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

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Take up our quarrel with the foe. To you from failing hands we throw the torch Be yours to hold it high, if ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders fields. That's one of the most celebrated of all war poems and it was written by a a doctor, an army officer from Canada called John McCrae, and he wrote it during the Second Battle of East.

in May nineteen fifteen. And it is the poem that has effectively enshrined the poppy as the symbol of the four million men who fell on the Western Front during the First World War. And Dominic, it's um it's unusual among First World War poetry, isn't it? For actually, although it laments the deaths of the men in the war.

It doesn't actually question the need for the war. It ends with this rousing appeal to the men who are going to be coming up to the trenches, presumably to be killed in their turn, to take up the torch, to hold it high, and to keep faith with those who are already dead amid the mud and barbed wire of Flandersfield.

You know, we did a big series about the first few months of the First World War. We did an episode about the Christmas truce of nineteen fourteen. And in those we discussed how ordinary soldiers very rarely questioned whether they were doing the right thing. They believed, absolutely, I think, that they were fighting for principles of justice, and they were fighting for their own national survival.

themselves. But we'll come back to Macrae's poem, and indeed the battle in which he wrote it, the Bat Second Battle of Epres, a little bit later. But first let's set out what's coming in this series. So

This series is about a single year in the First World War, the year nineteen fifteen, and it's it's one of the most colourful, one of the most exciting years of the war. If you think of the First World War as just sort of a muddy, miserable stalemate, you are dead wrong. There's all kinds of drama and we'll be getting into this in this series. So we'll be talking about how Italy got into the war and how it prefigured the rise of fascism.

we'll be talking about two of the war's most controversial and colourful stories. So that's the sinking of the ship the Lusitania. So a Titanic style story. Except the difference is in this case the Lusitania is sunk by a U boat and this ignites this firestorm of controversy in America. And then

In many ways, an equally controversial story, which is the German execution of a nurse or spy, we will discuss which, called Edith Cavill in Brussels in nineteen fifteen. And then we'll finish off with uh two episodes about one of the most dramatic military disasters uh in all modern history, which is the Allied attempt to seize the approaches to Constantinople,

So let's kick off with the with outlining where we are, where we've got to. So at the beginning of nineteen fifteen, the the First World War has been going on for five months. And it began As listeners will remember, with Austria Hungary's decision to exact revenge on Serbia for the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who's now slightly been forgotten, I'm sad to say.

And this triggered the European alliance system. So Germany piles in on behalf of Austria, Russia, France and Britain are defend effectively defending Serbia. And from the very beginning of the war, the Central Powers, that's Austria, Hungary and Germany, are massive underdogs, because they have less than half of the total population of the Entente or the Allies as they become known.

They've got half the military manpower, they've got far smaller economic resources. They can't win a long war. They know that. So what the Germans do is they gamble on knocking out the Western Allies in six weeks. They charge through Belgium into the heart of France. They're closing in on Paris at the end of august nineteen fourteen. But they're driven back at the Battle of the Marne,

and they fall all the way back to the chalk lands of the River Ainne in eastern France, and there they literally dig in, and they dig the first line of defensive trenches. By the end of nineteen fourteen, beginning of nineteen fifteen, These lines of trenches stretch all the way from the English Channel in the north, through Flanders, through eastern France, to the Swiss border. That's about four hundred and fifty miles. This is the Western Front.

And very, very roughly, the British are guarding the bit in the north, so that's from the Channel, down through Flanders to the French uh town of Amiens, and the French are handling everything to the south of that. And what they're basically trying to do is to push the Germans even further back, so out of France and out of Belgium. But this is a military challenge the like of which has never been seen in history.

Because it's very difficult to push people back when they have machine guns trenches and barbed wire, which give the defenders a massive advantage. So basically if you attack you end up dying. That's that's the issue.

military strategists, the top brass in the various armies of the combatants in the First World War, before the outbreak of the war, had not thought that that was going to be an issue. They had thought that it was going to be a kind of massively mobile combat. And so really no plans have been drawn up with how to deal with this eventuality.

which is General Codona, the Italian Supreme Commander. I mean this is very common. And actually the story of the First World War is these guys realizing that they were completely and utterly wrong. And that basically they're gonna have to figure out a way to break the enemy defenses. And in experimenting, they will kill hundreds of thousands of their own men. I mean, this is the sort of tragedy of it.

