Dan Snow's History Hit - The 1914 Christmas Truce (Part 1)

Episode Date: December 27, 2021

On Christmas Eve 1914 many sectors of the Western Front in France and Belgium fell silent. Troops from all sides put down their weapons and sang carols, exchanged gifts and buried their dead in No Man's Land. The following day the truce continued in many, but not all areas, and troops gathered in crowds between the lines. there may even have been a bit of a kick about. This is part 1 of a two-part Christmas podcast that explores the truce with three distinguished historians, Peter Hart, Taff Gillingham and Rob Schaefer. We also hear extracts of letters and diaries from the men involved, including some broadcast here for the first time in English. This episode was first released on 23rd December 2020.Please vote for us! Dan Snow's History Hit has been nominated for a Podbible award in the 'informative' category: https://bit.ly/3pykkdsIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everyone, welcome to Downstone's History. At this time of year everyone thinks back to one of the most infamous Christmas events in history and that is of course the Christmas Truce of 1914. We made a TV show and a podcast series about it last year. They proved so popular that we decided to give it another airing this year around Christmas. On Christmas Eve 1914, as many of you all know, sectors of the Western Front in France and Belgium fell silent. Many troops from all the different combatant nations put down their weapons and initially sang carols. Then they decorated their trenches, shouted to each other, and eventually they exchanged gifts. They fraternized. They even buried their dead in no man's land. The following

day, Christmas Day, the truce continued for many, but not all areas, of course. And the troops gathered between the lines of something of a party. There was even, in more than two places, yes, a little bit of a kickabout with a football. Now this is episode one of the Christmas Truce podcast. We're exploring the truce with three very distinguished historians, Peter Hart, Taff Gillingham and Rob Schaefer. three very distinguished historians, Peter Hart, Taff Gillingham and Rob Schaeffer. And we're going to be hearing extracts of letters and diaries from the men involved, including some of these are broadcast for the first time ever in English. They're from the German archives via Rob Schaeffer, broadcast in English for the first time ever. This is the story of the Christmas Truce. If you want to watch the documentary, which we shot over a year ago now,

it's one of my favourite documentaries ever made for History Hit TV, please head over to History Hit TV. The link is in the podcast information, wherever you're listening to this podcast, it's there in the text. And because it is the Boxing Day sale, the famous History Hit Boxing Day sale, if you use the code BOXINGDay, you get 50% off your first six months. It's ridiculous. It's going to be so cheap. You're going to be watching history at the World's Best History Channel until the summer. Until the summer for half price. It works anywhere in the world. It's like Netflix for history. Hundreds and hundreds of history documentaries on there. Thousands of podcasts. You're going to love it. Follow the link in the podcast description and make sure you use

the code BOXINGDAY. In the meantime, folks, here's my podcast on the Christmas truce. In the summer of 1914, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary caused a crisis between his empire, Austria-Hungary, and Serbia, whom the Austrians blamed for this act of terrorism. Both sides were able to call on support of neighbouring powers, which triggered a series of alliances which drew all the great powers of Europe into the First World War. Now, obviously, this process is dealt with in slightly more detail

in other history hit podcasts but essentially it all kicked off. A general war had begun, Germany invaded the West, France, Britain and Belgium fought to blunt and then reverse the German advance. Peter Hart is a legend, he's a historian of the Great War and while he was at the Imperial War Museum he interviewed dozens of veterans for their oral history project. The first few months of the Great War were an incredible period. It's a clash of two mighty empires, the French and the Germans, and they both have their own plans. One, the Germans are going to sweep round through Belgium and crash into northern France, aiming up either side of Paris, whilst the French are going to drive into their lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine. So you get this sort of circular motion.

