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- [00:05]
Tom Holland
This episode is brought to you by Lloyds, which has been backing British ambition for over 250 years now. When you think about it, every dynasty in history has boiled down to two important elements, aspiration and action. And a classic example of this from British history, the rise of the House of Wessex, the family of Alfred the the Great and his heirs, who between them established the United Kingdom of England.
- [00:38]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, it's a great story, isn't it, Tom? A great lesson in leadership, I think, for anybody. So Alfred and his heirs, they marry idealism and pragmatism. They're brilliant at alliances, they're brilliant at managing power. They're brilliant, of course, at managing their money, which is a key part of political leadership. And, of course, we are all reaping the rewards of their wisdom and foresight. When it's time to make your next move, you can bank on Lloyds to be ready when you are. 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 Lloyds to help make their dreams a reality.
- [01:21]
Tom Holland
Based on Lloyds internal customer data from March 2026. In Flanders fields the poppies blow between the crosses row on row that mark our place and in the sky the larks still bravely singing fly Scarce heard amid the guns 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 McCrae, and he wrote it during the Second Battle of Ypres in May 1915. And it is the poem that has effectively enshrined the Poppy as the symbol of the 4 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? For 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 W of Flanders Fields.
- [03:20]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, you're right. Hi, everybody. It Seems I'm representative of war poetry because we're used to war poems by Sigrid Sassoon or Wilfred Owen that question the futility and 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, it's 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.
- [04:04]
Tom Holland
And Dominic, even poets in the early months and years of the war were capable 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.
- [04:19]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, exactly. And I think at the time, if you'd asked most of the Tommies, do you stand with kind of the Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon anti war school of poetry, or do you stand with Rupert brooke and John McCrae, they would say the latter, even though of course, Seyfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen fought very bravely themselves. We'll come back to McCrae's poem and indeed the battle in which he wrote it, the Second Battle of Ypres, 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 Lusitan. So a Titanic style story, except the difference is in this case, the Lusitania is 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 Cavell 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.
- [05:53]
Tom Holland
And, Dominic, 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?
- [06:00]
Dominic Sandbrook
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 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. With outlining 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 listeners will remember, with Austria Hungary's decision to exact revenge on Serbia for the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who's now slightly being 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 Entente, 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 Marne, and they fall all the way back to the chalk lands of the River Aisne 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 the issue.
- [08:28]
Tom Holland
And there had kind of been hints of the challenge that the Allies might face in doing this, hadn't there, 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 combatants 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.
- [09:09]
Dominic Sandbrook
Not at all. And actually, the story of the next four years is them actually figuring out that they were wrong. So, as we'll see when we will come in the next episode, to one of many extravagantly mustachioed 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 Cadorna, the Italian supreme commander. I mean, this is very common. And actually the story of the First World War is these guys realizing that they were completely and utterly wrong and that basically they're gonna have to figure out a way to break the enemy defences. And in experimenting, they will kill hundreds of thousands of their own men. I mean, this is the sort of
- [09:47]
Tom Holland
tragedy of it, and it's why they're cast as 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.
- [10:02]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. So we, I think we alluded in a previous series, Lord Kitchener, great British kind of war hero here of the war and whatnot.
- [10:09]
Tom Holland
Great Moustache.
- [10:10]
Dominic Sandbrook
Great Moustache, goes to see the trenches at the end of 1914 and he says, this is not war, as I understand it. You know, 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 Museum's oral 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's 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. Tom.
- [10:57]
Tom Holland
Yeah, he was a big fan of the Mother Goddess.
- [10:59]
Dominic Sandbrook
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.
- [11:13]
Tom Holland
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.
- [11:18]
Dominic Sandbrook
He did. His name was Robert von Ranker Graves, but he dropped the von Ranke for obvious reasons. He did keep quiet about it. So he's a very accomplished person, Robert Graves. He wrote poetry, he boxed at a very high level, he was a great 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 Fusiliers. 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 Le Havre in France with six other young officers in the Welsh Fusiliers. And his first memory, he says, as soon as we'd arrived, we were accosted by numerous little boys pimping for their sisters. I take you to my sister. She. Very nice, very good. Jigga jig, not much money, very cheap. Very good. I take you now. Plenty champagne for me.
- [12:18]
Tom Holland
I mean, he didn't go to Charterhouse to do that kind of thing.
- [12:21]
Dominic Sandbrook
Not at all. Well, we don't know, because he doesn't explicitly say that he didn't take them up on their offer. No.
- [12:25]
Tom Holland
Does he not?
- [12:25]
Dominic Sandbrook
But he implies that he didn't because they were too busy.
