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

Introduction

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War Poetry

1:25In 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 gums below. We are the dead. Short days ago, we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved, and were loved,

2:02and now we lie in Flanders' fields. Take up our quarrel with the foe. To you, from failing hands, we throw the torch. Be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders' fields.

John McRae

2:23That's one of the most celebrated of all war poems, and it was written by a doctor, an army officer from Canada called John McRae, and he wrote it during the Second Battle of Ypres in May 1915, and it is the poem that has effectively enshrined the poppy as the symbol of the 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?

2:55For 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 Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen

3:27that question the futility and the horror of the First World War. And those are the poems that people study in British schools when they're teenagers, and they've become emblematic of the war. But actually, in Flanders' fields, it's probably more representative of what ordinary soldiers at the time thought. You know, we did a big series about the first few months of the First World War. We did an episode about the Christmas Truce. Of 1914. And in those, we discussed how ordinary soldiers very rarely questioned whether they were doing the right thing.

3:57They 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, and kind of lauding it. Yeah, exactly. And I think, at the time, if you'd asked most of the Tommies, do you stand with kind of the Wilfred Owen, Seyfried Sassoon anti-war school of poetry,

4:28or do you stand with Rupert Brooke and John McRae? They would say the latter, even though, of course, Seyfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen fought very bravely themselves.

Series Overview

4:37But we'll come back to McRae's poem, and indeed the battle in which he wrote it, the Second Battle of Ypres, a little bit later. But first, let's set out what's coming in this series. So this series is about a single year in the First World War, the year 1915, and it's one of the most 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,

5:07and how it prefigured the rise of fascism. And we'll be talking about two of the war's most controversial and colourful stories. So that's the sinking of the ship, the Lusitania. So a Titanic-style story, except the difference is in this case, the Lusitania is sunk by a U-boat, and this ignites this firestorm of controversy in America. And then, in many ways, an equally controversial story, which is the German execution of a nurse or spy, we will discuss which, called Edith Cavill in Brussels in 1915.

5:39And 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 ANZAC listeners there.

Western Front

6:04But today, I thought what we would do is we would kick off with the epicentre 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 outlining where we are, where we've got to. So at the beginning of 1915, the First World War has been going on for five months. And it began, as listeners will remember, with Austria-Hungary's decision to exact revenge on Serbia for the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who's now slightly been forgotten,

6:38I'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.

7:12They charge through Belgium into the heart of France. They're closing in on Paris at the end of August 1914, but they're driven back at the Battle of the Marne, and they fall all the way back to the chalk lands of the River Aisne in eastern France. And there they literally dig in, and they dig the first line of defensive trenches. By the end of 1914, beginning of 1915, these lines of trenches stretch all the way from the English Channel in the north, through Flanders, through eastern France, to the Swiss border. That's about 450 miles.

7:44This 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

8:19wire, which give the defenders a massive advantage. So basically, if you attack, you end up dying. That's the issue. And there had kind of been hints of the challenge that the Allies might face in doing this, hadn't there, in the American Civil War first, and then the war fought between the Russians and the Japanese in the early 20th century. And there was the occasional military strategist who would kind of write a book about this and say, an industrial war is going to be horrific. But by and large, military strategists, the top brass in the various armies of the combatants

8:54in 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 mustachioed generals who has written a sort of little pamphlet about offensive doctrine and about how you win wars through dash and vigor and charging forwards, which is General

9:28Codona, 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 and 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 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.

10:00None 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 moustache. Great moustache. Goes to see the trenches at the end of 1914. And he says, this is not war as I understand it. You know, this is something different. I do not know how you break this barbed wire and machine guns and stuff.

Trench Life

10:20Anyway, what was it actually like then to live in the trenches in 1915? What did it look and feel like? We know more about this than any previous war. We're very fortunate because so many of the survivors told their stories to things like the Imperial War Museums or 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.

10:52Some 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 Dominic, didn't he have a German name? Kind of a bit like the royal family. I don't know if he changed it. He did. His name was Robert von Ranker Graves. But he dropped the von Ranker for obvious reasons.