Anyway, what was it actually like then to live in the trenches in nineteen fifteen? What did it look and feel like? We know more about this than any previous war. We're very fortunate because so many of the survivors told their stories to things like the Imperial War Museums. or a history archive and there were a series of brilliant literary memoirs.

And one of the most celebrated of all those literary memoirs, quite rightly, is Robert Graves' book, Goodbye to All That. So Robert Graves, very well known, of course, I Claudius. So Great kind of classical scholar. Uh some quite outlandish ideas, I think, about classical mythology, Tom. Is that

And he's finally sent to the front in May nineteen fifteen and I thought it would be interesting to make the journey with him, as it were.

So his war narrative opens with him arriving by boat at Le Havre in France with six other young officers in the Welsh fusiliers. And his uh his first memory he says, um as soon as we had arrived we were accosted by numerous little boys pimping for their sisters. I take you to my sister, she very nice, very good jig a jig, not much money, very cheap, very good. I take you now. Plenty champagne for me.

of kind of cross class collaboration in the trenches. You know, they did not go to Charter House. And as he says in his book, many of them are either wildly too old or too young. So he says, Fred Prosser, a painter in civil life, who admitted to forty eight was really fifty six. David Davis, a collier, a minor, who admitted to forty two, and Thomas Clark, another collier who admitted to forty five, were only one or two years junior to Prosser.

And the oldest of these men is a guy called James Burford, who's another miner. Burford gives himself away because he's confused by the safety catch on his rifle. He says, What's this? And then he says to Graves, you know, I haven't fired a rifle since eight eighteen eighty two.

And Graves said, Didn't you fight in the Burr War? And he says, No, I tried to re enlist, but they told me I was too old, sir. That was fourteen years ago. I had been an old soldier when I was in Egypt. My real age is sixty three.

Oh, leave me alone Which is a kind of capital offence, but Graves always um you know excuses it or whatever. Exactly. So they're loaded onto this troop train bound for the front. And they're heading to Betun, which is the railhead, which is the end of the line, and that's near France's northeastern border, just south of Calais. And it takes them twenty five hours on this train. Very boring. They play cards to pass the time.

and they finally arrive. It's nine o'clock at night. They are and I quote hungry, cold and dirty and on the platform the guy who's going to guide them to the front is waiting for them. A little man, says Robert Graves, in filthy khaki. He's gonna take them on foot to the trenches which are about six miles away. We marched through the unlit suburbs of the town. We were all intensely excited at the noise and flashes of the guns in the distance, says Graham.

At this point, um, they see their first kind of enemy action, as it were. A German shell flies towards them and it lands twenty yards away. And as it explodes, they all throw themselves to the ground. There's an explosion and then they hear this kind of tinkling, which is the sound of the little bits of shell casing. falling down, buzzing down all around, as Graves says. And one of the sergeants says at Riley, they calls them the musical instruments.

And they all get up and they trudge on and they get to a village called Combra, which is about a mile from the trenches now. And here they're led into this ruined house which had previously been a chemist's shop. And here, you know, there are people waiting, they give them their gas masks, their respirators, they give them their field dressings, so the kind of bandages and stuff.

And they are given a little bit of something to eat. So bread, bacon, rum, and bitter stewed tea, sickly with sugar. And then once they've finished that, the guide leads them on again. It's still very dark, by the way. They're led into these uh woods east of the village. And they go through the woods and then they see an opening and this is the beginning of the trench network. And they go down into this long deep trench which has been cut in the kind of clay of the soil.

And Graves gets his torch out as they're walking to see what it to see what it's like. And he realizes he switch switches it off almost straight away,'cause he realizes to his horror that they are walking on live field mice and frogs that have a sort of carpet of them. They've all fallen into the trench and couldn't get out again.

He's struck by how wet and how slippery the trench is. They can hear the hiss of uh rifle bullets coming at them. And actually somebody says to him at one point, There's no point in ducking if you hear a bullet. 'Cause if you can hear the bullet it means it's gone by you. So it will kill you before you hear it. So if you hear it, no point. You know, you've you're fine. Anyway, they trudge down this trench and they get to a dugout and that is the battalion headquarters.

where the colonel is waiting for them. And Graves is surprised how cozy it is. So they duck in and it's that classic scene that you've seen, so for our British listeners, you'd have seen it in Black Adder Goes Forth, the comedy series. It's quite cozy. There's like a nice ornamental lamp, there's a table with a tablecloth.