- [12:27]
Tom Holland
This is the man who wrote I, Claudius. I suppose so maybe he did.
- [12:30]
Dominic Sandbrook
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 Prosser, 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 Prosser. And the oldest of these men is a guy called James Burford, who's another miner. 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 since 1882. And Graves said, didn't you fight in the Boer War? And he says, no, I tried to reenlist, 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.
- [13:48]
Tom Holland
So he's like Corporal Jones in Dad's army.
- [13:50]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. He is, yeah, with a, 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 Platoon. One of them is only 15 and he keeps four. Like classic teenager, 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.
- [14:20]
Tom Holland
Teenage lion.
- [14:21]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. So they're loaded onto this troop train bound for the front and they're heading to Bethune, which is the railhead, which is the end of the line. And that's near France's 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 khaki. He's going to take them on foot to the trenches, which are about six miles away. We march through the unlit suburbs of the town. We were all intensely excited at the noise and flashes of the guns in the distance, says Graves.
- [15:04]
Tom Holland
I mean, that's an amazing phrase, isn't it intensely excited. So at this point in Graves career, and perhaps kind of more generally in the parabola of public reactions to the war, it's still seen as exciting, of course.
- [15:16]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, I mean, it would be exciting, would it not, to go to war for the first time. You're 20 years old, or in this, or in the case of James Burford, you're 63.
- [15:24]
Tom Holland
Maybe you're speaking for yourself there.
- [15:26]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, don't forget they're going voluntarily. These aren't. These are not people who are being conscripted. These are people who've chosen, who have elected to go to do their bit.
- [15:34]
Tom Holland
Yeah, I guess that's true.
- [15:35]
Dominic Sandbrook
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. It 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 and it lands 20 yards away. And as it explodes, they all throw themselves to the ground. There's an explosion and then they hear this 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 at Riley, they calls them the musical instruments. And they all get up and they trudge on and they get to a village called Cambran, 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, you know, there are people waiting. They give them their gas masks, their respirators, they give them their field dressings, so the kind of bandages and stuff. And they are given a little bit of something to eat, so bread, bacon, rum and bitter stewed tea, sickly with sugar. And then once they finish that, the guide leads them on again. 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 realizes. He switches it off almost straight away because he realizes to his horror that they are walking on live field mice and frogs that have a sort of carpet of them. They've all fallen into the trench and couldn't get out again.
- [17:26]
Tom Holland
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, 1917, that wood will have just become shattered tree stump.
- [17:40]
Dominic Sandbrook
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, because 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 cozy it is. So they duck in and it's that classic scene that you've seen. So for our British listeners, you'd have seen it in Blackadder Goes Forth, the comedy series. It's quite cozy. There's like a nice ornamental lamp. There's a table with a tablecloth. The, 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.
- [18:54]
Tom Holland
Could I ask a really dumb question?
- [18:55]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah.
- [18:56]
Tom Holland
Where are they getting the electricity from? Or is it a wind up gramophone?
- [18:58]
Dominic Sandbrook
It might be a wind up, yeah. I don't, 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 C 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 bearers 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.
- [19:48]
Tom Holland
No, that's the kind of thing I do.
- [19:50]
Dominic Sandbrook
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.
- [20:00]
Tom Holland
What an awful way to go.
- [20:02]
Dominic Sandbrook
Terrible wound. Yeah, must have. I mean, there must have been so many people, thousands upon thousands who died in similar ways. Anyway, at last they reach their company, C 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 is astonished to find that Captain Dunn is actually two months 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 Sabi paired 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, clever chap, comes from Cambridge, fancies himself as 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.
- [21:13]
Tom Holland
So he's a bit like asking the score in the test match or something.
- [21:16]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. And Graves says, well, this is the news from England. And then Donne says, okay, well let me tell you what it's like out here in the trenches. Donne has this tremendous line. He says, we have absolutely nothing to do with the French except when there's a battle on and then we generally let each other down.
- [21:30]
Tom Holland
Well, we've seen that was true, haven't we? From the series we did on the opening months of the war.
- [21:35]
Dominic Sandbrook
And Donne says this is basically how it's going to work. We have breakfast at 8am 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, you know, 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 1 till 6. So they're basically like a kind of group of navvies or something. And then we have, then the men feed again. We have stand to at dusk for about an hour, we work all night and then we stand to for an hour before dawn. And that's the general program. Sounds fun. It's not the end of the world, right?
- [22:15]
Tom Holland
I mean, it's better than being in a coal mine. Right?
