The Rest Is History - 671. The First World War: Blood in the Trenches (Part 1)

Episode Date: May 17, 2026

During the First World War, what was it like to live in the trenches on the Western Front in 1915? How did the Germans attempt to knock the Allies out of the war right from the outset? And, what secret weapon did the Germans unleash? Join Dominic and Tom as they plunge back into the First World War, and carry us through life in the trenches, the horrors of shelling, and the escalation of this totemic conflict. _______ Lloyds. 250 years on and still backing the nation's aspirations. Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at the⁠restishistory.com⁠ To read our new newsletter, sign up at: therestishistory.com/newsletters Advertise with us: [e-mail] _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude  Senior Producer: Callum Hill  Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 Great and his heirs, who between them established the United Kingdom of England. 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. Based on Lloyd's internal customer data from March 26. 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 for from failing hands we throw the torch.

Be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders fields. That's one of the most celebrated of all war poems, and it was written by a doctor, an army officer from Canada called John McCray, and he wrote it during the Second Battle of Ipe in May 1915.

And it is the poem that has affected enshrined the poppy as the symbol of the four million men who fell on the Western Front during the First World War. And Dominic, it's unusual among First World War poetry, isn't it? 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 wire of Flanders Fields.

Yeah, you're right. Hi, everybody. It seems unrepresentative of war poetry because we're used to war poems by Secreed Sassoon or Wilfred Owen that question the futility in the horror of the First World War. And those are the poems that people study in British schools when they're teenagers and they've become ever, of the war. But actually, in Flanders' fields, is probably more representative of what ordinary soldiers at the time thought. You know, we did a big series about the first few months of the First World War. We did an episode about the Christmas truce of 1914. And in those, we discussed how ordinary soldiers very rarely questioned whether they were doing the right thing. They believed, absolutely, I think, that they were fighting for principles of justice and they were fighting for their own national survival. And Dominic, even poets in the early months and years of the war,

were capable of celebrating the need for sacrifice. So the other famous poem that does this is Rupert Brooks, you know, talking about a corner of a field that is forever England, kind of lauding it. Yeah, exactly. And I think at the time, if you'd ask most of the Tom is, do you stand with kind of the Wilfred Owen, Seyfried Sosoon, anti-war school of poetry,

or do you stand with Rupert Brooke and John McCrae? They would say the latter, even though, of course, Seafrid-Sahoon and Wilfred-Oen fought very bravely themselves. We'll come back to McCrae's poem, and indeed the battle in which he wrote it, the second battle will be 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 colourful, 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 Lusitania. So a Titanic-style story, except the differences 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 Cavill in Brussels in 1915. And then we'll finish off with two episodes about one of the most dramatic military disasters in all modern history, which is the Allied attempt to seize the approaches to Constantinople. And 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? Completely it is. So a little gift to our Anzaclessness 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-Hunger's decision to exact revenge on Serbia for the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who's now slightly been forgotten, I'm sad to say. And this triggered the European alliance system. So Germany piles in on behalf of Austria, Russia, France,

and Britain are effectively defending Serbia. And from the very beginning of the war, the central powers, that's Austria, Hungary and Germany are massive underdogs because they have less than half of the total population of the 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 fool all the way back to the chalklands of the River Aine in eastern France. And there they literally dig in. And they dig the first line of

defensive trenches. By the end of 1914, beginning of 1915, these lines of trenches stretch all the way from the English Channel in the north, through Flanders, through Eastern France, to the Swiss border. That's about 450 miles. This is the Western Front. And very, very roughly, the British are guarding the bit in the north, so that's from the channel, down through Flanders to the French town of Amiens, and the French are handling everything to the south of that. And what they're basically trying to do is to push the Germans even further back, so out of France and out of Belgium. But this is a military challenge,

the like of which has never been seen in history, because it's very difficult to push people back when they have machine guns, trenches and barbed wire, which give the defenders a massive advantage. So basically, if you attack, you end up. up dying. That's the issue. And there had kind of been hints of the challenge that the allies might face in doing this, haven'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 competence in the First World War, before the outbreak of the war, had not thought that that was going to be an issue. They had thought that it was going to be a kind of massively mobile combat. And so really, no plans have been drawn up with how to deal with this eventuality. Not at all. And actually the story of the next four years is 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 mustachio generals who has written a sort of little pamphlet about offensive doctrine,

about how you win wars through dash and vigor and charging forwards, which is General Kodona, the Italian Supreme Commander. I mean, this is very common. And actually, the story of the First World War is these guys realizing they were completely utterly wrong. And that basically they're going to have to figure out a way to break the enemy defenses. And in experimenting, they will kill hundreds of thousands of their own men. I mean, this is the sort of 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. Exactly. So we, I think we alluded in a previous series, Lord Kitchener, great British kind of war hero, here of the Boer War and whatnot. Great mustache. Great mustache. He goes to see the trenches at the end of 1914. 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?

