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

17:40Dominic Sandbrook:Yes, exactly. so by now i mean he's pretty tired they've been on the road a long time he's carrying they're all carrying these heavy kit bags and they've hung everything else on their belts he's got on his belt revolver field glasses compass whiskey flask wire cutters periscope and a lot more he's struck by how wet and how slippery the trench is they can hear the hiss of rifle bullets coming at them and actually somebody says to him at what point there's no point in ducking if you hear a bullet. Because if you can hear the bullet, it means it's gone by you. So it will kill you before you hear it.

18:17Dominic Sandbrook:So if you hear it, no point, you know, you're fine. Anyway, they trudge down this trench and they get to a dugout. And that is the battalion headquarters where the colonel is waiting for them. And Graves is surprised how cozy it is. So they duck in and it's that classic scene that you've seen. So for our British listeners, you'd have seen it in Blackadder Goes Forth, the comedy series. It's quite cozy. There's like a nice ornamental lamp. There's a table with a tablecloth the uh the people inside are having their dinner or whatever they're eating off polished silver there's a gramophone playing records there are easy chairs so the colonel his senior officers are having their dinner could i ask a really dumb question yeah where are they

18:55Tom Holland:getting the electricity from or is it a wind-up gramophone i might be a wind-up yeah i don't i

19:00Dominic Sandbrook:don't actually know it occurred to me when i said there was a gramophone so the adjutant says to graves right you and your platoon are going off to sea company under captain dunn and good news for you he's the soundest man in the battalion top shows so tremendous off they go again into the trench network it's now raining and it's very muddy still very dark they see their first casualty they pass a stretcher party and they're carrying a man who's got a sandbag over his face and the guide says oh who's that and one of the stretcher bearers says it's sergeant gallagher he thought he saw a fritz in no man's land near our wire sergeant gallagher it turns out fired a percussion bomb at this shape but sergeant gallagher aimed a little bit too low the bomb hit the top of the parapet it bounced back and it exploded in his face no that's the kind of thing i'd do and the stretcher bearer says riley poor silly bugger it's not worth sweating to get him back he's put paid to whatever and indeed it turns out that sergeant gallagher dies what an awful way to go terrible wound yeah must have i mean there must have been so many people thousands upon thousands who died in similar ways.

20:08Dominic Sandbrook:Anyway, at last, they reach their company, C Company, and the dugout that belongs to Captain Dunn. So this is, Robert Graves says, it's a two-room timber-built shelter in the side of a trench. It's a very similar scene. There's another table with a tablecloth. There's a bookcase. There's whiskey bottles and whatnot. And Captain Dunn is waiting for them. So he's Graves' superior officer. And Graves is astonished to find that Captain Dunn is actually two months younger than he is. That is to say, Captain Dunn is himself only 19. And Captain Dunn is your absolute classic public school, jolly, breezy officer.

20:51Dominic Sandbrook:Hugh Laurie in Blackadder. So you're prepared by Hugh Laurie. His opening words to Graves are, well, what's the news from England? Oh, sorry, first I must introduce you. This is Walker, clever chap, comes from Cambridge, fancies himself as an athlete. This is Price, who only joined us yesterday, but we like him. He brought some damn good whiskey with him. Well, how long is this war going to last and who's winning? We don't know a thing out here.

21:13Tom Holland:So he's a bit like asking the score in the test match or something. Exactly.

21:17Dominic Sandbrook:And Graves says, well, this is the news from England. And then Dunn says, OK, well, let me tell you what it's like out here in the trenches. Dunn has this tremendous line. He says, we have absolutely nothing to do with the French, except when there's a battle on. And then we generally let each other down. Well, we've seen that was true, haven't we?

21:32Tom Holland:from the series we did on the opening months of the war.

21:35Dominic Sandbrook:And Dunn says this is basically how it's going to work. We have breakfast at 8am, then we clean the trenches and we check our rifles. We work all morning. And what he means by work, he says the majority of our time here, we work on the trench. We dig, we reinforce the parapet, we try to get rid of some of the vermin, we do all this kind of thing. Then at 12, we have lunch, we work again from 1 till 6. So they're basically like a kind of group of navvies or something and then we have then the men feed again we have stand two at dusk for about an hour we work all night and then we stand two for an hour before dawn and that's the general program sounds fun it's not the end of the world right i mean it's better than being in a coal mine right well as we will discuss so graves gets a little bit of sleep and then at 1 a.m uh dun wakes him up and he says i'll give you a tour so they have a look over the parapet very gingerly and graves gets his first glimpse of no man's land it's dark and he can hardly see anything but a little later when it's lighter he gets a periscope and he has a look and he can see that the german trenches that's marked by a line of sandbags they're just 400 yards away and although he doesn't really say this in his memoir this must be a spine tingling moment after all this journey after all these months of waiting you finally see the enemy line it's just 400 yards you know you could you could walk to it within minutes although you'd get shot and the no man's land as yet is not kind of churned

23:02Tom Holland:up mud is it there are still flowers to be seen no he says a flat meadow with cornflowers and

23:06Dominic Sandbrook:whatnot long grass a few shell holes there's a wreck of an airplane and he can see barbed wire theirs and ours but that's it he has another little doze and he listens to the men grumbling about their lice a big issue for them we'll come back to this and then they have breakfast back in the dugout bacon and eggs coffee toast and marmalade so not bad and just as they're getting stuck in dunn's manservant his batman his man called kingdom rushes in his eyes blank with horror and excitement and he says gas sir gas they're using gas and dunn says the most british thing that anybody's ever said he says very well kingdom bring me my respirator from the other room and another pot of marmalade can you can you eat marmalade while you're wearing a gas mask I think marmalade surely is the priority, no?

