September 19, 2025 • 37 mins
In our first QnA Episode for Season 9 we look at what happened to the German forces when the guns went silent on 11th November 1918, discuss the use of poison gas and it's legacy on the battlefields today, examine if British and German dead were buried in the same trenches on the battlefield, and ask what happened to the horses used by the British Army when the war came to an end?
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Episode Transcript
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SPEAKER_00 (00:10):
Welcome back for our first question and answer
episode of season nine of theOld Frontline podcast.
This is where we featurequestions posed by you, the
podcast listeners, and we cover,as usual, a lot of diverse
subjects.
We've had a bit of a gap inthese Q&A episodes due to the
(00:30):
Royal Flying Corps and Royal AirForce series that we did towards
the end of season eight, andwe've built up quite a big
backlog of questions, but But asalways, keep them coming in
because these episodes areproving pretty popular and I
very much enjoy doing them,being challenged each week to
(00:51):
look at some different elements,different layers, different
parts of First World Warhistory.
And as we move into Season 9 ofthe podcast, our sixth year of
doing the Old Front Line, thisis the third series where we've
featured these Q&As and I thinkyou'll agree that they've become
(01:12):
really an integral part of whatwe do on the old front line now
so long may they continue andone other thing that I wanted to
mention as we move forward intothis new season is that we now
have an old front line podcastbulletin and that's an email
newsletter that goes out everytwo weeks where there's news
(01:35):
about the podcast about theYouTube channel that we've got
and it gives me you anopportunity to add a little bit
of extra to what we do on someof the podcast episodes and
share things with you as wellwhether that's links on YouTube
whether it's links to the onlineold front line shop where you
(01:56):
can buy podcast merch or whetherit's something else that's come
up during the course and oftenin response to some of the
episodes of that particularseason the bulletin is
completely free you can just tosign up for it via the link
that's in the show notes forthis episode and indeed every
episode and I hope you find itof interest but let's get back
(02:20):
to the Q&A's and what questionshave we got this week our first
question comes from KevinPennock Kevin asks when the
armistice was signed and theguns fell silent did the German
army just abandon the trenchesand retreat to Germany on their
own accord or were they taken asprisoners of war Or did troops
(02:41):
on both sides in reduced numbersstay in place until the Treaty
of Versailles was signed?
How did the opposing armiesreturn to their respective home
countries?
Well this is a really goodquestion Kevin.
Essentially what happened withthe armistice on the 11th
November 1918 that brought notthe whole of the First World War
to an end but the war on theWestern Front.
(03:05):
And you might have thought thatin preparation for it with these
two huge armies, the Allied onone side and the Germans on the
other side deadlocked along allthose hundreds of miles of what
had been the western front andthat although the final phase of
the war had been a war ofmovement and had seen
breakthrough on many parts ofthat static front it had still
(03:26):
brought them to a demarcationline if you like on the 11th of
November where the fighting hadstopped with allied troops on
one part of the battlefield andthe Germans on the other and as
As we've noted in previouspodcasts the fighting at
different parts of that frontwent on right to the very last
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second of the war with theCanadians at Mons and the
Americans along the Meuse Riverand the French near to Sedan and
many other places besides andyou'd have thought at the
conclusion of that as thearmistice came into effect at 11
o'clock on the 11th of November1918 as you suggest did they
just dig in and hold theirground until the war was finally
(04:10):
over because the armistice wasnot really a total end to the
war it was a ceasefire so didthey just sit there and hold
their ground well there was noprovision for that and no one
really wanted that when the warended essentially the Germans
just walked away I mean thereare stories of for example a
German machine gunner firing hismachine gun his belt-fed heavy
(04:33):
machine gun right up until thelast second of the war and then
basically firing off all hisammunition all his belt of ammo
and then standing up salutingthe enemy the British troops who
were in front of him and thenjust calmly walking away and no
one stopped them there was norounding up of the troops it's
not like the images that we haveof the end of the second world
(04:55):
war with those long lines of menbeing marched down the autobahn
it's clear in that conflict in1945 as the war in the west came
to an end it's clear that thosemen were defeated in November
1918 The Germans just simplywent home.
And there are many, many images.
(05:16):
I've got a lot of postcards ofGerman soldiers just marching
through the streets of Germantowns, going over the Cologne
Rhine Bridge.
That was a famous sequence ofphotographs of troops returning
to Germany via the Cologne RhineBridge, coming into Cologne,
columns of men, wagons withtroops on board, guns being
(05:38):
towed by their limbers and thehorse.
and then columns and columns oftroops marching down the road
marching over that bridge allwith their weapons their rifles
and their ammunition and theirtrench mortars and everything
else so there was no attempt atall to disarm the German army
round the German army up or putthem into prisoner of war cages
(06:02):
and make them prisoners theyjust simply went home and there
was a warning at the time fromquite a lot of senior officers
officers General Pershing whocommanded the American
Expeditionary Force was kind ofone of the loudest in that and
that he felt that this was amistake just to allow the
Germans to walk away was wrongbecause they needed to have a
(06:25):
sense that they'd been defeatedand these were wise and indeed
prophetic words because he couldsee a situation in which if you
hadn't clearly identified to theenemy that they'd lost and you
hadn't demonstrated to them thatthey were now going back home in
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defeat then they might notaccept that and they might build
up the resentment of a war thatwould end and a peace that might
punish them and they might comeback they might want to fight
another conflict a generationlater and as I say those are in
many respects prophetic wordsbecause Because if we jump on a
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bit to that period in the 1920sand 30s, which was this period
of conflict between two extremepolitical views, the extreme
left on one side and the extremeright on the other, it enables
people within those diversepolitical views to use the
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outcome of the First World Warin 1918 and the final chapter of
its ending for their ownpolitical views.
devices so it enables Hitler tostand on the stage of a beer
keller in Munich and tell thecrowd do you not remember at the
end of the first world war wewere not defeated our men came
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home with their rifles on theirchest their ammunition in their
pouches their grenades on theirbelt we were not defeated we
were stabbed in the back byBolsheviks traitors and Jews
which of course is to someonelike Hitler, those three groups
were essentially the samepeople.
And while we're not going tokind of go into the outcome and
(08:18):
the rise of fascism in Germanyin that interwar period, you can
see a clear correlation and themistake of not ending the war in
a way in which you took theenemy prisoner.
They'd agreed to anunconditional surrender, they
were defeated militarily,economically, politically, the
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whole country country was inruins was in revolution either
active or really on the edge ofrevolution in so many places
across Germany but not to reallyenforce in the minds of your
enemy of the German soldiers whowere on that battlefield on the
morning of the 11th of November1918 that this was an end to the
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war and that they had lost was acolossal mistake and when we
look at the images of some ofthese troops crossing the Rhine
Bridge at Cologne and so manyother images besides, they do
not look like defeated soldiers.
So it was a curious outcomereally, a curious ending to the
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war.
Having formalised thatarmistice, having brought that
war on the Western Front to anend, perhaps the outcome that
you wanted, that you needed,didn't really happen.
And the enemy, the Germans,those who had lost, just went
home.
