this trench and they get to a dugout, and that is the battalion headquarters, where the colonel is waiting for them. And Graves is surprised how cosy it is, so they're ducking, and it's that classic scene that you've seen, so for our British listeners, you'd have seen it in black how it goes forth. The comedy series. It's quite cosy. There's like a nice ornamental lamp. There's a table with a tablecloth. The people inside are having their dinner or whatever. They're eating off polished silver. There's a gramophone playing records. There are easy chairs. So the colonel, his senior officers are having their dinner. - Could I ask a really dumb question? - Yeah. Where are they getting the electricity from? - Was it a wind-up gramophone? - I might be a wind-up. Yeah, I don't actually know. It occurred to me when I said there was a gramophone. So the adjutant says to Graves, "Right, you and your platoon are going off to sea company under Captain Dunn, and good news for you. He's the soundest man in the battalion." - Top show. - So, tremendous. Off they go again into the trench network. It's now raining and it's very muddy, still very dark. They see their first casualty. They pass a stretcher party, and they're carrying a man who's got a sandbag over his face. And the guide says, "Oh, who's that?" And one of the stretcher bearer says, "It's Sergeant Gallagher." He thought he saw a fritz in No Man's Land near our wire. Sergeant Gallagher, it turns out, fired a percussion bomb at this shape. But Sergeant Gallagher aimed a little bit too low. The bomb hit the top of the parapet, it bounced back and it exploded in his face. - Oh, that's the kind of thing I'd do. - And the stretcher bearer says, "Riley, poor silly bugger. It's not worth sweating to get him back. He's put paid to whatever." and indeed it turns out that Sergeant Gallagher dies. what an awful way to go. - Terrible wound, yeah. I mean, there must have been so many people, thousands upon thousands who died in similar ways. Anyway, at last, they reached their company, sea company, and the dugout that belongs to Captain Dunn. So this is, Robert Graves says, it's a two-room timber-built shelter in the side of a trench. It's a very similar scene. There's another table with a tablecloth, there's a bookcase, there's whiskey bottles and whatnot, and Captain Dunn is waiting for them. So he's Graves' superior officer. And Graves has astonished to find that Captain Dunn is actually two-month younger than he is. That is to say, Captain Dunn is himself only 19. And Captain Dunn is your absolute classic public school, jolly, breezy officer. Hugh Laurie in Blackadder. - See if you'll pay by Hugh Laurie. His opening words to Graves are, well, what's the news from England? Oh, sorry, first I must introduce you. This is Walker, Clevver Chap, comes from Cambridge, fancies himself with an athlete. This is Price, who only joined us yesterday, but we like him. He brought some damn good whiskey with him. Well, how long is this war gonna last? And who's winning? We don't know a thing out here. - So he's a bit like asking the score in the test match or something. - Exactly. And Graves says, well, this is the news from England, and then Dunn says, okay, well, let me tell you what's like out here in the trenches. Dunn has this tremendous line. He says, we have nothing to do with the French, except when there's a battle on, and then we generally let each other down. Well, we've seen that was true, haven't we, from the series we did on the opening months of the war. And Dunn says, this is basically how it's gonna work. We have breakfast at 8 a.m. Then we clean the trenches and we check our rifles. We work all morning, and what he means by work, he says, the majority of our time here, we work on the trench. We dig, we reinforce the parapet. We try to get rid of some of the vermin, we do all this kind of thing. Then at 12, we have lunch, we work again from one till six. So they're basically like a group of navies or something. And then we have, then the main feed again. We have stand two at dusk for about an hour. We work all night, and then we stand two for an hour before dawn. And that's the general program. Sounds fun. It's not the end of the world, right? I mean, it's better than being in a coal mine, right? Well, as we would discuss. So Graves gets a little bit of sleep, and then at 1 a.m., Dunn wakes him up, and he says, I'll give you a tour. So they have a look over the parapet very gingerly. And Graves gets his first glimpse in No Man's Land. It's dark, and he can hardly see anything. But a little later when it's lighter, he gets a periscope, and he has a look. And he can see that the German trenches, that's marked by a line of sandbags, they're just 400 yards away. And although he doesn't really say this in his memoir, this must be a spine tingling moment. After all this journey, after all these months of waiting, you finally see the enemy line. It's just 400 yards. You know, you could walk to it within minutes, although you'd get shot. - And the No Man's Land, as yet, is not kind of churned up mud, is it? There are still flowers to be seen. - No, he says a flat meadow with corn flowers and whatnot, long grass, a few shell holes. There's a wreck of an aeroplane, and he can see barbed wire, there's an hours, but that's it. He has another little dose, and he listens to the men grumbling about their lice, a big issue for them, we'll come back to this. And then they have breakfast back in the dugout, bacon and eggs, coffee, toast and marmalade. It's not bad. And just as they're getting stuck in, Dunn's man servant, his batman, his man called Kingdom, rushes in, his eyes blank with horror and excitement. And he says, "Gas, they're using gas." And Dunn says the most British thing that anybody's ever said. He says, "Very well, Kingdom. Bring me my respirator from the other room and another pot of marmalade." Can you eat marmalade while you're wearing a gas mask? - I think marmalade's short is the priority, no? It's a mirror at all over your tube, wouldn't you? - If you want to find out what happened next, I think the thing to do is to read the book, because I don't want to do the whole book, but I thought we would maybe talk about some of the things that have come up in Graves' account so far. So first of all, the trenches. So the trenches, as you'd said, Tom, they are relatively new. When Graves arrives, they are only months old. They were improvised. They were cut into the clay and the chalk in a hurry. And a key thing for people to remember, the Allies, when they dug their trenches, did not think, "Well, we're going to be here for four years." So we better make them good. They actually thought we might be here for a couple of weeks. And then we're going to hopefully resume the offensive and drive the Germans further back east. - And are they still thinking that at this point? - I think by now, so in May 1915, there probably is an awareness that this is, this is why they're working so hard on the trenches that they're going to be here for a little bit longer. So the way the trenches work, you've got these kind of barricades and parapets that are built really of our earth, of soil and a rubble. And people would reinforce them with wooden planks and with sandbags. And then they would line the ground of the trench with these wooden planks, these duckboards. And they gave them names. They would often name off the London Street, Soxford Street, Regent Street and more or not. And an intersection would be named after a famous junction in London. So Hyde Park Corner, Oxford Circus and so on. - Elephant and Castle. - Yeah, I mean, I suppose conceivably. - Probably not. - Probably not. - And they would also make up names for the German lines opposite them. So there's a bit in Siegfried's Assume, where Siegfried's Assume says, "Our objective was pint trench, taking bitter and beer and clearing ale and vat and also pills and lane." So they'd name them all. The German trenches all after beers. Now on the German trenches, everybody agrees the German trenches are much better. They're deeper, they are safer, they're better defended, they're more comfortable. And the reason for that, obviously, is the Germans are there for the long haul. They're like what we have we hold. So it's not just about the Germans being better at building things. - Maybe they are better at building things, I don't know. - I mean, they use reinforced