1915. What did it look and feel like? We know more about this than any previous war. We're very fortunate because so many of the survivors told their stories to things like the Imperial War Museums or History Archive and there were a series of brilliant literary memoirs. And one of the most celebrated of all those literary memoirs, quite rightly, is Robert Graves' book, Goodbye to All That. So Robert Graves, very well known, of course, I. Claudius. So great kind of classical scholar. Some quite outlandish ideas. I think about classical mythology, Tom. Yeah, he was a big fan of the mother goddess.

But his memoir, goodbye to all that, is a fantastic, fantastic window into the experience of the war. So to give you a sense of Robert Graves, he was born into a fairly wealthy Anglo-Irish family in 1895. He went to Charterhouse, one of the great public schools. And Domney, didn't he have a German name? Kind of a bit like the royal family. I don't know if he changed it. He did. His name was Robert von Ranka Graves.

But he dropped the von Ranker. He kept quiet about that. 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 La Ave 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. Jigger Jig. Not much money.

Very cheap. Very good. I take you now. Plenty champagne for me. I mean, he didn't go to Charter House to do that kind of thing. Not at all. Well, we don't know because he doesn't explicitly say that he didn't take up on their offer. But he implies that he didn't because they were too busy.

Well, this is the man who wrote I Claudius, I suppose, so maybe he did. So he and his fellows are told they're going to be attached, not to their own regiment, but to a different regiment, the Welsh regiment, and they've got to head up the line with their men. And Robert Graves, he's not yet 20 years old, so he's 19. And he is told, this is going to be your platoon of 40 men. Now, the vast majority of these men are working class. So this is your classic example of kind of cross-class collaboration in the trenches. They did not go to Charter House. 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, is another minor. Burford gives himself away because he's confused by the safety catch on his rifle. He says, what's this? And then he says to Graves, you know, I haven't fired a rifle since 1882. And Grave said, didn't you fight in the Burr War? And he says, no, I tried to re-enlist, but they told me I was too old, sir.

That was 14 years ago. I had been an old soldier when I was in Egypt. My real age is 63. So he's like Corporal Jones in Dad's Army. Exactly he is, yeah, with his experience in Africa. But then five of them are too young. So you're meant to be 18, but over the course of the war, about a quarter of a million younger boys lied about their age to fight in the British Army.

And five of these guys are in Graves at Spatoon. One of them is only 15. And he keeps, like the classic teenager, he keeps falling asleep on duty. Oh, leave me alone. Which is a kind of capital offence, but Graves always, you know, excuses it or whatever. So teenage lion. Exactly. So they're loaded onto this troop train bound for the front.

And they're heading to Betune, 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 9 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 marched 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. I mean, that's an amazing phrase, isn't it? Intensely excited. So at this point in Graves' career, and perhaps more generally in the parabola of public reactions to the war, it's still seen as exciting.

Of course. I mean, it would be exciting, would it not? to go to war for the first time, you're 20 years old, or in the case of James Burford, you're 63. Maybe you're speaking for yourself there. Well, don't forget, they're going voluntarily. These are not people who are being conscripted. These are people who have chosen who have elected to go to do their bit.

Yeah, I guess that's true. They are nervous, though. Gray's 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. A 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 Grave says. And one of the sergeants says Riley, they calls them the musical instruments. And they all get up and they trudge on and they get to a village called Combrain, 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

dressing, 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. It's still very dark, by the way. They're led into these woods east of the village, and they go through the woods, and then they see an opening, and this is the beginning of the trench network. And they go down into this long, deep trench, which has been cut in the kind of clay of the soil, and Graves gets his torch out as they're walking to see what it's like.

and he realizes to his switch switches it off almost straight away because he realizes to his horror that they are walking on live field mice and frogs that have sort of carpet of them they've all fallen into the trench

and couldn't get out again and I guess you can tell from that that this is still the early stages of the war because you still have wildlife in the trench system and you have trees so you know by 1916 1917 that that wood

will have just become shattered tree stump 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 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 trudged 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, uh, 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 offices, are having their dinner. Could I ask a really dumb question? Yeah. Where are they getting the electricity from? Is it a wind-up gramophone?

I might be a wind-up, yeah. I don't actually know it occurred to me when I said there was a gramophone. So the adjutant says to Graves, right, you and your platoon are going off to Sea Company under Captain Dunn. And good news for you, he's the soundest man in the battalion. Top shows. 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 had exploded in his face No, that's the kind of thing I'd do And the stretcher bearer says Riley Poor silly bugger It's not worth sweating to get him back He's put paid to whatever And indeed it turns out that Sergeant Gallagher dies What an awful way to go

Terrible wound, yeah 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, sea company, and the dugout that belongs to Captain Dunn. So this is, Robert Graves says, it's a two-room timber-built shelter in the side of a trench. It's a very similar scene. There's another table with a tablecloth. There's a bookcase.