The uh the people inside are having their dinner or whatever. They're eat eating off polished silver. There's a gramophone playing records. There are easy chairs. So the colonel and his senior officers are having their dinner.

they pass a stretcher party and they're carrying a man who's got a sandbag over his face. And the guide says, Oh, who's that? And one of the stretcher bearers says, It's Sergeant Gallagher. He thought he saw a Fritz in no man's land near our wire. Sergeant Gallagher, it turns out, fired a percussion bomb at this shape. But Sergeant Gallagher aimed a little bit too low. The bomb hit the top of the parapet, it bounced back and it exploded in his face.

So this is Robert Graves says it's a two room timber built shelter in the side of a trench. It's a very similar scene. Um, there's another table with a tablecloth, there's a bookcase, there's whiskey bottles and whatnot, and Captain Dunn is waiting for them, so he's Graves' superior officer.

And Graves is astonished to find that Captain Dunn is actually two months younger than he is. That is to say Captain Dunn is himself only nineteen. And Captain Dunn is your absolute classic public school jolly, breezy um officer. Save paid by Hugh Laurie. His opening words to Graves are, Well, what's the news from England? Oh sorry, first I must introduce you. This is Walker, clever chap, comes from Cambridge, fancies himself as an athlete. This is Price.

who only joined us yesterday, but we like him. He brought some damn good whisky with him. Well, how long is this war gonna last, and who's winning? We don't know a thing out here.

We dig, we reinforce the parapet, we, you know, try to get rid of some of the vermin, we do all this kind of thing. Then at twelve we have lunch, we work again from one till six. So they're basically like a kind of group of navvies or something. And then we have then the men feed again. We have stand two at dusk for about an hour. We work all night. And then we stand two for an hour before dawn. And that's the general programme.

So they have a look over the parapet very gingerly. And Graves gets his first glimpse of No Man's Land. It's dark and he can hardly see anything. But a little later when it's lighter, he gets a periscope and he has a look, and he can see that the German trenches that's marked by a line of sandbags.

They're just four hundred yards away. And although he doesn't really say this in his memoir, this must be a spine-tingling moment. After all this journey, after all these months of waiting, you finally see the enemy line. It's just four hundred yards. You know, you could you could walk to it within min minutes, although you'd get shot.

No, he says a flat meadow with cornflowers and whatnot, long grass, a few shell holes, there's a wreck of an aeroplane, and he can see barbed wire, theirs and ours, but that's it. He has another little doze and he listens to the men grumbling about their lice, a big issue for them, and we'll come back to this.

and then they ha have breakfast back in the dugout. Bacon and eggs, coffee, toast and marmalade. So not bad. And just as they're getting stuck in, Dunn's manservant, his Batman, whose man called Kingdom, rushes in, his eyes blank with horror and excitement, and he says, Gas, sir, gas they're using gas And Dunn says the most British thing that anybody's ever said. He says, Very well, Kingdom, bring me my respirator from the other room, and another pot of marmalade.

So first of all the trenches. So the trenches, as you said, Tom, they are relatively new. You know, when Graves arrives, they are only months old. They were improvised, they were cut into the clay and the chalk in a hurry. And a key thing for people to remember, the Allies, when they dug their trenches, did not think, Well, we're gonna be here for four years you know, so we better make them good. They actually thought we might be here for a couple of weeks.

And then we're gonna hopefully resume the offensive and drive the Germans further back east.

And people would reinforce them with wooden planks and with sandbags. And then they would line the ground of the trench with these wooden planks, these duckboards. And they gave them names. They would often name them after London Street, so Oxford Street, Regent Street and whatnot. And an intersection would be named after a famous junction in London, so Hyde Park Corner, Oxford Circus and so on.

They're deeper, they are safer, they're better defended, they're more comfortable. And the reason for that obviously is that the Germans are there for the long haul. They're like what we have we hold.

And this is the aspect of trench life that soldiers mention the most in subsequent accounts. So there's a diary of the war by a guy called Captain Alexander Stewart, which was published in two thousand and nine. He joined the Scottish Rifles. in uh nineteen fifteen. He says of the mud. Mud is a bad description. It's not mud. The soil was more like a thick slime. When walking one sank several inches, it was difficult to withdraw the feet.

The consequence was that men who were standing still or sitting down got embedded in the slime and were unable to extricate themselves, and as the trenches were so shallow they had to stay where they were all day.