concrete, don't they? Which seems a kind of typical hunt trick. (laughing) - Well, when people do take German trenches, they're stunned how good they are. They have kind of sealing beams, they have nice, kind of cladded walls. - Cinemas. - In the dugouts, they have kind of skylights and alcoves, sort of decorative alcoves and things. - And they go really deep, don't they? I mean, some of them go so deep that actually, they're kind of impervious to anything the British can fire at them. - Well, this is one of the issues when the British think, "Oh, we'll just clear the German trenches with, "I'll tell you a bombardment." They don't realize just how deep sea to these German trenches are. Graves talks, the one thing he, obviously, talks about in the trench, which is the most common thing that people associate with them is mud. And this is the aspect of trench life that soldiers mention the most in subsequent accounts. So there's a diorama war by a guy called Captain Alexander Stewart, which was published in 2009. He joined the Scottish rifles in 1915. He says of the mud, "Mud is a bad description, it's not mud." The soil was more like a thick slime. When walking one sank several inches, it was difficult to withdraw the feet. The consequence was that men who were standing still, sitting down, got embedded in the slime, and were unable to extricate themselves. And as the trenches were so shallow, they had to stay where they were all day. - God, imagine being stuck there. - But here's the thing, you stuck there, and if it's in the middle of a battle, you're sitting duck, and there are a lot of accounts, actually, reading through soldiers' accounts, there's loads of them where they say, "Blogs got stuck." And the Germans were basically using for target practice, or sort of dropping shells, getting closer and closer to him, and he couldn't get out, because he was stuck in all this mud. But there's worse things than mud. So Graves, remember I said, he was dozing, and he heard the people talking about lice. Lice are a big issue, but there's also flies and fleas. So flies, I'll examine just you it again. He talks about filthy, fat, dirty flies drawn by the dead bodies. - Well, the flies must be, I mean, it must be, all their Christmases come at once. - Ah, exactly, yeah. In the company headquarters dug out, he says they were masked on the ceiling like a swarm of bees, and when a man was asleep, they would settle all around his mouth and over his face. - So the corpses would be full of maggots, I guess. - Exactly. Fleece, everybody had fleas. You pretty much got fleas within weeks. They would get into underclothes, and what the soldiers would do is they would get candles, and they would kind of run the candle, the sort of lit candle along the seams of their underwear. And as one puts it, you could hear the eggs crackling, so you kind of burned your own underpants with this candle. And then the lice, this is a French stretcher bearer called Raymond Clemon. He said, "Without telling anybody, I take my clothes off, and I see hundreds of lice and lava jumping out at me, they're everywhere in my shirt, my trousers, my underwear, et cetera. I shake my clothes as much as I can, and I finally wear them again. The only choice we have is to wait for the next relief, and then to boil our clothes." - So is this a regular occurrence that people are taking their clothes off? Shaking the lice out? - Do you think? - Yeah, I think it is. I mean, there's no sort of personal discretion as it were. There's not much place for that on the Western front, really. You're going to the toilet altogether, on a kind of plank and whatnot, and you'd rather be naked than bitten to death by flea? - Of course. And the lice carries something called trench fever. And trench fever is an infectious disease. It's extremely common in the trenches, and the worst case, it's going to be fatal. So JRR Tolkien was invalidated out at the psalm with a very severe case of trench fever. And ironically, the trench fever probably saved his life, because if he'd stayed in the psalm, he could easily have died. A.A. Milne had trench fever. C.S. Lewis had trench fever. - God, it's hard to think of A.A. Milne, isn't it, with trench fever? - Winny the poo with lice. - He probably would have had fleas, certainly. Well, what about Winnie the Pooh with rats? So Graves has a section in his memoir where he's talking about rats and he says there was a new officer who turned up and he's first night, he goes to the bed and he wakes and he hears the scuffle on his bed. There were two rats on his blankets tussling for the possession of a severed hand. This was thought a great joke, so that's Graves. And again, the rats are so common they are ubiquitous. So like the flies, they're drawn by the dead bodies. They become huge because they're eating dead soldiers. Yeah, there are so many cats that are being as big as cats. And often the men deliberately do not kill them because they will they will just be left there to putrify and they will stink and spread disease or the dead bodies will draw other rats to kind of feed on them. So this is another Tommy writing home. In the night we have heaps of company rats and mice and the other livestock. Every time you wake the rats are fighting and squeaking all over you. The other night one took a flying jump onto my face. There's a famous poem by Ivan Rosenberg called "Break of Day in the Trenches" which kind of almost implies a fondness for what he calls a queer, sadonic rat. And he imagines the rat brushing up against his hand and then going and brushing up against a German hand. Say, "Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew your cosmopolitan sympathies." So it may be that in, you know, a bit like Christopher Robin befriending a piglet. If you're in the trench you might prefer. My friend or rats, I mean, I think I mean, while you might tell, I think I draw the line of befriending or rat frankly. I take friendship where I can get it. That's fair. All this sounds pretty nightmarish and some of this doesn't sound like a great laugh. So you are muddy, you're wet, you're cold, you've got rats, there's also the shells going off all around you. And it's also very boring. There's a lot of waiting around. So there's a young German writer called Ernst Junger, who we will feature more after the break. And Junger arrived very excited and very idealistic. Can't couldn't wait to get out of a crack at the British. And he said in his memoir "Storm of Steel" after a new short time of the regiment, we become thoroughly disillusioned. Instead of the danger that we had hoped for, we'd be given dirt, work and sleepless nights. Worse still was the boredom, which was still more innovating for the soldier than the proximity of death. But one point to make is we approach the break. It's really important to say, you said earlier, it's a lot better than working down a mine. And I think you're right. And a lot of soldiers enjoy it. This is a thing that I think subsequently people in the 21st century struggle to get into their heads. There are a lot of soldiers particularly working class men from poorer backgrounds who worked in factories or, you know, in mines or had back breaking, you know, industrial jobs. The routine on the western front really isn't that bad. You got four regular meals a day, breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner. Yeah, I mean, all that, marmalade, brilliant. Yeah. But you think it's the food really, it's a little bit like when we did the Titanic episodes and we were talking about life in third class. You know, it might look bad to us, but to people at the time, you're getting tins of what's called Billy Beef. You've got biscuits, you've got bread and jam, you have regular, you have a lot of tea, you have kind of bits of, you have rum, you have cigarette rations, all of this kind of thing. There's a lot of time for chatting and for general bants. There's a lot of sleep. You write letters, you play cards. Is that worse than working in a mine? Not necessarily. No. It's a constant risk of death in a mine, aren't you? Of course you are and you're outdoors and a lot of people actually love the outdoor element. So here's a really good example. Here's like a private earnest Todd looking back at the war and he says on a nice summer's day, you could think there wasn't a war on really. Early in the morning, you'd have the first planes coming