There's whiskey bottles and whatnot. And Captain Dunn is waiting for them. So he's Graves' superior officer. And Graves is astonished to find that Captain Dunn is actually two months young. 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, um, officer. Hugh Laurie in Blackadder. See, he be paid by Hugh Laurie. His opening words to Graves are, well, what's the news from England? Oh, sorry, first I missed 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 damn good whiskey with him. Well, how long is this war going to last and who's winning? We don't know a thing out here. So he's a bit like asking the score in the test match or something. Exactly. And Graves says, well, this is the news from England. And then Dunn says, okay, well, let me tell you what's like out here in the trenches. Dunn has this tremendous line. He says, we have absolutely nothing to do with the French, except when there's a battle on. And then we generally let each other down. Well, we've seen that was true, haven't we, from the series we did on the opening months of the war. And Dunn says this is basically how it's going to work.

breakfast at 8 a.m. Then we clean the trenches and we inspect and we check our rifles. We work all morning. And what he means by work, he says, in 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 one till six. 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 two 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 i mean it's better than being in the coal mine right well as we would discuss so graves gets a little bit of sleep and then at 1 a m done wakes them 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 little later when it's lighter he gets a periscope and has a look. And he can see that the German trenches, that's marked by a line of sandbags, they're just 400 yards away. And although he doesn't really say this in his memoir, this must be

a spine-tingling moment. After all this journey, after all these months of waiting, you finally see the enemy line. It's just 400 yards. You know, you could walk to it within minutes, although you'd get shot. And the no man's land as yet is not kind of churned up mud, is it? There are still flowers to be seen. No, he says a flat meadow. with 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, his man called Kingdom, rushes in, his eyes blank with hot. horror and excitement and he says gas, sir, gas, they're using gas. And Dunn says the most British thing that anybody's ever said. He says, very well, Kingdom, bring me my respirator from the other room and another pot of marmalade. Can you, can you eat marmalade while you're wearing a gas mask? I think marmalade sure 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'd

would maybe talk about some of the things that have come up in Graves' accounts 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 four years, so we better make them good.

they actually thought we might be here for a couple of weeks and then we're going to hopefully resume the offensive and drive the Germans further back east. And are they still thinking that at this point? I think by now, so we're in May 1915, there probably is an awareness that this is, this is why they're working so hard on the trenches that they're going to be here for a little bit longer.

So the way the trenches work, you've got these kind of barricades and parapets that are built really of earth, of soil and of rubble, and people would reinforce them with wooden planks and with sandbags and then they would lie in the ground of the trench with these wooden planks, these duckboards. And they gave them names. They would often name after London Street, 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. Elephant and Castle. Yeah, I mean, I suppose, conceivably. Probably not. Probably not. And they would also make up names for the German lines opposite them. So there's a bit in Siegfried Sassoon where Siegfried Sassoon says, Our objective was pint trench,

taking bitter and beer and clearing ale and vat and also Pils and Lane. So they're name them all, the German trenches all after beers. Now on the German trenches, everybody agrees the German trenches are much better. They're deeper, they are safer, they're better defended, they're more comfortable. And the reason for that, obviously, is the Germans are there for the long haul. They're like what we have we hold. So it's not just about the German. being better at building things.

Maybe they are better at building things, I don't know. I mean, they use some reinforced concrete, don't they? Which seems a kind of typical Hun trick. Well, 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. 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? 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 19. 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. God, imagine being stuck there. But here's the thing. You stuck there. And if it's in the middle of a battle, you're a sitting duck. And there are a lot of a counter. 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. Well, the flies must be, I mean, it must be all their Christmases come at once. Exactly, yeah.

In the company headquarters dug out, he says, they were masked on the ceiling like a swarm of bees. And when a man was asleep, they would settle all around his mouth and over his face. So the corpses would be full of maggots, I guess. Exactly. 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 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 Clemell. He said, without telling anybody, I take my clothes off and I see hundreds of lice and lava jumping out at me. They're everywhere in my shirt, my trousers, my underwear, 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. So is this a regular occurrence that people are taking their clothes off and shaking the lice out, do you think? Yeah, I think it is. I mean, you're, there's no sort of personal discretion, as it were. There's not much place for that on the Western Front, really. You're going to the toilet altogether on a kind of plank and whatnot.

And you'd rather be naked than bitten to death by fleas? Of course. 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 J.R. 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. A.A. Milne had trench fever. C.S. Lewis had trench fever.

God, it's hard to think of A.A. Milne, isn't it, with trench fever? Winnie the poo with lice. He probably would have had fleas, certainly. Well, what about Winnie the Pooh with rats? So Graves has a section in his memoir where he's talking about rats, and he says there was a new officer who turned up. And his first night, he goes to bed, and he wakes and he hears this scuffle on his bed. There were two rats on his blankets tussling for the possession of a severed hand. This was thought a great joke, says Graves. And again, the rats are so common they are ubiquitous.

