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Beyond the trenches: a new take on WW1
00:44:12
Historian Alex Churchill explores lesser-known dimensions of the opening weeks of the First World War, from untold global stories to the myths and misconceptions we have about the conflict
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- [00:00]
Rachel Dinning
Love the History Extra Podcast. Well download the History Extra app for ad free episodes, exclusive long read features and interactive courses led by experts in the History Extra Academy.
- [00:13]
Alex Churchill
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- [00:53]
Nikolai Eberholst
Read somewhere that the average American spends 13 hours a year waiting in pharmacies for prescriptions. Clearly I am above average. I thought being above average would feel better.
- [01:07]
Alex Churchill
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- [01:50]
Rachel Dinning
Welcome to the History Extra podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. When you think of the First World War, what springs to mind? Is it trench warfare? The myth that troops would be home by Christmas? Or perhaps the idea that the whole thing began because of the assassination of an Austro Hungarian Archduke? Well, in this episode, Rachel Dinning is joined by historian Alex Churchill, the co author of a new book, Ring of Fire, to consider new perspectives on the conflict, highlighting the voices of ordinary people caught up in the war, as well as examining how it unfolded across the globe. Alex is also the presenter of a new History Extra Academy series, World War II Myths and Misconceptions, that's out now and available to watch on the History Extra app. Check out the link in the episode description of this podcast to download the app now or visit historyextra.com academy for more information.
- [02:54]
Nikolai Eberholst
You've just published a new book, Ring of A New Global History of the Outbreak of the First World War. And we should mention your co author Nikolai Eberholst, a historian based in Copenhagen. Shout out to Nikolai, who can't be with us today. But my opening question to you, Alex, is With so much literature and histories of the First World War out there, is it possible to write something completely new about this area of history more than 110 years later, later?
- [03:23]
Daniel Kramer Arden
So this was why we started looking at doing it in the first place, because another book came out and it wasn't that we were like, oh, this is a terrible book. But what we did say was, oh my God, this is the same format that we've seen for a hundred years. It says it's going to tell us all this new stuff about the war, but can it really? And then Nikolai and I started talking about how would you do it so that it's new and different and what would you do? And we decided two things really. We decided first of all there was lots of room still to write a big sweeping new account of the war from the bottom up. So when we talk about top down history, we're talking about describing it from the perspective of politicians, people. So you'll see names like Churchill and you'll see generals and you'll see kings and you'll see all of the people making the decisions at the top end. But what there isn't so much of is bottom up, which is just your average normal person in the street. So we decided that there was some scope there. And then we also decided that if someone was going to claim that they had done a tr. Comprehensive worldwide sweep, then you absolutely cannot only work in English. And really if Nikolai was here, he say you can't just work in English, French and German either because it just doesn't wash because the second you get into the Austro Hungarian army, which is absolutely massive, I'm sure we'll come to talk about the scope of what's going on in the east in the opening weeks of the war, but we hardly talk about it in English. And there's, there's something like 30 odd languages and dialects going on in the Austro Hungarian army. So you've got Czech, you've got Slovenian, you've got Bosnian, you've got Serbian, you've got the German. So we kind of thought it probably needs a team to try and do this. Why don't we try it? And I think the good thing was that Nikolai and I have completely different language skill set. So he does the German and he also, he studied in Russia as well. So he does Russian, which means that he can kind of get enough of a handle on the Cyrillic stuff to know what he's looking at to. And I, on the other hand, do the French, which I started learning in lockdown. So I think the interesting thing about us two working together is that, firstly, we have absolutely nothing in common when it comes to First World War interests. And secondly, we also do all of the opposite languages. So it works out quite well as a team. So, to answer your initial question, yes, I think by looking at it from a broader perspective and not relying on Anglophone sources and traditional sources from people like Winston Churchill, we had opened ourselves up to just hundreds of new voices about the First World War. Or new in English, definitely.
- [06:02]
Nikolai Eberholst
You said you wrote this book from the bottom up rather than top down. So rather than the perspectives of the great kings or presidents or leaders, how challenging was it finding accounts from ordinary people or unheard voices?