And those are the two great visions of what will happen. What does happen is it all goes wrong. They start to dig in and from there race to the sea. It's unbelievable. They're not racing to the sea. They're trying to outflank each other. And thus you get trenches going from Switzerland to the North Sea. All that happens in three or four months. Taff Gillingham is also a historian of the war and the expert who sources equipment and extras for big TV and film productions. He's helped us so many times over the years, and he's just helped us produce our big Christmas Truce 1914 show. At that point, both sides settle down, can't get the advantage,

can't get the better of one another, and dig in. So really then, by the end of 1914, there's a fairly loose line of trenches stretching from the Belgian coast all the way down through Belgium and France. For the British, and it's important to notice that because the French had been digging in before, for the British, the first trenches come in mid-September with the Battle of the Aisne. This is where they go to ground. And from then on, they're digging trenches all the time. As they race to the sea, trying to outflank each other with the French, the Germans, and smaller part there, the British, try to outflank each other, then as they do that, as they crash into each other,

there's an exchange of fire, one side or the other trying to gain domination. And what happens is that when they fail, then they dig in as best they can, and then they look to outflank. The British soldier of 1914 is well equipped for what they were expecting to do, fire and movement. So they had an absolutely excellent rifle, the Lee-Enfield. It was brilliant. It was everything you could want from a rifle. When the British army go to war in 1914, very specifically, anybody under 19 years old is left behind. So all of those underage lads who

had been serving as drummers or who were just 18 or 18 and a half years old all of them in theory although some battalions did take them were left behind and sent to their depot units literally to wait until they're old enough to go at the other end of the scale you've got some some of these old-timers who'd been in the army maybe 12 years or more and there was a lot of much older men still serving in the army than you'd expect so whilst I couldn't tell you the exact average age of the soldier of 1914 it's probably much older than you'd expect it to be. At least half the British Expeditionary Force were regular serving soldiers who obviously were up to fitness but the fact that so many of them had been called back from reserve,

literally only a couple of weeks beforehand, before they find themselves fighting at Mons, means that certainly a good proportion of them really hadn't had time to build up their strength and certainly to break in their boots for the amount of marching that was going to be required as the British army pulled back the retreat from Mons, best part of 200 miles, all the way down to the Marne. But there is one thing they haven't got. They've got no equipment for trench warfare because that's not what they were expecting to do. So they have no hand grenades. They have no trench mortars. They haven't got the right artillery. Yes, they've got good artillery, but they haven't got any heavy artillery, which you need to smash up trenches. They haven't got the right sort of

shells. They've got shrapnel. Well, shrapnel doesn't harm a trench. It's just pellets, lead pellets. It doesn't do anything. They need high explosive shells. They haven't got it. And in this respect, the Germans are far, far better off. They are equipped for trench warfare. They are equipped to blast people from the face of the earth. warfare, they are equipped to blast people from the face of the earth. After the baking hot temperatures of August 1914, the thermometers dropped as winter approached. The British soldier was not equipped for winter weather. Perhaps for a cold snap, yes, perhaps even for a bit of snow. Not equipped for living in a flooded trench. They didn't have trench waders. Their boots would fall apart. They're good boots, but they fall apart

if they're constantly in water and mud. Their puttees, you immerse them constantly in water. They don't work. They don't have balaclavas. They're just not enough clothing to keep them warm. They are not well equipped for the sort of winter they got in December 1914. And sod's law, what do they get?

One of the worst winters of the century. The British soldier was not equipped for winter weather. Lieutenant Arthur Pelham Byrne of the Gordon Highlanders described the mud in a letter home. I used to think I knew what mud was before I came out here, but I was quite mistaken. The mud here varies from six inches to three and four feet, even five feet, and it's so sticky that my men used

to arrive in the trenches with bare feet. The most important change to the battlefield in late 1914 was the development of those trenches. How do you end up in a trench? People often wonder that. Well, the thing is you're not intending to be in a trench. What happens? You're in a firefight with the Germans. They're shooting at you. You scrape with your little entrenching tool. You try and get anything. Men will hide behind a blade of grass, they'll always tell you. But you just try and get that five or six inches down, put the earth in front of you and then make it a bit deeper. Even better, there's a ditch.