So like the flies, they're drawn by the dead body. is 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 just be left there to putrify and they will stink and spread disease.

Or the dead bodice will draw other rats to kind of feed on them. So this is another Tommy writing home. In the night we have heaps of company rats and mice and the other livestock. Every time you wake, the rats are fighting and squeaking all over you. The other night, one took a flying jump onto my face. There's a famous poem by Ivan Rosenberg called Break of Day in the Trenches, which kind of almost implies a fondness for what he calls a queer sardonic rat.

And he imagines the rat brushing up against his hand and then going and brushing up against a German hand. And say, droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew your cosmopolitan sympathies. So it may be that in, you know, a bit like Christopher Robin befriending, piglet. If you're in the trench, you might befriend it. My friend a rat. I mean, I think that... Well, you might, Tom. I think I draw the line of preferring a rat, frankly. I take friendship where I can get it. That's fair. All this sounds pretty nightmarish. And some listeners are 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. Can't couldn't wait to get, have a crack at the British. And he said in his memoir, Storm of Steel, after only short time of the regiment, we'd become thoroughly disillusioned.

Instead of the danger that we had hoped for, we'd be given dirt, work and sleepless nights. Worse still was the boredom, which was still more innovating for the soldier than the proximity of death. But one point to make 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 backbreaking, 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, day. Yeah, I mean, all that marmalade, 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 of, you have rum, you have cigarette rations, all of this kind of thing. There's a lot of time for chatting and for general bantz. there's a lot of sleep you write letters

you play cards is that worse than working in a mine not necessarily no because you're on constant risk of death in a mine aren't you? Of course you are and you're outdoors and a lot of people actually love the outdoor element so here's a really good example

here's like a private 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 barminusant ease. Breakfast would come up if there was going to be any and you would settle down to a day of laziness in the sun if you could. The lads would sit on this firestep and talk and sing. Towards the evening they get sentimental talking about their homes.

Yes, during those summer months of 1915 you could forget that there was a war on. You really could. And part of the reason for that is actually you think of the First World War and you think of the trenches and you sort of imagine that people just either digging or 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 organise lectures and debates. They're reading. There's some graves in his book. a 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 straff by a plane so machine gun fire

stops play but it's nice to think it's not so muddy that you can't you can't play cricket there's loads of stuff like that I mean I think the reason they play football

more famously rather than cricket is that it's easier to play football yeah jumpers for goalposts exactly but there's also I think a real sense

of camaraderie. Again, you get that in Graves' 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 Regiments, I mean, this is all kind of cliched stuff, but of course this is how people spoke and indeed speak today. We knew we were there to do that job and we were so fond of our country and we were like a lot of brothers today. We were just like a band of brothers.

Oh, well, sweet. Nelson would have been proud, Tom. Yeah, well, like Hashingkor, which is not far from where they're stationed, does me. Not far at all. But, of course, there is one aspect of life on the Western Brother that we haven't mentioned at all, because they haven't actually been sent there to have a holiday. No. They haven't actually been 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, we'll find out after the break. This episode is brought to you by the Times and by the Sunday Times. Now, if there is one thing that history, and indeed Bob Dylan, teaches us, it is that the Times they are. always are 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 Kirstama are

Rosie? So looking at the career of Edward Heath, for instance, who was prime minister in the previous oil crisis? It didn't work out brilliantly for Ted Heath, to be honest. Actually, he and Kirstarmer, 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. But, you know, the facts, they shouldn't be uncertain. And that, of course, is where the Times and the Sunday Times come in.

Yeah, and I would say that understanding the news is absolutely vital when you're navigating an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world. So to subscribe to the Times and the Sunday Times, visit the Times.com. Come on man, get up. We're moving out. I woke up in dew sodden grass. Through a stuttering swath of machine gun fire, we plunged back into our communication trench and moved to a position on the edge of the wood previously held by the French. A sweetish smell and a bundle hanging in the wire caught my attention. In the rising mist, I leaped out of the trench and found a shrunken, French corpse. 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 strymed. bands of hair on the bluish black skull indicated that the man was not among the living. So that was a German, obviously, and it's a man we've already met in the first half, the writer Ernst Junger, and he's describing the fighting at Les Epage 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. 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 Wondervigel.

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

being pretty anti-Semitic in the 20s. He then was quite close to the Staufenberg plotters, so the people who tried to blow Hitler up in 1944, he was thrown out of the army but not executed. He becomes an early enthusiast for LSD. He does, exactly. And also he's very keen entomologist. He had an inordinate fondness for beetles.