- [06:16]
Daniel Kramer Arden
I think rather than finding them, it was choosing what to use, because we had a whole planet to choose from and this stuff is out there. And it's important to say that a book like this, we're not. We would never claim to be experts on every single facet of the First World War and every single place in the world. So you lean heavily on scholarship. And there are a lot of people doing niche academic work. Like, for instance, I used a 300 page old book about the Dutch East Indies in the First World War, which would probably not get any traction in a general publishing, sort of general history market. But what it did have was amazing anecdotes about things like everybody there hoarding rice when the war broke out. So the same kind of rush on banks and rush on supplies that you see in London and Berlin, you're also seeing in Jakarta as well. And that gave us that. So it wasn't so much finding voices. I think the one people always ask you about is finding indigenous African and Indian sources. The Indian one wasn't such a huge problem because they come in in the epilogue, the Indians are just arriving in Marseille when our book finish, but very much so, we needed to look at African soldiers, and in particular French African soldiers and civilians as well. And we did find a couple of amazing sources for that. So we have kind of a rundown as to the general feeling of a certain area in what's now Malawi. And it's all based on. There was an academic, his name's Melvin Page, and he's absolutely lovely and he's American, and he spent years living in that area in the 70s. And he just started interviewing all the old men he found that had fought in the war. And he collated the interviews and transcribed them. And I laboriously went through about 600 pages of them, picking out themes that kept coming up. So One of the themes that comes up is everybody being angry at the white man for bringing this war down on top of them. And another one that came out that was quite funny was this preconception, this thing that had got into the heads of the locals about how the Germans were cannibals. They were all terrified of the German cannibals. And another one was anger, actually at their own chiefs as well, the village chiefs who were encouraging them to go to war and sending them to war. And we found even in one account, the locals had set fire to the chief's house because they'd had enough of it for basically saying that you're collaborators and you're bringing down this pain on us. So it was more dealing with the volume and picking out the threads that kept coming up. Because I think for every account that ended up in the book, we had five. So we had to be really choosy in the end about which one we used, which voice we used. And I hope that what comes across is that that person, not really only speaking for themselves, but they're also speaking for a wider trend or a wider point about the First World War. So I don't know how rude we could be on this one. But in West Africa, what's now Mali, so this is French at the time, and there are locals and it's local men discussing why they think a war has broken out in Europe. And they perceive the entire war being the result of white men's obsession with their penises. So they believe that white men are oversexed and obsessed with sex. And they also believe that there's a shortage of women in Europe. Now, apparently this comes from the fact that French colonial officials didn't tend to take their wives with them, so they would come alone, so they didn't bring women. So these men have sort of assumed that there's a big shortage of women. White men are obsessed with sex. It's all they care about. So obviously it's ended up in a war and it makes complete sense to them. So it was interesting to find that you get othering on all sides. Like, it was really interesting.
- [10:05]
Nikolai Eberholst
Well, my next question to you is actually going to be, what are some of the international perspectives of the opening months of the war that we don't have in Britain? I mean, the one you just said is a fantastic example. What others do we have that are in your book?