Because he's stuck in all this mud. But there's worse things than mud. So Graves, remember I said he was dozing and he heard the people talking about lice. Lice are a big issue, but there's also flies and fleas. So flies, Alexander Stewart again, he talks about filthy, fat, dirty flies drawn by the dead bodies.

This is a French stretcher bearer called Raymond Clemont. He said Without telling anybody I take my clothes off and I see hundreds of lice and lava jumping out at me. They're everywhere in my shirt, my trousers, my underwear, etcetera I shake my clothes as much as I can and I finally weigh wear them again. The only choice we have is to wait for the next relief and then to boil our clothes.

And again, the rats are so common they are ubiquitous. So, like the flies, they're drawn by the dead bodies, they become huge.

There's a lot of waiting around, so there's a young German writer called Ernst Junger, who we will feature more after the break. And Junger arrived very excited and very idealistic. Con couldn't wait to get have a crack at the British. And he said in his memoir Storm of Steel

After only a short time with the regiment we become thoroughly disillusioned. Instead of the danger that we had hoped for, we would be given dirt, work, and sleepless nights. Worse still was the boredom, which was still more enervating for the soldier than the proximity of death. But one point to make as we approach the break.

It's really important to say you said earlier it's a lot better than working down a mine. And I think you're right. And a lot of soldiers enjoy it. This is a thing that I think subsequently people in the twenty first century struggle to get into their heads. Th for a lot of soldiers, particularly working class men from poorer backgrounds who worked in factories or, you know, in mines or had back breaking, you know, h industrial jobs.

The routine on the Western Front really isn't that bad. You've got four regular meals a day breakfast, uh, lunch, tea, dinner.

you have kind of bits you have rum, you have cigarette rations, all of this kind of thing. There's a lot of time for chatting and for general bants. There's a lot of sleep. You uh write letters, you play cards. Is that worse than working in a mine? Not necessarily, no.

On a nice summer's day, you could think there wasn't a war on really. Early in the morning you'd have the first planes coming over and a general air of balm innocent ease. Breakfast would come up if there was going to be any, and you would settle down to a day of laziness in the sun if you could.

The lads would sit on this firestep and talk and sing. Towards the evening they get sentimental talking about their homes. Yes, during those summer months of nineteen fifteen, you could forget that there was a war on. You really could. And part of the reason for that is actually you think of the First World War and you think of the trenches and you sort of imagine that people are just either digging or they're going over the top.

But actually, a Tommy, a British soldier, spends less than half of his time on the front line. He spends three fifths of his time in the rear. And what they're doing in the rear, they're just hanging about. They're playing football, they go to film screenings, there are special concerts put on for them, they go to plays, there are people organise lectures and debates, they're reading, they're

This is all kind of cliched stuff, but of course this is how people spoke and indeed speak today. We knew we were there to do that job and we were so fond of our country and we were like a lot of brothers today. We were just like a band of brothers. Oh sweet. Nelson would have been proud Tom. Yeah, well.

Are the Germans about to unleash a secret weapon to end the deadlock in the trenches and win the war? Tom will find out after the break.

The writer Ernst Junger and he's describing um the fighting at Les Epages near Verdun in april nineteen fifteen and it comes from his memoir Storm of Steel which is one of the great war memoirs, not just of the First World War, but o of all time, isn't it? So Dominic, probably worth giving a character sketch. I mean he's an amazing, amazing man. Extraordinary life.

So they're kind of these sort of wandering birds. They're a little bit like the Boy Scouts, but they're more nationalistic and more kind of idealistic in a way. Then he ran away to join the French Foreign Legion, and then he came back, and then on the first of august nineteen fourteen, that's the day Germany entered the war, he joined up, he was so keen to get in stuck in. Says nineteen, like Graves.

And later on, after he'd published this book Storm of Steel, he became this incredibly controversial German literary figure. So all through his life he was very militaristic and very nationalistic. But he never joined the Nazis. He did serve as an army captain in Paris in the nineteen forties, but he was appalled by the anti Semitism of the Nazis, even though he'd himself been pretty anti Semitic in the twenties.

He then was quite close to the Stauffenberg plotters, so the people who tried to blow Hitler up in nineteen forty four. He was thrown out of the army, but not executed.