I think he had about seven types of beetle named after him or something improbable. And then he died at the age of 102, so in I think, 1998. God, that's mad, isn't it? Yeah, crazy. Anyway, Storm of Steel, his book, which I really recommend is, it's very different in tone from Robert Graves' memoir, even though they're at the same age and they're writing about exactly the same point in time. Because Younger is much more interested in what it's like of the excitement and the adrenaline and the experience of fighting and battle. So it really captures his book, the adrenaline, the noise, the sensations, and this sort of 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 units has been pushed forward into the French lines. So the Germans have punched a little hole in the French lines and his units have been thrown in. And this is his first experience of battle. And he's in this trench and it's full of dead Frenchmen. Rotted, dried, stiffened to mummies, frozen in an eerie dance of death. Such an eerie image, isn't it? It is.

But the really eerie thing, he realizes that they've been there for ages. and that the French must have just not bothered to bury. Poor from the French, I think, not to bury their dead. Anyway, they haven't buried these books. Well, especially since the same muddy, you just roll them and they can sink into the glute. So what he does, you know, don't forget this is the middle of a battle. He has a little stroll. He looks for souvenirs.

He finds, again, this sort of 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. 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 boughs. The crash echoed through the woods. Stricken eyes looked at each other. bodies press themselves into the ground. And then there's this series of explosions. He says choking gases drifted through the undergrowth, smoke obscured the tree tops. There are trees crashing down, there 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 has basically sliced into his leg. and he drops his pack, he throws down his pack, and he runs back to the trench that they 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. 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 10 times or whatever. He's incredibly brave, and he loves it. You know, when we're describing this, the great God pain, blokes with their heads, the heart kind of blown open and all of this. You might think, gosh, how horrific, how terrible. What an unbelievably awful scene, a nightmare. But it actually makes Younger feel more enthusiastic about the war, not less. Because it makes him feel alive?

Yeah, it makes it feel alive. It's a kind of intensity of experience that he wouldn't have had otherwise. And when he gets back to Germany, so on that break, you might think when he goes back, invalided out, you know, it would make him dread to go back. Not a bit of it. He says, to go back and to see his native land, makes him feel that Germany is eminently worth our blood and our lives. For the first time, I sense that this war was more than just a great adventure. So it's a great adventure, but it's even better than that because it's in the noble cause. And the other thing that strikes him, at the end of this scene, which is brilliantly done, you know, he's seen people. killed, he's seen combat, he's seen explosions and stuff, but he's seen dead French, but he hasn't seen a single live Frenchman. He hasn't seen a single live opponent. And actually, you could go through the war for a very long time and you could see people shot around you and you could shoot, you know, you could cause death to other people, but you might never actually lay eyes upon them in. That's one of the great innovations,

I think, of the First World War. Because death is coming from a distance or it's coming from the lice or the rats or whatever, you know, it's kind of basalaya and stuff. And both these things are very typical. So first of all, most soldiers never engage in hand-to-hand combat. And actually, when you look at the stats, it is clear most soldiers never killed anybody. And in fact, two-thirds of the casualties in the First World War were caused by artillery fire. They're not caused by one person, as it were, deliberately killing another person that they can see in front of them. And Younger is not untypical in finding battle enjoyable.

So there's an example that reminded me of one of our goalhanger comrades, Tom. So I'm an uncle 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. Because he was a poet. Wasn't he as well? He was a poet. Yeah. Because he was also a professional soldier. Do you think that might have made a difference? Is he more seasoned?

Comes perhaps as less of a shock to him because he's already fought in battle. Maybe. I don't know. I think there are a lot of people. I think it's a question of temperament as much as everything. I think you don't know until you get there, actually. It's like that classic thing about what makes you're 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 historians would say you can be conditioned. But, I don't know. I mean, not everybody's like this. So there's a brilliant account by a German sergeant called Stefan Vestman, who went on to be a Harley Street doctor,

and he was interviewed by the BBC for their brilliant series about the Great War in the 1960s. And he describes in this interview, storming enemy trenches, and he suddenly comes face to, 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 said, I realized that he was after my life exactly as I was after his,

but I was quicker than he was. I pushed his rifle away and I ran my bayonet through his chest. He fell, putting his hand on the place where I'd hit him and then I thrust again. Blood came out of his mouth and he died. I nearly vomited. My knees was 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 he had killed a Puelu, 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 traveller. Two were students, the rest

farm workers, ordinary people who would never have thought to harm anybody. So another 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 that they didn't know they had. But Stefan Vestman, 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. Oh, so it's like the, um, the Wilfred Owen poem where, what's it, I am, the enemy. I own the enemy you killed, my friend.

Exactly. Really moving and strange poem. They sees him in a dream, doesn't he? The man that he had killed. Yeah, at the end of a long tunnel. And I suppose whether you kill or not, you just have to get used to the fact there's going to be a lot of death and a lot of killing.

We were talking about the trenches. I mean, one thing we didn't mention, the fighting can be so fierce sometimes that it's impossible to clear the bodies. They either left in no man's land or they're hastily buried in the side of the trenches. So people will write home, this is an example, a guy from the Argyn and Sutherland Highlanders, Captain Aden Lidl,

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. Because I see on this, lots of exclamation marks after that. How about that, Mata? Imagine writing that to your mum. And then there's a French soldier.