A mistake that was not made atthe end of the second world war
as we mentioned those images ofmen marching in defeat their
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weapons removed their dignity inpieces the regime terrible
regime that they'd fought forfragmented and destroyed and the
country of their birth literallyin ruins perhaps that in 1918
would have changed the outcomeof the next two decades who
(10:07):
knows i'm not a fan of war butcertainly it makes an
interesting speculation.
So thanks for that, Kevin.
I'm sure the armistice is asubject that we will return to
many, many times on thispodcast.
It's a fascinating element ofthe First World War, again, with
so many layers to it.
(10:29):
So let's move on to questionnumber two.
This one comes from SamuelAyers.
Samuel asks, I was wondering acouple of things regarding
poison gas shells.
Firstly, how long did it takefor the gas to dissipate also
did the gas in the shells have ashelf life so if one was found
today would the gas in it stillpose a threat well the the
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legacy of the first world warone of the many legacies of the
first world war on thatlandscape today is that
so-called iron harvest whereevery year when there's plowing
or any kind of work orarchaeology the ordinance of the
first world war comes to lightand this can be from clips of
ammunition through to handgrenades through to to shells
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from artillery shrapnel highexplosive and of course gas and
the presence of gas projectileswhether that's shells whether
it's gas canisters whether it'slivens projectors full of gas
that poses a massive problem andthreat to people even today more
(11:30):
than a century later so toinitially answer your final
element of that question gas isstill a problem and up at EAP
for example in the bomb disposalunit there in Huttos Forest they
had to develop a special bit ofequipment that the gas shells
were placed into and the gas wasthen released from the shell and
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it was burnt because if theyjust blew the gas shells up the
gas would be released and theywould have no control over where
it went and it might destroyelements of the forest, it might
escape in the wind to localcommunities, of course none of
that was acceptable.
So this bit of kit, a kind ofchamber that the shells are put
into and then the shell isessentially opened up and the
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gas is released and then it'sburnt now that takes quite some
time and it means that the stockof gas shells that they have
just in that one disposal unitnever really goes down I don't
think because every year they'rebrought in every year it takes a
while to dispose of the onesthat have already got there and
then they are essentiallycontinuously replaced so it's
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almost never ending that lessonlegacy of the First World War.
But in terms of the use ofpoison gas shells in the First
World War that came aboutbecause the early use of gas
being released from cylinders tocreate a gas cloud was
unreliable because the wind hadto be blowing in the right
direction to carry that gas andas the British found out at the
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Battle of Loos in 1915 the windcan change direction and blow
the gas back onto your attackingtroops and cause just as many if
not more casualties to your ownmen so gas shells were developed
which were essentially the sameas ordinary high explosive
shells with some of the highexplosive removed and a gas
canister placed inside either ametal canister or in the case of
(13:24):
many German gas shells it was agreen bottle and some years ago
a whole stockpile of these greenbottles came up and I remember
buying one in a in a Rommelmarkta car boot sale an antiques fair
in Kemmel the village of Kemmelnot far from Ypres for example
so when the shell was fired fromthe artillery piece it would act
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as a normal high explosive shellcontinuing its trajectory to its
target and then explode and thenthe gas would be released
because the explosion wouldshatter the canister shatter the
bottle and the gas would comeout liquid gas forming a gas
cloud and it meant with abombardment you could deliver a
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huge number of gas shells into agiven area and saturate a
target.
Now in terms of how long it tookfor the gas to then dissipate,
disperse, that depends on anumber of factors.
It's often dependent on theweather.
So if there was a lot of rain,that could dissipate the gas,
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and if there was strong wind,and the wind could obviously
carry the gas that had beenfired into those areas away from
the target that you were tryingto neutralise with your gas
attack, so there isn't really aset period as such I'm sure
someone at the time could workout the properties of gas and
how long they would remaineffective in one specific area
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but the conditions on abattlefield on any bit of ground
are never 100% favourable and sothe weather and the landscape
and the ground where the gas wasfired onto then I'm sure all of
that played a part in how longit would remain effective.
What the troops of course thenhad to endure were periods
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wearing gas masks to protectthem from that gas so the gas
would come down explode theywould see that rather than high
explosive shells these were gasshells instead they made a
slightly different noise andveteran soldiers could
distinguish between theexplosion of a high explosive
shell and a gas shell so whatboth sides would do was to mix
(15:36):
up a greater proportion of HEwith gas shells to disguise the
fact that gas was being droppedamongst that high explosive but
once it was realised that therewas a gas attack gas alarms
would be sounded and thatfamiliar phrase gas gas gas
would be shouted by the men asthey donned their masks that
wasn't always massively reliablein the din of battle they had
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gas rattles as well but later onin the war the British for
example brought in what wascalled a strombus horn which was
a massive horn that made a veryloud noise that was powered if
you like by compressed air andwhen you heard that noise you
knew gas was present on yourbattlefield and then at some
point during that period whereyou've donned your mask the gas
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is visible perhaps begins todissipate then it's someone's
job to work out whether it'ssafe or not to remove your mask
so this kind of shelf lifereally on the battlefield
depended on a number of thingsif this is late on in the war
and the men are at advancingover open ground probably the
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gas would have less of an effectthan if it was back in 1916 and
they were in deep trenches andthe gas could then collect if
you like within trenches andwithin dugouts and make it much
more problematic to the men inthose conditions but gas that
weapon really that we foreverassociate with the war on the
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western front and the great wargenerally just going back to
where we started with thisanswer again remains one of the
most potent and potentiallydeadly elements of the legacy of
the First World War and therehave been people injured by gas
when it's been releasedincluding mustard gas which is
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not just a poisonous gas it is achemical weapon as well that can
burn when it comes into contactwith skin and soft tissue and
there have been those who havebeen injured by that even when
that's been sitting in theground for more than a century
so there's no sign that any ofthese weapons that were built to
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kill built to destroy built tomaim built to saturate areas as
with gas with poison gas there'sno evidence that they're really
getting any easier to deal withby those on the ground by the
bomb disposal units in Belgiumand those in France who operate
on that much bigger area of theold landscape of the the Western
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Front from the Great War butanother element to this question
is the reliability of gas on thebattlefield as a weapon there's
no doubt that it had a massivefear factor for the men who were
on those battlefields theygreatly greatly feared poison
gas it being dropped on themunable to get their masks on
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suffocating because of itMalcolm Vivian whose story I
told at the end of season 8 inone of those bonus episodes he
was gas in 1916 with a gas thatsmelt like pineapples and
whenever he smelt that again forthe rest of his life he went
into complete panic mode sothere was no doubt a
psychological element to the useof gas but because it did
(18:54):
disperse and because it had noguaranteed shelf life on the
battlefield itself then itwasn't the best and most
reliable of weapons when it wasmost effective was when you
could release a huge amount ofin one go to cover an area or
you could drop a huge number ofgas shells onto a part of the
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battlefield and with the Britishdevelopment of the Livens
projector which is a big sausageshaped bomb fired from a tube
buried in the ground with a kindof mass battery of these tubes
that would fire the Livens bombswith phosgene gas inside which
is much more deadly gas comparedto the earlier chlorine gas for
example these would then befired onto German German
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positions and would literallymake them impossible to hold or
would cause heavy casualtiesamongst those who were holding
that ground and they were usedto good effects for example in
the prelude to the third battleof EPUB in the northern sector
near Bosinga where it wasimpossible to attack across the
Issa canal and a massivebombardment and gas bombardment
(20:03):
of the German lines thereeffectively pushed the Germans
back from the edge of the canaland back to a position known as
artillery wood where an outpostline was established and then
the guards division was able tocross that canal and set up
positions ready to make theassault over that ground for the
attack on the 31st of July 1917now that's a story in its own
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right and perhaps something willcome to another day but it shows
how gas could be used but therewas always potentially and
especially when the war becamemobile there were always
problems in the use So thanksfor that question, Samuel.