So it really captures his book, the adrenaline, the noise, the sensations, and this sort of dream like confusion and surrealism, which you had a sort of taste of there when he sees those French bodies. So in this particular occasion We're in April nineteen fifteen. His unit has been pushed forward into the French lines, so they've the Germans have punched a little hole in the French lines and his units have been thrown in. And this is his first experience of battle.

And he's in this trench and it's full of dead Frenchmen, rotted, dried, stiffened to mummies, frozen in an eerie dance of death.

He lights up his pipe, he has a smoke, then he hears the guns starting up again what he calls a savage pounding dance. And eventually he hears someone calling, it's basically one of the officers saying, Come on, on your feet, get all of you get ready. They form up again. They go out of the trench and into a wood. You know, they have no idea where they are, where they're going, they're just following orders as people do.

Uh so it's very dreamlike still. They go into this woods, they go into a clearing and they sit down, the sun is setting, they're just sort of chatting, and they think, well, this is probably it for today. And it's at this point, it's a it's a fantastic scene in the book. He says our ribble conversations were suddenly cut off by a marrow freezing cry.

Twenty yards behind us, clumps of earth whirled up out of a white cloud and smacked into the boughs. The crash echoed through the woods. Stricken eyes looked at each other. Bodies pressed themselves into the ground. And then there's this series of explosions. He says choking gases drifted through the undergrowth. Smoke obscured the treetops. There are trees crashing down, the screams. We leaped up and ran blindly from tree to tree.

like looking for cover. They're like frightened game, he says. And in the middle of all this he feels a blow on his left thigh, and this is a piece of shrapnel that's come from one of the explosions and is basically sliced into his leg. And he drops his pack, he throws down his pack and he runs back to the trench that they'd all come from. The trench was appalling, choked with seriously wounded and dying men. A figure stripped to the waist with a ripped open back leaned against the parapet.

Another with a triangular flap hanging off the back of his skull emitted short, high pitched screams. And then this incredible line. This was the home of the great god Pain, and for the first time I looked through a devilish chink into the depths of his realm. Very evocative writing. So he carries on running through the trench in this sort of panic, blood streaming from his leg.

He eventually collapses. Afterwards, when it's died down, he's found by stretcher bearers and is taken to a dressing station. And then eventually he is put on a train to go all the way home to Germany into his hometown of Heidelberg.

And the other thing that strikes him, at the end of this scene, which is brilliantly done, you know, he's seen people killed, he's seen combat, he's seen explosions and stuff, but he He's seen dead French, but he hasn't seen a single live Frenchman. He hasn't seen a single live opponent. And actually you could go through the war for a very long time and you could see people shot around you and you could shoot uh you know, you could cause death to other people.

But you might never actually lay eyes upon them and that's one of the great innovations, I think, of the First World War.

enjoyable. So there's an uh an example that reminded me of a one of our um one of our goal hangar comrades, Tom. So a man called Julian Grenfell who went to Eton and Balliol, like Rory Stewart. And he was killed on the Western Front in may nineteen fifteen, and before he was killed he wrote to his parents, I adore war. It is like a big picnic.

The fighting excitement vitalizes everything, every sight and action, and then this incredible light. One loves one's fellow man so much more when one is bent on killing him.

But, I don't know, I mean not everybody's like this. So there's a brilliant account by a German sergeant called Stefan Westmann.

who went on to be a Harley Street doctor, and he was interviewed by the BBC for their brilliant series about the Great War in the nineteen sixties. And he describes in this interview storming enemy trenches and he suddenly comes face to it's a very young man and he suddenly comes face to face with a French soldier and he said um I'm actually not going to do the accident.

Because it's a very moving kind of quote. And he says I realized that he was after my life exactly as I was after his, but I was quicker than he was. I pushed his rifle away and I ran my bayonet through his chest. He fell, putting his hand on the place where it hit him, and then I thrust again. Blood came out of his mouth, and he died. I nearly vomited, my knees were shaking, and they asked me, What's the matter with you? They is his comrades.

And he goes on to say, his comrades were absolutely undisturbed by what had happened. One of them boasted that it had killed a Poilu, that's a Frenchman, with the butt of his rifle. Another one had strangled a French captain, a third had hit somebody over the head with his spade. They were ordinary men like me. One was a tram conductor, another a commercial traveller, two were students, the rest farm workers. ordinary people who would never have thought to harm anybody.

