October 3, 2025 • 37 mins
In this WW1 Q&A episode, we explore the lives and social backgrounds of British Army officers, ask whether First World War veterans hated their German enemies, and share the remarkable stories of soldiers who were discharged but re-enlisted to fight again. We also look at how people living on the Western Front battlefields today connect with the war, and whether interest in the Great War is fading—or still as strong as ever.
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Episode Transcript
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SPEAKER_00 (00:10):
We're already a few episodes into season nine, and
thanks as always for yourcontinued feedback.
It's always good to hear whatyou think of the podcast and
indeed individual episodes.
I get quite a lot of emailsevery week and they're always
fascinating.
You give me information aboutyour trips to the battlefields
(00:32):
and what you've seen and howyou've listened to particular
episodes in the field, literallyon those battlefields that the
podcasts are about.
And it's great to have that kindof level of contact with you.
So please, please keep thatgoing.
It was also good last weekend tobe up in Buckinghamshire at the
(00:53):
We Have Ways Festival.
Of course it's a Second WorldWar festival.
I kept hearing about the wrongwar, as people would call it,
this phrase which I guessrelates to conflicts that aren't
World War II.
But of course, one thing thatyou learn the more you study any
of these periods within thatfirst half of the twentieth
(01:13):
century is how they alwaysinterconnect.
And we've had quite a fewepisodes here about how the
first world war meets thesecond, and in some respects
vice versa as well.
But what was great is to seepeople's enthusiasm for history
at a festival like that, andalso have an opportunity to talk
to so many of you who listen tothe old frontline podcast, and I
(01:38):
was very impressed to see threepeople who were wearing their
old frontline t-shirts.
So well done on that.
Now we do have a merch shop now.
Due to popular demand, peopleasked about this.
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And I'll put a link to thatmerch shop which has got
(02:01):
t-shirts and tote bags and tinmugs.
I'll put a link to that in theshow notes for this episode.
Also in the show notes is a linkto the old frontline bulletin,
and this is a regular bulletinthat I put out every two weeks.
It's a way of me talking to youas an audience to tell you
(02:23):
what's going on, just to flag upa few things, highlight a few
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It's free to subscribe to,follow the link, fill in your
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inbox.
So on to this week's questions,and we've got four via the usual
(02:48):
methods of email, but also somefrom fan mail as well, and
that's where you can send a kindof text message to the podcast,
but always remember to put yourname in it.
And our first question is fromNeil Babman, who indeed sent it
in on fan mail and remembered toput his name on there, so thanks
for that, Neil.
Neil asks, were officers in theBritish Army commissioned on the
(03:12):
basis of social status in theFirst World War?
I read that paying forcommissions in the British Army
was ended by law in eighteenseventy one.
Was a good question, Neil, andyou are absolutely correct in
what you say that as part of theCardwell Army reforms, paid
commissions where families paidfor a son to be commissioned
(03:36):
into a particular regiment,perhaps a regiment that there
was a family connection to, thatended in January 1871.
So if we go back to that kind ofVictorian period where we can
read fiction or true accounts ofofficers in the Victorian Army,
getting to where they were inthat army, rank and status, and
(03:58):
purchasing that as they wentalong.
And ordinary men could neverbecome officers because you
needed money to be acommissioned officer in the army
in that period.
So the Cardwell Army reformschanged all that.
However, if we kind of jump onto 1914 and we look at the
composition of the Britishregular army, in some respects
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the type of men who wereofficers hadn't really changed
since the Victorian period.
So although you didn't have topay and there was no question of
paying, and you couldn't pay tonecessarily advance yourself in
that peacetime army before 1914,you nevertheless came generally
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from a privileged background, aprivately educated background,
and often a moneyed backgroundas well, because the army paid
you essentially a salary thatwas pay for officers, but that
wouldn't necessarily pay foreverything.
And officers found that to livethe life of a regular officer in
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Britain or an active service inIndia or Burma or South Africa
or wherever it was, you needed abit of extra tin, a bit of extra
money to continue to have thatkind of life and status that you
enjoyed as an officer in theBritish Army.
And when men went forcommissions to be commissioned
in that army, they were asked aseries of questions.
(05:28):
There was an interview.
One of the principal questionswas, What is your educational
background?
Where did you go to school?
So the vast majority of replieswere Eton College, Harrow, and
you know so many other publicschools that existed at that
time, and in fact, there was abook, an approved list that the
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Army used that listed theschools that the Army accepted
as the right criteria for yourbackground and education.
So if you went to your interviewand said I was educated at Eton,
you were going to become anofficer of the British Army.
But if you went and said I waseducated at Bogner Regis Council
(06:12):
School, I mean not that I thinkthat existed before 1914, but
you kind of get where I'm comingfrom, then you were not going to
be accepted.
And you might ask yourself, youknow, is that the right kind of
question?
What is your educationalbackground?
Should they be asking, what isyour ability to lead men in
battle?
Now you've got to remember thatfor the War Office, they were
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the same question that if youwent to that kind of school
where there'd been an officertraining corps, where certain
virtues and values have beeninstilled in you, then that was
the kind of criteria that thearmy was looking for.
So if we look at a kind ofcross-section of British Army
officers in 1914, we aren'tgoing to see too many ordinary
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men in commission ranks.
Now there were some who'd beencommissioned from the ranks,
often through an incident,perhaps in the Second Boer War
of 1899 to 1902, where they hadcarried out a particular deed on
the battlefield that had gotthem essentially what was often
referred to as a battlefieldcommission, but those kind of
men were very, very small innumber in the 1914 army.
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Now we can see that reallyreadily on the old front line
today when we go to somewherelike Zillabeek Churchyard, which
has got men who were killed atEape in 1914, officers and
buried in that cemetery close towhere they were fighting.
And when we look at the kind ofbackgrounds to them, there are
English lords in there, thereare barons, and we see a kind of
(07:44):
whole plethora of English publicschools represented amongst
those casualties.
So that was the army at thebeginning of the war.
And when we look at theterritorial army, sometimes
that's not always the same.
You look at Yorkshire, when Istudied Yorkshire territorial
battalions, a lot of theofficers were drawn from
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families that had money infactories or were connected to
the colleries, the pits in thatarea.
So it's a kind of differentperspective there.
And when the new army camealong, there was still that
criteria to have been educatedin a certain way, but you begin
to see that breaking down as thearmy expands.
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But generally speaking, in thosefirst two years of the war from
1914 to 16, while you couldn'tpay to be commissioned and you
couldn't pay to advance yourselfas an officer, generally they
were drawn from a fairly smallniche of British society.
What of course changed all thatwas losses on the battlefields.
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And those kind of men who hadbeen taught from the very
beginning at schools like thatto set an example were not the
kind of men that told theirtroops, their soldiers that they
were commanding head off overtheir chaps.
They were the kind of men thatsaid follow me, and because of
that they suffered tremendouscasualties on the battlefield.
They were often the first to bekilled and wounded.
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So by 1917 there was arequirement to change all this,
and the army relaxed itsconditions on what your
educational background could be,and essentially just about
anybody could apply for acommission.
So in those last two years ofthe war, when a conscript army
was kind of reaching itscrescendo in terms of how it
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reflected this huge swathe ofBritish society, conscripting
people from 18 to 55, theofficers reflected that too, and
were drawn from all kinds ofbackgrounds.
And many men who had served inthe ranks as working class
soldiers in the early period ofthe war put in for commissions
and got them, and many men whowould not traditionally have
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been commissioned were givencommissions.