- [22:17]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, as we will discuss. So Graves gets a little bit of sleep and then at 1am Don 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 of 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. That's just 400 yards. You know, you could walk to it within minutes, although you'd get shot.
- [23:00]
Tom Holland
And the no man's land as yet is not kind of churned up mud, is it? There are still flowers to be seen.
- [23:05]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, he says, a flat meadow with cornflowers and whatnot, long grass, a few shell holes. There's a wreck of an aeroplane. And he can see barbed wire, theirs and ours, but that's it. He has another little doze 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. So not bad. And just as they're getting stuck in Dunn's manservant, his batman, who's a man called Kingdom, rushes in, his eyes blank with horror and excitement. And he says, gas, sir, gas. They're using gas. And Donne 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.
- [23:50]
Tom Holland
Can you eat marmalade while you're wearing a gas mask?
- [23:52]
Dominic Sandbrook
I Think marmalade, surely, is the priority? No, you'd smear it 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 said, Tom, they are relatively new. You know, 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.
- [24:44]
Tom Holland
And are they still thinking that at this point?
- [24:47]
Dominic Sandbrook
I think by now. So we're in May 1915. There probably is an awareness that 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 earth, of soil and of 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 duck boards. And they gave them names. They would often name after London streets, so Oxford Street, Regent street and whatnot. And an intersection would be named after a famous junction in London, so Hyde Park Corner, Oxford Circus and so on.
- [25:25]
Tom Holland
Elephant and Castle.
- [25:26]
Dominic Sandbrook
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 Sassoon where Siegfried Sassoon says, our objective was Pint Trench, taking bitter and beer and clearing ale and vat, and also Pilsen Lane. So they 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.
- [26:02]
Tom Holland
So it's not just about the Germans being better at building things.
- [26:05]
Dominic Sandbrook
Maybe they are better at building things. I don't know.
- [26:07]
Tom Holland
I mean, they use reinforced concrete, don't they? Which seems a kind of Typical Hun trick.
- [26:13]
Dominic Sandbrook
But when people do take German trenches, they're stunned how good they are. They have kind of ceiling beams, they have nice sort of cladded walls, cinemas in the dugouts. They have kind of skylights and alcoves, sort of decorative alcoves and things.
- [26:28]
Tom Holland
And they go really deep, don't they? I mean, some of them go so deep that actually they're kind of impervious to. To anything the British can fire at them.
- [26:35]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, this is one of the issues when the British think, oh, we'll just clear the German trenches with artillery bombardment. They don't realize just how deep seated 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 diary of the 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 or 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.
- [27:24]
Tom Holland
God, imagine being stuck there.
- [27:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
But here's the thing, you're stuck there. And if it's in the middle of a battle, you're sitting duck. And there are lots of accounts actually reading through soldiers accounts, there's loads of them where they say blogs got stuck and the Germans were basically using him for target practice or sort of dropping shells, getting closer and closer to him and he couldn't get out because he's 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. Alexander Stewart again, he talks about filthy, fat, dirty flies drawn by the dead bodies.
- [28:04]
Tom Holland
Well, the flies must be. I mean, it must be all their Christmases come at.
- [28:07]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. Yeah. In the company headquarters dugout, he says they were massed 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.
- [28:18]
Tom Holland
So the corpses would be full of maggots, I guess.
- [28:20]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. Fleas. 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. And as one puts it, you could hear the eggs crackling as you kind of burned your own underpants with this candle. And then the lice. This is a French stretcher bearer called Raymond Clement. He said, without telling anybody, I take my clothes off and I see hundreds of lice and larva jumping out at me. They're everywhere, in my shirt, my trousers, my underwear, etc. 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.
- [29:07]
Tom Holland
So is this a regular occurrence that people are taking their clothes off and shaking the lice out, do you think?
- [29:11]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, I think it is. I mean, you live. You. There's no, you know, sort of personal discretion, as it were. There's not much place for that on the Western Front, really. You're, you know, going to the toilet altogether on a kind of plank and
- [29:23]
Tom Holland
whatnot, and you'd rather be naked than bitten to death by fleas, of course.
- [29:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
And the lice carry something called trench fever. And trench fever is an infectious disease. It's extremely common in the trenches, and the worst cases can be fatal. So JRR Tolkien was invalided out at the Somme with a very severe case of trench fever. And ironically, the trench fever probably saved his life because if he'd stayed in the Somme, he could easily have died. AA Milne had trench fever. CS Lewis had trench fever.
- [29:52]
Tom Holland
God, it's hard to think of a. A Milne, isn't it, with trench fever. Winnie the Pooh with lice. He probably would have had fleas, certainly.