So in other words, these are people who would never have hit somebody over the head with a spade or strangled them in real life, in civilian life. But they've been thrust into this environment and they found something in themselves that they didn't know they had. But Stefan Westman, who's a sergeant, you know, he's got a a a job that involves a degree of responsibility. He doesn't have that. He says, I woke up at night sometimes drenched in sweat. Because I saw the eyes of my fallen adversary.

So people will write home this is an example, a guy from the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders, Captain Aidan Liddle, he's writing unbelievably to his mother and he says all the ground is full of dead bodies, and when the wall of a dugout falls in there's generally a body exposed. One man wanted to cut the ends of some roots that were sticking out of his dugout wall. He discovered they were a corpse's fingers.

His helmet had rolled away, he was showing a grimacing face with no flesh, his skull bare, his eyes eaten, a denture had slid onto his rotting shirt, and out of his gaping mouth a foul animal jumped. Oh God.

Yeah, really, really grim. But what are the chances that you might end up like that, Tom? No. They're smaller than they're smaller than you think. They are much smaller than you think.

So I fell down a massive rabbit hole. There are tons and tons of articles online about this by people who know far more about it, A than I do, and B, I think than is h than is healthy for any human being. And Generally the odds of death for a British soldier in on the Western Front, in the front line are Are about ten percent. So nine out of ten people there will live and one will die. And that is a lot better than the Crimean War, where basically two out of ten died.

Almost every soldier on the front line gets wounded one way or another, and or they come down with disease. You know, at some point you will get trench fever, dysentery, you'll be invalided out at some stage, probably. And of course the difference between this war and previous war is that the dangers are not merely physical, they are mental. So this is a shell shock. Yeah, um I th I sort of have one French trench journal, Le Soucis, quoted by Neil Ferguson in his book The Pity of War.

describes the shelling as a a form of torture that the soldier cannot see the end of. And this is one thing I think, you know, we can imagine what it's like to be very muddy or we can imagine the horror of all the flies or something. But I I guess it's probably very hard for us to imagine what it's like to be under shellfire.

For hours and hours or days and days. They're ap their sort of relentless, relentless pounding. Ernst Junger in Storm of Steel has this very famous description. You must imagine you're securely tied to a post, being menaced by a man swinging a heavy hammer. Now the hammer has been taken back over his head, ready to be swung. Now it's cleaving the air towards you, on the point of touching your skull. Then it has struck the post and the splinters are flying.

that is what it is like to experience heavy shelling in an exposed position. And the poet Siegfried Sassoon, he arrived in France towards the end of nineteen fifteen and became friends with Robert Graves, and was decorated for his exceptional bravery He has these lines in one of his poems, Oh Christ, I want to go out and screech at them to stop. I'm going crazy. I'm going stark, staring mad, because of the guns.

And this, of course, is not uncommon. So even before the end of nineteen fourteen, only months into the war, there are there start to be reports of a lot of British soldiers reporting to the sick bay saying I feel dizzy. I'm you know, they're they're trembling and they don't know why. They have headaches. They have kind of nervous symptoms, as they were called at the time. And the term shell shock was coined in February.

nineteen fifteen, in an article in the Lancet, kind of medical journal, by Captain Charles S. Myers of the Royal Army Medical Corps. And I had a look at it online, you can see it online. And Myers is writing about three cases of soldiers who have had shells explode nearby, and these soldiers ever since have had blurred vision, they've been shivering, they have been crying, they've been in a state of general confusion, And the doctors cannot see an obvious physical cause for it.

And actually interestingly, only forty-eight Germans. So it differs from army to army. Actually the Italians are the worst. They're very harsh on their own men. But these figures, as you know, lamentable as they are, They're a tiny, tiny fraction.

and they said to him, Investigate this new disorder. And Turner wrote back, he wrote his report, he said, It's not just cowardice. It is a form of temporary nervous breakdown, often after soldiers have witnessed a ghastly sight or a harassing experience. The patient becomes nervy, unduly emotional and shaky, and most typical of all, his sleep is disturbed by bad dreams. And actually, we already mentioned Wilfred Owen, the strange meeting poem. Bad dreams are a feature of a lot of war poetry.

meets Wilfred Owen in due course. The two great poets meet each other. Now, senior officers think it's you know, they think it's a real thing, shell shock, but often they say, well, it's maybe the result of an individual weakness. that you have a flaw in your temperament. But actually, most of the men we've mentioned in this episode prove that to be totally wrong. So we mentioned Ernst Junger. Ernst Junger is ridiculously brave and he also loves war.