Walter Tull, black Britishfootballer, one of the first
black officers in the BritishArmy, is a classic example of
this.
In 1914 he would never have beencommissioned because of his
background, not just because ofhis skin colour, which
technically he was restricted inbecoming an officer because he
(10:15):
was black.
We've looked at that in aprevious episode on Britain's
black army and the First WorldWar.
But that's not just the issue,it's his educational and his
kind of upbringing backgroundthat would have excluded him
from being an officer.
That all changes in 1917, whichis when he's commissioned.
But of course there's many, manyother examples besides, and I
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could go through dozens anddozens of such men that I've
researched.
I'll give you one quick example,Lieutenant Leonard J.
Brown of the first East Surreys,who was killed attached to the
second Royal Fusiliers on the19th of August 1918.
He was someone whose papers Iacquired many years ago.
He was an ordinary working classlad.
(11:00):
He went over to Ireland, changedhis name, joined the regular
army as a private soldier, cameup through the ranks, served
overseas as another rank in theearly period of the war, and
when the army changed itsapproach to educational
background and people who couldapply for commissions, he got a
commission in the East SurreyRegiment in 1917 and was killed
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as a lieutenant on thebattlefield in 1918, having
spent nearly four years at thefront at that point and having
been wounded multiple times,experienced many battles and was
a very qualified soldier interms of his regular background,
but also an experienced soldieras well.
So all of this kind of reflectsthe changing nature of the army
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in the Great War, and it was a Ithink a turning point in the
history of the army, so that ageneration later, while there
were still restrictions on theeducational background of
officers and who could apply, itwas much more of a grammar
school army in terms of officerswhen it came to 1939.
But that's a subject for anotherday and another podcast.
(12:05):
So thanks for that, Neil, andhopefully that's given everyone
a bit of an insight intoofficers in the Great War.
Moving on to question numbertwo, this comes from Steve
McQuaid.
Steve asks, of all the veteransyou met, did any still hate the
Germans, or did they to a mansee them in their later years as
people who were unfortunateenough to understand exactly
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what they went through?
Well that's a good question, andagain, kind of the parallels
with the Second World War, goingback to attending We Have Ways
and the idea of the wrong war.
In my mind, all these thingskind of come together.
But in the First World War, Iobviously I did not know those
veterans when they were youngmen, so I don't know what their
contemporary view of the Germanswere, but we can have an insight
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into this when we look at thepropaganda of that period, which
in 1914-15 was obviously very,very anti-German.
There were cartoons depictingthe Hun of German soldiers
raping and pillaging their waythrough gallant little Belgium.
They were crucifying everythingfrom kittens to nuns to
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Canadians on church doors, andall kinds of bedlam was going on
and all kinds of war crimes werebeing committed by the Germans.
Now, from the distance of over ahundred years, we know that the
Germans in Belgium in 1914 didcommit war crimes in quite a lot
of towns and villages and citieswithin Belgium in that early
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phase of the First World War.
But the propaganda was all aimedat creating hate towards Germany
to get soldiers to hate theirnew enemy.
And you have Henry Williamsontalks about this when his
battalion, the 5th LondonRegiment, the London Rifle
Brigade, are about to head offto the Western Front, the Bishop
of London gives them a talk tothe whole battalion, tells them
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that every word of atrocity thatthey've read about the Germans,
every account of them doingthese terrible deeds across
France and Flanders, all of itis true, and they were off to
fight almost a holy crusadeagainst the Germans to rid
Europe of the Hun.
(14:21):
And it's that kind of languagethat you see.
So I would guess that many ofthese men at the time, before
they joined the army, duringtheir training, and perhaps even
in the early period of theirexperience on the battlefield,
possibly felt that way becauseof that high level of
(14:42):
propaganda.
But of course, from the verybeginning, soldiers begin to
meet the enemy, whether that'sprisoners captured in a battle
or for the regulars andterritorials of nineteen
fourteen, Christmas Day, thatChristmas truce, where men like
Henry Williamson and manyregular soldiers went out into
no man's land, and suddenly theenemy became human and they
(15:06):
swapped cat badges and buttonsand food and drink, and they
acted like they would have doneas civilised people before the
war.
And while that only temporarilykind of broke that down, I think
the more men were exposed to howthe enemy conducted themselves,
and that that would be true ofcourse of the Germans' view of
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the British and the French, thenthe opinions of those soldiers
that changes too.
And although I can think of acouple of veterans describing
incidents where stretcherbearers went out to pick up the
wounded and the Germans startedsniping and shot them, that of
course happened.
We know that there's many, manyaccounts of this.
But you've got to remember thatstretcher bearers only wore a
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very small brassard, a verysmall armband, that indicated
that they were stretcherbearers, and maybe it was easy
to miss that, not see it, notunderstand what it was.
I'm not making excuses for them,but there could be reasons for
this.
So while there were things thatsoldiers did see that perhaps
changed their views, perhaps itwas almost like a roller
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coaster.
One minute they'd see the enemyas human, then they'd witness
something like this, and perhapstheir view would change, and
then perhaps they'd meet someGerman prisoners, particularly
in that last phase of the war,and it was quite clear to many
men who were capturing theenemy, capturing German
soldiers, that they werestarving, that their rations
were very poor, and that if theywere quite happy to eat tons and
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tons of bully beef that Britishsoldiers had been chomping on
for years, then obviouslysomething was was wrong there
and the condition in their armywere poor.
So I think generally though, andthis is something that a lot of
them expressed to me, a lot ofthem said that they felt a
kinship to the German soldier.
When they came back, the gapbetween soldier and civilian in
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Britain was huge.
Most people did not understandwhat these men had gone through
and really didn't want to hearit.
And they knew that the men onthe other side of No Man's Land
who'd gone through the sameexperiences, the same
privations, the same conditionsas them did understand it.
So a lot of them used to expressthis idea that the Hun, old
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Jerry, Fritz, whatever theycalled him, was someone who
understood their war as well asthey did, and they didn't feel a
great degree of animositytowards them.
What they often expressed was anecessity to do their job.
They were there to fight thewar, end the war, rid Belgium of
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the occupation, rid France ofoccupation by the Germans, and
then come home.
It was a job.
That was their job, and theywere there as part of their job
to fight and kill the enemy.
And quite a few of them kind ofrelated how officers often
reminded them of this.
One had been decorated forbravery on the Sombe and awarded
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the military medal.
They had a medal parade, theydidn't actually dish the medals
out, it was the ribbon, and thegeneral commanding this division
went round, and as he went alongthe line of men pinning on the
ribbon of the military cross orthe DCM or the military medal,
he would push it hard onto theirtunic so it didn't fall off, and
then say to them and look 'em inthe eye, kill more Germans.
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And he'd go along this line,kill more Germans, kill more
Germans, kill more Germans.
And of course, again from thedistance of a hundred years,
it's sometimes difficult for usto understand that that is the
purpose of a soldier, to fightand kill the enemy.
Now these men didn't relishthat, it was their job, and when
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that job was done, they camehome.
And jumping on again to thatperiod in the eighties and
nineties, when I first joinedthe Western Front Association, I
used to go to the meetings atthe National Army Museum in
London, and John Giles and theother members of the committee
used to put out the first coupleof rows for veteran members.
And I can remember that many ofthose veterans, of course, had
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fought in all kinds of battlesagainst all kinds of enemies,
and on one occasion one of theirformer enemies was sitting there
with them, Herbert Sultzbach,who wrote the book with German
guns.