23:55Dominic Sandbrook:You'd smear it all over your tube, wouldn't you? If you want to find out what happened next, I think the thing to do is to read the book, because I don't want to do the whole book. But I thought we would maybe talk about some of the things that have come up in Graves' account so far. So first of all, the trenches. So the trenches, as you said, Tom, they are relatively new. You know, when Graves arrives, they are only months old. they were improvised they were cut into the clay and the chalk in a hurry and a key thing for people to remember the allies when they dug their trenches did not think well we're going to be here for four years so we better make them good they actually thought we might be here for a couple of weeks and then we're going to hopefully resume the offensive and drive the germans further back east and are they still thinking that at this point i think by now so we're in may 1915 there probably is an awareness that this is this is why they're working so hard on the trenches that they're going to be here for a little bit longer so the way the trenches work you've got these kind of barricades and parapets that are built really of earth of soil and of rubble and people would reinforce them with wooden planks and with sandbags and then they would lie in the ground of the trench with these wooden planks these duckboards and they gave them names they would often name after london street so oxford street regent street and whatnot and an intersection would be named after famous junction in london so hyde park corner oxford circus and so on elephant and castle yeah i mean i suppose conceivably probably not probably not and they would also make up names for the german lines opposite them so there's a bit in siegfried sesun where siegfried sesun says our objective was pint trench taking bitter and beer and clearing ale and vat and also pilsen lane so they named them all the german uh trenches all after beers they're on the German trenches.

25:47Dominic Sandbrook:Everybody agrees the German trenches are much better. They're deeper, they are safer, they're better defended, they're more comfortable. And the reason for that, obviously, is the Germans are there for the long haul. They're like, what we have, we hold.

26:01Tom Holland:So it's not just about the Germans being better at building things.

26:04Dominic Sandbrook:Maybe they are better at building things, I don't know.

26:06Tom Holland:I mean, they use reinforced concrete, don't they? Which seems a kind of typical hum trick.

26:13Dominic Sandbrook:well when people do take german trenches they're stunned how good they are they have kind of ceiling beams they have nice sort of cladded walls cinemas in the dugouts they have kind of skylights and alcoves sort of decorative alcoves and things and they go really deep don't they i

26:29Tom Holland:mean some of them go so deep that actually they're kind of impervious to to anything the british can

26:34Dominic Sandbrook:fire at them well this is one of the issues when the british think oh we'll just clear the german trenches with artillery bombardment they don't realize just how deep-seated these german trenches are graves talks the one thing he obviously talks about in the trench which is the most common thing that people associate uh with them is mud and this is the aspect of trench life that soldiers mention the most in subsequent accounts so there's a diary of the war by a guy called captain alexander stewart which was published in 2009 he joined the scottish rifles in uh 1915 he says of the mud mud is a bad description it's not mud the soil was more like a thick slime when walking one sank several inches it was difficult to withdraw the feet the consequence was that men who were standing still or sitting down got embedded in the slime and were unable to extricate themselves and as the trenches were so shallow they had to stay where they were all day god imagine being stuck there but here's the thing you stuck there and if it's in the middle of a battle you're you're a sitting duck and there are a lot of accounts actually uh reading through soldiers accounts there's loads of them where they say blogs got stuck and the germans were basically using him for target practice or sort of dropping shells getting closer and closer to him and he couldn't get out because he's stuck in all this mud but there's worse things than mud so graves remember i said he was dozing and he heard the people talking about lice lice are a big issue but there's also flies and fleas so flies alexander stewart again he talks about filthy fat dirty flies drawn by the dead bodies well the flies must be i mean it must be all their christmases come at once exactly yeah in the company headquarters dug out he says they were massed on the ceiling like a swarm of bees and when a man was asleep they would settle all around

28:15Tom Holland:his mouth and over his face so the corpses would be full of maggots i guess exactly uh fleas

28:22Dominic Sandbrook:everybody had fleas you pretty much got fleas within weeks they would get into underclothes and what the soldiers would do is they would get candles and they would kind of run the candle the sort of lit candle along the seams of their underwear and as one puts it you could hear the eggs crackling as you kind of burned your own underpants with this candle and then the lice this is a french stretcher bearer called Raymond Clément he said without telling anybody I take my clothes off and i see hundreds of lice and lava jumping out at me they're everywhere in my shirt my trousers my underwear etc i shake my clothes as much as i can and i finally wear them again the only choice we have is to wait for the next relief and then to boil our clothes so is this a

29:07Tom Holland:regular occurrence that people are taking their clothes off and shaking the lice out do you think

29:11Dominic Sandbrook:yeah i think it is i mean you're live you there's no you know sort of personal discretion as it were there's not much place for that on the western front really you're you're going to the toilet all together on a kind of plank and whatnot and you'd rather be naked than bitten to death by fleas of course and the lice carry something called trench fever and trench fever is an infectious disease it's extremely common in the trenches and the worst cases can be fatal so jr r tolkien was invalided out at the somme with with a very severe case of trench fever and ironically the trench fever probably saved his life because if he'd stayed on in the somme he could easily have died a.a.