- [10:18]
Daniel Kramer Arden
So when we were collating on the other side, on East Africa, around what's now Malawi and around Lake Malawi, a few interesting things came out. And not everybody had all of the same opinions, but I stuck with ones that came up at least three or four times they went on the short list. One was this attitude to say, look, the white man's done this to us. We're all going to end up dead by the end of it. Being under one is as bad as being under any other. This is a white man's war, not our problem, but we're all going to suffer for it. Was one. Another one that came up repeatedly was, look, we've got used to the British. We don't like that they're here, but we don't now want to trade them for the cannibal Germans and deal with a whole new Overlord. So surely it's just better the devil we know. So we'll fight with the British. There's one village where they say that the Germans have promised them, well, if you come and fight for us, you'll have brand new houses with tin roofs at the end of it, which was a lie. And also, they didn't win, so they didn't provide the houses. But interestingly as well, you had indigenous Africans that, because of those attitudes, would end up fighting on both sides. I think it's the Germans that pay better. So they would flip and go and serve the other one, because to them it's just a job. And they ask people like, why did you join the army? And another one that came up was, because we were starving, because we needed food. And another one is clothes. The army gives you new clothes, which was revelatory in some villages. So they joined for the clothes. So it was really interesting to see what their motivations were for going to war and also as well, what their attitudes were to why the war had broken out. But you find racism within racism as well. So you have certain tribes in West Africa that look down their nose at certain other tribes that the French army won't recruit, because both France and Britain, who are the ones with these big global empires and all of these indigenous peoples that they can try and push into war, they all have some form of, like, racial theory about who's a better soldier. So, for instance, the 20 of the Indian army is made up of 6, I think, in 1914, but they only make up 2% of the population in India. So what you find is hugely skewed to the north of the country where they're being impacted by the war because their men have gone to fight, and huge areas in the south where they don't want soldiers from and which are regarded as lower castes that others won't serve with them, which is, again, is the racism within racism, where really the war doesn't touch them as much at all because of that. So it was really interesting learning about how the British and the French perceived it. I think the most succinct one. I will tell you how the French ranked North African soldiers. So they said Moroccans were brilliant. You want them in your army, they're amazing Algerians. Well, they're quite good and they're useful, but they're pretty stupid. So what you need to do is give them a simple thing to take care of and they'll run at it and they'll be good. And they don't like Tunisians. I think the slur was, Tunisians might as well be women, whatever that means. But it was interesting to see. And the French pay for that in a way as well. So when their first North African units go across in 1914, they don't operate like they should because they haven't trained the Moroccans and Algerians in how to wire up telephones for communications or how to operate a machine gun, because they deem them as too stupid to do it. And it means that those units get absolutely slaughtered. The Moroccans, in the opening weeks of the war. So there's a Moroccan division that goes. And you have to be a bit careful because it doesn't mean everybody in it was Moroccan, it just means it came from Morocco. So it also has some Senegalese soldiers in it as well, which they think are the pinnacle of their colonial soldiers. They just think they're warriors. But they were serving in Morocco when the war broke out, and they were actually due to go home, some of them, and instead of turning left and sailing for home, they turned right and sailed for Europe. We have a famous account by one of those as well, about his early fighting. So, yeah, it was insane. And I think I don't have a lot of patience for people to say, well, this stuff just isn't out there. It is. And sometimes it's really hard to find. And sometimes you have to. Like, we had to invest sitting there and reading 600 pages of interviews and marking down what every answer related to and then seeing which ones were coming up over and over again. But if you do it, then the voices are there.
- [14:44]
Nikolai Eberholst
Absolutely. So you're the host of our new History Extra Academy series, World War Myths and Misconceptions, which examines, as you might expect from the title, some of the myths that surround the First World War. So, on the topic of misconceptions, what in your view are some of the most close minded viewpoints we have about how the war started.