He was a gunner officer in theFirst World War and served in
the British Army in the second,he was a German Jew who had fled
Nazi Germany in the 1930s, andpeople like Don Price, who was a
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veteran of the public schoolsbattalion, Rolf Fusiliers, and
he fought with them at Highwoodin July 1916.
I can remember him and HerbertSaltzbach talking and laughing
with each other.
And although that was many yearsafter the conflict, I think they
would have done that in thetwenties and thirties.
It's in stark contrast to myexperience with veterans of the
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Second World War.
I think something that I've saidon this podcast before, the
vets, the infantry soldiers thatI took to Normandy, Arnhem, into
the Rhinelands, to Italy, and somany other Second World War
battlefields, those men wouldnot have happily sat and talked
to the Germans.
They wouldn't have shook theirhands, they wouldn't have had
(20:11):
drinks with them, they wouldn'thave socialized with them, and
they would not go into Germancemeteries.
They didn't want to go in thereand honour the German dead
because their view of that enemyin World War II and what the
German soldiers stood for wasvery different to the veterans
of the Great War.
Many of them said to me, youknow, did you know, Paul, they'd
(20:32):
say that those German soldiershad a little belt buckle and on
it it said Gott mit uns, God iswith us, and they believed that
just as much as we did.
So I think they identified morewith their enemy in the Great
War than those soldiers, thoseveterans of the Second World War
did with their enemy, who haddone things that made those
atrocities that the Germans,those terrible atrocities that
(20:55):
the Germans had carried out innineteen fourteen look mild by
comparison.
But again, I think we'vedemonstrated how important it is
to understand these two greatconflicts and how important it
is to see them in context toeach other.
So thanks for that greatquestion, Steve.
(21:15):
We're moving on to questionnumber three, another one from
Fan Mail, and this one comesfrom Richard Tatterton.
Richard asks My great uncleJames McGuire served with the
Royal Dublin Fusiliers and hewas wounded in nineteen fifteen
and discharged due to wounds,but later re enlisted and served
with various regiments andworked in the Graves
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Registration Unit.
How common was it for pensionedout men to re enlist without
using a pseudonym?
Would this have only beenpossible post war as it was a
non-combatant role?
Well, you might think if youlook at the history of the Great
War and the experience ofsoldiers on the battlefield and
how often terrible thosebattlefields were in terms of
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the experience of soldiers, thephysical conditions, let alone
the actual fighting,battlefields like Passchendale,
3rd Epe in 1917, where this vastswamp smashed to bits by shell
fire, and men had to try andlive in that and fight in it.
You might think that once they'dgone through that and they had a
an opportunity to be dischargeddue to a wound or sickness
(22:19):
contracted on active service,then they would be done with the
army and they would walk away.
And many did.
That was it.
They'd done their bit, they'dbeen injured, they couldn't
fight again.
But others, they wanted to goback, they wanted to return.
And I've come across this a lotin many, many years of
researching individual soldiers.
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Now, if they were discharged, noone's going to force them to
re-enlist, they couldn't bere-conscripted.
So if you were discharged in1914-15, technically you
wouldn't be conscripted later onin the war, although again I've
seen some examples wheresoldiers were erroneously
conscripted and then had to showtheir discharge papers, their
(23:02):
civil war badge, whatever itwas, to prove that they'd
already been in uniform.
So that that did happen, butthat's not really what we're
talking about here.
What happens?
Men get discharged, and that'sit, they're done, their war's
over.
But there were some who, Iguess, had an itch that needed
to be scratched again and theywanted to go back into the army,
or they left with discharged forall kinds of reasons.
(23:24):
So I once came across alieutenant in the Royal Marines,
for example, who had served atGallipoli with the Royal Naval
Division in 1915, and he wasdischarged the following year,
then re-enlisted in 1916 as arifleman in the 18th London
Regiment, the London IrishRifles, and then transferred to
the Machine Gun Corps as aprivate and was killed in 1917.
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So he went at the beginning ofthe war from an officer to being
another rank and then was killedin action on the battlefield.
And that is not the only exampleof that that I've seen.
And there's another officer thatI researched from my book Great
War Lives, and although he's notdischarged due to wounds or
sickness, he was cashiered infact in 1916, so kicked out the
(24:13):
army.
He went back and he re-enlistedas a private soldier in the 2nd
20th London Regiment, the BlackHeath and Woolwich Battalion.
He served with them in Palestineand then on the Western Front,
and he was killed on theHindenburg line, storming a
German machine gun post in 1918.
So there's lots of reasons thatmen would re-enlist after being
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discharged like that for allkinds of different reasons.
There were those who werelegitimately discharged because
of wounds, who tried tore-enlist with their own names,
but the army had a record thatthey'd served before and had
been discharged, so couldn'tre-enlist, but that didn't
necessarily stop them.
So when I lived in Bogner many,many years ago, I researched two
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local lads who had served withthe 1st 4th Battalion, the Royal
Sussex Regiment at Gallipoli.
And one had got the DCM for hisbravery at Souvler Bay.
Both of them had got really baddysentery, which was a massive
problem at Souvler and the wholeof the Gallipoli Peninsula, to
such an extent that they hadbeen discharged from the army as
(25:21):
a consequence of that dysentery.
They were not happy with that,and they both tried to re-enlist
but were refused.
So what they did is they went upto Liverpool and they changed
their names, and this comes toyour point about joining under a
pseudonym, for example, Richard.
They went up to Liverpool, theylied about what their names
were, they changed their names,and they joined the Liverpool
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Irish, which was a territorialbattalion of the King's
Liverpool Regiment, and theywent overseas.
That battalion was in the 55thWest Lanx Division, and in one
of the actions near GavinciGivenchy in northern France,
they took part in a trench raidwhere they both were awarded the
military medal.
Now the interesting thing aboutthem is that they got two sets
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of medals, one for their servicein the Royal Sussex, and another
set of medals under theirassumed name for their service
in the King's LiverpoolRegiment.
And I came across this because Ihad the medals of one of these
two lads.
He became a publican in one ofthe villages close to Bogner
after the war, and this storycame out through the research on
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him.
The lad, his mate, his bestmate, had been awarded the DCM
for Gallipoli.
He returned, he'd been woundedlater on in the Great War and
sadly died in the early twentiesof his wounds.
So I think when we researchthese stories, we get a sense of
what duty meant to these men.
They weren't mucking about, theythey wanted to serve.
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So that's kind of one level.
That's when the war is on.
And you again, Richard, you kindof point to this in your
question.
When the war was over, I thinkthese kind of conditions relaxed
a bit, and some men didre-enlist.
Some years ago I was working ona television programme, kind of
Who Do you Think You Are kind ofthing, where we looked at the
(27:12):
story of one celebrities familymember who did just this, who
had served, come out of thearmy, and then he re-enlisted
and joined the GravesRegistration Unit and served
with them at EAP in 1919 and oninto the early 20s, going across
the battlefield to recover thedead.
And I think that a lot of mendid do that.
(27:34):
They rejoined after the end ofhostilities to work with things
like the Graves RegistrationUnit, but also some of them
because they were politicallymotivated to go and fight in
Russia, because Britain had senttroops with other nations to
fight alongside the whiteRussians who were still loyal to
the Tsar, although he was deadby then, but they were fighting
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Bolshevism, communism, theBolsheviks who had risen up in
Russia in that latter part ofthe First World War, and a lot
of men didn't like the sound ofwhat Bolshevism, communism stood
for, and this was the beginningof that kind of polarization of
European politics in theinterwar period, and these men
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re-upped, re-enlisted, and wentto go and fight against the
Russians, the Bolsheviks, inwhat was then essentially the
Russian Civil War.