- [30:00]
Dominic Sandbrook
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. His first night, he goes to 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. This was thought a great joke, says 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 accounts of them being as big as cats. And often the men deliberately do not kill them because they will. They will just be left there to putrefy 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.
- [31:03]
Tom Holland
There's a famous poem by Evan Rosenberg called Break of Day in the Trenches, which kind of almost implies a fondness for what he calls a queer, sardonic rat. And he imagines the rat brushing up against his hand and then going and brushing up against the German hand. 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
- [31:32]
Dominic Sandbrook
befriend it might befriend a rat. I mean, I think, I mean, well, you might, Tom. I think I'd draw the line at befriending a rat. Frankly.
- [31:40]
Tom Holland
I take friendship where I can get it.
- [31:41]
Dominic Sandbrook
That's fair. All this sounds pretty nightmarish and some listeners may be thinking 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. Couldn't wait to have a crack at the British. And he said in his memoir Storm of Steel, after only a 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 enervating for the soldier than the proximity of death. But one point to make as 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. For 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've got four regular meals a day, breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner.
- [32:58]
Tom Holland
Yeah, I Mean, all that marmalade.
- [32:59]
Dominic Sandbrook
Brilliant. Yeah. But you think, is 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 bully 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, 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.
- [33:38]
Tom Holland
Because you're in constant risk of death in a mine, aren't you?
- [33:41]
Dominic Sandbrook
Of course you are. And you're outdoors. And a lot of people actually love the. The outdoor element. So here's a really good example. Here's a guy called Private Ernest 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 barm, innocent 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 fire step 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 are 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, there are special concerts put on for them, they go to plays. There are people. People organize lectures and debates. They're reading.
- [34:52]
Tom Holland
Doesn't Graves, in. In his book 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 GUN FIRE STOPS PLAY but it's, you know, it's nice to think it's not so muddy that you can't.
- [35:12]
Dominic Sandbrook
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.
- [35:19]
Tom Holland
Yeah, Jumpers for gold pastes.
- [35:21]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. But there's also, I think, a real sense of camaraderie. Again, you get that in Graves's 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, it's. 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, wow. Sweet. Nelson would have been proud. Tom.
- [35:59]
Tom Holland
Yeah, well, like Ashinkor, which is not far from where they're stationed, I suppose.
- [36:03]
Dominic Sandbrook
Not far at all. But, of course, there is one aspect of life on the Western Front that we haven't mentioned at all, because they haven't actually been sent there to have a holiday. No. Actually be sent there to make friends with people 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 are the 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.
- [36:44]
Tom Holland
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, what with America attacking Iran and oil crises. So do you think that the lessons of that for Keir Starmer are rosy? So, looking at the career of Edward Heath, for instance, who was Prime Minister in the previous oil crisis, it didn't
- [37:13]
Dominic Sandbrook
work out brilliantly for Ted Heath, to be honest. And actually, he and Keir Starmer, I think, are quite similar. They're from relatively humble backgrounds and there's a slight sense of floundering which they have in common. 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.
- [37:28]
Tom Holland
But you know, the facts they shouldn't be uncertain. And that, of course, is where the Times and the Sunday Times come in.
- [37:36]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, And I would say that understanding the news is absolute vital when you're navigating an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world. So to subscribe to the Times and the Sunday Times, visit thetimes.com.
- [37:57]
Tom Holland
Come on, man, get up. We're moving out. I woke up in dew sodden grass. Through a stuttering swathe of machine gun fire, we plunged back into our communication trenches 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. Flesh like mouldering fish gleamed greenishly 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 leather harness and on its back was a fully packed haversack topped by a round mess. Tin, empty eye sockets and a few strands of hair on the bluish black skull indicated so 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 Les Epages near Verdun 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.
- [39:37]
Dominic Sandbrook
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 Vondervel. 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 twenties. He then was quite close to the Stauffenberg plotters, so the people who tried to blow Hitler up. In 1944 he was thrown out of the army, but not executed.
- [40:57]
Tom Holland
He becomes an early enthusiast for lsd.
- [40:59]
Dominic Sandbrook
He does, exactly.
- [41:01]
Tom Holland
And also he's very keen entomologist. He had an inordinate fondness for beetles. I think he had about kind of seven types of beetle named after him or something. Improbable.
- [41:09]
Dominic Sandbrook
And then he died at the age of 102. So in, I think 1998.
- [41:14]
Tom Holland
God, that's mad, isn't it?