But he describes in Storm of Steel how there's a point where he becomes so jumpy that when somebody drops a book in the dugout, he'll be reduced to being a a a a gibbering wreck'cause he thinks it's a landing shell. There's a moment in the book where he and his men come under heavy shell fire and he runs away in terror.

And then he meets up with some of the survivors, and I quote, I was finished, I threw myself on the ground and I broke into convulsive sobs while the men stood gloomily around me. This is a very brave and militaristic man doing this. Siegfried Sassoon, so suicidally brave that his men nicknamed him Mad Jack, wins the Military Cross And then he cracks, he publishes this denunciation of the war, he's sent to this hospital.

And then when he's been in the hospital, he comes out of the hospital, he goes back to the front and he fights very bravely again. So, you know, everybody has their kind of breaking point. Robert Graves in Goodbye to All That, he says everyone has a breaking point.

And the way it works is this you've been there a month and you start to show the first signs of shell shock. After nine months, an officer becomes a drag on the other company officers. After twelve months, an officer is and I quote worse than useless. And by the summer of nineteen sixteen, by which point he's been there twelve months.

he can feel it in himself. Quote, My breaking point was near now. It would be a general nervous collapse, with tears and twitchings and dirted trousers. I had seen cases like that. But as it happens, he's wounded by a shell fragment of the Somme, he almost dies, and he's invalided out, and he never comes back. And at that point, he definitely has what we would call shell shock.

The fear of gas obsessed me, any unusual smell, even a sudden strong scent of flowers in a garden was enough to send me trembling, and I couldn't face the sound of heavy shelling now. The noise of a car backfiring would send me flat on my face or running for cover.

The truth is they are in an impossible situation and they they're so there's this urgent demand for men at the front. So they can't give everybody a break every now and again.

sides had experimented with gas before the war, but the Germans had a massive head start because they're a big scientific powerhouse, the biggest in the world. They have the best researchers, they have the best chemical engineers, they have manufacturers like Agva and Bayer and all these kind of companies.

And their um new Supreme Commander, Eric von Falkenhayn, kind of Prussian figure, he says, Look, we're gonna lose if it's a long war. I mean, they know that the Germans, and that their their great gamble has failed. We must try anything urgently to get a breakthrough.

I fear it will produce a tremendous scandal in the world. War has nothing to do with chivalry anymore. The higher civilization rises, the viler man becomes. So he's not an enthusiast for gas. Even so, they decide to go for it and they're going to launch it

On the twenty second of April at Ypres. Now people may remember there's a thing called the Ypres salient, which is basically the front line bulges out a bit. So it's sort of surrounded on three sides and the British are determined to hold it.

and this is where the Germans are gonna make their trial. And at five o'clock that evening, the engineers open the valves on six thousand cylinders of chlorine gas. Yeah, they're waiting for the wind to be in the right direction. The wind blows this yellow kind of cloud. Towards thousands of actually French Algerian troops who are the people in the way. And these Algerian blokes flee in total panic. They're they're blinded, they're screaming for water, they're vomiting blood.

as the gas is basically eating into their lungs. Now, as it turns out, even though this opens a hole in the Allied Lions, the Germans don't have enough reserves to exploit it properly. Two days later they have another go, more gas. This time they are targeting Canadians. And again the gas inspires utter horror and panic.

So this is one of many sort of awful eyewitness accounts. I've never seen men so terror stricken. They were tearing at their throats, their eyes were glaring out. Blood was streaming from those who were wounded and they were tumbling over each other. Those who fell couldn't get up because of the panic of the men following them, and eventually they were piled up two or three high in the trench. And it's this that's the context for the poem that we began with.

in Flanders Fields. So it's against this background that McCrae writes those famous words. And he was from Ontario, rural Ontario. He was a very distinguished doctor and a professor of pathology. He'd volunteered in the Burr War, so he he loved Britain. I applaud him. Uh he volunteered again in nineteen fourteen, even though he was forty one, and he became the chief medical officer of the first brigade of the Canadian Field Artillery. So he's in the thick of all this.

And on the second of May a friend of his, who was called Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, was killed by a shell, and McCrae presided over his burial service, and it's at that point at his burial service that McCrae noticed these poppies growing around the grave. And the next day, I mean there are multiple different kind of apocryphal stories about this, but the most common is McCrae is sitting in the back of an ambulance near Ypres and he's just thinking about these poppies.