- [15:07]
Daniel Kramer Arden
Should we do neutrality? Because I find that really interesting. We've put the war into neat little boxes, haven't we? And that was one thing Nikolai and I, when we were selling the book, said we wanted to smash the boxes and basically make one big dumpster fire that was the first two months of war, and then try and pick it apart without putting everything in Western Front, Eastern Front. And I think neutrality is an interesting box because we have a list of dates when countries eventually did come into the war, if they came into the war. So we would look at Italy and we would say, oh, Italy aren't in the war until May 1915. And that's true officially, but it's a lie. To say that Italy was behaving like a neutral until May 1915 is an absolute lie. And I think I said it when we were filming the series that for every nation that was supposedly neutral on the outbreak of the First World War, I can tell you something sneaky they did that violates the terms of being a neutral. So to be a neutral, you're supposed to have absolutely no stake in the war whatsoever and no opinion on what happens on it. And that's fine if you're looking at a war with a couple of hundred thousand men in Spain like Wellington was, because in Britain you would just ignore it, right? But by 1914, I think the scale has got so much bigger that that's impossible. But also the way the world works has changed as well. So I'll give you two examples. One is that by 1914, Britain doesn't produce not even half of the food that British people eat. She brings it in from everywhere else. So a huge one is bringing in frozen meat from South America and Argentina in particular. Britain only has eight weeks worth of food at the beginning of the First World War. So if the supply chain stops, everybody starts starving after eight weeks. And another one which is more warlike is Sweden. So Sweden, one of her huge exports is iron ore and you need metal in an industrialized war, so everybody's going to want it. So now previously, Sweden and Argentina would have had absolutely nothing to do with the war and stayed out of it and had no opinion whatsoever. But now to survive, Sweden needs to carry on selling that iron ore. So who does she sell it to? And does that mean she's neutral or is she violating neutrality because she's going to sell it to Germany is where it's going to go. So that's not neutral, is it? And if Argentina's sending all of that beef to Europe for Britain and France, because there's no German boats at sea, because they're all hiding, because they're vastly outnumbered. So it's not like she can say, well, I'll sell an equal amount to both of you. There's nothing, comparatively nothing going into Germany because they're all too scared to take to the seas in case the Royal Navy catches up with them. So they're only going to be selling to one side. It's the same with the Americans. Once they start manufacturing weapons, they're only going to supply the Allies because they can't get anything to Germany because of the blockade that the Royal Navy are doing. So they are picking a side, really. They're participating in the war and helping one side. The food thing is the really vague area because you say, well, okay, the iron ore is obviously going to help fight the war because it's metal and they're going to make stuff out of it. But with the food, the line is even fuzzier. So the Royal Navy will tell you, well, they're going to use it to feed an army. So that's particip in the war, which is even greater. So it's really hard to still be neutral. And most of them are fibbing. And there's loads of secret agreements going on as well.
- [18:40]
Alex Churchill
The summer is heating up with Marvel Studios. The Fantastic Four. Light them up, Johnny. On July 25th. Time to save the planet. What's the plan? Trust me, I hate that.
- [18:53]
Daniel Kramer Arden
Bad plan.
- [18:53]
Alex Churchill
Come on, that's a stupid plan. Prepare for Fantastic.
- [18:58]
Daniel Kramer Arden
We will face this together as a family.
- [19:02]
Alex Churchill
Marvel Studios. The Fantastic Four first steps only in theaters July 25th. Get tickets now. This film is not yet rated, so.
- [19:10]
Nikolai Eberholst
You discuss wartime neutrality in the new History Extra Academy series. It's going to be live on the 6th of July, and people, if listening, can head to historyextra.com academy to find that. Now in the series as well, you look at questions like how did the war start? So we think that it begins with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, but actually it obviously had much longer rates. What was the true cause of the First World War, in your view?
- [19:37]
Daniel Kramer Arden
So I know that when you write your essays, you're supposed to give a big, long list of long and short term causes and you're supposed to talk about the naval arms race, and you're supposed to talk about imperialism, and you're supposed to talk about the short term cause and the catalyst being Franz Ferdinand. And I would argue that the overwhelming cause of the First World War is stuff. It's stuff people want that they don't have, or protecting stuff that they do have. And it's all about imperialism. It's all about being the biggest kid in the playground. So you will be told that Britain's argument or how the British government sold it to the people was that we were going to war for gallant little Belgium. No, we weren't. We were going to war because if we didn't participate in a war this big and it ended and all of the winners started dividing up the stuff, we might not make out so well, we needed a seat at the table. So, yeah, everything is about stuff.
- [20:35]
Nikolai Eberholst
And I wanted to ask you some more about some of the stories, the personal stories that you uncovered in the book. So perhaps we could start with some of the civilian experiences of the war.