- [41:15]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, crazy. Anyway, Storm of Steel, his book, which I really recommend, it's very different in tone from Robert Graves memoir, even though they're the same age and they're writing about exactly the same point in time. Because Junger 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 dreamlike 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 unit has been pushed forward into the French lines. So the Germans have punched a little hole in the French lines and his unit has 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.
- [42:09]
Tom Holland
Such an eerie image, isn't it?
- [42:11]
Dominic Sandbrook
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 poor. From the French, I think not to bury their dead anyway. They haven't buried these guys well, especially
- [42:23]
Tom Holland
since it's so muddy. You just roll them and they can sink into the gloop.
- [42:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
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 dreamlike 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 a 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. So it's very dreamlike still. They go into this 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 ribble conversations were suddenly cut off by a marrow freezing cry. 20 yards behind us, clumps of earth whirled up out of a white cloud and smacked into the bow. 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 is 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 this sort of panic. Blood streaming from his leg. He eventually collapses. Afterwards, when it's died down, he's found by stretcher bearers and he's 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.
- [45:03]
Tom Holland
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.
- [45:16]
Dominic Sandbrook
He's incredibly brave and he loves it. You know, when we're describing this, the great God pain blokes with their heads 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 Junger feel more enthusiastic about the war, not less.
- [45:34]
Tom Holland
Because it makes him feel alive.
- [45:35]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, it makes him feel alive.
- [45:37]
Tom Holland
It's a kind of intensity of experience that he wouldn't have had otherwise.
- [45:39]
Dominic Sandbrook
And when he gets back to Germany, so on that break, you might think when he goes back invalided 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 I say 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 in combat, he's seen explosions and stuff, but he. 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,
- [46:35]
Tom Holland
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 basilai and stuff.
- [46:42]
Dominic Sandbrook
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 Junger is not untypical in finding battle enjoyable. So there's an example that reminded me of one of our goal hangar comrades, Tom. So a man called Julian Grenfell, who went to Eton and Balliol, like Rory Stewart and He was killed on the Western Front in May 1915. And before he 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.
- [47:37]
Tom Holland
Because he was a poet, wasn't he, as well?
- [47:39]
Dominic Sandbrook
He was a poet, yeah, because he
- [47:40]
Tom Holland
was also a professional soldier. Do you think that might have made a difference? Is he more seasoned? Comes perhaps as less. As less of a shock to him because he's already fought in battle?
- [47:51]
Dominic Sandbrook
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 anything. I think you don't know until you get there, actually. It's like that classic thing about what makes you a 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. Military historians would say you could be. 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 Vestmann, 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. He's a very young man, 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 says, 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 undisturbed by what had happened. One of them boasted that it had killed a poilu, 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, in civilian life. But they've been thrust into this environment and they found something in themselves they didn't know they had. But Stefan Vestmann, 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 in sweat because I saw the eyes of my fallen adversary.
- [50:02]
Tom Holland
Oh, so it's like the. The Wilfred Owen poem where. What's it? I am the enemy. I am the enemy. You killed my friend.
- [50:08]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. Really moving and strange poem. They sees him in a dream, doesn't he? The man that he had killed.
- [50:14]
Tom Holland
Yeah. At the end of a long tunnel.
- [50:15]
Dominic Sandbrook
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. This fighting can be so fierce sometimes that it's impossible to clear the bodies. They're either left in no man's land or they're hastily buried in. In the side of the trenches. So people will write home. This is an example. A guy from the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders, Captain Aidan Liddell. 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, there's 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.
- [50:55]
Tom Holland
Because I see on this lots of exclamation marks are after that, I.
- [51:00]
Dominic Sandbrook
How about that, Mater? Imagine 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, really grim. But what are the chances that you might end up like that, Tom?
- [51:40]
Tom Holland
In my case, I think fairly high.
- [51:42]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, they're smaller than. 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 by people who know far more about it, A, than I do and B, I think than is. Than is healthy for any human being. And generally the odds of death for a British soldier on the Western Front in the front line are about 10%. So nine out of 10 people there will live and one will die. And that is a lot better than the Crimean war where basically 2 out of 10 died.
- [52:14]
Tom Holland
Or the Battle of Cannae, right, where,
- [52:16]
Dominic Sandbrook
you know, lots of. Lots and lots of people die. But if you're French, the odds are higher. 20% of French soldiers die and about 25% of Germans.
- [52:25]
Tom Holland
And why the difference?
- [52:26]
Dominic Sandbrook
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,
- [52:48]
Tom Holland
I suppose the British don't have a Verdun, do they?