over and a general air of barminis and ease. Breakfast would come up if there was going to be any and you would settle down to a day of laziness in the sun if you could. The lads would sit on this firestep and talk and sing towards the evening they get sentimental talking about their homes. Yes, during those summer months of 1915, you could forget that there was a war on, you really could. And part of the reason for that is actually, you think of the First World War and you think of the trenches and you sort of imagine that people just either digging or they're going over the top. But actually, a Tommy, a British soldier spends less than half of his time on the front line. He spends three-fifths of his time in the rear. And what they're doing in the rear, they're just hanging about. They're playing football. They go to film screenings. They're a special concert's put on for them. They go to plays. There are people organize lectures and debates. They're reading. There doesn't graves in in his book. I recounts a cricket match where they they use, I think, a dead parrot in a cage as the wicket. And then they get kind of strapped by a plane. So machine gunfire stops play. But it's, you know, it's less to think it's not so muddy that you can't. You can't play cricket. There's loads of stuff like that. I mean, I think the reason they play football more famously rather than cricket is that it's easier to play football. Yeah. Jumpers for goalposts. Exactly. But there's also, I think, a real sense of camaraderie. Again, you get that engraved his book, you know, the affectionate way that he talks about his platoon. This sort of sense that, I mean, this is one of the most common things that people said afterwards about life in the trenches that barriers of class and region and indeed nation within the United Kingdom end up being broken down. So to quote William Holmes of the London Regiment, I mean, this is all kind of cliched stuff. But of course, this is how people spoke and indeed speak today. We knew we were there to do that job and we were so fond of our country. And we were like a lot of brothers today. We were just like a band of brothers. Oh, sweet Nelson would have been proud to him. Yeah, well, like, I'm ashenko, which is not far from where the station does mean. Not far at all. But of course, there is one aspect of life on the Western brother. We haven't mentioned at all because they haven't actually been sent there to have a holiday. No, haven't actually been sent there to make friends with people from other from other towns and to play football. They have been sent there for one reason and one reason only, which is to fight and kill the enemy. So what was it like to go over the top to kill another human being in your country's name and other Germans about to unleash a secret weapon to end the deadlock in the trenches and win the war? Tom will find out after the break. This episode is brought to you by the Times and by the Sunday Times. Now, if there is one thing that history and indeed Bob Dylan teaches us, it is that the Times, they are always a changing. And Dominic, I guess we're living in changing times now with America attacking Iran and oil crises. So do you think that the lessons of that for Kierstammer are busy? So looking at the career of Edward Heath, for instance, he was prime minister in the previous oil crisis. It didn't work out brilliantly for Ted Heath to be honest. Actually, he and Kierstammer, I think, are quite similar. They're from relatively humble backgrounds and there's a slight sense of foundering, which they're having common. So their bigger point is you never really know what's around the corner, do you? Because when you look at history, the future is always pretty uncertain. But, you know, the facts, they shouldn't be uncertain. And that, of course, is where the Times and the Sunday Times come in. Yeah, and I would say that understanding the news is absolutely vital when you're navigating the increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world. So to subscribe to the Times and the Sunday Times, visit thetimes.com. We're at flight with 350 passengers on board. The great game, strategic struggle between Britain and Russia. We assess a Prime Minister with high confidence it was Russian. Holding the Russians accountable is world war. They took down a British passenger jerk containing 350 people. Man in the Kremlin is playing Alex. Got to ask yourself, you want to play? Oh, you are the Prime Minister. If done, nothing! We would need to understand the policy context. All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today and disseminated into an operation order or frago. And a frago that says to kill the president of Russia. Yes. New from Golhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off? I should drive you Sergeant Thomas Duff. Duffie. An audio drama journey like no other. Men like Duffie, they are our most valuable weapons. Devised as a technically rigorous geopolitical action forever. We have to take friendly care of you. We're Britain plays its strongest arm. He's the best. Against its strongest foe. Bear hunt. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Marina Hyde. Host of the rest is entertainment and let's face it. If you have heard me on the show, you will know that I am always on. Now I have tried switching off and not listening to all the news or not watching all the videos on the internet, but unfortunately I just can't. So why not join me for my new show titled Always On? It is home to my writing and also my new YouTube show and each week I'm going to be sublimating all of my thoughts on culture and entertainment, politics, sports, media, intercomment across YouTube, substack, marinahyde.com and socials. So, wherever it feels best to talk about something or to have a laugh about it, most importantly, I will be there. Imagine the bat signal going up. I don't know that we need this new superhero, but we've got to. You can subscribe now by searching always on with marinahyde on Google. Always on YouTube, always on marinahyde.com, always on with me. Marinahyde, never off, never off. Come on, man, get up. We're moving out. I woke up in due sod and grass. Through a stuttering swath of machine gun fire, we plunged back into our communication trench, and moved to a position on the edge of the wood, previously held by the French. A sweetish smell and a bundle hanging in the wire caught my attention. In the rising mist I leaped out of the trench and found a shrunken French corpse. Fleshed like mouldering fish, gleamed greenish leaves through splits in the shredded uniform. Turning round, I took a step back in horror. Next to me a figure was crouched against a tree. It still had gleaming French lezzar harness, and on his back was a fully packed have a sack, topped by a round mess tin, empty eye sockets, and a few strands of hair on the bluish black skull, indicated that the man was not among the living. So that was a German, obviously, and it's a man we've already met in the first half. The writer Ernst Junger, and he's describing the fighting at Lis et Parge, near for done in April 1915, and it comes from his memoir "Storm of Steel", which is one of the great war memoirs, not just of the First World War, but of all time, isn't it? So Dominic, probably worth giving a character sketch. I mean, he's an amazing, amazing man, extraordinary life. He has an incredible life, Ernst Junger. You know, you can trace the whole of German 20th century history through his life, really. He was born in Heidelberg in 1895, and his father was a rich, kind of chemist, kind of chemical engineer. And he went to boarding school, like Robert Graves, but he was typical of kind of German youth before the First World War. He joined a nationalist youth group called the Von der Virgel, so they're kind of these sort of wandering birds. They're a little bit like the Boy Scouts, but they're more nationalistic and more kind of idealistic in a way. Then he ran away to join the French foreign Legion, and then he came back. And then on the 1st of August 1914, that's the day Germany entered the war. He joined up. He was so keen to get stuck in. So he's 19, like Graves. And later on, after he'd published this book "Storm of Steel", he became this incredibly controversial German literary figure. So all through his life, he was very militaristic and very nationalistic, but he never joined the Nazis. He