So there's all kinds of reasonswhy a soldier might re-enlist,
and I and I think this and andso many other stories that we
could pull out of the past tellus so much about the men of that
(28:41):
generation and what motivatedthem to serve as well.
It's a fascinating subject.
I've never seen any figures forit.
I guess it's probablyunquantifiable because you'd
have to research so manyindividual cases.
But thank you, Richard, forgiving us a chance to kind of
shed a bit of a spotlight onthis subject and talk about some
(29:02):
of these examples, and I hopethat's answered your question.
On to our fourth and finalquestion.
This comes from Angus Cole.
Angus asks, I wanted to ask whatcountries such as France and
Belgium and to a lesser extentGallipoli think about the Great
War in comparison to the UK andthe Commonwealth in terms of
(29:24):
commemoration, pilgrimages tothe battlefields, and the never
ending appetite by ourselves formore information relating to
every aspect of the Great Warand its continued hold and
fascination.
Is it right to say that Belgiumand France in particular would
like to see as time goes on aquiet fading of memories because
of their countries and populacebeing ravaged by war in both the
(29:47):
First and Second World Wars andare ambivalent about the
continued memorialization in thesame way that we do?
Well this is a really goodquestion, Angus, and I can only
give you my own idea.
Opinion.
I'm not kind of broadcasting tothe nation on this here.
We've all got our view of thisbased on our own experiences.
(30:07):
And over forty-three years ofvisiting the old front line in
not just France and Flanders butmuch wider beyond that to
Gallipoli, which you mentioned,for example, many times.
I don't sense any animosityamongst anybody.
Sometimes curiosity, why are weso still obsessed with this in
(30:28):
Britain and the Commonwealth andto a lesser extent America?
What is the continuedfascination of it?
But I think also comes alongwith that respect that we do, we
travel to these battlefields tohonour relatives that we never
knew, or in the case of many ofus, we research people that
aren't even part of our family,and they become part of us, we
(30:52):
adopt them almost, and we gothere to put a cross on their
grave, or stand there andremember them and look at their
photographs, whatever it is.
And I sense amongst the peoplewho live on these old
battlefields, like I say, agreat respect for that.
And I can cite a few examples.
I remember sitting in arestaurant in Albert many years
(31:12):
ago in the 90s when I was livingat Corsolette, talking to a
French family, and they wereasking, you know, why we were
visiting, and when theydiscovered we were living there,
why we're living there, and whatthe fascination was.
And I said to them, you know,have you been to the British
semantics?
Oh yes, when we look out and wevisit those places, we stand
(31:33):
there, and for us, these are themen who saved Europe.
I mean, that is the phrase thatthey used.
And what you see in just aboutevery commune in France in
particular, and also in Belgium,but particularly I notice in
France, they have the twonational holidays of the 8th of
May, VE Day for World War II,and obviously the 11th of
(31:55):
November for the end of theGreat War.
But the mayor, in those communeswhere they have British
cemeteries within the communeboundary, they go to the
cemeteries on the 11th ofNovember and the 8th of May, and
they lay a wreath and have ashort service of remembrance.
And that has continued for manyyears, it existed before the
centenary, it's carried on afterthe centenary, and that kind of
(32:17):
connection I don't see fadingwhatsoever.
It's not necessarily just anolder generation, because some
mayors of some villages that Ican think of are quite young,
it's something that iscontinuing, and I think that
that respect that we see onthese battlefields for the
fallen of Britain and theCommonwealth and other nations
(32:38):
is something that is to beadmired and valued because, as
I've said very often on thispodcast, if we can't get the
people who live on thesebattlefields onside and
understanding the importance ofthat landscape of the past and
how it blends into the landscapeof the present, we've got no
chance to preserve anything froma long-term point of view.
(33:02):
And I don't think it's reallyany different in Gallipoli.
There's a different mindsetthere.
Gallipoli is quite literally alegend in Turkey.
I mean, millions of Turks visitGallipoli every year, far more
than any English-speakingpeople, whether that's from
Britain or Australia or NewZealand.
The Turks really value theirpast and they value the stand
(33:25):
and the bravery and the heroismof Turkish soldiers there.
They've built memorials to themover the last few years, and I
think that's a really good thingbecause they value that ground,
and they also value the dead,their enemy, in the cemeteries
on that ground too, which issomething that you see in some
of the statuary that exists onthose battlefields in Gallipoli
(33:49):
today.
And I've found the people inTurkey and on that Gallipoli
battlefield to be veryaccommodating when visiting
places, very helpful, and verykind, people that will welcome
you in a really big way whereveryou go.
And again, no signs of anydifficulty or animosity or
anything like that, andcertainly not wanting to see
(34:11):
non-Turkish visitors not come.
They want everybody to go there.
So looking at your kind ofquestion about Belgium and
France, and would they want tosee a quiet fading of memories,
again, I don't really see that.
I don't see that.
I think there is a greaterunderstanding in France now,
perhaps, of the first world war,and as we move further away from
(34:33):
the second, an acceptance ofthat, and perhaps an
understanding of France'smultiple kind of layered roles
of involvement in that conflict,which is far more complex than
the first world war.
But I think that there is a kindof reality to this as well,
which is tourism, it's worth alot of money across these
battlefields in terms of thepeople that visit them.
(34:54):
But it's not just about that.
These are ordinary people whounderstand sacrifice, they value
how people are committed toremembering those from the past,
whether they're relatives orpeople that they've researched.
And we see this, I guess, insharp focus at the last post
each evening at eight o'clockwhen a ceremony that's nothing
(35:15):
to do with the CommonwealthWargraves Commission, nothing to
do with the Royal British Legionor any British Veterans or
Commonwealth VeteransAssociation.
It is the last post association,a Belgian organisation, and from
the very beginning it is the waythat Belgium chose to honour the
fallen of what was then Britainand the Empire in those
(35:38):
battlefields around Eap duringthe Great War.
And until that last post fades,I don't see any sign of those
people who live on thosebattlefields, no matter where it
is, I don't see any sign oftheir interest, their
commitment, and their way ofhonouring this fading either.
(35:59):
But it's a great, greatquestion, Angus, and if anyone's
got opinions on this, pleasepost them on the podcast website
or send them into email, and I'dlove to hear your view.
So thanks for all those greatquestions this week.
As always, you can sendquestions in via email, via fan
mail, or via the Discord server,and there's links to all of
(36:21):
those on the show notes for thisepisode.
And I'll see you again soon forsome more questions on the Old
Frontline.
You've been listening to anepisode of the Old Frontline
with me, military historian PaulReed.
You can follow me on Twitter atSomcor, you can follow the
(36:43):
podcast at OldFrontline Pod.
Check out the website atoldfrontline.co.uk where you'll
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that are mentioned in thepodcast.
And if you feel like supportingus, you can go to our Patreon
page, patreon.com slasholdfrontline, or support us on
(37:04):
buymea coffee atbuymeacoffee.comslash
oldfrontline.
Links to all of these are on ourwebsite.
Thanks for listening, and we'llsee you again soon.
We're already a few episodes into season nine, and
thanks as always for yourcontinued feedback.
It's always good to hear whatyou think of the podcast and
indeed individual episodes.