- [20:46]
Daniel Kramer Arden
We've talked about this before and you know that I was particularly obnoxious about wanting to tell the story of elderly people. I gave a talk last night where the audience was substantially over retirement age and I said, all of you still have opinions and feelings. So the idea that elderly people don't usually make the narrative because they're not fighting and they're not working in factories or hospitals, that they kind of slip out of the narrative, I really wanted to change that. So we have these vignettes, kind of these elderly people. So one of them is the way the French army works their reserves. So German reserves are trained brilliantly. They're epic. French reserves are kind of regarded as a load of old farts that aren't really much use to anybody. And so you find these descriptions of these French territorial units in the opening weeks of war. And what happens is Joffre, who's in command of the French, realizes that the Germans are going far further into France than he anticipated and he needs to make his line longer. So he rounds up a load of these territorial units and plonks them on the end of his line. So they come in into facing enemy soldiers instead of just guarding railway lines and stuff, which is kind of how they anticipated using them. And so from the town of Ternai, I have like amazing accounts of these older soldiers who were out of practice and their uniforms don't fit properly, still helping defend Belgium. And the local Belgians are absolutely in love with them. Like this. Look at this guy. This guy's like my dad and he's here and he's pot shotting at Germans and helping save our town. But I also found as well, there's one WOMAN and so it's when the Germans march into Brussels. So the Belgians, they left Brussels open and said, take it. It has no strategic value in a war. And because of the news that was coming out about atrocities happening further east, they said, fill in the trenches. Take down the barricades. Let them have it. We don't want people to die for something that's of no military value. And so you have this scenario, and it's raining, and they're fresh German soldiers. They haven't been fighting, so they're all immaculately dressed, and they're marching through Brussels. And there's this. This silent, miserable crowd watching them. And this woman pushes her way to the front, screaming. And she's screaming, you killed my boy. You killed my boy. They took him. Because her son has been killed elsewhere in the war already. And all of the other crowd people near her are dragging her away because they don't want her to get into trouble. And to the credit of the German soldiers, who have probably no idea what's going on at this point, they looked at her as they walked past, but they didn't respond. They let her grieve very loudly in front of them. But you also have elderly people participating in ways that you don't usually think of. So one of the photos in the book is of this really old Belgian lady. I say that because she looks really old. She's probably about 50, but by 1940, she's very elderly and she's out doing the harvest. And if you think about it logically, all of the men have been taken for war from countries like France. It's harvest time when the war starts. And also as well, the army has come and taken all of your draft horses and your animals. So you're left with women, children and the elderly to out in the fields and harvest by hand. And you read these great stories of sort of collective efforts where they're like, well, today we'll do Doris's Field, and then tomorrow we'll do yours. And they all band together and help each other get it in, because otherwise they're going to have a complete disaster. But I think my favorite one is there's this book, and I think if you pitched it to a publisher now, they'd laugh in your face. What it is, is it's a French journalist wandering the streets of Paris for the first three weeks of war and just writing down everything he saw. And his book was a gold mine for things. Like, he would write down every sign that a shopkeeper had nailed to the door to Try and stop looters. He would transcribe it and it was an amazing rich source of how people were responding to the war in Paris. But he's out one day and he's wandering the streets and one of the things I didn't consider was that all the able bodied men have gone and that includes a lot of dustbin men, trash collectors. So Paris very quickly becomes full of rubbish and starts to smell really badly. And he's out walking and he sees this lorry and I think there's a teenager driving it and there's another guy and then somewhere in the distance there's an old man and he says to them, oh, are you collecting the rubbish? And they're like, well, yeah, like unofficially, yeah. And he said, oh, can you do my street? Because it really smells. And the kid says to him, oh, you need to ask the boss at the back. And it's this old guy following the truck down the road and he says to him, are you like the bin men now? And he says, well, look at me, I'm too old to join the army. Both my sons are fighting. You just have to be as useful as you can. And this is what I want to do. He says, oh, so give me your address and yeah, we'll make our way over there and we'll pick your rubbish up. And as he opens his jacket to get a notebook out so that he can write down the address, he sees that the journalist sees that he's wearing the Legion of Honor. Like this is a retired colonel who wasn't needed for the actual fighting, but he's just trying to do something useful.
- [25:43]
Nikolai Eberholst
Yeah, that's amazing. And we sometimes don't consider the stories of the people left behind on the home front and the huge efforts they were going to. What's a good example from your book of a child's experience of the start of the war?