And he scribbles this poem in his notepad. And then the story goes that he re he he cr he read it to some of the other guys and then he crumpled it up and threw it away. And one of the other guys picked it up and said, Don't throw it away, it's actually good. he ended up sending it to the humorous magazine Punch, where it was published in uh December nineteen fifteen and it was a massive hit. And it was used in British propaganda, in Canadian, in American propaganda.

I mean Canada in particular became a real kind of sensation. Um, McCrae himself d uh unfortunately died in the last year of the war. He died of pneumonia and meningitis. Uh but the poem, as you we said right at the beginning, lives on well it lives on I mean it's quoted every November, isn't it, in Britain, certainly, probably in Canada too, I imagine.

Anyway, back to the gas. Gas is one of a series of innovations. So massive artillery bombardments, I suppose U boats, tanks, all of these things that haven't really been been seen before. But gas is the one. that frightens soldiers the most because it's this silent killer, invisible killer. You know, you don't see it coming and it and and as soon as it's on you, you're dead.

And people were doing this. I mean, this is what they had t this is what they did. And then in nineteen sixteen they issued what was called a small box respirator that protects you against chlorine and phosgene, which are the two common gases that are being used at this point. The one thing it doesn't protect you against is mustard gas, because mustard gas blisters your skin. So you know the famous painting by John Singer Sargent

They're all in a line. That's mustard gas that they are suffering from, not um chlorine. Now you said it wasn't cricket. Sir John French, the well known poll troon, he agrees with you, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force.

And so this sets the stage for the biggest British attack of the whole of the year, nineteen fifteen. It's in Luce, which is uh just south of um Lille in France. Sometimes Tom you hear people saying that Luce might be in Belgium, but it's not, is it? No.

Anyway, when they finally ordered the troops to advance, They find the Germans very much ungassed, and their artillery bombardment and this is a theme that will run for the next few years, their artillery and bombardment, which they thought will break the German barbed wire and weaken their defences, has completely failed to do so. So basically Luce, which goes on for the next two weeks, is your classic example of a Western Front offensive.

where generals are throwing men against positions that turn out to be much better defender than they thought and they're getting absolutely nowhere. It ends with sixty thousand British casualties. only twenty five thousand German casualties. It is one of the great Allied disasters of the first year or so of the war, and the result of this is that finally Sir John French

who was being useless, frankly, from the very beginning. And if you remember he actually wanted to to to abandon the French completely. He's finally booted out as commander in chief and he's replaced with Sir Douglas Haig.

John Kipling was sixteen years old when the war broke out, and his father was desperate to get him a commission. But John was rejected because of severe short sightedness. Basically the medical board said he would be totally at sea, you know, because he can't see anything. But Kipling soror pulled all kinds of strings with his old friend Lord Roberts, and he got John commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Irish Guards.

And on the second day of the Battle of Luce, John Kipling was reported missing in action, and he was, and I quote, last seen stumbling in the mud in search of his glasses, which had fallen off during the attack. And Roger Kipling was devastated by this. He never recovered. And when he published his epitaphs for the war in nineteen nineteen, the theme of dead sons run and bereaved parents runs right through it. And the most famous of all these epitaphs that Kipling wrote

is uh a couplet that's often seen as a kind of epitaph for the war more generally. If any question why we died, tell them because our fathers lied.

Right. Uh there'll be a lot more young men uh to be lost, ad sadly, because there are five more episodes to come in this dramatic series, all of them set over the course of this one tumultuous year, nineteen fifteen. So next time a new combatant enters the arena. This is Italy. We tell the story of how Italy was cajoled into war by the proto fascist poet Gabriele D'Annunzio.

and of the dreadful fate that awaited the Italians when they went up into the mountains to fight the Austro Hungarian army. Then next week, two of the great controversial stories of the wars that's the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U boat and the execution of the British nurse and alleged spy, Edith Cavill.

And then the third week finally we get to one of the great military disasters in all history, and that is the Allied attempt to um land at Gallipoli. And of course if you're a member of the Rest is History Club You can hear those five episodes straight away. And if you go to the rest is history dot com, you can join the club and only by going to the rest is history dot com will you get the full benefits of being in the club. So lots to look forward to, Tom.

about Weimar, Germany, and in particular, the town of Weimar through history, and Professor Adam Smith

All things Persian with Dan Jackson about the pit of death. And I will be talking to friend of the show, Willie Dalrymple, about the links between ancient India and Greece and Rome.