did serve as an army captain in Paris in the 1940s, but he was appalled by the anti-Semitism of the Nazis, even though he'd himself been pretty anti-Semitic in the 20s. He then was quite close to the Staufernberg blotters, so the people who tried to blow Hitler up in 1944, he was thrown out of the army but not executed. It becomes an early enthusiast for LSD. He does, exactly. And also, he's very keen entomologist. He had an inordinate fondness for Beatles. I think he had about kind of seven types of Beatles named after him or something, you're probable. And then he died at the age of 102, so in I think 1998. God, that's mad as a man. Yeah, crazy. Anyway, "Storm of Steel", his book, which I really recommend is, it's very different in time from Robert Graves' memoir, even though they're the same age, and they're right about exact at the same point in time. Because younger is much more interested in what it's like of the excitement and the adrenaline and the experience of fighting and battle. So it really captures his book, the adrenaline, the noise, the sensations, and this sort of dream-like confusion and surrealism, which you had a sort of taste of there when he sees those French bodies. So in this particular occasion, we're in April 1915. His units has been pushed forward into the French lines, so the Germans have punched a little hole in the French lines and his units have been thrown in. And this is his first experience of battle. And he's in this trench and it's full of dead Frenchmen, rotted, dried, stiffened to mummies, frozen in an eerie dance of death. That's an eerie image, isn't it? It is. But the really eerie thing, he realizes that they've been there for ages and that the French must have just not bothered to bury. Paul from the French, I think, not to bury their dead. Anyway, they haven't buried these. Well, especially since it's a muddy, you just roll them and they're going to sink into the glute. So what he does, you know, don't forget this is the middle of a battle. He has a little stroll. He looks for souvenirs. He finds, again, this sort of dream-like quality. He finds a suitcase that's sort of been blown open. And one of the things in the suitcase is this beautiful striped shirt. And he takes off his army tunic and he puts the shirt on. I relished the pleasant tickle of clean cloth against my skin. He said, he lights up his pipe. He has a smoke. Then he hears the guns starting up again. What he calls the savage pounding dance. And eventually, he hears someone calling. It's basically one of the officers saying, come on, on your feet, get all of you, get ready. They form up again. They go out of the trench and into a wood. You know, they have no idea where they are, where they're going. They're just following orders as people do. I said, it's very dream-like still. They go into the woods. They go into a clearing and they sit down. The sun is setting. They're just sort of chatting. And they think, well, this is probably it for today. And it's at this point, it's a fantastic scene in the book. He says, our rebel conversations were suddenly cut off by a marrow-freezing cry. Twenty yards behind us clumps of earth world up out of a white cloud and smacked into the boughs. The crash echoed through the woods, stricken eyes looked at each other, bodies pressed themselves into the ground. And then there's the series of explosions. He says choking gases drifted through the undergrowth, smoke obscured the treetops. There are trees crashing down the screams. We leaped up and ran blindly from tree to tree, like looking for cover. They're like frightened game, he says. And in the middle of all this, he feels a blow on his left thigh. And this is a piece of shrapnel that's come from one of the explosions. And it's basically sliced into his leg. And he drops his pack, he throws down his pack, and he runs back to the trench that they'd all come from. The trench was appalling, choked with seriously wounded and dying men, a figure stripped to the waist with a ripped open back leaned against the parapet, another with a triangular flap hanging off the back of his skull, emitted short, high-pitched screams. And then this incredible line. This was the home of the great god, pain. And for the first time, I looked through a devilish chink into the depths of his realm, very evocative writing. So he carries on running through the trench in the pseudapanic blood streaming from his leg. He eventually collapses afterwards when it's tied down. He's found by stretcher bearers and is taken to a dressing station. And then eventually, he is put on a train to go all the way home to Germany into his hometown of Heidelberg. But then he comes back, doesn't he? And he just keeps getting wounded throughout the war. And don't the Germans have kind of weird thing you get a medal for every wound you have. And he ends up with I think the gold medal for having been shot ten times or whatever. He's incredibly brave. And he loves it. You know, when we're describing this, the great god, pain, blokes with their heads, heart kind of blown open all of this, you might think, gosh how horrific, how terrible, what an unbelievably awful scene, a nightmare. But it actually makes you even feel more enthusiastic about the war, not less. Because it makes him feel alive? Yeah, it makes him feel alive. It's a kind of intensive experience that he wouldn't have had otherwise. And when he gets back to Germany, so on that break, you might think when he goes back, invalid it out, you know, it would make him dread to go back, not a bit of it. He says to go back and see his native land, makes him feel that Germany is eminently worth our blood and our lives. For the first time, my sense that this war was more than just a great adventure. So it's a great adventure, but it's even better than that because it's in the noble cause. And the other thing that strikes him at the end of this scene, which is brilliantly done, you know, he's seen people killed, he's seen combat, he's seen explosions and stuff, but he's seen dead French, but he hasn't seen a single live Frenchman. He hasn't seen a single live opponent. And actually, you could go through the war for a very long time. And you could see people shot around you and you could shoot, you know, you could cause death to other people, but you might never actually lay eyes upon them. And that's one of the great innovations, I think, of the First World War because death is coming from a distance or it's coming from the lice or the rats or whatever, you know, it's kind of basalye and stuff. And both these things are very typical. So first of all, most soldiers never engage in hand-to-hand combat. And actually, when you look at the stats, it is clear, most soldiers never killed anybody. And in fact, two-thirds of the casualties in the First World War were caused by artillery fire. They're not caused by one person, as it were deliberately killing another person that they can see in front of them. And younger is not untypical in finding battle enjoyable. So there's an example that reminded me of one of our, one of our gohanger comrades, Tom. So I'm actually Julian Grenfell, who went to Eaton and Baylil, like Rory Stewart. And he was killed on the western front in May 1915. And before he was was killed, he wrote to his parents, "I adore war. It is like a big picnic. The fighting excitement vitalizes everything, every sight and action, and then this incredible light. One loves one's fellow man so much more when one is bent on killing him." Because he was a poet, wasn't he, as well? He was a poet, yeah. Because he was also a professional soldier. Do you think that might have made a difference? Is he more seasoned? It comes, perhaps, as less of a shock to him, because he's already fought in battle? Don't know, maybe. I don't know. I think there are a lot of people. I think it's a question of temperament as much as everything. I think you don't know until you get there, actually. It's like that classic thing about what makes for your coward or brave. You don't know until you've been in that environment. You can do all the training in the world, but it comes down to, I don't know, you can be conditioned, I suppose. I guess military historians would say you can be conditioned. But I don't know. I mean, not everybody's like this. So there's a brilliant account by a German sergeant called Stefan Westman, who went on to be a Harley Street doctor, and