I get quite a lot of emailsevery week and they're always
fascinating.
You give me information aboutyour trips to the battlefields
(00:32):
and what you've seen and howyou've listened to particular
episodes in the field, literallyon those battlefields that the
podcasts are about.
And it's great to have that kindof level of contact with you.
So please, please keep thatgoing.
It was also good last weekend tobe up in Buckinghamshire at the
(00:53):
We Have Ways Festival.
Of course it's a Second WorldWar festival.
I kept hearing about the wrongwar, as people would call it,
this phrase which I guessrelates to conflicts that aren't
World War II.
But of course, one thing thatyou learn the more you study any
of these periods within thatfirst half of the twentieth
(01:13):
century is how they alwaysinterconnect.
And we've had quite a fewepisodes here about how the
first world war meets thesecond, and in some respects
vice versa as well.
But what was great is to seepeople's enthusiasm for history
at a festival like that, andalso have an opportunity to talk
to so many of you who listen tothe old frontline podcast, and I
(01:38):
was very impressed to see threepeople who were wearing their
old frontline t-shirts.
So well done on that.
Now we do have a merch shop now.
Due to popular demand, peopleasked about this.
So a shop has been put onlineand you can order stuff and it
will ship it to just aboutanywhere.
And I'll put a link to thatmerch shop which has got
(02:01):
t-shirts and tote bags and tinmugs.
I'll put a link to that in theshow notes for this episode.
Also in the show notes is a linkto the old frontline bulletin,
and this is a regular bulletinthat I put out every two weeks.
It's a way of me talking to youas an audience to tell you
(02:23):
what's going on, just to flag upa few things, highlight a few
past episodes, and also talkabout a particular aspect of the
battlefields in every bulletin.
It's free to subscribe to,follow the link, fill in your
details, and you'll be gettingit every two weeks in your
inbox.
So on to this week's questions,and we've got four via the usual
(02:48):
methods of email, but also somefrom fan mail as well, and
that's where you can send a kindof text message to the podcast,
but always remember to put yourname in it.
And our first question is fromNeil Babman, who indeed sent it
in on fan mail and remembered toput his name on there, so thanks
for that, Neil.
Neil asks, were officers in theBritish Army commissioned on the
(03:12):
basis of social status in theFirst World War?
I read that paying forcommissions in the British Army
was ended by law in eighteenseventy one.
Was a good question, Neil, andyou are absolutely correct in
what you say that as part of theCardwell Army reforms, paid
commissions where families paidfor a son to be commissioned
(03:36):
into a particular regiment,perhaps a regiment that there
was a family connection to, thatended in January 1871.
So if we go back to that kind ofVictorian period where we can
read fiction or true accounts ofofficers in the Victorian Army,
getting to where they were inthat army, rank and status, and
(03:58):
purchasing that as they wentalong.
And ordinary men could neverbecome officers because you
needed money to be acommissioned officer in the army
in that period.
So the Cardwell Army reformschanged all that.
However, if we kind of jump onto 1914 and we look at the
composition of the Britishregular army, in some respects
(04:22):
the type of men who wereofficers hadn't really changed
since the Victorian period.
So although you didn't have topay and there was no question of
paying, and you couldn't pay tonecessarily advance yourself in
that peacetime army before 1914,you nevertheless came generally
(04:44):
from a privileged background, aprivately educated background,
and often a moneyed backgroundas well, because the army paid
you essentially a salary thatwas pay for officers, but that
wouldn't necessarily pay foreverything.
And officers found that to livethe life of a regular officer in
(05:06):
Britain or an active service inIndia or Burma or South Africa
or wherever it was, you needed abit of extra tin, a bit of extra
money to continue to have thatkind of life and status that you
enjoyed as an officer in theBritish Army.
And when men went forcommissions to be commissioned
in that army, they were asked aseries of questions.
(05:28):
There was an interview.
One of the principal questionswas, What is your educational
background?
Where did you go to school?
So the vast majority of replieswere Eton College, Harrow, and
you know so many other publicschools that existed at that
time, and in fact, there was abook, an approved list that the
(05:51):
Army used that listed theschools that the Army accepted
as the right criteria for yourbackground and education.
So if you went to your interviewand said I was educated at Eton,
you were going to become anofficer of the British Army.
But if you went and said I waseducated at Bogner Regis Council
(06:12):
School, I mean not that I thinkthat existed before 1914, but
you kind of get where I'm comingfrom, then you were not going to
be accepted.
And you might ask yourself, youknow, is that the right kind of
question?
What is your educationalbackground?
Should they be asking, what isyour ability to lead men in
battle?
Now you've got to remember thatfor the War Office, they were
(06:33):
the same question that if youwent to that kind of school
where there'd been an officertraining corps, where certain
virtues and values have beeninstilled in you, then that was
the kind of criteria that thearmy was looking for.
So if we look at a kind ofcross-section of British Army
officers in 1914, we aren'tgoing to see too many ordinary
(06:56):
men in commission ranks.
Now there were some who'd beencommissioned from the ranks,
often through an incident,perhaps in the Second Boer War
of 1899 to 1902, where they hadcarried out a particular deed on
the battlefield that had gotthem essentially what was often
referred to as a battlefieldcommission, but those kind of
men were very, very small innumber in the 1914 army.
(07:21):
Now we can see that reallyreadily on the old front line
today when we go to somewherelike Zillabeek Churchyard, which
has got men who were killed atEape in 1914, officers and
buried in that cemetery close towhere they were fighting.
And when we look at the kind ofbackgrounds to them, there are
English lords in there, thereare barons, and we see a kind of
(07:44):
whole plethora of English publicschools represented amongst
those casualties.
So that was the army at thebeginning of the war.
And when we look at theterritorial army, sometimes
that's not always the same.
You look at Yorkshire, when Istudied Yorkshire territorial
battalions, a lot of theofficers were drawn from
(08:05):
families that had money infactories or were connected to
the colleries, the pits in thatarea.
So it's a kind of differentperspective there.
And when the new army camealong, there was still that
criteria to have been educatedin a certain way, but you begin
to see that breaking down as thearmy expands.
(08:27):
But generally speaking, in thosefirst two years of the war from
1914 to 16, while you couldn'tpay to be commissioned and you
couldn't pay to advance yourselfas an officer, generally they
were drawn from a fairly smallniche of British society.
What of course changed all thatwas losses on the battlefields.
(08:47):
And those kind of men who hadbeen taught from the very
beginning at schools like thatto set an example were not the
kind of men that told theirtroops, their soldiers that they
were commanding head off overtheir chaps.
They were the kind of men thatsaid follow me, and because of
that they suffered tremendouscasualties on the battlefield.
They were often the first to bekilled and wounded.
(09:11):
So by 1917 there was arequirement to change all this,
and the army relaxed itsconditions on what your
educational background could be,and essentially just about
anybody could apply for acommission.
So in those last two years ofthe war, when a conscript army
was kind of reaching itscrescendo in terms of how it
(09:32):
reflected this huge swathe ofBritish society, conscripting
people from 18 to 55, theofficers reflected that too, and
were drawn from all kinds ofbackgrounds.
And many men who had served inthe ranks as working class
soldiers in the early period ofthe war put in for commissions
and got them, and many men whowould not traditionally have
(09:54):
been commissioned were givencommissions.
Walter Tull, black Britishfootballer, one of the first
black officers in the BritishArmy, is a classic example of
this.