He describes have just outside their trench. Dead bodies lay for a month. One evening, Jacques 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 bear, 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? In my case, I think fairly high. No, they're smaller than you think.

They're much smaller than you think. So I fell down a massive rabbit hole. There are tons and tons of articles online about this. I have people who know far more about it, A, than I do, and B, I think, than is healthy for any human being. And generally, the odds of death for a British soldier on the Western Front, in the front line, are about 10. 10%. So 9 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. Well, the Battle of Can I. Right. Where, you know, 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. And why the difference? I was thinking about this. Why is this? Well, the Germans obviously lose the war. I mean, that is a pretty big, a big difference. And of course, they lose it in circumstances where they launch a massive offensive. Lots of you are shot when you're attacking. So they launch a massive offensive in 1918. They're driven back and a lot of them die in that in the course of

2018. The French... I suppose the British don't have a Verdun, do they? The Som is pretty bad, but Verdun is a charnel house. Well, we were talking about that maybe next year in 2027 when we get to 1916. So a lot die at Verdun, I suppose. I mean, I don't have an answer, actually. Maybe military historians will have an answer about this big difference.

But the chances are that you would be a casualty one way or another. So almost every soldier on the front line gets wounded one way or another and or they come down with disease. You know, at some point you will get trench fever, dysentery, you'll be invalided out at some stage, probably. And of course, the difference between this war and previous wars that the dangers are not merely physical. So this is shell shock. Yeah. As one French trench journal, Les 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, you know, we can imagine what it's like to be very muddy or we can imagine the horror of all the flies or something. But I guess it's probably very hard for us to imagine what it's like to be under shell fire for hours

and hours or days and days. They're sort of relentless, relentless pounding. Ernst 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 touching your skull. Then it has struck the post and the splinters are flying.

That is what it is like to experience heavy shelling in an exposed position. the poet 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 the start to be reports. of a lot of British soldiers reporting to the sick bay saying, I feel dizzy, they're trembling and they don't know why. They have headaches. They have kind of nervous symptoms, as they were called at the time. And the term shell shock was coined in February, 1915, in an article in The Lancet, the medical journal,

by Captain Charles S. Myers, the Royal Army Medical Corps. And I had to look at it. 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. 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? It is more nuanced. So this is part of the sort of caricature. I mean, you alluded to it in the first half, that the generals with their tremendous moustaches,

are sitting in castles, kind of eating elaborate meals, and just throwing their men into the 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 306 British and imperial soldiers were executed for cowardice, 650 Frenchmen, and actually, interestingly, only 48 Germans.

So it differs from army to army. Actually, the Italians are the worst. They're very harsh on their own men. But these figures, as, you know, lamentable as they are, they're a tiny, tiny fraction. Right, because we're talking about millions. of competence. Right. So there were six million British Empire troops. And 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 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 and duly 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. 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.

Yeah, surely it must have, I mean, there must have been men at Waterloo who were completely traumatised or the Crimea or something. I mean, it's utterly implausible that there weren't, or indeed Ashinko, frankly. Some of these battles must have been terrifying experiences that recurred in men's dreams for years or for decades, afterwards. 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. 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 And this is where Secreid 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, Shellshock, but often they say, well, it's maybe the result of an individual weakness, that you have a flaw in your temperament. But actually, most of the men we've mentioned in this episode prove that to be totally wrong.

So 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 shell fire and he runs away in terror and then he meets up with some of the survivors. And I quote, I was finished. I threw myself on the ground and I broke into 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 and 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. 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. 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? 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. It's 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're so, there's this urgent demand for men at the front.

So they can't give everybody a break every now and again. And it's what we were saying right at the start, that they are facing a situation, a strategic situation, that is so imponderable that they are just groping around for answers. Indeed, and this brings us perfectly to one of the first answers they come up with. So Graves just mentioned it. And this is the secret weapon that 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. I mean, this is maybe, but it's still cheating, isn't it? I mean, it's not cricket. I don't think it is cheating, actually, because the Hay Convention of 1899 outlawed using projectiles that would be solely used for asphyxating 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 Eric von Falkenheim, 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 their great gamble has failed. We must try anything urgently to get a breakthrough. I mean, he has the vibe of a man who would approve of mustard gas. That's harsh. That's harsh. That's harsh. The name, the look. I mean, to be fair, the British ended up using gas too. Would you say that of Douglas Haig? Or Sir John French? I would definitely have Sir John French.

What did we call John French last time? Paltroon and a buffoon, I think, wasn't it? Anyway, lots of Falcon Heinz officers say to him, I don't know about this. First of all, the Allies will retaliate with gas themselves. And the prevailing winds over France and Flanders... Right. Are westerly. Yeah, they're in the wrong direction. We'll be in a mess.