- [52:50]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, the Somme is pretty bad, but Verdun is a charnel house. Well, we're talking about that maybe next year in 2027 when we get 1916. So a lot divert done, 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 invalided out at some stage, probably. And of course the difference between this war and previous wars is the dangers are not merely physical, they are mental.
- [53:32]
Tom Holland
This is a shell shock.
- [53:33]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, I serve one. French trench journal, Le Sussis, quoted by Neil Ferguson. This 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 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 probably very hard for us to imagine what it's like to be under shellfire for hours and hours or days and days. They're sort of relentless, relentless pounding. Ernst Junger 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 touc 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 Siegfried Sassoon. 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 start to be reports of a lot of British soldiers reporting to the sick bay saying, I feel dizzy. I'm. You know that 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, in February 1915 in an article in the Lancet. It's got a medical journal by Captain Charles S. Myers, the Royal Army Medical Corps. And I had a look at it online. 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 have been crying, they've been in a state of general confusion and the doctors cannot see an obvious physical cause for it.
- [55:46]
Tom Holland
So Dominic, the stereotype is that the British High command regard this as nonsense and think that the chaps should man up. Is that actually the case or is it a little bit more nuanced? I'm guessing the latter.
- [56:01]
Dominic Sandbrook
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 mustaches 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, 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 three hundred and six 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.
- [56:59]
Tom Holland
Right, because we're talking about millions of. Of competence.
- [57:02]
Dominic Sandbrook
Right? So there were 6 million British Empire troops, and of those, only 306 are executed for cowardice. I mean, that'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 and more sensitive to this than you might assume. And in fact, they are, because in May 1915, the War Office sent a doctor to the front, Dr. 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 are a feature of a lot of war poetry.
- [57:55]
Tom Holland
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 shell shock. It's often described as the first instance in recorded history of this condition.
- [58:10]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, surely. Must have. I mean, there must have been men at Waterloo who were completely traumatized or the Crimea or something. I mean, it's utterly implausible that there weren't. Or indeed Agincourt, frankly, some of these battles must have been terrifying experiences that recurred in men's dreams for years, for decades afterwards.
- [58:28]
Tom Holland
Yeah, the soldier at Marathon sees a kind of colossal figure moving through the ranks, and he ends up blind from the shock of it.
- [58:36]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, so what the War Office 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 neurasthenia. 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 Siegfried Sassoon meets Wilfred Owen. In due course, the two great poets meet each other. Now, senior officers think it's, you know, they think it's a real thing, shell shock. 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 that to be totally wrong. So we 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 gibbering wreck because he thinks it's a landing shell. There's a moment in the book where he and his men come under heavy shellfire 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 broke into conf. Convulsive sobs while the men stood gloomily around me. This is a very brave and militaristic man doing this. Siegfried Sassoon, 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 officers. After 12 months, an officer is, and I 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 dirtied trousers. I had seen cases like that. But as it happens, he's wounded by a shell fragment of the Somme. He almost dies and he's invalided 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, trembling, and I couldn't face the sound of heavy shelling. Now the noise of a car backfiring would send me flat on my face or running for cover.
- [61:20]
Tom Holland
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?
- [61:29]
Dominic Sandbrook
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 generals as just this sort of boorish, brutal idiots, but actually, when you look at their life stories and their lives away from the war, often these quite cultivated, intelligent kind of men, the truth is they are in an impossible situation and they. They're. So. There's this urgent demand for men at the front, so they can't give everybody a break every now and again.
- [61:58]
Tom Holland
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.
- [62:10]
Dominic Sandbrook
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 the 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 Bayer and all these kind of companies.
- [62:43]
Tom Holland
I mean, this is maybe. But it's still cheating, isn't it? It's not cricket.
- [62:48]
Dominic Sandbrook
It's. I don't think it is cheating, actually, because the Hague Convention of 1899 outlawed using projectiles that would be solely used for asphyxiating or deleterious gases. But the Germans get their lawyers to look at this, and the lawyers say, as long as you're not using projectiles that have been made solely for that purpose, nothing else has been outlawed. And their new supreme commander, Erich von Falkenhayn, kind of Prussian figure, he says, look, we're going to lose if it's a long war. I mean, they know that the Germans and that their great gamble has failed. We must try anything urgently to get a breakthrough.
- [63:26]
Tom Holland
I mean, he has the vibe of a man who would approve of mustard gas.
- [63:31]
Dominic Sandbrook
That's harsh. That's harsh.
- [63:33]
Tom Holland
The name, the look.
- [63:34]
Dominic Sandbrook
I mean, to be fair, the British end up using gas too. Would you say that of Douglas Haig, Sir John French?