In 1914 he would never have beencommissioned because of his
background, not just because ofhis skin colour, which
technically he was restricted inbecoming an officer because he
(10:15):
was black.
We've looked at that in aprevious episode on Britain's
black army and the First WorldWar.
But that's not just the issue,it's his educational and his
kind of upbringing backgroundthat would have excluded him
from being an officer.
That all changes in 1917, whichis when he's commissioned.
But of course there's many, manyother examples besides, and I
(10:39):
could go through dozens anddozens of such men that I've
researched.
I'll give you one quick example,Lieutenant Leonard J.
Brown of the first East Surreys,who was killed attached to the
second Royal Fusiliers on the19th of August 1918.
He was someone whose papers Iacquired many years ago.
He was an ordinary working classlad.
(11:00):
He went over to Ireland, changedhis name, joined the regular
army as a private soldier, cameup through the ranks, served
overseas as another rank in theearly period of the war, and
when the army changed itsapproach to educational
background and people who couldapply for commissions, he got a
commission in the East SurreyRegiment in 1917 and was killed
(11:20):
as a lieutenant on thebattlefield in 1918, having
spent nearly four years at thefront at that point and having
been wounded multiple times,experienced many battles and was
a very qualified soldier interms of his regular background,
but also an experienced soldieras well.
So all of this kind of reflectsthe changing nature of the army
(11:42):
in the Great War, and it was a Ithink a turning point in the
history of the army, so that ageneration later, while there
were still restrictions on theeducational background of
officers and who could apply, itwas much more of a grammar
school army in terms of officerswhen it came to 1939.
But that's a subject for anotherday and another podcast.
(12:05):
So thanks for that, Neil, andhopefully that's given everyone
a bit of an insight intoofficers in the Great War.
Moving on to question numbertwo, this comes from Steve
McQuaid.
Steve asks, of all the veteransyou met, did any still hate the
Germans, or did they to a mansee them in their later years as
people who were unfortunateenough to understand exactly
(12:27):
what they went through?
Well that's a good question, andagain, kind of the parallels
with the Second World War, goingback to attending We Have Ways
and the idea of the wrong war.
In my mind, all these thingskind of come together.
But in the First World War, Iobviously I did not know those
veterans when they were youngmen, so I don't know what their
contemporary view of the Germanswere, but we can have an insight
(12:52):
into this when we look at thepropaganda of that period, which
in 1914-15 was obviously very,very anti-German.
There were cartoons depictingthe Hun of German soldiers
raping and pillaging their waythrough gallant little Belgium.
They were crucifying everythingfrom kittens to nuns to
(13:14):
Canadians on church doors, andall kinds of bedlam was going on
and all kinds of war crimes werebeing committed by the Germans.
Now, from the distance of over ahundred years, we know that the
Germans in Belgium in 1914 didcommit war crimes in quite a lot
of towns and villages and citieswithin Belgium in that early
(13:36):
phase of the First World War.
But the propaganda was all aimedat creating hate towards Germany
to get soldiers to hate theirnew enemy.
And you have Henry Williamsontalks about this when his
battalion, the 5th LondonRegiment, the London Rifle
Brigade, are about to head offto the Western Front, the Bishop
of London gives them a talk tothe whole battalion, tells them
(14:00):
that every word of atrocity thatthey've read about the Germans,
every account of them doingthese terrible deeds across
France and Flanders, all of itis true, and they were off to
fight almost a holy crusadeagainst the Germans to rid
Europe of the Hun.
(14:21):
And it's that kind of languagethat you see.
So I would guess that many ofthese men at the time, before
they joined the army, duringtheir training, and perhaps even
in the early period of theirexperience on the battlefield,
possibly felt that way becauseof that high level of
(14:42):
propaganda.
But of course, from the verybeginning, soldiers begin to
meet the enemy, whether that'sprisoners captured in a battle
or for the regulars andterritorials of nineteen
fourteen, Christmas Day, thatChristmas truce, where men like
Henry Williamson and manyregular soldiers went out into
no man's land, and suddenly theenemy became human and they
(15:06):
swapped cat badges and buttonsand food and drink, and they
acted like they would have doneas civilised people before the
war.
And while that only temporarilykind of broke that down, I think
the more men were exposed to howthe enemy conducted themselves,
and that that would be true ofcourse of the Germans' view of
(15:27):
the British and the French, thenthe opinions of those soldiers
that changes too.
And although I can think of acouple of veterans describing
incidents where stretcherbearers went out to pick up the
wounded and the Germans startedsniping and shot them, that of
course happened.
We know that there's many, manyaccounts of this.
But you've got to remember thatstretcher bearers only wore a
(15:49):
very small brassard, a verysmall armband, that indicated
that they were stretcherbearers, and maybe it was easy
to miss that, not see it, notunderstand what it was.
I'm not making excuses for them,but there could be reasons for
this.
So while there were things thatsoldiers did see that perhaps
changed their views, perhaps itwas almost like a roller
(16:11):
coaster.
One minute they'd see the enemyas human, then they'd witness
something like this, and perhapstheir view would change, and
then perhaps they'd meet someGerman prisoners, particularly
in that last phase of the war,and it was quite clear to many
men who were capturing theenemy, capturing German
soldiers, that they werestarving, that their rations
were very poor, and that if theywere quite happy to eat tons and
(16:33):
tons of bully beef that Britishsoldiers had been chomping on
for years, then obviouslysomething was was wrong there
and the condition in their armywere poor.
So I think generally though, andthis is something that a lot of
them expressed to me, a lot ofthem said that they felt a
kinship to the German soldier.
When they came back, the gapbetween soldier and civilian in
(16:55):
Britain was huge.
Most people did not understandwhat these men had gone through
and really didn't want to hearit.
And they knew that the men onthe other side of No Man's Land
who'd gone through the sameexperiences, the same
privations, the same conditionsas them did understand it.
So a lot of them used to expressthis idea that the Hun, old
(17:17):
Jerry, Fritz, whatever theycalled him, was someone who
understood their war as well asthey did, and they didn't feel a
great degree of animositytowards them.
What they often expressed was anecessity to do their job.
They were there to fight thewar, end the war, rid Belgium of
(17:38):
the occupation, rid France ofoccupation by the Germans, and
then come home.
It was a job.
That was their job, and theywere there as part of their job
to fight and kill the enemy.
And quite a few of them kind ofrelated how officers often
reminded them of this.
One had been decorated forbravery on the Sombe and awarded
(18:00):
the military medal.
They had a medal parade, theydidn't actually dish the medals
out, it was the ribbon, and thegeneral commanding this division
went round, and as he went alongthe line of men pinning on the
ribbon of the military cross orthe DCM or the military medal,
he would push it hard onto theirtunic so it didn't fall off, and
then say to them and look 'em inthe eye, kill more Germans.
(18:22):
And he'd go along this line,kill more Germans, kill more
Germans, kill more Germans.
And of course, again from thedistance of a hundred years,
it's sometimes difficult for usto understand that that is the
purpose of a soldier, to fightand kill the enemy.
Now these men didn't relishthat, it was their job, and when
(18:44):
that job was done, they camehome.
And jumping on again to thatperiod in the eighties and
nineties, when I first joinedthe Western Front Association, I
used to go to the meetings atthe National Army Museum in
London, and John Giles and theother members of the committee
used to put out the first coupleof rows for veteran members.