I mean, certainly from myperspective as a young man all
those years ago, going, forexample, to the Imperial War
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Museum and being fascinated withthe Great War, one of the things
that always kind of slightlyobsessed me were the look of
First World War gas masks.
The masks themselves are prettyhorrific looking devices.
And I think that that connectsus to the story of gas and that
potent weapon and that potentsymbol really.
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of what the whole First WorldWar on the Western Front was
really like.
Moving on to question numberthree.
This one comes from RichardTatterton on fan mail.
Now fan mail is a way you cansend me a text message via
Buzzsprout who are the hosts ofour podcast.
There's a link to that in theshow notes.
If you do send in a questionthat way remember to put your
(21:31):
name at the end because itdoesn't tell me who you are and
I don't see your mobile numbereither so I can't respond to
you.
So thank you you Richard forthis question and thank you for
your generous comments you saythat you're a massive fan of the
podcast and your question is thestandard pod and Q&A pods have
been really insightful I'mcurrently reading Some Mud by
(21:54):
EPF Lynch I'm very much enjoyingit my question is he talks about
a burial party filling in atrench full of dead soldiers
near Delville Wood from the bookit's both Tommies and Germans
I've not come across So was thisa practice you know of, and have
any been discovered?
I assume, if so, now givenproper burial plots.
(22:18):
Well, the burial and recovery ofthe dead, so the burial during
the war, the recovery of thedead after the war, and the
continued recovery of the deadtoday, is something that, again,
a bit like gas, is kind of verymuch a legacy of the First World
War.
The landscape, when it's peeledback, doesn't just reveal us,
artifacts, it can reveal humanremains as well.
(22:43):
And I've been privileged to workwith archaeologists to see the
kind of work that they do, theincredible work, whether it's
the amateurs like the diggers20-odd years ago, or
professionals like SimonVerdigum working at Messines and
many other places besides.
The incredible work they do torecover the archaeology,
(23:03):
understand the archaeology,record it, but also to recover
the dead and as well and thebook that you mentioned Some Mud
by EPF Lynch is a fantasticmemoir of the First World War
published many many years afterhis death easily available now
there's hardback and paperbackeditions of it and he served as
(23:25):
a young soldier in the 45thBattalion of the Australian
Imperial Force so he was adigger and he goes into a lot of
detail about a lot of reallyinteresting elements of the
First World War and it really isa classic memoir which I think
got quite a good public coverageand brought many people into the
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subject of the First World Warnot just from an Australian
perspective.
Now during the war itself theproblem of burying the dead on
the battlefield while thefighting was going on was just
that, it was a problem.
Soldiers don't linger too longto bury the dead in case they
expose themselves while they'redoing that work and they end up
(24:06):
essentially joining the dead.
So So often there was a bit of arush to bury the dead.
Now, in terms of their own men,when a position was captured,
and when I think of theinterviews that I did with
veterans all those years ago,they often used to speak about
this, to capture a Germanposition in an assault.
They'd lose some of their guys.
They'd be buried back behindthem in no man's land, or they'd
(24:27):
been killed capturing the trenchand their bodies were in the
trench.
They would round those up.
You don't want to be sittingthere, particularly in the
summer, surrounded by deadsoldiers.
You want to get them buried asquickly as possible you'd wait
till nightfall and then you'dselect an area close to the
trench and bury them there theBritish and by British I mean
the British Expeditionary Forceso that includes Australians
(24:49):
Canadians New Zealanders and allthe others they were pretty
strict about the non-burial ofdead in a trench because if you
bury your comrades in the trenchyou're now occupying at some
point you are going to have towork on that trench put in a new
parapet dig the floor deeper laysome duck boards and then and
you will then exhume thosebodies and you're going to have
(25:11):
a lot of problems with that sothey would bury the dead close
to their trench perhaps in ashell hole in no man's land
perhaps men would be if they hadshovels detailed to go out and
bury the dead on the battlefieldin a battlefield burial site and
these are often the kind ofthings that archaeologists all
these years later uncover interms of the enemy dead so
(25:32):
you've captured a trench you'vekilled german soldiers in the
capture of that position theywould often be taken to a shell
hole they would be properlyburied but it would be done very
very hastily and sometimes ifyou had resources close by they
would bring up quick lime andquick lime would be placed over
those bodies to prevent thespread of disease with rotting
(25:53):
corpses close to a position thatyou were now holding but that
was more likely in a staticposition than in a fluid battle
but what it means is thatthere's really not a kind of set
way of burying the dead and I'msure there must have been
circumstances in which perhaps adisused piece of trench slightly
away from the ground you've justcaptured which you're not going
(26:15):
to use that ground againyourself then you would take
your dead and perhaps the enemydead and bury them side by side
there was a respect for theGerman soldier in the First
World War that you really don'tsee amongst British soldiers in
the Second World War and I thinkthat they wouldn't necessarily
in the Great War have had muchof a problem burying their lads
(26:35):
next to German soldiers whothey'd seen fight and respected
them for that fight andrespected them as the warriors
the soldiers that they were andof course we know there were
trench burials because there aremany cemeteries on the western
front where we will findexamples of that the Devonshire
cemetery at Nemetz which wasitself essentially a trench
(26:58):
burial disused bit of trenchthat the men of the 8th and 9th
Devons were brought into forburial after the first day of
the Somme is a good example ofthat but there are plenty of
others as well.
If you look for trench andinverted commas cemeteries on
the Commonwealth War GravesCommission database you will
find quite a lot and they'renormally connected to the story
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of a position being captured, atrench being taken and sometimes
as a kind of mark of respect forthe sacrifice of those men they
were buried in the ground thatthey captured.
I remember going to a cemeterythat was situated on a section
of the Drocor-Quillon switchline, the DQ line, captured by
by Canadian soldiers inSeptember 1918.
(27:41):
And when I used Linesman, thatdigital bit of software that
allows you to use First WorldWar trench maps with GPS, I
realised that plot one of thecemetery, where the Canadians
who fell in that action areburied, is literally on the
trench and they're most likelyburied in the trench to mark the
fact that they took it in thatkey battle of 1918.
(28:02):
So there were examples of menbeing buried in trenches.
Whether it was that common tobury...