29:49Dominic Sandbrook:milne had trench fever c.s lewis had trench fever god it's hard to think of a milne isn't it with trench fever winnie the pooh with lice he probably would have had fleas certainly well what about winnie the pooh with rats so graves has a section in his memoir where he's talking about rats and he says there was a new officer who turned up and he his first night he goes to bed and he wakes and he hears the scuffle on his bed there were two rats on his blankets tussling for the possession of a severed hand this was thought a this was thought a great joke says graves and again the rats are so common they are ubiquitous so like the flies they're drawn by the dead bodies they become huge because they're eating dead soldiers yeah there are so many accounts of them being as big as cats and often the men deliberately do not kill them because they will they will just be left there to putrefy and they will stink and spread disease or the dead bodies will draw other rats to kind of feed on them so this is another tommy writing home in the night we have heaps of company rats and mice and the other livestock every time you wake the rats are fighting and squeaking all over you the other night one took

31:01Tom Holland:a flying jump onto my face there's a famous poem by iovan rosenberg called break of day in the trenches which kind of almost implies a fondness for what he calls a queer sardonic rat and he imagines the rat brushing up against his hand and then going and brushing up against a german hand say droll rat they would shoot you if they knew your cosmopolitan sympathies so it may be that in you know a bit like christopher robin befriending a piglet if you're in the trench you might befriend a rat i mean i think i mean well you might tom i don't think i think i draw the line at befriending a rat frankly i take friendship where i can get it that's fair all this sounds

31:42Dominic Sandbrook:pretty nightmarish and some listeners are thinking this doesn't sound like a great laugh so you are um muddy you're wet you're cold you've got rats there's also the shells going off all around you and it's also very boring there's a lot of waiting around so there's a young german writer called ernst junger who we will feature more after the break and junger arrived very excited and very idealistic 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 of the regiment we become thoroughly disillusioned Instead of the danger that we had hoped for, we'd be given dirt, work and sleepless nights.

32:16Dominic Sandbrook: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 21st century struggle to get into their heads. for a lot of soldiers particularly working class men from poorer backgrounds who worked in factories or you know in mines or had back-breaking you know 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 yeah i mean all that marmalade brilliant yeah but your thing is the food really it's a little bit like when we did the titanic episodes and we were talking about life in third class you know So it might look bad to us, but to people at the time, you're getting tins of what's called bully beef.

33:12Dominic Sandbrook:You've got biscuits, you've got bread and jam, you have regular, you have a lot of tea, you have kind of bits, you have rum, you have cigarette rations, all of this kind of thing. there's a lot of time for chatting and for general bants there's a lot of sleep you uh write letters you play cards is that worse than working in a mine not necessarily no so because you're at constant risk of death in a mine aren't you of course you are and you're outdoors and a lot of people actually love the outdoor element so here's a really good example here's a guy called Private Ernest Todd looking back at the war and he says on a nice summer's day you could think there wasn't a war on really early in the morning you'd have the first planes coming over and a general air of barm 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 fire step and talk and sing towards the evening they get sentimental talking about their homes yes during those summer months of 1915 you could forget that there was a war on you really could and part of the reason for that is actually you think of the first world war and you think of the trenches and you sort of imagine that people just either digging or they're going over the top but actually a tommy 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 organize lectures and debates they're reading there's some graves in uh in his book

34:54Tom Holland:over counts a cricket match where they they use i think a dead parrot in a cage as the wicket um and then they get kind of strapped by a plane so machine gun fire stops play but it's you know Yeah, it's nice to think it's not so muddy that you can't play cricket.

35:13Dominic Sandbrook:There's loads of stuff like that. I mean, I think the reason they play football more famously rather than cricket is that it's easier to play football. Yeah, jumpers for goalposts. Exactly. But there's also, I think, a real sense of camaraderie. Again, you get that in Graves' book, you know, the affectionate way that he talks about his platoon. this sort of sense that um i mean this is one of the most common things that people said afterwards about life in the trenches that barriers of class and region and indeed nation within the united kingdom end up being broken down so to quote william holmes of the london regiment i mean it's this is all kind of cliched stuff but of course 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

35:59Tom Holland:tom yeah well like um hashing call which is not far from where they're stationed i suppose not

36:02Dominic Sandbrook:far at all but of course there is one aspect of life on the western run that we haven't mentioned at all because they haven't actually been sent there to have a holiday no they haven't actually been sent there to make friends with people from other from other towns and to play football they have been sent there for one reason and one reason only which is to fight and kill the enemy so what was it like to go over the top to kill another human being in your country's name and are the Germans about to unleash a secret weapon to end the deadlock in the trenches and win the war Tom will find out after the break

36:43Tom Holland:this episode is brought to you by the times and by the sunday times now if there is one thing that history and indeed Bob Dylan teaches us it is that the times they are always a changing and Dominic I guess we're living in changing times now what with America attacking Iran and oil crises so do you think that the lessons of that for Keir Starmer are rosy so looking at the career of Edward Heath for instance who was prime minister in the previous oil crisis it didn't work out

37:13Dominic Sandbrook:brilliantly for Ted Heath to be honest actually he and Keir Starmer I think are quite similar They're from relatively humble backgrounds and there's a slight sense of floundering, which they have in common. Their bigger point is you never really know what's around the corner, do you? Because when you look at history, the future is always pretty uncertain. But, you know, the facts, they shouldn't be uncertain.

37:31Tom Holland:And that, of course, is where the Times and the Sunday Times come in.

37:35Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, and I would say that understanding the news is absolutely vital when you're navigating an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world. So to subscribe to The Times and The Sunday Times, visit thetimes.com.