he was interviewed by the BBC for their brilliant series about the Great War in the 1960s. And he describes in this interview, storming enemy trenches, and he suddenly comes face to face with a French soldier. And he said, "I'm actually not going to do the accent because it's a very moving kind of quote." And he said, "I realized that he was after my life exactly as I was after his, but I was quicker than he was. I pushed his rifle away and I ran my bayonet through his chest. He fell, putting his hand on the place where I'd hit him, and then I thrust again. Blood came out of his mouth, and he died. I nearly vomited. My knees were shaking, and they asked me, "What's the matter with you? They is his comrades." And he goes on to say, "His comrades were absolutely understered by what had happened. One of them boasted that it had killed a pollo, that's a Frenchman, with the butt of his rifle. Another one had strangled a French captain. A third had hit somebody over the head with his spade. They were ordinary men like me. One was a tram conductor, another a commercial traveler, two were students, the rest farm workers, ordinary people who would never have thought to harm anybody." So in other words, these are people who would never have hit somebody over the head with a spade or strangled them in real life and civilian life, but they've been thrust into this environment and they found something in themselves they didn't know they had. But Stefan Westman, who's a sergeant, you know, he's got a job that involves a degree of responsibility. He doesn't have that. He says, "I woke up at night, sometimes drenched and sweat, because I saw the eyes of my fallen adversary." Oh, so it's like the Wilfred Owen poem. Where? What's it? I am the enemy. I am the enemy you killed, my friend. Exactly. Really moving and strange poem. They seize them in a dream, doesn't he? The man that he had killed. Yeah, at the end of a long tunnel. And I suppose whether you kill or not, you just have to get used to the fact there's going to be a lot of death and a lot of killing. We were talking about the trenches. I mean, one thing we didn't mention. There's fighting can be so fierce sometimes that it's impossible to clear the bodies. They left in no man's land or they're hastily buried in the side of the trenches. So people will write home, this is an example, a guy from the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders, Captain Aiden Little, he's writing unbelievably to his mother and he says all the ground is full of dead bodies and when the wall of a dugout falls in, this generally a body exposed. One man wanted to cut the ends of some roots that were sticking out of his dugout wall. He discovered they were a corpse's fingers. Because I see on this that lots of exclamation marks after that. How about that, mate? I'm just writing that to your mum. And then there's a French soldier. He describes how just outside their trench, dead bodies lay for a month. One evening, Jack on patrol saw enormous rats fleeing from under their faded coats. They were fat from human meat. His heart pounding, he crawled towards a dead man. This is Jack who's on patrol. His helmet had rolled away. He was showing a grimacing face with no flesh, his skull bare, his eyes eaten, a denture had slid onto his rotting shirt and out of his gaping mouth a foul animal jumped. Oh god. Yeah, really grim. But what are the chances that you might end up like that, Tom? In my case, I think fairly high. No. They're smaller than this. They're smaller than you think. They're much smaller than you think. So I fell down a massive rabbit hole. There are tons and tons of articles online about this. I people who know far more about it, A, than I do, and B, I think than is healthy for any human being. And generally the odds of death through a British soldier on the western front in the front line are about 10%. So nine out of ten people there will live and one will die. And that is a lot better than the Crimean War where basically two out of ten died. All the battle of can I? Right. A lot of people would die. But if you're French, then odds are higher. 20% of French soldiers dying about 25% of Germans. And why the difference? I was thinking about this. Why is this? Well, the Germans obviously lose the war. I mean, that is a pretty big, a big difference. And of course, they lose it in circumstances where they launch a massive offensive. Lots of you are shot when you're attacking. So they launch a massive offensive in 1918. They're driven back and a lot of them die in that in the course of 1918. The French, I suppose, the British don't have a Verdun, do they? The song is pretty bad. But Verdun is a channelhouse. Well, we were talking about that maybe next year in 2027 when we get to 1916. So a lot of a Verdun, I suppose. I mean, I don't have an answer. Actually, maybe military historians will have an answer about this big difference. But the chances are that you would be a casualty one way or another. So almost every soldier on the front line gets wounded one way or another. And or they come down with disease. You know, at some point you will get trench fever, dysentery, you'll be invalidated out at some stage probably. And of course, the difference between this war and previous wars and the dangers are not merely physical. They are mental. So this is shell shock. Yeah. So if one French trench journal, the Suces quoted by Neil Ferguson is book The Pity of War, describes the shelling as a form of torture that the soldier cannot see the end of. And this is one thing, I think, you know, we can imagine what it's like to be very muddy or we can imagine the horror of all the flies or something. But I guess it's probably very hard for us to imagine what it's like to be under shell fire for hours and hours or days and days. They're sort of relentless, relentless pounding. Ernst Jungo in Storm of Steel has this very famous description. You must imagine you're securely tied to a post being menaced by a man swinging a heavy hammer. Now the hammer has been taken back over his head, ready to be swung. Now it's cleaving the air towards you on the point of touching your skull. Then it has struck the post and the splinters are flying. That is what it is like to experience heavy shelling in an exposed position. And the poet's secret is soon he arrived in France towards the end of 1915 and became friends with Robert Graves and was decorated for his exceptional bravery. He has these lines in one of his poems. Oh Christ, I want to go out and screech at them to stop. I'm going crazy. I'm going stark staring mad because of the guns. And this of course is not uncommon. So even before the end of 1914, only months into the war, there are the start to be reports of a lot of British soldiers reporting to the sick bay saying, I feel dizzy. They're trembling and they don't know why. They have headaches. They have kind of nervous symptoms as they were called at the time. And the term shell shock was coined in February 1915 in an article in The Lancet. It's a medical journal by Captain Charles S. Myers, the Royal Army Medical Corps. And I had a look at it. I'd like you can see it online. And Myers is writing about three cases of soldiers who have had shells explode nearby. And these soldiers ever since have had blurred vision. They've been shivering. They've been crying. They've been a state of general confusion. And the doctors cannot see an obvious physical cause for it. So Dominic, the stereotype is that the British high command regard this as nonsense and think that the chap should man up. Is that actually the case or is it a little bit more nuanced? I'm guessing the latter. It is more nuanced. So this is part of the sort of caricature. I mean, you alluded to it in the first half that the generals with their tremendous moustaches are sitting in castles kind of eating elaborate meals and just throwing their men into a meat grinder into the meat grinder heedlessly and that they are incredibly reactionary and stupid that they are donkeys leading lions and all of this. So the figure that you often see, that the fact that people often bring up, they say a lot of men were executed for desertion and cowardice when really they were suffering from shell shock. So 306 British and imperial soldiers were executed for cowardice, 650 Frenchmen. And actually interestingly, only 48 Germans. So it differs from army to army. Actually, the Italians