British or French and thenGerman soldiers side by side I
suspect that was less common andI don't recall any examples of
that in recent archaeologicalprojects where they've excavated
a trench and found BritishTommies lying there side by side
(28:25):
with German Soldaten.
The diggers for example whenthey were operating at Bosinger
did find German soldiers butthey were buried in their own
trenches separately or buried inshell holes in no man's land
they weren't buried in the sameplaces that they found all those
dozens and dozens of Britishsoldiers which had been largely
(28:46):
killed in 1915 so I don't recallany recent examples of that and
if you kind of look at therecords of the recovery of
British dead you don't often seea reference to British soldiers
being removed from German burialsites in terms of the same
location where both sides areburied and literally side by
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side.
British soldiers are recoveredfrom German cemeteries, and if
you go to a cemetery likeCabaret Rouge at Suchet, just
north of Arras, there's a veryhigh percentage of burials in
certain parts of that cemetery,where there are graves that have
been removed from Germancemeteries that were in that
part of northern France, wherethe German cemeteries have
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sometimes been retained orperhaps closed, moved into
another German cemetery, and theBritish burials have then been
taken from there to CabaretRouge to be buried properly in a
Commonwealth then an ImperialWar Graves Commission cemetery
but that's a kind of differentthing really but it's a
fascinating subject the burialand the recovery the continued
recovery of the dead and I thinkthat we learn more and more
(29:54):
about it all the time especiallythrough memoirs like Some Mud
and again I can't recommend thatas a memoir enough really well
worth seeking out so thank youfor that Richard and thank you
for your fan mail onto ourfourth and final question from
frank baxendale on social medianow a few people do post
(30:16):
questions on social media it'ssometimes difficult for me to
keep on top of those so pleaseif possible send them in through
email or through the discordserver or fan mail but frank is
a long-time listener to thepodcast a long-time supporter of
the podcast and someone who verygenerously is continuously kind
(30:36):
about what we do week after weekand i always appreciate frank's
comments on the episodes that weput out now frank's question is
a really good one and this is itwhat happened to all of the
horses at the end of the greatwar i read somewhere that they
were put down surely that's notcorrect well the whole subject
(30:57):
of horses in the first world warhas always been there i mean if
you go back to the 20s and 30sthere's quite a few books
written by men who were in thearmy veterinary corps or in
cavalry units or in artilleryunits units that speak about the
horses the suffering and theconditions that these horses
endured on the battlefield sothat very emotive subject when
we kind of look at the warthrough the eyes of animals but
(31:20):
what brought it into sharp focuswas Michael Morpurgo's War Horse
the book the film and the playincredibly moving I read the
book when my daughter was littlewe saw the film and we went to
see a production of the stageversion of itself and I I mean
to be honest I kind of brokedown towards the end of it
(31:41):
because it brought back a lot ofmemories of listening to
veterans talk about their horsesand what happened to them on the
western front and there wasrecently a BBC Radio 4 reunion
program about War Horse which isavailable now on BBC Sounds
which is quite interesting tolisten to to how the book came
(32:01):
about and then the productioncame about as well but anyway we
digress slightly let's get backto the history.
Now where do we find informationabout the use of horses by the
British Army in the Great War?
Well there's a publicationcalled Statistics of the
Military Effort of the BritishArmy During the Great War
published by HMSO in 1922.
(32:24):
That's His Majesty's StationeryOffice.
It's a huge volume, hundreds ofpages.
It's available as a free digitalfile online which you can
download and it's got all kindsof information about just about
any of that British militaryeffort during the First World
War and there's a section on theuse of horses and it says in
(32:47):
August 1914 the quota of horsesin the British Army was raised
from a standing figure of 25,000horses to 165,000 in a very
short period of time as the sizeof the army grew as the
expeditionary force went acrossto France and then the Crusaders
(33:08):
and arrival of the new armyKitchener's army the requirement
for horses just got bigger andbigger and bigger and by the end
of the Great War over 428,000horses had been purchased from
North America for use within theBritish Army and over 450,000
had been brought in from placeswithin the UK itself so the
(33:33):
total number of horses used inthe British forces during the
first world war was somethinglike 1.2 million and over 36
million pounds was spent on theacquisition of those horses and
that's 36 million pounds in oldmoney which is probably billions
(33:54):
of pounds today so it wasn't asmall amount and it shows how
important these horses were tothe war effort they were
absolutely essential in themovement of equipment of men of
supplies of ammunition forweapons to be moved from A to B
whether that was field guns ortrench mortars or whatever it
(34:16):
was they were absolutely vitalto the war effort and that's why
so much money was thrown intothe acquisition of horses so
they could be used on thebattlefield casualties to horses
in the British ExpeditionaryForce on the Western Front were
nearly 226,000 horses killeddestroyed missing or died and
(34:37):
when When the war was over andyou had that vast army of horses
that had been used in thatconflict and you spent so much
money on acquiring them, whatdid you do with them?
And I'm afraid, Frank, that yourworst fears were realised
because when the war was over, acertain number were taken home,
(34:58):
but the vast majority of whatwere called surplus horses were
sold in all theatres of warwith, for example, many in
Mesopotamia and Palestine andEgypt being sent to India or
sold locally and then Marseillethe port of Marseille was used
as a hub for horses then theywould then be sold on from
(35:19):
Marseille to buyers all over theworld and in France and Flanders
alone 197,000 horses used by theBEF were sold at the end of the
war and sadly terribly over40,000 on top was sold for meat
(35:40):
they were sold to the Frenchmeat industry because horse meat
was eaten on a big scale byFrench people during that period
and indeed much later I rememberin the early years visiting
places like Albert and Arrasstill seeing horse meat butchers
I mean when we look back overthe passage of over a century I
(36:00):
guess it's hard for us tounderstand and perhaps accept
this that horses that are givenso much which are sold off many
of them sold for meat havingsaid that I've seen figures
which suggest perhaps less than60,000 horses came home after
the war so that wasn't the fatefor all of them but that 60,000
(36:21):
of the hundreds of thousandsthat served is only a very small
proportion with the vastmajority becoming casualties in
the conflict itself or beingsold it's a sad thought a sad
conclusion considering all thethings that we know horses went
through on those battlefields ofthe Great War.
(36:44):
But the past is a differentworld to the world of today, and
I guess things were looked atvery differently when that war
was over.
So a highly emotive subject, andthank you, Frank, for that
excellent question, and I'msorry it's taken a bit longer
than normal to answer it.
So thanks to you all for thequestions this week.
(37:04):
Keep them flowing in throughemail, through the Discord
server, through fan mail andI'll join you again soon for
some more questions and answerson the old front line.
you've been listening to anepisode of the old front line
with me military historian paulreed you can follow me on
(37:27):
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(37:47):
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Links to all of these are on ourwebsite.
Thanks for listening and we'llsee you again soon.
Welcome back for our first question and answer
episode of season nine of theOld Frontline podcast.
This is where we featurequestions posed by you, the
podcast listeners, and we cover,as usual, a lot of diverse
subjects.