37:56Tom Holland:Come on, man, get up. We're moving out. I woke up in dew-sodden grass. Through a stuttering swathe of machine-gun fire, we plunged back into our communication trench and moved to a position on the edge of the wood previously held by the French. A sweetish smell and a bundle hanging in the wire caught my attention. In the rising mist, I leaped out of the trench and found a shrunken French corpse. Flesh like moldering fish gleamed greenishly through splits in the shredded uniform. Turning round, I took a step back in horror. Next to me, a figure was crouched against a tree. it still had gleaming french leather harness and on its back was a fully packed haversack topped by a round mess tin empty eye sockets and a few strands of hair on the bluish black skull indicated so that the man was not among the living so that was um a german obviously um And it's a man we've already met in the first half, the writer Ernst Jünger.

39:11Tom Holland:And he's describing the fighting at Les Épages near Verdun in April 1915. And it comes from his memoir, Storm of Steel, which is one of the great war memoirs, not just of the First World War, but of all time, isn't it? So, Dominic, probably worth giving a character sketch. I mean, he's an amazing, amazing man.

39:35Dominic Sandbrook:Extraordinary life. He has an incredible life, Ernst Jünger. You know, you can trace the whole of German 20th century history through his life, really. He was born in Heidelberg in 1895, and his father was a rich kind of chemist, kind of chemical engineer. And he went to boarding school, like Robert Graves. But he was typical of kind of German youth before the First World War. He joined a nationalist youth group called the Wunderwürgel. 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.

40:08Dominic Sandbrook:Then he ran away to join the French Foreign Legion, and then he came back. And then on the 1st of August 1914, that's the day Germany entered the war, he joined up. He was so keen to get stuck in. So he's 19, like Graves. And later on, after he'd published this book, Storm of Steel, he became this incredibly controversial German literary figure. So all through his life, he was very militaristic and very nationalistic, but he never joined the Nazis. He did serve as an army captain in Paris in the 1940s, but he was appalled by the anti-Semitism of the Nazis, even though he'd himself been pretty anti-Semitic in the 20s.

40:48Dominic Sandbrook:He then was quite close to the Stauffenberg plotters, so the people who tried to blow Hitler up in 1944. He was thrown out of the army, but not executed.

40:57Tom Holland:He becomes an early enthusiast for LSD.

40:59Dominic Sandbrook:He does, exactly.

41:00Tom Holland:and also he's very keen entomologist he had an inordinate fondness for beetles i think he had about kind of seven types of beetle named after him or something improbable and then he died at

41:10Dominic Sandbrook:the age of 102 so in i think 1998 god that's mad isn't it yeah crazy anyway storm of steel his book which i really recommend it's it's very different in tone from robert graves's memoir even though they're the same age and they're writing about exactly the same point in time because younger is much more interested in what it's like of the excitement and the adrenaline and the experience of fighting and battle. So it really captures his book, the adrenaline, the noise, the sensations, and this sort of dreamlike confusion and surrealism, which you had a sort of taste of there when he sees those French bodies.

41:45So in this particular occasion, we're in April 1915,

41:50Dominic Sandbrook:his unit has been pushed forward into the French lines. So the Germans have punched a little hole in the French lines and his unit has 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.

42:09Tom Holland:Such an eerie image, isn't it?

42:11Dominic Sandbrook:It is. But the really eerie thing, he realizes that they've been there for ages and that the French must have just not bothered to bury. Poor from the French, I think, not to bury their dead. Anyway, they haven't buried these books. Well, especially since it's so muddy, you just roll them. sink into the gloop so what he does you know don't forget this is the middle of the of a battle he has a little stroll he looks for souvenirs he finds again this sort of dreamlike quality he finds a suitcase that's sort of been blown open and one of the things in the suitcase is this beautiful striped shirt and he takes off his army tunic and he puts the shirt on i relished the pleasant tickle of clean cloth against my skin he says 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 so it's very dreamlike still They go into this woods, they go into a clearing and they sit down.

43:20Dominic Sandbrook:The sun is setting. They're just sort of chatting and they think, well, this is probably it for today. And it's at this point, it's a fantastic scene in the book. He says, our ribble conversations were suddenly cut off by a marrow freezing cry. 20 yards behind us, clumps of earth whirled up out of a white cloud and smacked into the boughs. The crash echoed through the woods. Stricken eyes looked at each other. Bodies 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 it's 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 to his hometown of heidelberg but then he comes back doesn't he

45:04Tom Holland:and he just keeps getting wounded throughout the war and don't the germans have kind of weird thing you get a medal for every wound you have and he ends up with i think the gold medal for having

45:13Dominic Sandbrook:been shot 10 times or whatever he's incredibly brave and he loves it you know when we're describing this the great god pain blokes with their heads heart kind of blown open all of this you might think gosh how horrific how terrible what an unbelievably awful scene a nightmare but it actually makes junger feel more enthusiastic about the war not less because it makes him feel alive yeah it makes him feel alive it's it's a kind of intensity of experience that he wouldn't have had otherwise and when he gets back to germany so on that break you might think when he goes back invalided out you know it would make him dread to go back not a bit of it he says to go back and see his native land makes him feel that germany is eminently worth our blood and our lives for the first time i sense that this war was more than just a great adventure so it's a great adventure but it's even better than that because it's in the noble cause and the other thing that strikes him at the end of this scene which is brilliantly done you know he's seen people killed he's seen combat he's seen explosions and stuff but he he's seen dead French but he hasn't seen a single live Frenchman he hasn't seen a single live opponent and actually you could go through the war for a very long time and you could see people shot around you and you could shoot you know you could cause death to other people but you might never actually lay eyes upon them and that's one of the great innovations i think of the first world war because death is coming

46:35Tom Holland:from a distance or it's coming from the lice or the rats or whatever you know it's kind of