- [25:58]
Daniel Kramer Arden
So we had, I think one that people remember is a little French boy saying goodbye to his horse because his horse has been requisitioned. I think his dad's a doctor and he had bought this horse to be able to ride around the various villages and see his patients. And the army took it away. And the account, I think he says something like he's absolutely devastated that the horse leaves, but it took me a long time to realize what else was departing with her. Like my whole way of life. Basically the one I like is Boy Scouts. So various levels of Boy Scout involvement in the opening weeks of war. So in Britain they're a long way from the Fighting that they're helping direct soldiers. So the ones in Surrey and Hampshire, you have all these reservists reporting to places like Aldershot to go into camp, and they'd know their way around. So the Boy Scouts are there to direct them where they need to go. And then they do things like they're doing breakfast runs, so troops guarding railway lines in the area, they'll do the breakfast run and take them their food every morning. So they're helping out like that. In Brussels, they are slightly more obnoxious because obviously their country is being invaded. And I think they very quickly started doing things like running messages backwards and forwards, like not at the front lines, but like in cities, between officials and things, they were running important messages backwards and forwards. And then this story hit the newspapers that one boy scout had located a German spy. And then suddenly there was an epidemic of naughty schoolboys accusing everybody of being a spy. And they were. This one brilliantly written account of this Belgian kid that decides, this man is a spy, and they said he stalks him Red Indian style is the way they put it. And this poor man, this chubby older man who has absolutely no connections with the Germans whatsoever, gets so flustered. And the bloke that wrote it said, I watched him go into three separate shops to buy tobacco in the space of 10 minutes because he was trying to shake his Boy Scout tail and he couldn't outrun him. And eventually the kid caught up with him and they said there was this dramatic moment where he pointed at this guy and just went, spy. And then everybody started trying to lynch this poor man. And then the policeman came along and went, bob, is that you? And poor Bob was on the floor. Yes, it's just me. And then we're like, can we stop this now, please? This is clearly a mistake. This guy is not a German spy. But you also had down really near the French line. So in Nancy, in France, you had Boy Scouts trying to go out to collect souvenirs and then bring them back, and they were trading them in the local market, basically. So they had a vested interest in putting themselves in danger. And I never found the documentary evidence, but it basically says one or two were her. And so the authorities banned them, but they were an absolute menace. So, yeah, the idea that children had no agency as well, like all different ways for them to get involved too.
- [28:56]
Nikolai Eberholst
Definitely not seen and not heard or whatever, the idiot.
- [28:59]
Daniel Kramer Arden
Definitely not Belgian Boy Scouts, no, they were very much heard accusing all of their neighbours of being the enemy.
- [29:05]
Nikolai Eberholst
I think this was Nikolai's Area of specialty when it came to writing your book. But the atrocities. Why was it important not to shy away from accounts of atrocities?