We've had a bit of a gap inthese Q&A episodes due to the
(00:30):
Royal Flying Corps and Royal AirForce series that we did towards
the end of season eight, andwe've built up quite a big
backlog of questions, but But asalways, keep them coming in
because these episodes areproving pretty popular and I
very much enjoy doing them,being challenged each week to
(00:51):
look at some different elements,different layers, different
parts of First World Warhistory.
And as we move into Season 9 ofthe podcast, our sixth year of
doing the Old Front Line, thisis the third series where we've
featured these Q&As and I thinkyou'll agree that they've become
(01:12):
really an integral part of whatwe do on the old front line now
so long may they continue andone other thing that I wanted to
mention as we move forward intothis new season is that we now
have an old front line podcastbulletin and that's an email
newsletter that goes out everytwo weeks where there's news
(01:35):
about the podcast about theYouTube channel that we've got
and it gives me you anopportunity to add a little bit
of extra to what we do on someof the podcast episodes and
share things with you as wellwhether that's links on YouTube
whether it's links to the onlineold front line shop where you
(01:56):
can buy podcast merch or whetherit's something else that's come
up during the course and oftenin response to some of the
episodes of that particularseason the bulletin is
completely free you can just tosign up for it via the link
that's in the show notes forthis episode and indeed every
episode and I hope you find itof interest but let's get back
(02:20):
to the Q&A's and what questionshave we got this week our first
question comes from KevinPennock Kevin asks when the
armistice was signed and theguns fell silent did the German
army just abandon the trenchesand retreat to Germany on their
own accord or were they taken asprisoners of war Or did troops
(02:41):
on both sides in reduced numbersstay in place until the Treaty
of Versailles was signed?
How did the opposing armiesreturn to their respective home
countries?
Well this is a really goodquestion Kevin.
Essentially what happened withthe armistice on the 11th
November 1918 that brought notthe whole of the First World War
to an end but the war on theWestern Front.
(03:05):
And you might have thought thatin preparation for it with these
two huge armies, the Allied onone side and the Germans on the
other side deadlocked along allthose hundreds of miles of what
had been the western front andthat although the final phase of
the war had been a war ofmovement and had seen
breakthrough on many parts ofthat static front it had still
(03:26):
brought them to a demarcationline if you like on the 11th of
November where the fighting hadstopped with allied troops on
one part of the battlefield andthe Germans on the other and as
As we've noted in previouspodcasts the fighting at
different parts of that frontwent on right to the very last
(03:46):
second of the war with theCanadians at Mons and the
Americans along the Meuse Riverand the French near to Sedan and
many other places besides andyou'd have thought at the
conclusion of that as thearmistice came into effect at 11
o'clock on the 11th of November1918 as you suggest did they
just dig in and hold theirground until the war was finally
(04:10):
over because the armistice wasnot really a total end to the
war it was a ceasefire so didthey just sit there and hold
their ground well there was noprovision for that and no one
really wanted that when the warended essentially the Germans
just walked away I mean thereare stories of for example a
German machine gunner firing hismachine gun his belt-fed heavy
(04:33):
machine gun right up until thelast second of the war and then
basically firing off all hisammunition all his belt of ammo
and then standing up salutingthe enemy the British troops who
were in front of him and thenjust calmly walking away and no
one stopped them there was norounding up of the troops it's
not like the images that we haveof the end of the second world
(04:55):
war with those long lines of menbeing marched down the autobahn
it's clear in that conflict in1945 as the war in the west came
to an end it's clear that thosemen were defeated in November
1918 The Germans just simplywent home.
And there are many, many images.
(05:16):
I've got a lot of postcards ofGerman soldiers just marching
through the streets of Germantowns, going over the Cologne
Rhine Bridge.
That was a famous sequence ofphotographs of troops returning
to Germany via the Cologne RhineBridge, coming into Cologne,
columns of men, wagons withtroops on board, guns being
(05:38):
towed by their limbers and thehorse.
and then columns and columns oftroops marching down the road
marching over that bridge allwith their weapons their rifles
and their ammunition and theirtrench mortars and everything
else so there was no attempt atall to disarm the German army
round the German army up or putthem into prisoner of war cages
(06:02):
and make them prisoners theyjust simply went home and there
was a warning at the time fromquite a lot of senior officers
officers General Pershing whocommanded the American
Expeditionary Force was kind ofone of the loudest in that and
that he felt that this was amistake just to allow the
Germans to walk away was wrongbecause they needed to have a
(06:25):
sense that they'd been defeatedand these were wise and indeed
prophetic words because he couldsee a situation in which if you
hadn't clearly identified to theenemy that they'd lost and you
hadn't demonstrated to them thatthey were now going back home in
(06:46):
defeat then they might notaccept that and they might build
up the resentment of a war thatwould end and a peace that might
punish them and they might comeback they might want to fight
another conflict a generationlater and as I say those are in
many respects prophetic wordsbecause Because if we jump on a
(07:11):
bit to that period in the 1920sand 30s, which was this period
of conflict between two extremepolitical views, the extreme
left on one side and the extremeright on the other, it enables
people within those diversepolitical views to use the
(07:32):
outcome of the First World Warin 1918 and the final chapter of
its ending for their ownpolitical views.
devices so it enables Hitler tostand on the stage of a beer
keller in Munich and tell thecrowd do you not remember at the
end of the first world war wewere not defeated our men came
(07:56):
home with their rifles on theirchest their ammunition in their
pouches their grenades on theirbelt we were not defeated we
were stabbed in the back byBolsheviks traitors and Jews
which of course is to someonelike Hitler, those three groups
were essentially the samepeople.
And while we're not going tokind of go into the outcome and
(08:18):
the rise of fascism in Germanyin that interwar period, you can
see a clear correlation and themistake of not ending the war in
a way in which you took theenemy prisoner.
They'd agreed to anunconditional surrender, they
were defeated militarily,economically, politically, the
(08:39):
whole country country was inruins was in revolution either
active or really on the edge ofrevolution in so many places
across Germany but not to reallyenforce in the minds of your
enemy of the German soldiers whowere on that battlefield on the
morning of the 11th of November1918 that this was an end to the
(09:01):
war and that they had lost was acolossal mistake and when we
look at the images of some ofthese troops crossing the Rhine
Bridge at Cologne and so manyother images besides, they do
not look like defeated soldiers.
So it was a curious outcomereally, a curious ending to the
(09:21):
war.
Having formalised thatarmistice, having brought that
war on the Western Front to anend, perhaps the outcome that
you wanted, that you needed,didn't really happen.
And the enemy, the Germans,those who had lost, just went
home.
A mistake that was not made atthe end of the second world war
as we mentioned those images ofmen marching in defeat their
(09:47):
weapons removed their dignity inpieces the regime terrible
regime that they'd fought forfragmented and destroyed and the
country of their birth literallyin ruins perhaps that in 1918
would have changed the outcomeof the next two decades who
(10:07):
knows i'm not a fan of war butcertainly it makes an
interesting speculation.
So thanks for that, Kevin.
I'm sure the armistice is asubject that we will return to
many, many times on thispodcast.