46:40Dominic Sandbrook:and stuff and both these things are very typical so first of all most soldiers never engage in hand-to-hand combat and actually when you look at the stats it is clear most soldiers never killed anybody and in fact two-thirds of the casualties in the first world war were caused by artillery fire they're not caused by one person as it were deliberately killing another person that they can see in front of them and younger is not untypical in finding battle enjoyable so there's an example that reminded me of a one of our um one of our goal hanger comrades tom so a man called julian grenfall who went to eton and baliol like rory stewart and he was killed on the western front in may 1915 and before he was killed he wrote to his parents i adore war it is like a big picnic the fighting excitement vitalizes everything every sight and action and then this incredible light one loves one's fellow man so much more when one is bent on killing him because he was a poet

47:38Tom Holland:wasn't he as well he was a poet yeah because he was also a professional soldier do you think that might have made a difference um is he more seasoned comes perhaps as less as less of a shock to him because he's already fought in battle don't know maybe i don't know i think i think

47:53Dominic Sandbrook:there are a lot of people i think it's a question of temperament as much as anything i think you don't know until you get there actually it's like that classic thing about what makes you a coward or brave you don't know until you've been in that environment you can do all the training in the world but it comes down to i don't know you can be conditioned i suppose i guess military historians would say you could be you can be conditioned but i don't know i mean not everybody's like this so there's a brilliant account by a german sergeant called stefan westman who went on to be a harley street doctor and he was interviewed by the bbc for their brilliant series about the great war in the 1960s and he describes in this interview storming enemy trenches and he suddenly comes face he'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 a 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 i'd 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 he 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 traveler 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 and civilian life but they've been thrust into this environment and they found something in themselves they didn't know they had but stefan westman who's a sergeant you know he's got 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

50:01Tom Holland:oh so it's like the um the wilfred owen poem where what's it i am the enemy i am the enemy

50:06Dominic Sandbrook:you killed my friend exactly really moving and strange poem they sees him in a dream doesn't he

50:12Tom Holland:the man that he had killed yeah the end of a long tunnel and i suppose whether you kill or not you

50:17Dominic Sandbrook:just have to get used to the fact there's going to be a lot of death and a lot of killing um we were talking about the trenches i mean one thing we didn't mention this fighting can be so fierce sometimes that it's impossible to clear the bodies they're left in no man's land or they're hastily buried in the side of the trenches so people will write home this is an example a guy from the argon and sutherland highlanders captain aid and little he's writing unbelievably to his mother and he says all the ground is full of dead bodies and when the wall of a dugout falls in there's generally a body exposed one man wanted to cut the ends of some roots that were sticking out of his dugout wall he discovered they were a corpse's fingers because i see on this that lots of exclamation marks after that how about that mater imagine writing that to your mum and then there's a french soldier he describes have just outside their trench dead bodies lay for a month one evening jack on patrol saw enormous rats fleeing from under their faded coats they were fat from human meat his heart pounding he crawled towards a dead man this is jack who's on patrol his helmet had rolled away he was showing a grimacing face with no flesh his skull bare his eyes eaten a denture had slid onto his rotting shirt and out of his gaping mouth a foul animal jumped oh

51:32Tom Holland:Oh, God. Yeah.

51:35Dominic Sandbrook:Really, really grim. But what are the chances that you might end up like that, Tom?

51:39Tom Holland:In my case, I think fairly high.

51:41Dominic Sandbrook:No, they're smaller than you think. They're much smaller than you think. So I fell down a massive rabbit hole. There are tons and tons of articles online about this by people who know far more about it, A, than I do, and B, I think, than is healthy for any human being. And generally, the odds of death for a British soldier on the Western Front, in the front line, are about 10%. So nine out of 10 people there will live and one will die. And that is a lot better than the Crimean War, where basically two out of 10 died.

52:14Tom Holland:Or the Battle of Cannae.

52:15Dominic Sandbrook:Right, where lots and lots of people die. But if you're French, the odds are higher. 20 % of French soldiers die and about 25 % of Germans. And why the difference? I was thinking about this. Why is this? Well, the Germans obviously lose the war. I mean, that is a pretty big difference. And of course, they lose it in circumstances where they launch a massive offensive. Lots of you are shot when you're attacking. So they launch a massive offensive in 1918. They're driven back and a lot of them die in the course of 1918. The French...

52:47Tom Holland:I suppose the British don't have a Verdun, do they?

52:50Dominic Sandbrook:The Somme is pretty bad, but Verdun is a charnel house. well we were talking about that maybe next year um in 2027 when we get to 1916 um so a lot of done i suppose i mean i i don't have an answer actually maybe um military historians will have an answer about this big difference but the chances are that you would be a casualty one way or another so almost every soldier on the front line gets wounded one way or another and or they come down with disease you know at some point you will get trench fever dysentery you'll be invalided out at some stage probably and of course the difference between this war and previous wars that the dangers are not merely physical they are mental so this is shell shock yeah um i serve one french trench journal le soucis quoted by neil fergus in his book the pity of war describes the shelling as a form of torture that the soldier cannot see the end of and this is one thing i think you know we can imagine what it's like to be very muddy or we can imagine the horror of all the flies or something but i guess it probably very hard for us to imagine what it's like to be under shell fire for hours and hours or days and days they're at that 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 1915 and became friends with Robert Graves and was decorated for his exceptional bravery he has these lines in one of his poems oh Christ I want to go out and screech at them to stop.