11:25Yeah, he did keep 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 Havre in France with six other young officers in the Welsh Fusiliers.

12:01And 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. Jig a jig. Not much money. Very cheap. Very good. I take you now. Well, plenty champagne for me. I mean, he didn't go to Charterhouse 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 them up on their offer. No, does he not? 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.

12:37And they've got to head up the line with their men. And Robert Graves, he's not yet 20 years old. So he's 19. And he is told, this is going to be your platoon of 40 men. Now, the vast majority of these men are working class. So this is your classic example of kind of cross-class collaboration in the trenches. You know, they did not go to Charterhouse. And as he says in his book, many of them are either wildly too old or too young. So he says, Fred Prosser, a painter in civil life who admitted to 48, was really 56.

13:09David Davis, a collier, a minor, who admitted to 42. And Thomas Clarke, another collier who admitted to 45, were only one or two years junior to Prosser. And the oldest of these men is a guy called James Burford, who's another 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 Graves 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.

13:41That 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' platoon. One of them is only 15. And he keeps falling, like the classic teenager, he keeps falling asleep on duty.

14:13Oh, leave me alone. Which is a kind of capital offense. But Graves always, you know, excuses it or whatever. So teenage lie-in. 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 nine o'clock at night. They are, and I quote, hungry, cold and dirty.

14:45And 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. And that's an amazing phrase, isn't it? Intensely excited. So at this point in Graves's career, and perhaps kind of more generally in the parabola of public reactions to the war, it's still seen as exciting.

15:15Of course. Well, I mean, it would be exciting, would it not? To go to war for the first time, you're 20 years old, or in 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. Graves notes that they're singing hymns to keep their spirits up. The Welsh always sang when they were a bit frightened and pretending they were not. It kept them steady, he says. We marched towards the flashes, and we could soon see the flare lights curving over the trenches in the distance.

15:50The 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 Graves says. And one of the sergeants says, Riley, they calls them the musical instruments.

16:21And they all get up, and they trudge on, and they get to a village called Combrin, which is about a mile from the trenches now. And here they're led into this ruined house, which had previously been a chemist's shop. And here, you know, there are people waiting. They give them their gas masks, their respirators. They give them their field dressings, so the kind of bandages and stuff. And they are given a little bit of something to eat. So bread, bacon, rum, and bitter stewed tea, sickly with sugar. And then once they've finished that, the guide leads them on again. It's still very dark, by the way.

16:52They're led into these woods east of the village, and they go through the woods, and then they see an opening, and this is the beginning of the trench network. And they go down into this long, deep trench, which has been cut in the kind of clay of the soil. And Graves gets his torch out as they're walking to see what it's like. And he realises, he switches it off almost straight away, because he realises to his horror that they are walking on live field mice and frogs that have a sort of carpet of them.

17:23They'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 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 a revolver, field glasses, compass, whiskey flask, wire cutters, periscope, and a lot more.

17:58He's struck by how wet and how slippery the trench is. They can hear the hiss of rifle bullets coming at them. And actually, somebody says to him at what point, there's no point in ducking if you hear a bullet. Because if you can hear the bullet, it means it's gone by you. So, it will kill you before you hear it. So, if you hear it, no point. You know, you're fine. Anyway, they trudge down this trench, and they get to a dugout, and that is the battalion headquarters, where the colonel is waiting for them. And Graves is surprised how cozy it is.

18:29So, 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 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 and his senior officers are having their dinner. Could I ask a really dumb question? Yeah. Where are they getting the electricity from? Or is it a wind-up gramophone? It might be a wind-up. Yeah, I don't actually know.

19:00It occurred to me when I said there was a gramophone. So, the adjutant says to Graves, Right, you and your platoon are going off to C Company under Captain Dunn. And good news for you, he's the soundest man in the battalion. Top shows. So, tremendous. Off they go again into the trench network. It's now raining and it's very muddy. It's 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.

19:32He thought he saw a Fritz in no man's land near our wire. Sergeant Gallagher, it turns out, fired a percussion bomb at this shape. But Sergeant Gallagher aimed a little bit too low. The bomb hit the top of the parapet. It bounced back and it exploded in his face. 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.