And I can remember that many ofthose veterans, of course, had
(19:06):
fought in all kinds of battlesagainst all kinds of enemies,
and on one occasion one of theirformer enemies was sitting there
with them, Herbert Sultzbach,who wrote the book with German
guns.
He was a gunner officer in theFirst World War and served in
the British Army in the second,he was a German Jew who had fled
Nazi Germany in the 1930s, andpeople like Don Price, who was a
(19:29):
veteran of the public schoolsbattalion, Rolf Fusiliers, and
he fought with them at Highwoodin July 1916.
I can remember him and HerbertSaltzbach talking and laughing
with each other.
And although that was many yearsafter the conflict, I think they
would have done that in thetwenties and thirties.
It's in stark contrast to myexperience with veterans of the
(19:50):
Second World War.
I think something that I've saidon this podcast before, the
vets, the infantry soldiers thatI took to Normandy, Arnhem, into
the Rhinelands, to Italy, and somany other Second World War
battlefields, those men wouldnot have happily sat and talked
to the Germans.
They wouldn't have shook theirhands, they wouldn't have had
(20:11):
drinks with them, they wouldn'thave socialized with them, and
they would not go into Germancemeteries.
They didn't want to go in thereand honour the German dead
because their view of that enemyin World War II and what the
German soldiers stood for wasvery different to the veterans
of the Great War.
Many of them said to me, youknow, did you know, Paul, they'd
(20:32):
say that those German soldiershad a little belt buckle and on
it it said Gott mit uns, God iswith us, and they believed that
just as much as we did.
So I think they identified morewith their enemy in the Great
War than those soldiers, thoseveterans of the Second World War
did with their enemy, who haddone things that made those
atrocities that the Germans,those terrible atrocities that
(20:55):
the Germans had carried out innineteen fourteen look mild by
comparison.
But again, I think we'vedemonstrated how important it is
to understand these two greatconflicts and how important it
is to see them in context toeach other.
So thanks for that greatquestion, Steve.
(21:15):
We're moving on to questionnumber three, another one from
Fan Mail, and this one comesfrom Richard Tatterton.
Richard asks My great uncleJames McGuire served with the
Royal Dublin Fusiliers and hewas wounded in nineteen fifteen
and discharged due to wounds,but later re enlisted and served
with various regiments andworked in the Graves
(21:36):
Registration Unit.
How common was it for pensionedout men to re enlist without
using a pseudonym?
Would this have only beenpossible post war as it was a
non-combatant role?
Well, you might think if youlook at the history of the Great
War and the experience ofsoldiers on the battlefield and
how often terrible thosebattlefields were in terms of
(21:57):
the experience of soldiers, thephysical conditions, let alone
the actual fighting,battlefields like Passchendale,
3rd Epe in 1917, where this vastswamp smashed to bits by shell
fire, and men had to try andlive in that and fight in it.
You might think that once they'dgone through that and they had a
an opportunity to be dischargeddue to a wound or sickness
(22:19):
contracted on active service,then they would be done with the
army and they would walk away.
And many did.
That was it.
They'd done their bit, they'dbeen injured, they couldn't
fight again.
But others, they wanted to goback, they wanted to return.
And I've come across this a lotin many, many years of
researching individual soldiers.
(22:41):
Now, if they were discharged, noone's going to force them to
re-enlist, they couldn't bere-conscripted.
So if you were discharged in1914-15, technically you
wouldn't be conscripted later onin the war, although again I've
seen some examples wheresoldiers were erroneously
conscripted and then had to showtheir discharge papers, their
(23:02):
civil war badge, whatever itwas, to prove that they'd
already been in uniform.
So that that did happen, butthat's not really what we're
talking about here.
What happens?
Men get discharged, and that'sit, they're done, their war's
over.
But there were some who, Iguess, had an itch that needed
to be scratched again and theywanted to go back into the army,
or they left with discharged forall kinds of reasons.
(23:24):
So I once came across alieutenant in the Royal Marines,
for example, who had served atGallipoli with the Royal Naval
Division in 1915, and he wasdischarged the following year,
then re-enlisted in 1916 as arifleman in the 18th London
Regiment, the London IrishRifles, and then transferred to
the Machine Gun Corps as aprivate and was killed in 1917.
(23:50):
So he went at the beginning ofthe war from an officer to being
another rank and then was killedin action on the battlefield.
And that is not the only exampleof that that I've seen.
And there's another officer thatI researched from my book Great
War Lives, and although he's notdischarged due to wounds or
sickness, he was cashiered infact in 1916, so kicked out the
(24:13):
army.
He went back and he re-enlistedas a private soldier in the 2nd
20th London Regiment, the BlackHeath and Woolwich Battalion.
He served with them in Palestineand then on the Western Front,
and he was killed on theHindenburg line, storming a
German machine gun post in 1918.
So there's lots of reasons thatmen would re-enlist after being
(24:36):
discharged like that for allkinds of different reasons.
There were those who werelegitimately discharged because
of wounds, who tried tore-enlist with their own names,
but the army had a record thatthey'd served before and had
been discharged, so couldn'tre-enlist, but that didn't
necessarily stop them.
So when I lived in Bogner many,many years ago, I researched two
(25:00):
local lads who had served withthe 1st 4th Battalion, the Royal
Sussex Regiment at Gallipoli.
And one had got the DCM for hisbravery at Souvler Bay.
Both of them had got really baddysentery, which was a massive
problem at Souvler and the wholeof the Gallipoli Peninsula, to
such an extent that they hadbeen discharged from the army as
(25:21):
a consequence of that dysentery.
They were not happy with that,and they both tried to re-enlist
but were refused.
So what they did is they went upto Liverpool and they changed
their names, and this comes toyour point about joining under a
pseudonym, for example, Richard.
They went up to Liverpool, theylied about what their names
were, they changed their names,and they joined the Liverpool
(25:43):
Irish, which was a territorialbattalion of the King's
Liverpool Regiment, and theywent overseas.
That battalion was in the 55thWest Lanx Division, and in one
of the actions near GavinciGivenchy in northern France,
they took part in a trench raidwhere they both were awarded the
military medal.
Now the interesting thing aboutthem is that they got two sets
(26:06):
of medals, one for their servicein the Royal Sussex, and another
set of medals under theirassumed name for their service
in the King's LiverpoolRegiment.
And I came across this because Ihad the medals of one of these
two lads.
He became a publican in one ofthe villages close to Bogner
after the war, and this storycame out through the research on
(26:30):
him.
The lad, his mate, his bestmate, had been awarded the DCM
for Gallipoli.
He returned, he'd been woundedlater on in the Great War and
sadly died in the early twentiesof his wounds.
So I think when we researchthese stories, we get a sense of
what duty meant to these men.
They weren't mucking about, theythey wanted to serve.
(26:51):
So that's kind of one level.
That's when the war is on.
And you again, Richard, you kindof point to this in your
question.
When the war was over, I thinkthese kind of conditions relaxed
a bit, and some men didre-enlist.
Some years ago I was working ona television programme, kind of
Who Do you Think You Are kind ofthing, where we looked at the
(27:12):
story of one celebrities familymember who did just this, who
had served, come out of thearmy, and then he re-enlisted
and joined the GravesRegistration Unit and served
with them at EAP in 1919 and oninto the early 20s, going across
the battlefield to recover thedead.
And I think that a lot of mendid do that.