54:45Dominic Sandbrook:I'm going crazy. I'm going stark, staring mad because of the guns. And this, of course, is not uncommon. So even before the end of 1914, only months into the war, there are starting to be reports of a lot of British soldiers reporting to the sickbay saying, I feel dizzy. They're trembling and they don't know why. They have headaches. They have kind of nervous symptoms as they were called at the time and the term shell shock was coined in february 1915 in an article in the lancet it's a medical journal by captain charles s myers at the royal army medical corps and i had a look at it like 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've been crying they've been a state of general confusion and the doctors cannot see an obvious physical cause for it so dominic the the stereotype

55:48Tom Holland:is that the british high command regard this as nonsense and think that the chaps should man up um is that actually the case or is it a little bit more nuanced i'm guessing the latter it is

56:01Dominic Sandbrook:more nuanced so this is part of the sort of um caricature i mean you alluded to it in the first half that the generals with their tremendous moustaches are sitting in castles kind of eating elaborate meals and just throwing their men into a meat grinder into the meat grinder heedlessly and that they are incredibly reactionary and stupid that they are donkeys leading lions and all of this so the figure that you often see that the fact that people often bring up they say a lot of men were executed for desertion and cowardice when really they were suffering from shell shock so 306 British and imperial soldiers were executed for cowardice 650 Frenchmen and actually interestingly only 48 Germans so it differs from army to army actually the Italians are the worst they're very harsh on their own men but these figures as you know lamentable as they are

56:55Tom Holland:they're a tiny tiny fraction right because we're talking about millions of competence right so there were six million British Empire troops and of those only 306 are executed for cowardice I

57:08Dominic Sandbrook:mean that's 306 too many you might say but it's still not that many and actually what that might suggest is the authorities are more nuanced and more more sensitive to this than you might assume and in fact they are because in May 1915 the war office sent a doctor to the front Dr Aldrin Turner and they said to him investigate this new disorder and Turner wrote back he wrote his report he said it's not just cowardice it is a form of temporary nervous breakdown often after soldiers have witnessed a ghastly sight or harassing experience the patient becomes nervy and duly emotional and shaky and most typical of all his sleep is disturbed by bad dreams and actually we already mentioned wilfred owen the strange meeting poem bad dreams are a feature of a lot of war poetry

57:54Tom Holland:this is following on from an episode we did on the battle of marathon and there is an account in herodotus um of someone at the battle of marathon who gets what is often described as shell shock it's often described as the first instance in recorded history of this condition yeah surely

58:10Dominic Sandbrook:it must have i mean there must be men at waterloo who were completely traumatized or the crimea or something it's utterly implausible that there weren't or indeed ashincourt frankly these some of these battles must have been terrifying uh experiences that recurred in men's dreams

58:25Tom Holland:for years for decades afterwards yeah the soldier at marathon sees a kind of colossal figure moving through the the ranks um and ends up he ends up blind from the shock of it well

58:36Dominic Sandbrook:so what the war office experts can't agree on is whether the cause is mental or physical and back in britain they set up at least 20 specialist hospitals to treat what is then called neurasthenia and the most famous of these is craig lockhart in edinburgh this is the hospital in Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy. And this is where Siegfried Sassoon meets Wilfred Owen in Due Course. The two great poets meet each other.

59:04Tom Holland:Now, senior officers think it's, you know, they think it's a real thing, shell shock.

59:08Dominic Sandbrook: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 Jünger. Ernst Jünger is ridiculously brave. and he also loves war but he describes in storm of steel how there's a point where he becomes so jumpy that when somebody drops a book in the dugout he'll be reduced to being a gibbering wreck because he thinks it's a landing shell there's a moment in the book where he and his men come under heavy shell fire and he runs away in terror and then he meets up with some of the survivors and i quote i was finished i threw myself on the ground and i broke into convulsive sobs while the men stood gloomily around me.

59:53Dominic Sandbrook: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.

1:00:27Dominic Sandbrook:After nine months, an officer becomes a drag on the other company offices. After 12 months, an officer is, and I quote, worse than useless. And by the summer of 1916, by which point he's been there 12 months, he can feel it in himself. Quote, my breaking point was near now. It would be a general nervous collapse with tears and twitchings and 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.

1:01:06Dominic Sandbrook: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.

1:01:19Tom Holland:Do the military authorities start to factor this in? I mean, do they start to think, well, after a year or two, soldiers are going to be useless? Or do they just carry on anyway?

1:01:28Dominic Sandbrook:Good question. I think they're aware of it, but I think the demands of manpower are so great. People always have this idea, I think, of the First World War generals as just this sort of boorish, brutal idiots. But actually, when you look at their life stories and their lives away from the war, often these are quite cultivated, intelligent kind of men. The truth is, they are in an impossible situation, and they're so... there's this urgent demand for men at the front, so they can't give everybody a break every now and again.

1:01:58Tom Holland:And it's what we were saying right at the start, that they are facing a situation, a strategic situation, that is so imponderable that they are just groping around for answers.

1:02:10Dominic Sandbrook:Indeed, and this brings us perfectly to one of the first answers they come up with. so graves just mentioned it and this is the secret weapon that the germans come up with in the early months of 1915 to try to break this deadlock and this is gas now both sides had experimented with gas before the war but the germans had a massive head start because they're big scientific powerhouse the biggest in the world they have the best researchers they have the best chemical engineers they have manufacturers like agfa and buyer and all these kind of

1:02:42Tom Holland:companies i mean this is maybe but it's still cheating isn't it but it's not cricket it's i

1:02:48Dominic Sandbrook:don't think it is cheating actually because the hay convention of 1899 outlawed using projectiles that would be solely used for asphyxiating or deleterious gases but the germans get their lawyers to look at this and the lawyers say as long as you're not using projectiles that have been made solely for that purpose there's nothing else has been outlawed and their um new supreme commander eric von falkenhain 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 great gamble has failed we must try anything urgently to get a breakthrough i mean he has the vibe of a man who would approve of mustard gas that's harsh that's harsh the name the look i mean to be fair the british end up using gas too would you say that of douglas haig probably or sir john french i definitely have sir john french

1:03:41Tom Holland:What did we call John French last time? Paltrune and a buffoon, I think, wasn't it?