20:03Must have, I mean, there must have been so many people, thousands upon thousands who died in similar ways. Anyway, at last, they reach their company. C Company. And the dugout that belongs to Captain Dunn. So this is, Robert Graves says, It's a two-room timber-built shelter in the side of a trench. It's a very similar scene. There's another table with a tablecloth. There's a bookcase. There's whiskey bottles and whatnot. And Captain Dunn is waiting for them. So he's Graves' superior officer. And Graves is astonished to find that Captain Dunn is actually two months younger than he is.

20:39That is to say, Captain Dunn is himself only 19. And Captain Dunn is your absolute classic public school, jolly, breezy officer. Hugh Laurie in Blackadder. So you're prepared by Hugh Laurie. His opening words to Graves are, Well, what's the news from England? Oh, sorry. First, I must introduce you. This is Walker. Clever chap. Comes from Cambridge. Fances himself as an athlete. This is Price, who only joined us yesterday. But we like him. He brought some damn good whiskey with him.

21:09Well, 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 it's like out here in the trenches. Dunn has this tremendous line. And 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. We have breakfast at 8am. Then we clean the trenches and we check our rifles.

21:42We work all morning. And what he means by work, he says, the majority of our time here, we work on the trench. We dig. We reinforce the parapet. We, you know, try to get rid of some of the vermin. We do all this kind of thing. Then at 12, we have lunch. We work again from 1 till 6. So they're basically like a kind of group of navvies or something. And then we have, then the men feed again. We have stand two at dusk for about an hour. We work all night. And then we stand two for an hour before dawn. And that's the general programme.

22:13Sounds fun. It's not the end of the world, right? I mean, it's better than being in a coal mine, right? Well, as we will discuss. So Graves gets a little bit of sleep. And then at 1 a.m., Dunn wakes him up. And he says, I'll give you a tour. So they have a look over the parapet very gingerly. And Graves gets his first glimpse of no man's land. It's dark and he can hardly see anything. But a little later when it's lighter, he gets a periscope and he has a look. And he can see that the German trenches, that's marked by a line of sandbags. They're just 400 yards away.

22:43And 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 it's 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.

23:14He 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 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.

23:45Bring me my respirator from the other room and another pot of marmalade. Can you eat marmalade while you're wearing a gas mask? I think marmalade surely is the priority, no? You'd smear it all over your tube, wouldn't you? If you want to find out what happened next, I think the thing to do is to read the book because I don't want to do the whole book. But I thought we would maybe talk about some of the things that have come up in Graves' account so far. So first of all, the trenches. So the trenches, as you said, Tom,

24:16they are relatively new. You know, when Graves arrives, they are only months old. They were improvised. They were cut into the clay and the chalk in a hurry. And a key thing for people to remember, the Allies, when they dug their trenches, did not think, well, we're going to be here for four years, so we better make them good. They actually thought, we might be here for a couple of weeks. And then we're going to hopefully resume the offensive and drive the Germans further back east. And are they still thinking that at this point?

24:46I think by now, so we're in May 1915, there probably is an awareness that this is why they're working so hard on the trenches, that they're going to be here for a little bit longer. So the way the trenches work, you've got these kind of barricades and parapets that are built really of earth, of soil and of rubble. And people would reinforce them with wooden planks and with sandbags. And then they would line the ground of the trench with these wooden planks, these duckboards. And they gave them names. They would often name after London Street, so Oxford Street, Regent Street and whatnot.

25:18And 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'd name them all, the German trenches all after beers. Now on the German trenches, everybody agrees the German trenches

25:49are much better. They're deeper, they are safer, they're better defended, they're more comfortable. And the reason for that, obviously, is the Germans are there for the long haul. They're like, what we have, we hold. So it's not just about the Germans being better at building things. Maybe they are better at building things, I don't know. I mean, they use some reinforced concrete, don't they? Which seems a kind of typical hum trick. Well, when people do take German trenches, they're stunned how good they are. They have kind of ceiling beams,

26:19they 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 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 realise 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.