are the worst. They're very harsh on their own men. But these figures, as you know, lamentable as they are, they're a tiny, tiny fraction. Right, because we're talking about millions of competence. Right. So there were six million British Empire troops. And off those, only 306 are executed for cowardice. I mean, there's 306 too many, you might say. But it's still not that many. And actually, what that might suggest is the authorities are more nuanced and more sensitive to this than you might assume. And, in fact, they are, because in May 1915, the War Office sent a doctrine. to the front doctor, Aldrin Turner, and they said to him, "Investigate this new disorder." And Turner wrote back, he wrote his report, he said, "It's not just cowardice. It is a form of temporary nervous breakdown, often after soldiers have witnessed a ghastly sight or a harassing experience. The patient becomes nervy, unduly emotional and shaky, and most typical of all his sleep is disturbed by bad dreams." And actually, we already mentioned Wilfred Owen, the strange meeting poem, "Bad Dreams" or a feature of a lot of war poetry. This is following on from an episode we did on the Battle of Marathon, and there is an account in Herodotus of someone at the Battle of Marathon who gets what is often described as Shelflock, it's often described as the first instance in recorded history of this condition. Yeah, surely must have, I mean, there must be men at Waterloo who were completely traumatized or the Crimea or something, it's utterly implausible that it won't. Or indeed, Ashenko, frankly, some of these battles must have been terrifying experiences that recurred in men's dreams for years to for decades afterwards. Yeah, the soldier at Marathon sees a kind of colossal figure moving through the ranks and ends up, he ends up blind from the shock of it. Well, so what the war of his experts can't agree on is whether the cause is mental or physical. And back in Britain, they set up at least 20 specialist hospitals to treat what is then called Neurostinia. And the most famous of these is Craig Lockhart in Edinburgh. This is the hospital in Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy. And this is where secrets are soon meet Wilfredo and in Duke of the two great poets meet each other. Now, senior officers think it's, you know, they think it's a real thing, Shelflock, but often they say, well, it's maybe the result of an individual weakness that you have a flaw in your temperament. But actually, most of the men we've mentioned in this episode prove that to be totally wrong. So he mentioned Ernst Junger. Ernst Junger is ridiculously brave. And he also loves war. But he describes in Storm of Steel how there's a point where he becomes so jumpy that when somebody drops a book in the dugout, he'll be reduced to being a jibbering wreck because he thinks it's a landing shell. There's a moment in the book where he and his men come under heavy shell fire and he runs away in terror. And then he meets up with some of the survivors. And I quote, I was finished. I threw myself on the ground and I've broken to convulsive sobs while the men stood gloomily around me. This is a very brave and militaristic man doing this. See for it's a soon so suicidally brave that his men nicknamed him Mad Jack wins the military cross. And then he cracks. He publishes this denunciation of the war. He's sent to this hospital. And then when he's been in the hospital, he comes out of the hospital. He goes back to the front and he fights very bravely again. So, you know, everybody has their kind of breaking point. Robert Graves in Goodbye to all that. He says everyone has a breaking point. And the way it works is this. You've been there a month and you start to show the first signs of shell shock. After nine months, an officer becomes a drag on the other company offices. After 12 months, an officer is going to quote worse than useless. And by the summer of 1916, by which point he's been there 12 months, he can feel it in himself. Quote, my breaking point was near now. It would be a general nervous collapse with tears and twitchings and dirty trousers. I had seen cases like that. But as it happens, he's wounded by a shell fragment of the psalm. He almost dies and he's invalidated out and he never comes back. And at that point, he definitely has what we would call shell shock. The fear of gas obsessed me, any unusual smell, even a sudden strong scent of flowers in a garden was enough to send me trembling. And I couldn't face the sound of heavy shelling now. The noise of a car back firing would send me flat on my face or running for cover. Do the military authorities start to factor this in? I mean, do they start to think, well, after a year or two soldiers are going to be useless? Or do they just carry on anyway? Um, good question. I think they're aware of it, but I think the demands of manpower are so great. People always have this idea, I think, of the First World War General. It's just this sort of boring, brutal idiots. But actually, when you look at their life stories and their lives away from the war, often these are quite cultivated, intelligent kind of men. The truth is, they are in an impossible situation and they are so, there's this urgent demand for men at the front. So they can't give everybody a break every now and again. And it's what we were saying right at the start that they are facing a situation, a strategic situation that is so imponderable that they are just groping around for answers. Indeed. And this brings us perfectly to one of the first answers they come up with. So Graves just mentioned it. And this is the secret weapon that Germans come up with in the early months of 1915 to try to break this deadlock. And this is gas. Now both sides had experimented with gas before the war, but the Germans had a massive head start because they're a big scientific powerhouse, the biggest in the world. They have the best researchers, they have the best chemical engineers, they have manufacturers like Agfa and Bia and all these kind of companies. I mean, this is maybe, but it's still cheating, isn't it? But it's not cricket. I don't think it is cheating, actually, because the hay convention of 1899 outlawed using projectiles that would be solely used for asphyxiaating or deleterious gases. But the Germans get their lawyers to look at this and the lawyers say, well, sometimes you're not using projectiles that will be made solely for that purpose. There's nothing else has been outlawed. And there's some new supreme commander, Eric von Falkenheim, kind of a Prussian figure. He says, look, we're going to lose if it's a long war. I mean, they know that the Germans and their great gamble has failed. We must try anything urgently to get a breakthrough. I mean, he has the vibe of a man who would approve of mustard gas. That's harsh. That's harsh. The name, the look. I mean, to be fair, the British end up using gas too. Would you say that I've Douglas Hague probably made it onto John French? I would definitely have the John French. What did we call John French last time? Paltrune and Obefoon, I think, wasn't it? Anyway, lots of Falkenheim's officers say to him, I don't know about this. First of all, the Allies will retaliate with gas themselves and the prevailing winds over France and Flanders. Right. Are westerly. Yeah, they're in the wrong direction. We'll be in a mess. But also, some people definitely agree with you, Tom. So, somebody who agrees with you is General Karl von Einheim of the Third Army and he wrote to his wife, "I fear it will produce a tremendous scandal in the world. War has nothing to do with shiver anymore. The higher civilization rises, the vile man becomes." So, he's not an enthusiast for gas. Even so, they decide to go for it and they're going to launch it on the 22nd of April at EEP. Now, people may remember, this is the thing called the EEP salient, which is basically the front line bulges out a bit. So, it's sort of surrounded on three sides and the British are determined to hold it and this is where the Germans are going to make their trial. And at five o'clock, that evening, the engineers open the valves on 6,000 cylinders of chlorine gas. Yeah, the waiting for the wind to be in the right direction. The wind blows this yellow kind of cloud towards thousands of actually French Algerian troops who are the people in the way. And these Algerian blokes flee in total panic. They're