Let's use that ditch. It's got water's a ditch let's use that ditch it's got water in it let's use that ditch who cares about getting wet so the the trench signs are often built up from existing ditches and little scrape holes and as time goes on what happens is they join them together and so gradually from these little personal scrape holes, your funk hole, the thing that's keeping you alive, gradually develops into, firstly, a sort of a longer bit of trench and then a post, if you like, an outpost. And then they're joined together and gradually a front line develops. And, you know, early on, they're not all completely joined together. There are gaps in the line where you're covering it basically by rifle fire but gradually a complete trench system builds up but it's still all very crude i mean our image of trenches predominantly 1916 trenches are the sort of trenches we see in our minds

deep trenches heavily riveted lots of timber lots of woodwork duck boards in the bottom but in 1914 it was it was all very very crude it was just pretty much ditches shored up just to stop them collapsing very often just with planks laid in the bottom and in certain places certainly in the wet conditions around the Ypres salient those wooden boards would literally just keep sinking in the mud so every few days you'd be putting more and more boards in just so that you could keep a some sort of solid bottom to the trench. What does a trench look like in December 1914? It looks like a complete mess. Put out of your mind anything you ever think from a manual, how to build a trench, it's nothing like that. It is fundamentally a ditch, often less than four foot deep, so three

foot, four foot deep, so anybody has to crouch down. If you get any deeper, you might have a fire step, a step to stand on to fire but when it's four foot deep you don't need it water at the bottom you might have a little cubby hole to get out of the rain to get out of it just dug into that you're always into the front because the force of a shell flings shrapnel forward so little cubby holes as they call them in the front that's what a trench looked like it just looks like a ditch for the most part, a horrible nasty water and mud filled ditch. But I think it's also fair to say that those first trenches come about when both sides literally can't get the better of one another,

so that both sides on the opposite side of a field find themselves not being able to get any further forward and literally dig in where they are. and the problem with that is that those trenches might not be in a very suitable position and what I mean by that is that the Germans might well have observation over the land so you might not be able to resupply them in daylight you might not be able to bring any more ammunition up or food so eventually there becomes a bit more of a pragmatic approach where trenches some of the worst trenches are abandoned they pull back they build them elsewhere but by the end of 1914 a lot of them are still in pretty unsuitable conditions. So by November 1914, the trench network, if you like, has already started to evolve. It's still very crude. In most places, it certainly doesn't have the whole frontline,

support line, reserve line organisation that we'll see later. And its main purpose, the main purpose of all trenches is simply to make it safer for soldiers to live. The minute that you get below the surface, you're out of rifle fire, you can still be got by artillery, but it's certainly much, much safer to move around in daytime if you can stay below the ground. So the trenches evolve, they connect with other trenches, but it's still a long way from what we would think of as a very well-organized, very, you know, almost geometric proper trench with proper fire bays and saps and all sorts of stuff which come later. The Germans often had the better ground for the simple reason that as the war had progressed in

the first few months, the Germans had managed to push the British, the French and the Belgians pretty much right up into the top corner of Europe, held them there with one hand, looked over their shoulder and said, well, what's the best ground to defend? Built their defences on the best ground and then fallen back to sit in those defences while the British, the French and the Belgians follow them up. and, if you like, sit at the bottom of the hill with the Germans in the best positions until the British and the French and the Belgians can get enough momentum to then push the Germans off again. The high ground meant that the Germans could make deeper trenches. Certainly in Flanders, where the ground was very wet, you didn't go down very far before you struck water. That meant in practice that you had to build the trenches up using sandbags artificially. So a lot of trenches might only be three feet deep

and then built up with three feet of sandbags. Rob Schaefer is a German historian who's worked with me in history here over the years to bring new perspectives and previously untranslated German accounts to the English-speaking world. The system of trenches on the Western Front is not the enormous multi-line field fortification that people envisage when they think about trenches. The lines have only just frozen