- [29:16]
Daniel Kramer Arden
I think we had to talk about refugees. I mean, when you combine the refugees with the mobilization and the soldiers and everything. I think I've read that this was the largest movement of humanity ever in history, in the opening weeks of the war. The amount of people that got up and moved, and part of that is dealing with the worst aspects of those people on the move. And also, so when we talk about EEP and when we talk about the Somme, we don't talk about civilians, because we'd cleared them out, we'd made them leave the towns and villages that we talk about when we're talking about the fighting, you don't have what you have in 1914, which is civilians in the way everywhere when you're trying to fight. I mean, even at the Battle of Mons, there's accounts of the British shouting at Belgian children who are up on the railway embankment trying to watch what's going on, because this is the most entertaining thing they've ever seen. So there is huge scope for civilians being in the path of danger and being hurt. And then you have this whole phenomena of atrocities. And again, it's done in the same way that we did the whole book, which is to look at this as a whole. So you have. We'd be more familiar, probably with the rape of Belgium, which. It's very hard to quantify the damage. And actually, I'll tell you how the Belgians tried to do it for the centenary in a minute. But what you have is propaganda later, coming along and making everything sound much worse than it actually was. But these atrocities did happen. And we spoke to a lovely guy called Axel, who used to be the mayor of Dinant. Now, Dinant is this beautiful town on the River Mers, and it is the scene of the worst civilian atrocity in the West. And the Germans, on the same day as the Battle of Mons, General von Housen's 3rd army came across the river. It was largely made up of Protestant Saxons. They came across the river and they annihilated nearly 700 civilians. And I think the youngest victim was three weeks old, and the oldest one was in their 80s. And there's a huge memorial, the original memorial the Germans dynamited during World War II, because they didn't like it being there. So there's now a new modern memorial there. But it was also interesting. So the Belgians, what they did for the centenary was go out there with every account they had of an atrocity and then try and find the grave of the person that was being described to say, okay, I quantify this with a headstone that says this person died on this date. There's an actual body there. It's not, not like a kind of a friend of a friend of a friend told me about this whole family that were wiped out by the Germans. So they, they did really good work in trying to quantify it. But what you have and the cause of it, and I think we think the rape of Belgium is bad, but it's far worse in the Balkans. The atrocities carried out by the Austro Hungarians against the Serbs and the Austrians as well have this thing about taking photos of it afterwards. So you get like these braggy pictures of what they've done, which I think we chose not to include anything gruesome in the book because I think the chapter is harrowing enough. I mean it broke Nikolai writing it, but we also looked at the psychology of why it happened. And I think what you have. So I'll speak for Belgium, because I know that better. You have exhausted soldiers, many of whom were in civilian occupations and a reservist. They're not professional full time soldiers who have been plucked out of their jobs, thrown across the border and they've been on the march for dates and they're terrified. They've also been preconditioned. The Germans did not trust a single civilian they come into contact with. And this goes back to the Franco Prussian War and the Frank Terrors. So basically in that war, the official French army kind of disintegrated. And then the people that fought on, they were sometimes civilians in uniforms and these bands that came together to try and resist. So you would be fired on by a guy wearing everyday clothes. So the Germans have been preconditioned to believe that every Belgian and French civilian is going to try and kill them. They're exhausted, they're tired, they're terrified. They also as well, they're drunk in a lot of cases when this stuff happens. And it's because as they're going through these various Belgian French towns, they're looting the wine cellars and drinking. So their lack of sleep, lack of proper food because they're outrunning their supply lines, too much alcohol already terrified. And then so to explain about Danone is it's kind of in this depression and it has cliffs that come all the way down to the river and then the town is spread out along the river. And what triggered it off on this one and the obsession, the Germans had that they were being fired on by civilians behind them. They absolutely weren't at all. What they were hearing was their own bullets ricocheting off the cliffs and echoing. And then they had it in their head heads that the town was attacking them. And I can't say that no civilian decided to poke a rifle out of their window and take a shot at the person invading their country. They may well have done, but it just ended up in a bloodbath where the Germans were lying people up against the wall and shooting them. And I think Nikolai talks about East Prussia and the Russian atrocities against Germans there. And there's all kinds of cultural things as well, like barbed wire on farms. Russians don't use it. So when they see all this barbed wire separating farmland, they think the military have put it there and the civilians are helping the military. Well, no, that' just how they divide up their land in East Prussia. And they shoot anyone on a bicycle because in their world nobody has a bicycle for purposes other than military and official purposes. So they're all military officials or soldiers or people engaging with soldiers. So they kill anyone with a bicycle as well. So you've got cultural differences as well. I don't know, it's. It's kind of like it's a cultural thing in that you not only destroy your enemy, but then you annihilate his entire race. And we've seen it throughout history in that region, and it was no different in the First World War.
- [35:09]
Nikolai Eberholst
That's interesting. I was gonna ask you. And it's sort of going Beyond World War I, but do you think we view modern conflicts differently to how we look at World War I?