It's a fascinating element ofthe First World War, again, with
so many layers to it.
(10:29):
So let's move on to questionnumber two.
This one comes from SamuelAyers.
Samuel asks, I was wondering acouple of things regarding
poison gas shells.
Firstly, how long did it takefor the gas to dissipate also
did the gas in the shells have ashelf life so if one was found
today would the gas in it stillpose a threat well the the
(10:49):
legacy of the first world warone of the many legacies of the
first world war on thatlandscape today is that
so-called iron harvest whereevery year when there's plowing
or any kind of work orarchaeology the ordinance of the
first world war comes to lightand this can be from clips of
ammunition through to handgrenades through to to shells
(11:10):
from artillery shrapnel highexplosive and of course gas and
the presence of gas projectileswhether that's shells whether
it's gas canisters whether it'slivens projectors full of gas
that poses a massive problem andthreat to people even today more
(11:30):
than a century later so toinitially answer your final
element of that question gas isstill a problem and up at EAP
for example in the bomb disposalunit there in Huttos Forest they
had to develop a special bit ofequipment that the gas shells
were placed into and the gas wasthen released from the shell and
(11:51):
it was burnt because if theyjust blew the gas shells up the
gas would be released and theywould have no control over where
it went and it might destroyelements of the forest, it might
escape in the wind to localcommunities, of course none of
that was acceptable.
So this bit of kit, a kind ofchamber that the shells are put
into and then the shell isessentially opened up and the
(12:14):
gas is released and then it'sburnt now that takes quite some
time and it means that the stockof gas shells that they have
just in that one disposal unitnever really goes down I don't
think because every year they'rebrought in every year it takes a
while to dispose of the onesthat have already got there and
then they are essentiallycontinuously replaced so it's
(12:37):
almost never ending that lessonlegacy of the First World War.
But in terms of the use ofpoison gas shells in the First
World War that came aboutbecause the early use of gas
being released from cylinders tocreate a gas cloud was
unreliable because the wind hadto be blowing in the right
direction to carry that gas andas the British found out at the
(13:00):
Battle of Loos in 1915 the windcan change direction and blow
the gas back onto your attackingtroops and cause just as many if
not more casualties to your ownmen so gas shells were developed
which were essentially the sameas ordinary high explosive
shells with some of the highexplosive removed and a gas
canister placed inside either ametal canister or in the case of
(13:24):
many German gas shells it was agreen bottle and some years ago
a whole stockpile of these greenbottles came up and I remember
buying one in a in a Rommelmarkta car boot sale an antiques fair
in Kemmel the village of Kemmelnot far from Ypres for example
so when the shell was fired fromthe artillery piece it would act
(13:46):
as a normal high explosive shellcontinuing its trajectory to its
target and then explode and thenthe gas would be released
because the explosion wouldshatter the canister shatter the
bottle and the gas would comeout liquid gas forming a gas
cloud and it meant with abombardment you could deliver a
(14:06):
huge number of gas shells into agiven area and saturate a
target.
Now in terms of how long it tookfor the gas to then dissipate,
disperse, that depends on anumber of factors.
It's often dependent on theweather.
So if there was a lot of rain,that could dissipate the gas,
(14:27):
and if there was strong wind,and the wind could obviously
carry the gas that had beenfired into those areas away from
the target that you were tryingto neutralise with your gas
attack, so there isn't really aset period as such I'm sure
someone at the time could workout the properties of gas and
how long they would remaineffective in one specific area
(14:52):
but the conditions on abattlefield on any bit of ground
are never 100% favourable and sothe weather and the landscape
and the ground where the gas wasfired onto then I'm sure all of
that played a part in how longit would remain effective.
What the troops of course thenhad to endure were periods
(15:15):
wearing gas masks to protectthem from that gas so the gas
would come down explode theywould see that rather than high
explosive shells these were gasshells instead they made a
slightly different noise andveteran soldiers could
distinguish between theexplosion of a high explosive
shell and a gas shell so whatboth sides would do was to mix
(15:36):
up a greater proportion of HEwith gas shells to disguise the
fact that gas was being droppedamongst that high explosive but
once it was realised that therewas a gas attack gas alarms
would be sounded and thatfamiliar phrase gas gas gas
would be shouted by the men asthey donned their masks that
wasn't always massively reliablein the din of battle they had
(15:58):
gas rattles as well but later onin the war the British for
example brought in what wascalled a strombus horn which was
a massive horn that made a veryloud noise that was powered if
you like by compressed air andwhen you heard that noise you
knew gas was present on yourbattlefield and then at some
point during that period whereyou've donned your mask the gas
(16:20):
is visible perhaps begins todissipate then it's someone's
job to work out whether it'ssafe or not to remove your mask
so this kind of shelf lifereally on the battlefield
depended on a number of thingsif this is late on in the war
and the men are at advancingover open ground probably the
(16:41):
gas would have less of an effectthan if it was back in 1916 and
they were in deep trenches andthe gas could then collect if
you like within trenches andwithin dugouts and make it much
more problematic to the men inthose conditions but gas that
weapon really that we foreverassociate with the war on the
(17:03):
western front and the great wargenerally just going back to
where we started with thisanswer again remains one of the
most potent and potentiallydeadly elements of the legacy of
the First World War and therehave been people injured by gas
when it's been releasedincluding mustard gas which is
(17:24):
not just a poisonous gas it is achemical weapon as well that can
burn when it comes into contactwith skin and soft tissue and
there have been those who havebeen injured by that even when
that's been sitting in theground for more than a century
so there's no sign that any ofthese weapons that were built to
(17:45):
kill built to destroy built tomaim built to saturate areas as
with gas with poison gas there'sno evidence that they're really
getting any easier to deal withby those on the ground by the
bomb disposal units in Belgiumand those in France who operate
on that much bigger area of theold landscape of the the Western
(18:09):
Front from the Great War butanother element to this question
is the reliability of gas on thebattlefield as a weapon there's
no doubt that it had a massivefear factor for the men who were
on those battlefields theygreatly greatly feared poison
gas it being dropped on themunable to get their masks on
(18:30):
suffocating because of itMalcolm Vivian whose story I
told at the end of season 8 inone of those bonus episodes he
was gas in 1916 with a gas thatsmelt like pineapples and
whenever he smelt that again forthe rest of his life he went
into complete panic mode sothere was no doubt a
psychological element to the useof gas but because it did
(18:54):
disperse and because it had noguaranteed shelf life on the
battlefield itself then itwasn't the best and most
reliable of weapons when it wasmost effective was when you
could release a huge amount ofin one go to cover an area or
you could drop a huge number ofgas shells onto a part of the
(19:16):
battlefield and with the Britishdevelopment of the Livens
projector which is a big sausageshaped bomb fired from a tube
buried in the ground with a kindof mass battery of these tubes
that would fire the Livens bombswith phosgene gas inside which
is much more deadly gas comparedto the earlier chlorine gas for
example these would then befired onto German German
(19:39):
positions and would literallymake them impossible to hold or
would cause heavy casualtiesamongst those who were holding
that ground and they were usedto good effects for example in
the prelude to the third battleof EPUB in the northern sector
near Bosinga where it wasimpossible to attack across the
Issa canal and a massivebombardment and gas bombardment
(20:03):
of the German lines thereeffectively pushed the Germans
back from the edge of the canaland back to a position known as
artillery wood where an outpostline was established and then
the guards division was able tocross that canal and set up
positions ready to make theassault over that ground for the
attack on the 31st of July 1917now that's a story in its own
(20:25):
right and perhaps something willcome to another day but it shows
how gas could be used but therewas always potentially and
especially when the war becamemobile there were always
problems in the use So thanksfor that question, Samuel.