in autumn. So at this particular time all sides are busy extending, consolidating their positions as well as trying to make them habitable for winter. Both sides fight the cold, the steadily rising groundwater levels in Flanders and northern France and one another. Both sides fight the cold, the steadily rising groundwater levels in Flanders and northern France, and one another. So trenches during the period are mostly very simple affairs. There's a main fighting trench, sometimes with a second trench 50 to 100 meters behind that, that's on the German side. And to fortify those, the German soldiers would use materials they could source locally. That very much defined the look of the trench as well. So they would take material from ruined and uninhabited housing,

wooden roof beams, doors, window shutters, even bricks or ovens for the dugouts. So how a trench looked is very much defined by then of where it is situated. It's not that important. It isn't defined by who built it. In December 1914, the German army was only just starting to set up what they called pioneer parks in which they would store building materials they bring in from Germany and the occupied territories. We've all seen the pictures, haven't we? It's full of shell holes and it's just a devastated area, barbed wire everywhere. Well, not in December 1914 it wasn't. Then it was just countryside. You might be able to see a German trench. You might. Just the signs where the

parapet was. But mostly it's a field. It's grass. It's crops dying in the field by November. It's the odd dead cow. Sadly, lots of dead soldiers sometimes. It's hedges and fences and trees. You listen to Dan Snow's history. We're talking about the Christmas truce. More coming up. More coming up. who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Life in the trenches took on a terrible rhythm. What is it like for a soldier in the trenches took on a terrible rhythm what is it like for a soldier in the trenches in december 1940 well it's a miserable boring existence what marks it out a boring routine and freezing cold it's terrible so your day starts with stand two. Why stand two? Everybody stands two because that's

when they think the Germans might attack at dawn. So you stand two for an hour. Your officer or your NCO goes around, checks everybody's there, checks everybody's away. And then you move into the day. You have to set a sentry's hour. Sentry's watching over no man's land. Carefully, we get a bullet through the head. What do they do? They've got one per section, looking out, looking out over no man's land, carefully peering out over no man's land, possibly listening and peering, depends how cautious you are, doesn't it? So you've got them, the rest of the men, well, during the daytime, often sitting there, writing letters home, or attending to trench maintenance, digging out things that don't make you appear above

the sight line that the Germans could see you,, you'll get sniped. That's the underlying fear. You'll get sniped. And this is the day is spent. It's just boring. Well, the daily life of a German soldier in the trenches at that period of time is very similar to that of a British soldier. Opposite the British regiments in Flanders and northern France in December 1914, a lot of the duty of the German soldier is devoted to somehow trying to avoid those trenches, to flood or to cave in. He's busy extending and fortifying on what he has, and all that in addition of keeping an eye on the foe, patrolling, keeping everyone supplied.

At this early stage in this area of the front, the deep and nicely furnished dugouts that many people associate with German First World War trenches do not exist, not even on the high ground. So life in the furthermost trenches in winter is freezing cold, it's very wet, hygiene is poor, and many soldiers suffer from bowel problems, for example. It's a bone-breaking, physically exhausting and mentally draining routine. So taking the boots and socks and putties off at least once a day, drying them off,

getting them rubbed in whale oil, putting a drier pair of socks back on, that was a crucial thing because again, very, very quickly, fellas would get trench foot if they didn't keep their feet dry. But it certainly doesn't have anything like the sort of organisation and structure that trench warfare will have, you know, the trench routine of the later part of the war. It really is just boring. Freezing cold.

You're working, you're up to your ankles, up to your knees in water and mud and slush, sometimes freezing mud and slush. It's just an awful, awful routine. But in that early period, some of these trenches, certainly in November and December of 1914, were in a terrible state. Some of the trenches near Plug Street, which were literally almost full to the top with water. So they would have men in there with rifles perched just on heaps of mud and the rifles would just keep sinking in the mud. And every day those men would be pulled out and replaced simply because it wasn't possible to keep men in those conditions any more than a day at a time