blinded. They're screaming for water. They're vomiting blood as the gas is basically eating into their lungs. Now, as it turns out, even though this opens a hole in the Allied Alliance, the Germans don't have enough reserves to exploit it properly. Two days later, they have another go. More gas. This time, they are targeting Canadians. And again, the gas inspires utter horror and panic. So, this is one of many sort of awful eye-windents accounts. I've never seen men so terror-stricken. They were tearing at their throats. Their eyes were glaring out. Blood was streaming from those who were wounded and they were tumbling over each other. Those who fell couldn't get up because of the panic of the men following them. And eventually, they were piled up two or three high in the trench. And it's this that's the context for the poem that we began with in Flanders fields. So, it's against this background that McCray writes those famous words. And he was from Ontario, rural Ontario. He was a very distinguished doctor and a professor of pathology. He had volunteered in the Burr War. So, he loved Britain. I applaud him. He volunteered again in 1914, even though he was 41. And he became the chief medical officer in the first brigade of the Canadian field artillery. So, he's in the thick of all this. And on the second of May, a friend of his who was called Lieutenant Alexis Helmer was killed by a shell. And McCray presided over his burial service. And as to that point, at his burial service, that McCray noticed these poppies growing around the grave. And the next day, I mean, there are multiple different kind of apocryphal stories about this. But the most common is McCray is sitting in the back of an ambulance near Epe. And he's just thinking about these poppies. And he scribbles this poem in his notepad. And then the story goes that he read it to some of the other guys. And then he crumpled it up and threw it away. And one of the other guys picked it up and said, "Don't throw it away. It's actually good." He ended up sending it to the humorous magazine punch where it was published in December 1915. And it was a massive hit. And it was used in British propaganda in Canadian, in American propaganda. In Canada, in particular, became a real kind of sensation. McCray himself, unfortunately, died in the last year of the war. He died of pneumonia and meningitis. But the poem, as we said right at the beginning, lives on. Well, it lives on. I mean, it's quoted every November, isn't it? In Britain, certainly. Probably in Canada too, I imagine. Anyway, back to the gas. Gas is one of a series of innovations. So massive artillery bombardments, I suppose, you boats, tanks, all of these things that haven't really been seen before. But gas is the one that frightens soldiers the most because it's the silent killer, invisible killer. You know, you don't see it coming and as soon as it's on you, you're dead. That one that attacks the French Algerian troops is yellowish. It was yellowish, so I say it's invisible. I mean, you might not, would you notice an yellowish vapor heading towards you? I think I probably would. Okay, well, fair. There's a brilliant description by the fighter, a Cecil Lewis. He watched it from above, and he said he watched it, creeping panther-like over the scarred earth, curling down into dugouts, coiling and uncoiling at the wind's whim. Men were dying there under me from a whiff of it, not dying quickly, not even maimed or shattered. But dying whole, wretching and vomiting, blood and guts. And those who lived would be wrecks with seared poison lungs rotten for life. Because that is one of the archetypes of the Great War, isn't it? I mean, that's one of the reasons why it lives with such a kind of timbre of horror in people's memories. And it's the theme of perhaps the most famous poem written about the horrors of the war. Yeah, Wilfred Owen, Stolchea de Coromest, where there's a line in that poem where there's a gas boys' gas or whatever it is. And they're all rushing to get their masks on. There's one guy who's been too slow, and the imagery is all green, dim through the misty panes and thick green light, as under a green sear saw him drowning. In all his dreams before my helpless sight, he plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. So it's horrible, but does it work? No, it's just a waste of time, totally waste of time. So there's no break through a heap, the Canadians hold firm, and the thing is the gas doesn't kill enough people. I mean, that sounds like a mad thing to say, but only 6,000 British and Imperial forces in the whole course of the war died of gas poisoning. I'd assumed it was much, much more than that. No, doesn't kill you by and large, just leaves you with ruined lungs. Yeah, it definitely leaves people with ruined lungs, no question. Part of that is because the war office was quite good in getting gas masks to the front. So the first gas masks arrived a few weeks later, and these are sort of gauze pads that you tie over your face a little bit, like I suppose, like a COVID mask. And then up to that point, they basically were saying, you know, you need to urinate on on some cloth and hold it over your face, and the urine will act as a, and people were doing this. I mean, this is what they had, this is what they did. And then in 1916, they issued what was called a small box respirator. That protects you against chlorine and phosphine, which are the two common gases that are being used at this point. The one thing it doesn't protect you against is mustard gas, because mustard gas blisters your skin. So you know the famous painting by John Singer Sargent. Oh, the one where they're all in a line. They're all in a line. That's mustard gas that they are suffering from, not chlorine. Now, you said it wasn't cricket. So John French, the well-known poltrune, he agrees with you, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force. I'm aligned in then. I take it all back. You're right. Okay. He said it was a cynical and barbarous disregard of the well-known usages of civilized war. And of course, the Allied newspapers say, well, this is typical of the Germans. This is how the Germans behave. They're Huns, they're barbarians. I mean, I think it's probably fair to say, if you're losing, if you're the underdog, you will try anything. And this is what the Germans are doing. Especially if you've got a massive world-beating chemical industry. Yeah. I mean, they'd be kind of, I mean, I don't want to sound too pro-tute on. But yet they'd be mad not to try it. I think, anyway, the British, for all their talk of it not being cricket, they are secretly testing gas weapons themselves. And they make the same mistake the Germans did. They sort of convinced themselves, this will be brilliant. This will actually, this will be a game-changer. And so this sets the stage for the British British attack of the whole of the year, 1915. It's in loose, which is just south of Lille, in France. Sometimes Tom, you hear people saying that loose might be in Belgium, but it's not as it is. No, I mean, that's a rookie's error, isn't it? Anyone who thinks that is mad. So people who enjoy British, shambolic British military failures will relish the beginning of the battle of loose. The British have planned this gas bombardment. They've got 5,000 cylinders of chlorine gas. At six o'clock in the morning, they prepare to unleash them. And the gas engine is, say, the wind is in the wrong way. Don't open these gas cylinders, whatever you do. Are the top brass going to pay attention to this? The top brass, say, no, it's too late to change the plan now. Are you mad? The carry on. So they basically open the gas cylinders and it all blows back in their faces. And they've got these flannel gas masks. With urine. No, I don't know. They've got urine. I think some sort of chemical treatment or whatever. Anyway, they've got these gas masks. The eyepieces of the gas mask steam up. So the men, to see, take the gas mask off. They're probably poisoned by their own gas. So it's basically about that poor bloke who throws the missile out and then it blows up in his face? Yeah, it's basically that on a huge scale. Because basically the British gas, gasped four times, caused four times as many casualties among the British as it did among the Germans. Anyway, when they finally ordered the troops to advance, they find the Germans very much un-gast. And their