- [63:40]
Tom Holland
Oh, definitely of Sir John French.
- [63:41]
Dominic Sandbrook
What did we call John French last time? Poltroon.
- [63:44]
Tom Holland
And a buffoon, I think, wasn't it?
- [63:45]
Dominic Sandbrook
Anyway, lots of Falkenhayn'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 Western. Yeah. They're in. 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 Carl von Einem 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 chivalry anymore. The higher civilization rises, the viola 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 22 April at Ypres. Now, people may remember there's a thing called the Ypres 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. Now they're 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 lines, 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 eyewitness 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 McCrae 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 Boer 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 of the First Brigade of the Canadian Field Artillery. So he's in the thick of all this. And on the 2nd of May a friend of his who was called Lieutenant Alexis Helmer was killed by a chef cell. And McCrae presided over his burial service. And it's at that point, at his burial service that McCrae 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 McCrae is sitting in the back of an ambulance near Ypres and he's just thinking about these poppies and he scribbles this poem in his notepad. And then the story goes that he read. 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. McRae 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, U boats, tanks, all of these things that haven't really been been seen before. But gas is the one that frightens soldiers the most because it's this silent killer, invisible killer. You don't see it coming, and as soon as it's on you, you're dead.
- [67:50]
Tom Holland
So that one that attacks the French Algerian troops is yellowish.
- [67:53]
Dominic Sandbrook
It was yellowish. So I say it's invisible. I mean, you might not. Would you notice a yellowish vapor heading towards you?
- [68:00]
Tom Holland
I think I probably would.
- [68:01]
Dominic Sandbrook
Okay, well, fair. There's a brilliant description by the fighter ace 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, retching and vomiting blood and guts. And those who lived would be wrecks with seared, poisoned lungs, rotten for life.
- [68:29]
Tom Holland
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.
- [68:44]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. Wilfred Owens, Dolce Decorum est. Where there's a line in that poem where it'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 sea. I saw him drowning in all his dreams. Before my helpless sight he plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
- [69:11]
Tom Holland
So it's horrible, but does it work?
- [69:14]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, it's just a waste of time. Total waste of time. So there's no breakthrough at Ypres. 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.
- [69:31]
Tom Holland
I'd assumed it was much, much more than that.
- [69:34]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, doesn't kill you, by and large.
- [69:36]
Tom Holland
Just leaves you with. With ruined lungs.
- [69:38]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, it does. It definitely leaves people with ruined lungs, no question. I mean, part of that is because the War Office were 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. I mean, up to that point, they basically were saying, you know, you need to urinate on. 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 phosgene, 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?
- [70:25]
Tom Holland
Oh, the one where they're all in a line.
- [70:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
They're all in a line. That's mustard gas that they are suffering from, not chlorine. Now, you said it wasn't cricket. Sir John French, the well known poltroon, he agrees with you, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force.
- [70:40]
Tom Holland
I'm a lying tin. Then I take it all back.
- [70:43]
Dominic Sandbrook
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 fairer to say if you're losing, if you're the underdog, you will try anything. And this is what the Germans are
- [71:02]
Tom Holland
doing, especially if you've got a massive world beating chemicals industry.
- [71:06]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. I mean, they'd be kind of. I mean, I don't want to sound too pro. Tutorial on, but 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 biggest British attack of the whole of the year 1915. It's in Loos, which is just south of Lille in France. Sometimes, Tom, you hear people saying that loose might be in Belgium, but it's not, is it? No.
- [71:40]
Tom Holland
I mean, that's a rookie's error, isn't it? Anyone who thinks that is mad.
- [71:44]
Dominic Sandbrook
So people who enjoy British shambolic British military failures will relish the beginning of the Battle of Loos. 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 engineers say, the wind is in the wrong way. Don't open these gas cylinders, whatever you do.
- [72:03]
Tom Holland
Are the top brass going to pay attention to the this?
- [72:05]
Dominic Sandbrook
The top brass say, no, it's too late to change the plan now. Are you mad? 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 think they've got urine. I think it's some sort of chemical treatment or whatever. Anyway, they've got these gas masks. The eyepieces of the gas masks steam up. So the men to see take the gas mask off. They probably poisoned by their own gas.
- [72:30]
Tom Holland
So it's basically like that poor bloke who. Who throws the missile out and then it blows up in his face.
- [72:37]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, it's basically that on a huge scale. Because basically the British gas gassed four times, caused four times as many casualties among the British as it did among the Germans. Anyway, when they finally order the troops to advance, they find the Germans very much ungassed and their artillery bombardment, and this is a theme that will run for the next few years. Their artillery and 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 classy example of a Western Front offensive where generals are throwing men against positions that turn out to be a much better defender 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, 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 Haig.