I mean, certainly from myperspective as a young man all
those years ago, going, forexample, to the Imperial War
(20:47):
Museum and being fascinated withthe Great War, one of the things
that always kind of slightlyobsessed me were the look of
First World War gas masks.
The masks themselves are prettyhorrific looking devices.
And I think that that connectsus to the story of gas and that
potent weapon and that potentsymbol really.
(21:08):
of what the whole First WorldWar on the Western Front was
really like.
Moving on to question numberthree.
This one comes from RichardTatterton on fan mail.
Now fan mail is a way you cansend me a text message via
Buzzsprout who are the hosts ofour podcast.
There's a link to that in theshow notes.
If you do send in a questionthat way remember to put your
(21:31):
name at the end because itdoesn't tell me who you are and
I don't see your mobile numbereither so I can't respond to
you.
So thank you you Richard forthis question and thank you for
your generous comments you saythat you're a massive fan of the
podcast and your question is thestandard pod and Q&A pods have
been really insightful I'mcurrently reading Some Mud by
(21:54):
EPF Lynch I'm very much enjoyingit my question is he talks about
a burial party filling in atrench full of dead soldiers
near Delville Wood from the bookit's both Tommies and Germans
I've not come across So was thisa practice you know of, and have
any been discovered?
I assume, if so, now givenproper burial plots.
(22:18):
Well, the burial and recovery ofthe dead, so the burial during
the war, the recovery of thedead after the war, and the
continued recovery of the deadtoday, is something that, again,
a bit like gas, is kind of verymuch a legacy of the First World
War.
The landscape, when it's peeledback, doesn't just reveal us,
artifacts, it can reveal humanremains as well.
(22:43):
And I've been privileged to workwith archaeologists to see the
kind of work that they do, theincredible work, whether it's
the amateurs like the diggers20-odd years ago, or
professionals like SimonVerdigum working at Messines and
many other places besides.
The incredible work they do torecover the archaeology,
(23:03):
understand the archaeology,record it, but also to recover
the dead and as well and thebook that you mentioned Some Mud
by EPF Lynch is a fantasticmemoir of the First World War
published many many years afterhis death easily available now
there's hardback and paperbackeditions of it and he served as
(23:25):
a young soldier in the 45thBattalion of the Australian
Imperial Force so he was adigger and he goes into a lot of
detail about a lot of reallyinteresting elements of the
First World War and it really isa classic memoir which I think
got quite a good public coverageand brought many people into the
(23:45):
subject of the First World Warnot just from an Australian
perspective.
Now during the war itself theproblem of burying the dead on
the battlefield while thefighting was going on was just
that, it was a problem.
Soldiers don't linger too longto bury the dead in case they
expose themselves while they'redoing that work and they end up
(24:06):
essentially joining the dead.
So So often there was a bit of arush to bury the dead.
Now, in terms of their own men,when a position was captured,
and when I think of theinterviews that I did with
veterans all those years ago,they often used to speak about
this, to capture a Germanposition in an assault.
They'd lose some of their guys.
They'd be buried back behindthem in no man's land, or they'd
(24:27):
been killed capturing the trenchand their bodies were in the
trench.
They would round those up.
You don't want to be sittingthere, particularly in the
summer, surrounded by deadsoldiers.
You want to get them buried asquickly as possible you'd wait
till nightfall and then you'dselect an area close to the
trench and bury them there theBritish and by British I mean
the British Expeditionary Forceso that includes Australians
(24:49):
Canadians New Zealanders and allthe others they were pretty
strict about the non-burial ofdead in a trench because if you
bury your comrades in the trenchyou're now occupying at some
point you are going to have towork on that trench put in a new
parapet dig the floor deeper laysome duck boards and then and
you will then exhume thosebodies and you're going to have
(25:11):
a lot of problems with that sothey would bury the dead close
to their trench perhaps in ashell hole in no man's land
perhaps men would be if they hadshovels detailed to go out and
bury the dead on the battlefieldin a battlefield burial site and
these are often the kind ofthings that archaeologists all
these years later uncover interms of the enemy dead so
(25:32):
you've captured a trench you'vekilled german soldiers in the
capture of that position theywould often be taken to a shell
hole they would be properlyburied but it would be done very
very hastily and sometimes ifyou had resources close by they
would bring up quick lime andquick lime would be placed over
those bodies to prevent thespread of disease with rotting
(25:53):
corpses close to a position thatyou were now holding but that
was more likely in a staticposition than in a fluid battle
but what it means is thatthere's really not a kind of set
way of burying the dead and I'msure there must have been
circumstances in which perhaps adisused piece of trench slightly
away from the ground you've justcaptured which you're not going
(26:15):
to use that ground againyourself then you would take
your dead and perhaps the enemydead and bury them side by side
there was a respect for theGerman soldier in the First
World War that you really don'tsee amongst British soldiers in
the Second World War and I thinkthat they wouldn't necessarily
in the Great War have had muchof a problem burying their lads
(26:35):
next to German soldiers whothey'd seen fight and respected
them for that fight andrespected them as the warriors
the soldiers that they were andof course we know there were
trench burials because there aremany cemeteries on the western
front where we will findexamples of that the Devonshire
cemetery at Nemetz which wasitself essentially a trench
(26:58):
burial disused bit of trenchthat the men of the 8th and 9th
Devons were brought into forburial after the first day of
the Somme is a good example ofthat but there are plenty of
others as well.
If you look for trench andinverted commas cemeteries on
the Commonwealth War GravesCommission database you will
find quite a lot and they'renormally connected to the story
(27:20):
of a position being captured, atrench being taken and sometimes
as a kind of mark of respect forthe sacrifice of those men they
were buried in the ground thatthey captured.
I remember going to a cemeterythat was situated on a section
of the Drocor-Quillon switchline, the DQ line, captured by
by Canadian soldiers inSeptember 1918.
(27:41):
And when I used Linesman, thatdigital bit of software that
allows you to use First WorldWar trench maps with GPS, I
realised that plot one of thecemetery, where the Canadians
who fell in that action areburied, is literally on the
trench and they're most likelyburied in the trench to mark the
fact that they took it in thatkey battle of 1918.
(28:02):
So there were examples of menbeing buried in trenches.
Whether it was that common tobury...
British or French and thenGerman soldiers side by side I
suspect that was less common andI don't recall any examples of
that in recent archaeologicalprojects where they've excavated
a trench and found BritishTommies lying there side by side
(28:25):
with German Soldaten.