and expect them to be in any sort of condition to fight in. And what happens at night? Well, then the work starts because they can't see you. So you've got working parties digging out the trenches, perhaps digging a communication back. You've got ration parties going back. You've got patrols going out in front, possibly even a raid, because it's crucial to know if the Germans are changing the units in front of you. Change units means the Germans might be going to attack you. So there's all this going on at night. Of course, you've got to try and sleep. You've got more sentries on. One man in three is change units means the Germans might be going to attack you so there's all this going on at night and of course you've got to try and sleep you've got more sentries on one man in three is on two

hour sentry stints it's a busy time the night and is it any warmer at night no it's not it's just miserable and then it'll rain and then it might snow what a life in the trenches what food do you get well you can forget hot food you're not going to get hot food do you get? Well, you can forget hot food. You're not going to get hot food. What you get is standard British Army rations. And that is aimed to feed the body. It's not to feed the soul, that's for sure. So what do you get? You get the staples.

Bully beef. Now, we call that corned beef now. Tins of bully beef. You get that, they're sick to death of it. McConachies, that's a sort of lamb and vegetable stew. It's all right heated up if you can heat it up on a Tommy cooker, a little tiny Tommy cooker. It's a bit greasy and horrible otherwise. Pork and beans, that's not very nice. It's a lump of pork fat more than pork. Bacon rolled up in tins and biscuits. Oh, biscuits, that sounds nice. Nice little digest if you think it. No, these are more like dog biscuits.

Three inches, pretty well square, about a quarter of an inch thick. And they break your teeth. Remember, troops in those days, soldiers in those days, didn't have great teeth. So a lot of them broke teeth on these biscuits. Are the biscuits good for you? So they say. Apparently very nutritious. What did the soldiers think of them?

They didn't like them. They'd build walls with them, they reckoned. So that's the sort of food you got. If you were lucky, you got a loaf of bread. Sometimes you'd get cheese and you'd get jam. Always plum and apple on the Western Front. And this is all you got. Repetitive, repetitive,

but enough to keep body and soul together. Does the army care about your soul? No. All they want is you fit to be able to fight. You've got enough calories. You've got the right sort of food to enable you to continue to fight for your country. And that's all they care about. How do you keep clean in the trenches? Well, there's a bit of a problem. How would you keep clean in a trench full of 18 inch of water and mud? No hot water, no nothing. You might have in your personal kit,

you might have your toothbrush, you might have a flannel. But what? Everything's muddy. Everything's muddy. Your uniform is clarted with mud from head to foot. What are you going to do? You look down and you think, well, what should I clean first?

Mud everywhere. Cleanliness and hygiene was really, really important for the British Army. They'd learned a massive lesson in South Africa during the Boer War when more men have died of disease than they had of gunshot wounds. And in the years in between the South African War and the outbreak of the First World War, they had gone out of their way to make sure that men were trained and manuals of military hygiene were pushed on soldiers at every opportunity.

So by the time the fellas arrive in the front line in those trenches they know that every day they wash they shave and of course water is a problem it's it's such an issue to try and find clean water i mean if they couldn't possibly find any then obviously then at that point you'd just have to shave when you came out of the front line but what they would do they would uh they would get probably three inches of water in the bottom of the mess tin which was what they called the d-type mess tin because it was a sort of a d-shaped tin with a shallow lid half an inch of the water would be poured into the lid and they would use that half inch to shave with so you'd lather up your soap shave your face make sure that you rinsed off the razor in the top half

of the mess tin so you didn't get any of the bristles mixed up in the water that you're going to wash the rest of you with and then the two and a half inches left you would use that that to wash your face, you'd wash your hands, you'd unbutton your shirt, so you'd wash under your armpits, you'd just button it back up and dry yourself off, you'd unbutton your trousers, you'd have a rummage around and you'd do the same there, button yourself back up. And it is quite extraordinary because should you ever do this, which I have on numerous occasions, it's just like having a bath. You really do feel clean because what you've done, you've washed all the sweaty bits. So despite not having much water, every day the fellows managed to keep themselves as clean as possible. And again, once they'd been to the latrines,