- [35:19]
Daniel Kramer Arden
I think, yeah, I think so. Obviously, World War II gets more of the attention, doesn't it? And much more engagement. Many more books, many more war tv. I mean, we refer to it as the Shiny War because for every one book or documentary you get about the First World War, they'll commission 10 on World War II because of the interest levels. And I think because that, once again, was an escalation in total war, we sometimes think of this as being less barbaric, which absolutely isn't the case. I mean, so we've seen the Blitz, we've seen the footage of the Blitz in World War II. So we view World War I air raids as not that scary because it might be like 12 bombers coming over and dropping a few bombs. But to the people of 1914, the airplane hadn't been invented, not even two decades before. So for them, it's absolutely terrifying. People in Britain hadn't been fired on on their own soil since, like, the 1660s, I think. And there's a naval raid where German ships fire at Hartlepool at the end of 1914. But the idea that splendid isolation is gone and that the enemy can now fly over and rain death on you is existential to people in 1914. They don't know, oh, yeah, it's going to be much worse in World War II, so we should calm ourselves down. And it wasn't any less traumatic either. So there was. Was the biggest raid in 1917 on London was Gotha bombers that came over and one of their bombs went through the roof of a primary school, through the girls class, through the boys class, and landed in reception in the bottom floor and exploded. And it killed many, many children. And there's one footage of the school caretaker sifting the ruins for bodies, and one of the bodies he's found was his own child. So the idea that this was less barbaric and less terrifying to the people that lived it, I think doesn't. It doesn't do them justice, the people that experienced it.
- [37:27]
Nikolai Eberholst
That makes sense. We're at the end of the podcast now. How do you think we should be thinking about First World War and how it started more than a century on?
- [37:37]
Daniel Kramer Arden
I think I would like to think that this might spur on other people to look at the war from the perspective of ordinary men, women and children and how they lived it. I think we have a lot of literature and people will continue to produce literature about great people stalking the corridors of power and making the decisions, because that is absolutely valid history. But I think the best example I'll give is that that is what the Guns of August was by Barbara Tuckman, which is a beautifully written book, but it's half a century old now and it's still on bookshelves. It's the most stocked book in the IWM First World War section in their gift shop. And it's half a century old. And I would like to think that Ring of Fire does it in a completely different way. And it doesn't mean that that book isn't valid anymore, because it is. But what it means is that you could now read both and look at the war from both ends. And I would hope that we continue to try and look for new perspectives and new ways of examining the conflict. I think one of the big new academic trends now is to look at the war in terms of minerals and the fight for oil and the beginnings of that, which is really interesting when you start looking at the Caucasus, why everybody's still messing about down there in this really like esoteric front where you've got all of these conflicting enemies in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. And really the best thing for everybody would be let's just leave them to it and go home. But they don't because they're interested in the oil that Azerbaijan has. So I think there are still new ways to look at the war and I think we can still add to the literature as well. And I would like more people that only engage with the Second World War, hopefully to begin looking at the First World War and saying, do you know what? I not just going to write this off as a load of trenches and irrelevant to me, because actually what I'm seeing in the new stuff that's coming out is that this is the genesis of everything that I'm used to reading about in World War II.
- [39:36]
Rachel Dinning
That was Alex Churchill, a historian and presenter with a special interest in the 20th century, and she was speaking to Rachel Dinning. Alex is the presenter of a new History Extra Academy series, World War I Myths and Misconceptions, which is out now and available to watch on the History Extra app. In the series, Alex unpacks some more of the most enduring myths about World War I, exploring topics such as the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the complexities of wartime neutrality, and why the war didn't truly end on 11th November 1918 in much more detail than she's had space to today. You can watch those lectures by downloading the History Extra app for free. It's available now in the App Store or Google Play. Check out the link in the episode description of this podcast to download the app now or visit historyextra.com academy for more information. Thanks for listening. This this podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the.
- [40:48]
Nikolai Eberholst
Courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.
- [40:56]
Rachel Dinning
You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry.
- [40:59]
Daniel Kramer Arden
Sir Sunny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.
- [41:03]
Rachel Dinning
Join me, Alex von Tunzelman for History's Heroes.
- [41:08]
Nikolai Eberholst
Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.