26:50And this is the aspect of trench life that soldiers mention the most in subsequent accounts. So there's a diary of the war by a guy called Captain Alexander Stewart, which was published in 2009. He joined the Scottish Rifles in 1915. He says of the mud, mud is a bad description, it's not mud. The soil was more like a thick slime. When walking, one sank several inches, it was difficult to withdraw the feet. The consequence was that men who were standing still or sitting down got embedded in the slime and were unable to extricate themselves. And as the trenches were so shallow,

27:21they had to stay where they were all day. God, imagine being stuck there. But here's the thing, you're stuck there and if it's in the middle of a battle, you're a sitting duck and there are a lot of accounts actually, reading through soldiers' accounts, there's loads of them where they say, blogs got stuck and the Germans were basically using 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

27:51talking 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 dugout, he says, they were massed on the ceiling like a swarm of bees and when a man was asleep they would settle all around his mouth and over his face. So the corpses would be full of maggots, I guess. Exactly.

28:21Fleas, 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 Clément. He said, without telling anybody I take my clothes off

28:52and 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, 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 all together on a kind of plank

29:22and 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.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

29:53of A.A. Milne, isn't it? With trench fever. Winnie the Pooh 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 the scuffle on his bed. There were two rats on his blankets tussling for the possession of a severed hand. This was thought a great joke says Graves.

30:25And again the rats are so common they are ubiquitous. So like the flies they're drawn by the dead bodies they become huge. Because they're eating dead soldiers. Yeah. There are so many accounts of them being as big as cats and often the men deliberately do not kill them because they will they will just be left there to putrefy and they will stink and spread disease or the dead bodies will draw other rats to kind of feed on them. So this is another Tommy writing home. In the night we have heaps of company rats and mice and the other livestock.

30:56Every 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 saying droll rat they would shoot you if they knew your cosmopolitan sympathies. So it may be that in you know

31:26a bit like Christopher Robin befriending a piglet if you're in the trench you might befriend a rat. I mean I think well you might Tom I think I draw the line at befriending 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 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

31:57called Ernst Junge who we will feature more after the break and Junge arrived very excited and very idealistic couldn't wait to have a crack at the British and he said in his memoir Storm of Steel after only a short time in 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 enervating for the soldier than the proximity of death but one point to make as we approach the break it's really important to say you said earlier

32:27it'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 in mines or had backbreaking industrial jobs the routine on the western front really isn't that bad you've got four regular meals a day breakfast lunch tea dinner yeah

32:58I mean all that marmalade brilliant yeah but your thing is the food really it's a little bit like when we did the titanic episodes and we were talking about life in third class you know it might look bad to us but to people at the time you're getting tins of what's called bully beef you've got biscuits you've got bread and jam you have regular you have a lot of tea you have kind of bits you have rum you have cigarette rations all of this kind of thing there's a lot of time for chatting and for general bants there's a lot of sleep

33:28you write letters you play cards is that worse than working in a mine not necessarily no because you're at 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 a guy called private earnest todd looking back at the war and he says on a nice summer's day you could think there wasn't a war on really early in the morning you'd have the first planes coming over and a general air of barm innocent ease

33:58breakfast would come up if there was going to be any and you would settle down to a day of laziness in the sun if you could the lads would sit on this fire step and talk and sing towards the evening they get sentimental talking about their homes yes during those summer months of 1915 you could forget that there was a war on you really could and part of the reason for that is actually you think of the first world war and you think of the trenches and you sort of imagine that people just either digging or they're going over the top but actually a tommy

34:29a 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 organize lectures and debates they're reading there's some graves in in his book a cancer cricket match where they they use I think a dead

35:00parrot in a cage as the wicket and then they get kind of strapped by a plane so machine gun fire stops play but it's you know it's nice to think it's not so muddy that you can't 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's book you know the affectionate way that he talks about this sort of

35:30sense that I mean this is one of the most common things that people said afterwards about life in the trenches that barriers of class and region and indeed nation within the United Kingdom end up being broken down so to quote William Holmes of the London regiment I mean it's this is all kind of cliched stuff but of course