again, obsessive about cleaning their hands wherever possible, just to make sure that disease didn't spread through the trenches. Through the entire war, the soldiers in the front line, literally at the sharp end, sleep soldiers in the front line, literally at the sharp end, sleep exactly in that front line, in that front line trench on the fire step, because they are literally the point of contact with the German army. There's no point in them being in dugouts or somewhere tucked out of the way, because if the Germans attack, there'll be no time to get themselves organised to get back into the front line to stop the German attack. So they literally sleep on the fire step. In some instances, they'll have built themselves crude shelters, very often with doors at this stage in the war,

doors taken off houses nearby, which won't stop shell fire, but might well keep the rain off. But most of the time, they are just sitting on the fire step in the mud. And in the winter, certainly in the winter months, the British Army had a formal summertime and a wintertime. So in the wintertime, they were allowed to wear their greatcoats, which again, they made of wool, so they get soaking wet quite quickly. Some men had got their goatskin jerkins, which at least were waterproof, although again, they get very heavily waterlogged. And they would have a rubberized ground sheet,

which they could use, to be honest, you could either put it over the top of yourself to keep the rain off from the top of you, or you can put it underneath to stop the damp rising, but it wasn't big enough to do both. Sometimes you might share it with one of your mates. You might sit on his ground sheet and the two of you might try and huddle underneath yours.

But yeah, it was a fairly miserable existence in the cold, wet winter months. But that really didn't alter much throughout the entire war because, as I say, the need is to have soldiers in the front line ready to fight whenever the Germans show up and not struggling to get out of a dugout somewhere. How do you get to sleep in the freezing cold? It's so cold. You're frozen to the bone. Now, that's an expression we use when we're waiting for a bus. This is frozen to the bone. Your legs are covered in freezing cold water. You can't take them out and put them somewhere dry. You've just got to stand there. How do you go to sleep? Well, sometimes if you're

lucky and you've got a fire step, you could lie on the fire step. You could, sometimes they had cubby holes, they could get in. Sometimes there was a proper dugout. But sleeping is difficult in the front line. Very, very difficult. It's a horrible existence because you're so cold all the time. The men were exhausted. They were stressed out of their mind and exhausted. It's not to be forgotten how terrible an existence this was for the men at the front because that explains a lot of what happens at Christmas 1914. The German army may have been slightly better prepared, but it was

still overwhelmed, according to Rob Schaefer. Trench warfare, the fighting from fortified field positions, had formed part of the German regulations long before the war. Yet when the war broke out, no one was prepared for the huge scale of what would be needed when the lines actually froze and were fortified from the autumn of 1914. That German troops were prepped for trench warfare, that came only later in the war. In 1914 the enormity of the required work and the bone-crushing extortions of building, maintaining, living and fighting in a trench and making preparations for a construction for which all that could be done was new for all warring sides, not only for the German side.

The war will be over by Christmas, will it? Where does that come from? It comes from the usual places, from politicians and the media. It's not real. It's just something that people said. It's not what the generals thought. The phrase, it will all be over by Christmas, is actually quite hard to pin down. It crops up in some letters, it might have cropped up in a couple of newspapers, but it wasn't really that common. Certainly amongst the generals that were in charge of running the war, they were perfectly well aware of what it was going to take to defeat the Germans.

I mean, I think that even just from a simple point of view, 12 years earlier, it had taken four years to defeat a bunch of Dutch farmers on horseback in South Africa. So what might kill you in December 1914, if you're in the trenches? Well, there are three main risks. The first is shell fire. They weren't blasting the front lines, but shells could come across at any time and that was an obvious danger the most persistent danger though was from sniping the germans had a lot of good shots they've got a lot of woodland areas they've got a lot of game keepers that kind of person there were a lot of good snipers in the german army and they tended to dominate no man's land at this stage of the war before we had our sniper schools and so therefore

if you showed anything above the line of the parapet or off the top of the ditch you were likely to get a bullet through it now this means if you were average height of about 5 10 then possibly well unless you're very vulnerable to getting a bullet through the head a tall man walking even in a six foot trench with a natural sort of bounce, the top of their head would just occasionally bob up above the line. They'd get a bullet. The sniper would work out where the bobs were and then be waiting. If you have a loophole you look through,