- [73:45]
Tom Holland
And French is the guy who the British government thinks is just the man to go and solve the Irish question in Duke hall, where he's another tremendous success.
- [73:53]
Dominic Sandbrook
Poor Sir Jean French. Surely at some point we'll have to do a whole series rehabilitating him, but anyway, he's been replaced by Douglas Haig, one of the most controversial characters in British and indeed all military history, the goody baddie. I think we should come to this later on when I've read a bit more about it, because actually, I don't know what I think. I think probably he's been a bit. The general sense now is that he was maligned.
- [74:13]
Tom Holland
Gary Sheffield, he's all over how good.
- [74:15]
Dominic Sandbrook
Douglas Hagg from the University of Wolverhampton thinks that Douglas Hagg is one of the greatest men who ever lived. I think.
- [74:20]
Tom Holland
Well, there you go.
- [74:21]
Dominic Sandbrook
Anyway, just to end the episode, 60,000 British casualties at Loos. But one of them above all is very well known. And this is a young man who was 18 years old called John Kipling. And he was the only son of Rudyard Kipling, the great poet of empire and indeed of patriotism. John Kipling, 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, you know, because he can't see anything. But Kipling 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 Loos, John Kipling was reported missing in action. And he was, and I quote, last seen stumbling in the mud in search of his glasses, which had fallen off during the attack. And Rudyard Kipling 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 come Kipling wrote is a couplet that's often seen as kind of epitaph for the war more generally. If any question why we died, tell them because our fathers lied.
- [75:54]
Tom Holland
And it's not generally thought of, is it, that Kipling wrote perhaps the most devastating couplet condemning the war of any poet.
- [76:03]
Dominic Sandbrook
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 tumultuous 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, Gabriele d', Annunzio, 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, two of the great controversial stories of the war. So that's the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U boat and the execution of the British nurse and alleged spy, Edith Cavell. 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 Rest Is History Club, you can hear those five episodes straight away. And if you go to thereestishory.com you can join the club. And only by going to the restishistory.com will you get the full benefits of being in the club. So lots to look forward to, Tom.
- [77:27]
Tom Holland
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 rabble, rousing, and then up in the mountains of Slovenia getting massacred by Austrians. So we'll see you then. Bye bye.
- [77:42]
Dominic Sandbrook
Bye bye. Hi, everybody. We are back with another absolutely colossal update about the Rest Is History Festival.
- [77:56]
Tom Holland
While it's massive. So on the 4th and 5th of July, we will be at Hampton Court Palace. We have a weekend of brilliant talks, live music, exclusive access to historic royal palaces 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 unfortunate, unforgettable two days.
- [78:25]
Dominic Sandbrook
It is indeed. And at the core of the festival of these talks. And we've got some more talks to add to the lineup. So I will be talking to the brilliant Tudor historian Tracy Borman about the secrets of the six wives of Henry viii. I'll be talking to a friend of the show and 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 Heuer about Weimar Germany and in particular the town of Weimar 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.
- [79:10]
Tom Holland
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 Athelstan. I will be talking to Ali Ansari about all things Persian with Dan Jackson about the Pit of Death. Death. And I will be talking to friend of the show Willie Dalrymple about the links between ancient India and Greece and Rome.
- [79:49]
Dominic Sandbrook
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.
- [80:09]
Tom Holland
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 Tudor palace of Hampton Court and indeed the Royal tennis court. So that'll be very exciting.
- [80:28]
Dominic Sandbrook
There'll be food and drink fit for a king, which sounds very enticing. I picture the very glamorous people that are our club members and their summer garb. They're on the lawn at Hampton Court palace, they're chatting about history in delightful surroundings, 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.
- [80:53]
Tom Holland
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 the rest is history.com to sign up and grab your tickets and of course have access to a whole range of supplementary benefits. Once you have signed up to thereestishistory.com all you do then is log into the members area and you select festival. And it's all very obvious.
- [81:20]
Dominic Sandbrook
But you know what? There is a twist. If you do this, you will be entered into a genuinely unbelievable prize draw. And that prize draw, if you win, you and three other people, it's like the golden tickets in Charlie and 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.
- [81:52]
Tom Holland
Do not miss it.
- [81:53]
Dominic Sandbrook
Can't wait to see it there.
- [81:54]
Tom Holland
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Dominic Sandbrook
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Tom Holland
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Dominic Sandbrook
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Tom Holland
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