artillery bombardment, and this is a theme that will run for the next few years, their artillery bombardment, which they thought will break the German barbed wire and weaken their defenses, has completely failed to do so. So basically, loose, which goes on for the next two weeks, is your classic example of a Western Front Offensive, where generals are throwing men against positions that turn out to be much better defend than they thought, and they're getting absolutely nowhere. It ends with 60,000 British casualties. Only 25,000 German casualties. It is one of the great Allied disasters of the first year or so of the war. And the result of this is that finally, Sir John French, who has been useless, frankly, from the very beginning. And if you remember, he actually wanted to abandon the French completely. He's finally booted out as Commander-in-Chief, and he's replaced with Sir Douglas Hague. And French is the guy who the British government thinks is just the man to go and solve the Irish question, then do you call him? Yes. Where he's another tremendous success. Paul Sir John French, surely at some point we'll have to do a whole series rehabilitating him. But anyway, he's been replaced by Douglas Hague, one of the most controversial characters in British and indeed all military history. The booty, baddie. I think we should come to this later on when I've read a bit more about it. Essentially, I don't know what I think. I think probably he's been a bit. The general sense now is that he was maligned. Gary Sheffield, he's all over. How good Doug the thing. From the University of Wolverhampton, thinks that Douglas Hague is one of the greatest men who ever lived, I think. Well, there you go. Anyway, just to end the episode. 60,000 British casualties at loose, but one of them above all is very well known. And this is a young man who was 18 years old, called John Kippling, and he was the only son of Rudyard Kippling, the great poet of Empire and indeed of patriotism. John Kippling, 16 years old when the war broke out, and his father was desperate to get him a commission. But John was rejected because of severe short-sightedness. Basically, the medical board said he would be totally at sea, because he can't see anything. But Kippling's senior pulled all kinds of strings with his old friend Lord Roberts, and he got John commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Irish guards. And on the second day of the Battle of Loose, John Kippling was reported missing in action. And he was, and I quote, "last scene stumbling in the mud in search of his glasses, which had fallen off during the attack." And Rudyard Kippling was devastated by this. He never recovered. And when he published his epitaphs for the war in 1919, the theme of dead sons and bereaved parents runs right through it. And the most famous of all these epitaphs that Kippling wrote is a couplet that soft and seen as a kind of epitaph for the war, more generally. If any question why we died tell them because our father's lied. And it's not generally thought of is it that Kippling wrote perhaps the most devastating couplet condemning the war of any poet? Exactly. And of course, we've talked before in the show about his short story The Gardener, which I think is one of the most moving short stories ever written, which is also about the loss of a young man in action. Right. There'll be a lot more young men to be lost, sadly, because there are five more episodes to come in this dramatic series. All of them set over the course of this one, Chimaltrus year 1915. So next time a new combatant enters the arena, this is Italy. We tell the story of how Italy was cajoled into war by the proto-fascist poet Gabarelli Donuncio and of the dreadful fate that awaited the Italians when they went up into the mountains to fight the Austro-Hungarian army. Then next week to the great controversial stories of the war that's the sinking of the Lucertainia by a German U-boat and the execution of the British nurse and alleged spy Edith Cavill. And then the third week finally we get to one of the great military disasters in all history. And that is the Allied attempt to land at Gallipoli. And of course, if you're a member of the Restless History Club, you can hear those five episodes straight away. And if you go to the rest is history.com, you can join the club and only by going to the restless history.com will you get the full benefits. of being in the club. So lots to look forward to, Tom. Lots to look forward to. Thank you very much for that, Dominic. And in our next episode, we will be in Italy, listening to Roman Ravel Rousing, and then up in the mountains of Slovenia, getting massacred by Austrians. So we'll see you then. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Hi, everybody. We are back with another absolutely colossal update about the rest of history. Festival. Well, it's massive. So on the 4th and 5th of July, we will be at Hampton Court Palace. So we have a weekend of brilliant talks, live music, exclusive access to historic Royal Palace's collections. And yes, Dominic, most exciting of all, this is the thing I have been pushing for and I'm so looking forward to it. We have medieval combat, a terrifying, brutal, yet completely thrilling sport. It is going to be an unforgettable two days. It is indeed. And at the core of the festival of these talks, we've got some more talks to add to the line up. So I will be talking to the brilliant shooter historian Tracy Bourman about the secrets of the six wives of Henry VIII. I'll be talking to a friend of the show at Irish National Treasure, Paul Rouse, about whether there is an alternative universe in which islands could have remained part of the United Kingdom. We'll be talking to Katja Hoyer about Vimer Germany and in particular the town of Vimer through history. And Professor Adam Smith will be telling the story of America through three presidents. And on top of all that, I'll be doing a special event with Ian Hislop about the history of satire. And I will be on stage with Mary Beard and we will be talking about just how strange, just how alien, just how different to us Rome was or maybe it wasn't. I will be talking to Helen Castor about Elizabeth I and we'll be discussing whether she truly was England's greatest ruler or maybe whether that title should still be claimed by Atholstan. I will be talking to Ali Ansari about all things Persian with Dan Jackson about the pit of death. And I will be talking to a friend of the show Willie Dalrymple about the links between ancient India and Greece and Rome. Absolutely incredible scenes. And of course on both days, Tom and I will be on stage doing a show together as well. So on the first day, we'll be answering all our club members questions. And then to close the festival, we will do a definitive ranking of the all-time top friends of the show. So lots to look forward to. And beyond that, there is so much else that will be happening across the weekend. So think of it as the ultimate summer history hangout. And your tickets will give you full access to explore the great to the palace of Hampton Court and indeed the Royal Tennis Court. So that'll be very exciting. There will be food and drink fit for a king, which sounds very enticing. I picture the very glamorous people that are our club members. And they're summer garb. They're on the lawn at Hampton Court Palace. They're chatting about history and delightful surrounding sipping on a refreshing gin and tonic. And it's probably the most civilized festival there's ever been. I mean, that's what I imagine anyway. Just a reminder, the tickets are exclusive to club members. And if you are not a member, now is the perfect time to join. So head over to therestishistory.com and grab your tickets. And of course, have access to a whole range of supplementary benefits. Once you have signed up to therestishistory.com, all you do then is log into the members area and you select festival, and it's all very obvious. But you know what, there is a twist. If you do this, you'll be entered into a genuinely unbelievable prize draw. And that prize draw, if you win, you and three other people is at the Golden Tickets in Child in the Chocolate Factory because you will be given the chance to be upgraded to the premium experience and the premium experience will give you, among other things, unlimited food and drink for free all day. Do not miss it. Can't wait to see it.