a really good sniper could put a bullet through that loophole. There's constant dangers. They'd have fixed rifles on places where for instance the trench uh there was just a uh let's say a sandbag missing or a just a bit of a hole in the in the trench line and they'd have a fixed rifle and as the German walked past during the night they'd fire it and if you happen to be going past it at that time you're in trouble and the third threat is machine guns now the biggest threat for them is when you're in no man's land but of course they also fire on fixed lines so they could also splatter an area of trench or a communication trench during the night so these are the three

risks the one that most got on people's nerves was probably the snipers the slightest mistake and you could be dead and remember the most commonly hit place was the head. And you've got to remember, there is no head protection, no helmet. The pickle hat was useless for the Germans and our cloth gown was even more useless. So if you got hit, you were dead. German soldier Friedrich Niklaus of the 53rd Reserve Pioneer Battalion gives us an account of the twin terrors of the conditions and the enemy.

Things have got very much worse. Flanders is just one great morass and all military operations have been brought to a standstill by the mud. Day and night we stand up to our knees in mud and water. We have to wrap our legs up to our thighs in sandbags just to survive. The rain pours incessantly from above, while beneath us the water table has risen to just below ground level. On top of this all, this mad gun battle goes on across this forsaken plain,

stretching out in front of us as flat as a tabletop, where it is dangerous even to raise your head above ground during the day." One German soldier, Willy Boehn, started a letter home. Willy Boehn, We are simply nothing but moles, for we are burrowing trenches so that the Han Engländer shan't break through here. We have constructed dugouts in which we can lay our weary heads at night and slip into, to be out of the way of the shrapnel. He never finished it. He was struck by a sniper's bullet, and it was completed

and then posted home by his comrades. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans.

Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit.

Wherever you get your podcasts. At the very end of 1914, there came a series of offensives on the Western Front that I'd never really studied before. And even after years of visiting battlefields, making programmes, podcasts and writing books, I was stunned by the pointlessness of these particular attacks. Traditionally, campaigning stops for the winter because the days are too short, the weather's too bad, and everybody needs the opportunity to regroup, to rebuild their

armies, to resupply, ready for the campaign the following spring. However, as so often in the story of the British Army in the First World War, the French, who are the dominant partners in our coalition, say that what they really need is an attack by the British in conjunction with an attack that they're going to put in to keep the pressure on the Germans. Because there's also a very real feeling that the Germans are now relaxing after the first battle of Ypres. In December what's often forgotten is that the French are still really intent on driving into the German lines. They launch a series of absolutely massive attacks. One on the 17th of December in the Artois which is the Vimy Ridge area and then a few days later they smash home again in the Champagne. Now, just to give you the scale of this, that's quarter of a million men attacking, supported by 600 guns in the Champagne. Just think about that for the moment. That's more than the whole British army.

That's just one of two major attacks. These attacks last for weeks. They are smashing into the Germans. They are intent on trying to win the war, break the lines and get back to open warfare. What's the British part in this? Well, the commander of the French, Joff, he doesn't order Sir John French, but it intimates to him that it is expected that the British will do their bit. They also will attack. What he wants is the whole BEF to attack. What he gets is we water it down, then we water it down some more, then we water it down just a bit more.

And what eventually happens is the most famous one takes place, I think, in mid-December. We end up with just two battalions of second corps attacking. The poor old Gordon Highlanders and the Royal Scots, just two battalions. So an infantry attack in late 1914 is pretty much as you'd expect later, but without the sort of the organised start in trenches with trench ladders, it's pretty much hauling yourself up out of a much more shallow, almost like a ditch really, a trench at the time, and starting across no man's land, trying to shake yourselves out into some sort of line to advance. Because if they just go across in a big rush, in a big heap, there's no means of controlling it. The officers and the NCOs are going to be in no position to actually control them when they get to the German front line. So

there was always much more control over these things than you'd expect. It wasn't just a mad dash and hope for the best. And that's all that goes over the top. Now, why is that bad? Well, if you attack on a narrow front, that means all the enemy to your right and all the enemy to your left can shoot into that area. Whereas if you attack at a broad front, it's obviously reduced. This is terrible. And those two battalions are slaughtered.