1:03:45Dominic Sandbrook:Anyway, lots of Falkenhayn's officers say to him, I don't know about this. First of all, the Allies will retaliate with gas themselves. And the prevailing winds over France and Flanders are westerly. Yeah, they're in the wrong direction. We'll be in a mess. But also, some people definitely agree with you, Tom. So somebody who agrees with you is General Karl van Eynam of the Third Army. And he wrote to his wife, I fear it will produce a tremendous scandal in the world. War has nothing to do with chivalry anymore. The higher civilization rises, the viler man becomes. So he's not an enthusiast for gas.

1:04:22Dominic Sandbrook:Even so, they decide to go for it and they're going to launch it on the 22nd 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 going to make their trial. And at five o 'clock that evening, the engineers open the valves on 6 ,000 cylinders of chlorine gas. They're waiting for the wind to be in the right direction. The wind blows this yellow kind of cloud towards thousands of actually French Algerian troops who are the people in the way.

1:04:56Dominic Sandbrook:and these Algerian blokes flee in total panic. They're blinded, they're screaming for water, they're vomiting blood as the gas is basically eating into their lungs. Now, as it turns out, even though this opens a hole in the Allied lines, the Germans don't have enough reserves to exploit it properly. Two days later, they have another go, more gas. This time they are targeting 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.

1:05:29Dominic Sandbrook: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 McRae 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 Boer War so he loved Britain I applaud him he volunteered again in 1914 even though he was 41 and he became the chief medical officer of the first brigade of the Canadian field artillery so he's in the thick of all this and on the 2nd of May a friend of his who was called Lieutenant Alexis Helmer was killed by a shell and McRae presided over his burial service and as to that point at his burial service that mcrae 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 mcrae 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 read he read it to some of the other guys and then he crumpled it up and threw it away and one of the other guys picked it up and said don't throw it away it's actually good he ended up sending it to the humorous magazine punch where it was published in uh december 1915 and it was a massive hit and it was used in british propaganda in canadian in american propaganda in canada in particular became a real kind of sensation um mccray himself unfortunately died in the last year of the war he died of pneumonia and meningitis but the poem as we said right at the beginning lives on well it lives on i mean it's quoted every november isn't it in britain certainly probably in canada too i imagine anyway back to the gas gas is one of a series of innovations so massive artillery bombardments i suppose u-boats tanks all of these things that haven't really been been seen before But gas is the one that frightens soldiers the most because it's this silent killer, invisible killer.

1:07:46Dominic Sandbrook:You know, you don't see it coming. And as soon as it's on you, you're dead.

1:07:50Tom Holland:So that one that attacks the French Algerian troops is yellowish.

1:07:53Dominic Sandbrook:It was yellowish. So I say it's invisible. I mean, you might not.

1:07:56Tom Holland:Would you notice a yellowish vapor heading towards you? I think I probably would.

1:08:01Dominic Sandbrook:Okay. Well, fair. There's a brilliant description by the fighter ace Cecil Lewis. He watched it from above and he said he watched it creeping panther-like over the scarred earth, curling down into dugouts, coiling and uncoiling at the wind's whim. Men were dying there under me from a whiff of it, not dying quickly, not even maimed or shattered, but dying whole, retching and vomiting blood and guts. And those who lived would be wrecks with seared, poisoned lungs, rotten for life.

1:08:28Tom Holland:Because that is one of the archetypes of the Great War, isn't it? I mean, that's one of the reasons why it lives with such a kind of timbre of horror in people's memories. And it's the theme of perhaps the most famous poem written about the horrors of the war.

1:08:43Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, Wilfred Owens, Dolce de Coram Est, where there's a line in that poem where it's a gas, boys, gas, or whatever it is. And they're all rushing to get their masks on. There's one guy who's been too slow. And the imagery is all green. Dim through the misty panes and thick green light as under a green sea I saw him drowning. In all his dreams before my helpless sight, he plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. so it's horrible but does it work no it's just a waste of time totally waste of time so there's no breakthrough at ypres uh the canadians hold firm and the thing is the gas doesn't kill enough people i mean that sounds like a mad thing to say but only 6 000 british and imperial forces in the whole course of the war died of gas poisoning i'd assumed it was much much more than that no doesn't kill you by and large just leaves you with with ruined lungs yeah it does it definitely it leaves people with ruined lungs no question i mean part of that is because the war office were quite good in getting gas masks to the front so the first gas masks arrived a few weeks later and these are sort of gauze pads that you tie over your face a little bit like i suppose like a covid mask i mean up to that point they basically were saying you know you need to urinate on on on some cloth and hold it over your face and the urine will act as a and people were doing this i mean this is what they had this is what they did and then in 1916 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 sergeant the one where they're all in a line they're all in a line that's mustard gas that they are suffering from not chlorine now you said it wasn't cricket sir john french the well-known poltroon he agrees with you the commander of the british expeditionary force oh i maligned him then i take it all back right okay he said it was a cynical and barbarous disregard of the well-known usages of civilized war and of course the allied newspapers say well this is typical of the germans this is how the germans behave they're huns they're barbarians i mean i think it's probably fairer to say if you're losing if you're the underdog you will try anything and this is what the germans are