The diggers for example whenthey were operating at Bosinger
did find German soldiers butthey were buried in their own
trenches separately or buried inshell holes in no man's land
they weren't buried in the sameplaces that they found all those
dozens and dozens of Britishsoldiers which had been largely
(28:46):
killed in 1915 so I don't recallany recent examples of that and
if you kind of look at therecords of the recovery of
British dead you don't often seea reference to British soldiers
being removed from German burialsites in terms of the same
location where both sides areburied and literally side by
(29:09):
side.
British soldiers are recoveredfrom German cemeteries, and if
you go to a cemetery likeCabaret Rouge at Suchet, just
north of Arras, there's a veryhigh percentage of burials in
certain parts of that cemetery,where there are graves that have
been removed from Germancemeteries that were in that
part of northern France, wherethe German cemeteries have
(29:31):
sometimes been retained orperhaps closed, moved into
another German cemetery, and theBritish burials have then been
taken from there to CabaretRouge to be buried properly in a
Commonwealth then an ImperialWar Graves Commission cemetery
but that's a kind of differentthing really but it's a
fascinating subject the burialand the recovery the continued
recovery of the dead and I thinkthat we learn more and more
(29:54):
about it all the time especiallythrough memoirs like Some Mud
and again I can't recommend thatas a memoir enough really well
worth seeking out so thank youfor that Richard and thank you
for your fan mail onto ourfourth and final question from
frank baxendale on social medianow a few people do post
(30:16):
questions on social media it'ssometimes difficult for me to
keep on top of those so pleaseif possible send them in through
email or through the discordserver or fan mail but frank is
a long-time listener to thepodcast a long-time supporter of
the podcast and someone who verygenerously is continuously kind
(30:36):
about what we do week after weekand i always appreciate frank's
comments on the episodes that weput out now frank's question is
a really good one and this is itwhat happened to all of the
horses at the end of the greatwar i read somewhere that they
were put down surely that's notcorrect well the whole subject
(30:57):
of horses in the first world warhas always been there i mean if
you go back to the 20s and 30sthere's quite a few books
written by men who were in thearmy veterinary corps or in
cavalry units or in artilleryunits units that speak about the
horses the suffering and theconditions that these horses
endured on the battlefield sothat very emotive subject when
we kind of look at the warthrough the eyes of animals but
(31:20):
what brought it into sharp focuswas Michael Morpurgo's War Horse
the book the film and the playincredibly moving I read the
book when my daughter was littlewe saw the film and we went to
see a production of the stageversion of itself and I I mean
to be honest I kind of brokedown towards the end of it
(31:41):
because it brought back a lot ofmemories of listening to
veterans talk about their horsesand what happened to them on the
western front and there wasrecently a BBC Radio 4 reunion
program about War Horse which isavailable now on BBC Sounds
which is quite interesting tolisten to to how the book came
(32:01):
about and then the productioncame about as well but anyway we
digress slightly let's get backto the history.
Now where do we find informationabout the use of horses by the
British Army in the Great War?
Well there's a publicationcalled Statistics of the
Military Effort of the BritishArmy During the Great War
published by HMSO in 1922.
(32:24):
That's His Majesty's StationeryOffice.
It's a huge volume, hundreds ofpages.
It's available as a free digitalfile online which you can
download and it's got all kindsof information about just about
any of that British militaryeffort during the First World
War and there's a section on theuse of horses and it says in
(32:47):
August 1914 the quota of horsesin the British Army was raised
from a standing figure of 25,000horses to 165,000 in a very
short period of time as the sizeof the army grew as the
expeditionary force went acrossto France and then the Crusaders
(33:08):
and arrival of the new armyKitchener's army the requirement
for horses just got bigger andbigger and bigger and by the end
of the Great War over 428,000horses had been purchased from
North America for use within theBritish Army and over 450,000
had been brought in from placeswithin the UK itself so the
(33:33):
total number of horses used inthe British forces during the
first world war was somethinglike 1.2 million and over 36
million pounds was spent on theacquisition of those horses and
that's 36 million pounds in oldmoney which is probably billions
(33:54):
of pounds today so it wasn't asmall amount and it shows how
important these horses were tothe war effort they were
absolutely essential in themovement of equipment of men of
supplies of ammunition forweapons to be moved from A to B
whether that was field guns ortrench mortars or whatever it
(34:16):
was they were absolutely vitalto the war effort and that's why
so much money was thrown intothe acquisition of horses so
they could be used on thebattlefield casualties to horses
in the British ExpeditionaryForce on the Western Front were
nearly 226,000 horses killeddestroyed missing or died and
(34:37):
when When the war was over andyou had that vast army of horses
that had been used in thatconflict and you spent so much
money on acquiring them, whatdid you do with them?
And I'm afraid, Frank, that yourworst fears were realised
because when the war was over, acertain number were taken home,
(34:58):
but the vast majority of whatwere called surplus horses were
sold in all theatres of warwith, for example, many in
Mesopotamia and Palestine andEgypt being sent to India or
sold locally and then Marseillethe port of Marseille was used
as a hub for horses then theywould then be sold on from
(35:19):
Marseille to buyers all over theworld and in France and Flanders
alone 197,000 horses used by theBEF were sold at the end of the
war and sadly terribly over40,000 on top was sold for meat
(35:40):
they were sold to the Frenchmeat industry because horse meat
was eaten on a big scale byFrench people during that period
and indeed much later I rememberin the early years visiting
places like Albert and Arrasstill seeing horse meat butchers
I mean when we look back overthe passage of over a century I
(36:00):
guess it's hard for us tounderstand and perhaps accept
this that horses that are givenso much which are sold off many
of them sold for meat havingsaid that I've seen figures
which suggest perhaps less than60,000 horses came home after
the war so that wasn't the fatefor all of them but that 60,000
(36:21):
of the hundreds of thousandsthat served is only a very small
proportion with the vastmajority becoming casualties in
the conflict itself or beingsold it's a sad thought a sad
conclusion considering all thethings that we know horses went
through on those battlefields ofthe Great War.
(36:44):
But the past is a differentworld to the world of today, and
I guess things were looked atvery differently when that war
was over.
So a highly emotive subject, andthank you, Frank, for that
excellent question, and I'msorry it's taken a bit longer
than normal to answer it.
So thanks to you all for thequestions this week.
(37:04):
Keep them flowing in throughemail, through the Discord
server, through fan mail andI'll join you again soon for
some more questions and answerson the old front line.
you've been listening to anepisode of the old front line
with me military historian paulreed you can follow me on
(37:27):
twitter at somcor you can followthe podcast at old front line
pod check out the website atoldfrontline.co.uk where you'll
find lots of podcast extras andphotographs and links to books
that are mentioned in thepodcast and if you feel like
supporting us you can go to ourpatreon page patreon.com slash
(37:47):
old front line or support us onbuy me a coffee at
buymeacoffee.com slasholdfrontline.
Links to all of these are on ourwebsite.
Thanks for listening and we'llsee you again soon.
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