(27:34):
They rejoined after the end ofhostilities to work with things
like the Graves RegistrationUnit, but also some of them
because they were politicallymotivated to go and fight in
Russia, because Britain had senttroops with other nations to
fight alongside the whiteRussians who were still loyal to
the Tsar, although he was deadby then, but they were fighting
(27:57):
Bolshevism, communism, theBolsheviks who had risen up in
Russia in that latter part ofthe First World War, and a lot
of men didn't like the sound ofwhat Bolshevism, communism stood
for, and this was the beginningof that kind of polarization of
European politics in theinterwar period, and these men
(28:18):
re-upped, re-enlisted, and wentto go and fight against the
Russians, the Bolsheviks, inwhat was then essentially the
Russian Civil War.
So there's all kinds of reasonswhy a soldier might re-enlist,
and I and I think this and andso many other stories that we
could pull out of the past tellus so much about the men of that
(28:41):
generation and what motivatedthem to serve as well.
It's a fascinating subject.
I've never seen any figures forit.
I guess it's probablyunquantifiable because you'd
have to research so manyindividual cases.
But thank you, Richard, forgiving us a chance to kind of
shed a bit of a spotlight onthis subject and talk about some
(29:02):
of these examples, and I hopethat's answered your question.
On to our fourth and finalquestion.
This comes from Angus Cole.
Angus asks, I wanted to ask whatcountries such as France and
Belgium and to a lesser extentGallipoli think about the Great
War in comparison to the UK andthe Commonwealth in terms of
(29:24):
commemoration, pilgrimages tothe battlefields, and the never
ending appetite by ourselves formore information relating to
every aspect of the Great Warand its continued hold and
fascination.
Is it right to say that Belgiumand France in particular would
like to see as time goes on aquiet fading of memories because
of their countries and populacebeing ravaged by war in both the
(29:47):
First and Second World Wars andare ambivalent about the
continued memorialization in thesame way that we do?
Well this is a really goodquestion, Angus, and I can only
give you my own idea.
Opinion.
I'm not kind of broadcasting tothe nation on this here.
We've all got our view of thisbased on our own experiences.
(30:07):
And over forty-three years ofvisiting the old front line in
not just France and Flanders butmuch wider beyond that to
Gallipoli, which you mentioned,for example, many times.
I don't sense any animosityamongst anybody.
Sometimes curiosity, why are weso still obsessed with this in
(30:28):
Britain and the Commonwealth andto a lesser extent America?
What is the continuedfascination of it?
But I think also comes alongwith that respect that we do, we
travel to these battlefields tohonour relatives that we never
knew, or in the case of many ofus, we research people that
aren't even part of our family,and they become part of us, we
(30:52):
adopt them almost, and we gothere to put a cross on their
grave, or stand there andremember them and look at their
photographs, whatever it is.
And I sense amongst the peoplewho live on these old
battlefields, like I say, agreat respect for that.
And I can cite a few examples.
I remember sitting in arestaurant in Albert many years
(31:12):
ago in the 90s when I was livingat Corsolette, talking to a
French family, and they wereasking, you know, why we were
visiting, and when theydiscovered we were living there,
why we're living there, and whatthe fascination was.
And I said to them, you know,have you been to the British
semantics?
Oh yes, when we look out and wevisit those places, we stand
(31:33):
there, and for us, these are themen who saved Europe.
I mean, that is the phrase thatthey used.
And what you see in just aboutevery commune in France in
particular, and also in Belgium,but particularly I notice in
France, they have the twonational holidays of the 8th of
May, VE Day for World War II,and obviously the 11th of
(31:55):
November for the end of theGreat War.
But the mayor, in those communeswhere they have British
cemeteries within the communeboundary, they go to the
cemeteries on the 11th ofNovember and the 8th of May, and
they lay a wreath and have ashort service of remembrance.
And that has continued for manyyears, it existed before the
centenary, it's carried on afterthe centenary, and that kind of
(32:17):
connection I don't see fadingwhatsoever.
It's not necessarily just anolder generation, because some
mayors of some villages that Ican think of are quite young,
it's something that iscontinuing, and I think that
that respect that we see onthese battlefields for the
fallen of Britain and theCommonwealth and other nations
(32:38):
is something that is to beadmired and valued because, as
I've said very often on thispodcast, if we can't get the
people who live on thesebattlefields onside and
understanding the importance ofthat landscape of the past and
how it blends into the landscapeof the present, we've got no
chance to preserve anything froma long-term point of view.
(33:02):
And I don't think it's reallyany different in Gallipoli.
There's a different mindsetthere.
Gallipoli is quite literally alegend in Turkey.
I mean, millions of Turks visitGallipoli every year, far more
than any English-speakingpeople, whether that's from
Britain or Australia or NewZealand.
The Turks really value theirpast and they value the stand
(33:25):
and the bravery and the heroismof Turkish soldiers there.
They've built memorials to themover the last few years, and I
think that's a really good thingbecause they value that ground,
and they also value the dead,their enemy, in the cemeteries
on that ground too, which issomething that you see in some
of the statuary that exists onthose battlefields in Gallipoli
(33:49):
today.
And I've found the people inTurkey and on that Gallipoli
battlefield to be veryaccommodating when visiting
places, very helpful, and verykind, people that will welcome
you in a really big way whereveryou go.
And again, no signs of anydifficulty or animosity or
anything like that, andcertainly not wanting to see
(34:11):
non-Turkish visitors not come.
They want everybody to go there.
So looking at your kind ofquestion about Belgium and
France, and would they want tosee a quiet fading of memories,
again, I don't really see that.
I don't see that.
I think there is a greaterunderstanding in France now,
perhaps, of the first world war,and as we move further away from
(34:33):
the second, an acceptance ofthat, and perhaps an
understanding of France'smultiple kind of layered roles
of involvement in that conflict,which is far more complex than
the first world war.
But I think that there is a kindof reality to this as well,
which is tourism, it's worth alot of money across these
battlefields in terms of thepeople that visit them.
(34:54):
But it's not just about that.
These are ordinary people whounderstand sacrifice, they value
how people are committed toremembering those from the past,
whether they're relatives orpeople that they've researched.
And we see this, I guess, insharp focus at the last post
each evening at eight o'clockwhen a ceremony that's nothing
(35:15):
to do with the CommonwealthWargraves Commission, nothing to
do with the Royal British Legionor any British Veterans or
Commonwealth VeteransAssociation.
It is the last post association,a Belgian organisation, and from
the very beginning it is the waythat Belgium chose to honour the
fallen of what was then Britainand the Empire in those
(35:38):
battlefields around Eap duringthe Great War.
And until that last post fades,I don't see any sign of those
people who live on thosebattlefields, no matter where it
is, I don't see any sign oftheir interest, their
commitment, and their way ofhonouring this fading either.
(35:59):
But it's a great, greatquestion, Angus, and if anyone's
got opinions on this, pleasepost them on the podcast website
or send them into email, and I'dlove to hear your view.
So thanks for all those greatquestions this week.
As always, you can sendquestions in via email, via fan
mail, or via the Discord server,and there's links to all of
(36:21):
those on the show notes for thisepisode.
And I'll see you again soon forsome more questions on the Old
Frontline.
You've been listening to anepisode of the Old Frontline
with me, military historian PaulReed.
You can follow me on Twitter atSomcor, you can follow the
(36:43):
podcast at OldFrontline 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 supportingus, you can go to our Patreon
page, patreon.com slasholdfrontline, or support us on
(37:04):
buymea coffee atbuymeacoffee.comslash
oldfrontline.
Links to all of these are on ourwebsite.
Thanks for listening, and we'llsee you again soon.
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