But also, some people definitely agree with you, Tom. So somebody who agrees with you is General Karl von 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 vilerman. becomes. So he's not an enthusiast for gas. Even so, they decide to go for it and they're going to launch it on the 22nd of April at Eapr. Now people may remember, there's a thing called the Eepr 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 5 o'clock that evening, the engineers opened the valves on 6,000 cylinders of chlorine gas. 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 Canadian And again, the gas inspires utter horror and panic. So this is one of many sort of awful eye witness 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 Burr War. So he loved Britain. I applaud him.

He volunteered again in 1914, even though he was 41. And he became the chief medical officer 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 shell and McCray presided over his burial service and it's at that point at his burial service that McCray noticed these poppies growing around the grave and the next day I mean there are multiple different kind of apocryphal stories about this but the most common is McCray is sitting in the back of an ambulance near Eap 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, it became a real kind of sensation. McCrae himself, unfortunately, died in the last year of the war. He 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 seen before. But gas is the one that frightens soldiers the most, because it's this silent killer, invisible killer. You know, you don't see it coming, and as soon as it's on you, you're dead.

Though that one that attacks the French Algerian troops, it's yellowish. It was yellowish, so I say it's invisible. I mean, you might not, would you notice a yellowish vapour heading towards you? I think I probably would. 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, poison lungs, rotten for life. Because that is one of the archetypes of the Great War, isn't it? I mean, that's one of the reasons why it lives with such a kind of tamber of horror in people's memories.

And it's the theme of perhaps the most famous poem written about the horrors of the war. Yeah, Wilfred Owens, Dulcea de Coromest, where there's a line in that poem where there's a gas boys, gas, or whatever it is, and they're all rushing to get their masks on. There's one guy who's been too slow,

and the imagery is all green, dim through the misty panes and thick green light, as under a green sea I saw him drowning. In all his dreams before my helpless sight, he plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. So it's horrible. but does it work? No, this is a waste of time.

Totally waste of time. So there's no breakthrough at EAP. 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 and the whole course of the war died of gas poisoning. I'd assumed it was much more than that.

No, it doesn't kill you, by and large. Just leaves you with ruined lungs. Yeah, 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 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 1960s, they issued what was called a small box respirator. that protects you against chlorine and fostein, which are the two common gases that are being used at this point. The one thing it doesn't protect you against is mustard gas, because mustard gas blisters your skin. So you know the famous painting by John Singer-Sargent?

Oh, the one where they're all in a line. They're all in a line. That's mustard gas that they are suffering from, not chlorine. Now, you said it wasn't cricket. Sir John French, the well-known Paltroon, he agrees with you, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force. Oh, I maligned him then. I take it all back. 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 doing. Especially if you've got a massive world-beaten chemicals industry. Yeah. I mean, they'd be kind of, I mean, I don't want to sound too pro-tuton. But yet they'd be mad not to try it, I think. Anyway, the British, for all their talk of it not being cricket, they are secretly testing gas weapons themselves. And they make the same mistake the Germans did. They sort of convinced themselves, this will be brilliant.

This will actually 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 Luce, which is just south of Lille in France. Sometimes, Tom, you hear people saying that Luce might be in Belgium, but it's not, is it? No. I mean, that's a rookie's error, isn't it? Anyone who thinks that is mad. So people who enjoy British shambolic British military failures will relish the beginning of the Battle of Luce.

The British have planned this gas bombardment. They've got 5,000 cylinders of chlorine gas. At 6 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. Are the top brass going to pay attention to this? The top brass say, no, it's too late to change the plan now. Are you mad?

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 are poisoned by their own gas. So it's basically like that poor bloke who throws the missile out and then it blows up in his face. Yeah, it's basically that on a huge scale. because basically the British gas gasped four times, caused four times as many casualties among the British as it did among the Germans. Anyway, when they finally ordered the troops to advance,

they find the Germans very much 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 defences, has completely failed to do so. So basically, loose, which goes on for the next two weeks,

is your classic example of a Western Front offensive, where generals are throwing men against positions that turn out to be a much better defendant than they thought, and they're getting absolutely nowhere. It ends with 60,000 British casualties, only 25,000 German casualties. It is one of the great Allied disasters of the first year or so of the war. And the result of this is that finally Sir John French, who has been useless, frankly, from the very beginning. And if you remember, he actually wanted to abandon the French completely. he's finally booted out as commander-in-chief

and he's replaced with Sir Douglas Hague. And French is the guy who the British government thinks is just the man to go and solve the Irish question in due call. Yes. Where he's another tremendous success. Poor Sir John French. Surely at some point we'll have to do a whole series rehabilitating him. But anyway, he's been replaced by Douglas Hague,

one of the most controversial characters in British and indeed all military history. The 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.

Gary Sheffield, he's all over. How good Douglas Haynes. From the University of Wolverhampton thinks that Douglas Hager is one of the greatest men who ever lived, I think. Well, there you go. Anyway, just to end the episode. 60,000 British casualties at loose, but one of them above all is very well known.