And you can picture the scene when they go over the top. The whistles blow. The bombardment, if you can hear it, because there's not that many guns and they haven't got that many shells, the bombardment stops and they go across no man's land. What's no man's land like? Well, it's just fields but it is incredibly muddy the germans see you coming and they open fire the tack tack tack of the machine guns and then after a period the shell fire starts and the poor old gordon harlands the

royal scots are slaughtered in no man's land men falling all around them they're only two weak battalions, that's all that's going forward, and they are slaughtered, and then gradually it becomes apparent, the attack's failing, they can't get any further, and they fall back, people still being killed, of course, as they fall back, do you know, some of the men that were wounded in those attacks, were still crawling back, or being rescued from no man's land two or three days later imagine being wounded lying there bleeding unable to walk in in water and mud how are you going to get back imagine freezing cold beyond belief imagine what it must have been like for those men it is

it's difficult to imagine it really is mostly they'd walk across no man's land. It's not some instruction. It's just the kit they're carrying is heavy. And what are you going to leave behind? You've got to have your rifle. That's the heaviest bit, really. So they walk across no man's land. The ground conditions are not good. It's muddy. And they walk into the machine gun fire. I wonder what those men thought. It must have been terrible. There were a series of British attacks during December. The Indians made an attack, the Scots attacked. But what's wrong with these attacks?

Well, what's wrong with them is they're on a narrow front. They don't have a proper bombardment. There's no proper briefing. They haven't done a proper recce. The troops are already exhausted before they start. The unit's chosen, they've had a lot of casualties. It goes hopelessly wrong. One anonymous Scottish soldier wrote, I've just come from the trenches where I had my first baptism of fire. I will never forget.

When I saw my mates knocked over I felt a bit giddy. The ground was in an awful state. We were up to our knees in mud and water, shivering with cold. A soldier in the Border Regiment wrote in his diary, As soon as we went up, the Germans let us have it, and we were going down like raindrops. As our trenches was only 70 yards apart, we retired and then made the second charge but received the same. It was like being in a blacksmith's shop, watching him swing a hammer on Red Hot Shoe and sparks flying all round you. But instead of them being sparks, they were bullets. It was a pitiful sight to see near our comrades dying, and we couldn't get

out to help them as it meant certain death if we'd moved. So we had to lay there from 6.30 until 8.15 in the morning. And as an angel sent down from heaven, it came over very misty, and this being our only chance, we made good of it. So we crawled halfway and then made a run for it. I could not see where we were going, so I fell over our comrades who were dead. None of these attacks resulted in the lasting capture of a single section of German trench. What is the mood as they're coming in that last week towards Christmas? The mood is depressed. There's

no two ways about it. It's freezing cold. It actually starts to snow and the mud and water in the trenches starts to turn into slush and ice. What are men feeling? They're feeling depressed. They're feeling this war's not going to be over anytime soon. They can't see an end to the war. That means that they can't see an end to their personal torment. Well, that's the end of part one of this Christmas Truce special episode of the History Hit podcast. Tomorrow, our experts will describe the truce itself, one of the more remarkable episodes in modern military history. Don't forget, you can log on to historyhit.tv to watch our Christmas extravaganza, our drama

documentary about the Christmas truce in which we attempt to bring it to life with actors, re-enactors, the battlefield set and the historians and primary sources of course. So please do go and check it out. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career.

It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial for that project. If you did feel like doing me a favor, if you go to wherever you get your podcasts and give it a review, give it a rating, obviously a good one, ideally, then that would be fantastic and feel free to share it. We obviously depend on listeners, depend on more and more people finding out about it, depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in. Really appreciate it. Thank you.