And this is a young man who was 18 years old called John Kipling. And he was the only son of Rudyard Kipling, the great poet of empire and indeed of patriotism. John Kipling was 16 years old when the war broke out and his father was desperate to get him a commission. But John was rejected because of severe short-sightedness. Basically, the medical board said he would be totally at sea because he can't see anything.

But Kipling Sr. 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 Luce, John Kipling was reported missing in action. And he was, and I quote, last scene, stumbling in the mud in search of his glasses, which had fallen off during the attack. And Rudyard 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 Kipling wrote is a couplet that's often seen as an epitaph for the war more generally. If any question why we died, tell them because our fathers lied. And it's not generally thought of, is it, that Kipling wrote perhaps the most devastating couplet condemning the war of any poet. Exactly. And of course, we've talked before in the show about his short story, The Gardner, 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, we tell the story of how Italy, was cajoled into war by the proto-fascist poet Gabrile Donuccio 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 wars, that's the sinking of the lucetania by a German U-boat and the execution of the British nurse and alleged spy Edith Cavill. And then in 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 Restis History Club, you can hear those five episodes straight away. And if you go to the restishistory.com, you can join the club. And only by going to theresteshistory.com will you get the full benefits of being in the club? So lots to look forward to, Tom. Lots to look forward to. Thank you very much for that, Dominic.

And in our next episode, we will be. in Italy, listening to Roman rabble-rousing, and then up in the mountains of Slovenia, getting massacred by Austrians. So we'll see you then. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Hi, everybody. We are back with another absolutely colossal update about the rest is history festival. Well, 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 Palace's collections. And yes, Dominic, most exciting, of all, this is the thing I have been pushing for, and I'm so looking forward to it. We have medieval combat, a terrifying, brutal, yet completely

thrilling sport. It is going to be an unforgettable two days. It is indeed. And at the core of the festival of these talks, we've got some more talks to add to the lineup. So I will be talking to the brilliant Tudor historian Tracy Borman about the secrets of the six wives of Henry the 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 Katya Hoyer 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 Hislaw. about the history of satire. And I will be on stage with Mary Beard and we will be talking about just how strange,

just how alien, just how different to us Rome was, or maybe it wasn't. I will be talking to Helen Castor about Elizabeth I. And we'll be discussing whether she truly was England's greatest ruler or maybe whether that title

should still be claimed by Athelstan. I will be talking to Ali Ansari about all things personally, with Dan Jackson about the pit of death. And I will be talking to a friend of the show, Willie Dalrymple, about the links between ancient India and Greece and Rome. Absolutely incredible scenes.

And of course, on both days, Tom and I will be on stage doing a show together as well. So on the first day, we'll be answering all our club members' questions. And then to close the festival, we will do a definitive ranking of the all-time top friends of the show. So lots to look at.

forward to. And beyond that, there is so much else that will be happening across the weekend. So think of it as the ultimate summer history hangout. And your tickets will give you full access to explore the great Tudor Palace of Hampton Court and indeed the Royal Tennis Court. So that would be very exciting. 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 and delightful surroundings, sipping on a refreshing gin and tonic. And it's probably the most civilised festival there's ever been. I mean, that's what I imagine anyway. Just a reminder, the tickets are exclusive to club members. And if you are not a member, now is the perfect

time to join. So head over to The Restishistory.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 the restishistory.com, all you do then is log into the members area and you select festival and it's all very obvious. But you know what? There is a twist. If you do this, you'll be entered into a genuinely unbelievable prize draw. And that prize draw, if you win, you and three other people, It's like the golden ticket 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. Do not miss it. Can't wait to see it. Why did we really go to war with Iraq? And did Saddam Hussein really have weapons of mass destruction? I'm Gordon Carrera, National Security Journal.

list. And I'm David McCloskey, author and former CIA analyst. We are the hosts of the rest is classified, and in our latest series, we are telling the true story of one of history's biggest intelligence failures, Iraq, WMD. In 2003, the U.S. and UK told the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but they were wrong. This wasn't a simple lie. It was something far more complicated, far more interesting, and far more dangerous. Spies who believed their sources, politicians who wanted the public to believe in the threat, and a dictator who couldn't prove he'd already destroyed the weapons. In this series, we go deep inside the CIA and MI6, go into the rooms where decisions were made,

and look at the sources who fabricated the intelligence that took us to war. The Iraq War reshaped the Middle East and permanently weakened public trust in governments and intelligence agencies and its consequences are still playing out today. Plus, in a declassified club exclusive, we are joined by three people who are at the heart of the decision to go to war. Former head of MI6, Richard Deerlove, Tony Blair's former communications director, Alistair Campbell, and former acting head of the CIA, Michael Morel.

So get the full story by listening to The Rest is Classified and subscribing to the Declassified Club wherever you get your podcasts.