1:11:01Tom Holland:doing especially if you've got a massive world-beating chemicals industry yeah i mean

1:11:06Dominic Sandbrook:they'd be kind of i mean i don't want to sound too pro-tuton but they'd be mad not to try it i think anyway the british for all their talk of it not being cricket they are secretly testing gas weapons themselves and they make the same mistake the germans did they sort of convinced themselves this will be brilliant this will actually this will be a game changer and so

1:11:27Tom Holland:this sets the stage for the biggest british attack of the whole of the year 1915 it's in luce which

1:11:33Dominic Sandbrook:is uh just south of um lille in france sometimes tom you hear people saying that luce might be in

1:11:38Tom Holland:belgium but it's not is it no i mean that's a rookie's error isn't it anyone who thinks that

1:11:42Dominic Sandbrook:is mad so people who enjoy british shambolic british military failures um will relish the beginning of the battle of luce the british have planned this gas bombardment they've got 5 000 cylinders of chlorine gas. At six o 'clock in the morning, they prepare to unleash them. And the gas engineers say, the wind is in the wrong way. Don't open these gas cylinders or whatever you do. Are the top brass going to pay attention to this? The top brass say, no, it's too late to change the plan now. Are you mad? Carry on. So they basically open the gas cylinders and it all blows back in their faces. And they've got these flannel gas masks.

1:12:15Dominic Sandbrook:With urine? No, I don't think they've got urine. I think it's some sort of chemical treatment or whatever. Anyway, they've got these gas masks. The eyepieces of the gas masks steam up. So the men to see take the gas masks off. They probably get poisoned by their own gas.

1:12:30Tom Holland:So it's basically like that poor bloke who throws the missile out and then it blows up in his face.

1:12:36Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, it's basically that on a huge scale, because basically the British gas gassed four times, caused four times as many casualties among the British as it did among the Germans. Anyway, when they finally ordered the troops to advance, they find the Germans very much un-gassed. And their artillery bombardment, and this is a theme that will run for the next few years, their artillery bombardment, which they thought will break the German barbed wire and weaken their defences, has completely failed to do so. so basically loose which goes on for the next two weeks is your classic example of a western front offensive where generals are throwing men against positions that turn out to be a much better defender than they thought and they're getting absolutely nowhere it ends with 60 000 british casualties only 25 000 german casualties it is one of the great allied disasters of the first year or so of the war and the result of this is that finally Sir John French who has been useless frankly from the very beginning and if you remember he actually wanted to abandon the French completely he's finally booted out as commander-in-chief and he's replaced with Sir Douglas

1:13:43Tom Holland:Hague and French is the guy who the British government thinks is just the man to go and solve the Irish question in Ducon yes where he's another tremendous success poor Sir John French

1:13:54Dominic Sandbrook:Surely at some point we'll have to do a whole series rehabilitating him. But anyway, he's been replaced by Douglas Haig, one of the most controversial characters in British and indeed all military history. The goody? Baddy? I think we should come to this later on when I've read a bit more about it, because actually I don't know what I think. I think probably he's been a bit... The general sense now is that he was maligned.

1:14:12Tom Holland:Gary Sheffield, he's all over. How good Douglas Haig.

1:14:16Dominic Sandbrook:From the University of Wolverhampton thinks that Douglas Haig is one of the greatest men who ever lived, I think.

1:14:19Tom Holland:Well, there you go.

1:14:20Dominic Sandbrook:Anyway, just to end the episode. 60 ,000 British casualties at loose but one of them above all is very well known and this is a young man who was 18 years old called John Kipling and he was the only son of Rudyard Kipling the great poet of empire and indeed of patriotism John Kipling was 16 years old when the war broke out and his father was desperate to get him a commission. But John was rejected because of severe short-sightedness. Basically, the medical board said he would be totally at sea, you know, because he can't see anything. But Kipling Senior pulled all kinds of strings with his old friend, Lord Roberts, and he got John commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Irish Guards.

1:15:10Dominic Sandbrook:and on the second day of the battle of loose 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 rudyard kipling was devastated by this he never recovered and when he published his epitaphs for the war in 1919 the theme of dead sons and bereaved parents runs right through it and the most famous of all these epitaphs that kipling wrote is a couplet that's often seen as a kind of epitaph for the war more generally if any question why we died tell them

1:15:51Tom Holland:because our fathers lied and it's not generally thought of is it that kipling wrote perhaps the most devastating couplet condemning the war of any poet exactly and of course we've talked before in

1:16:04Dominic Sandbrook:the show about his short story The Gardener which I think is one of the most moving short stories ever written which is also about the loss of a young man in action right uh there'll be a lot more young men uh to be lost sadly because there are five more episodes to come in this dramatic series all of them set over the course of this one tumultuous year 1915 so next time a new combatant enters the arena this is Italy we tell the story of how Italy was cajoled into war by the proto-fascist poet Gabriele Donunzio and of the dreadful fate that awaited the Italians when they went up into the mountains to fight the Austro-Hungarian army.

1:16:44Dominic Sandbrook:Then next week, two of the great controversial stories of the war. So 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 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 therestishistory.com you can join the club and only by going to therestishistory.com will you get the full benefits of being in the club so lots to look forward to Tom.

1:17:26Tom Holland:Lots to look forward to thank Thank you very much for that, Dominic. And in our next episode, we will be in Italy listening to Roman rabble rousing and then up in the mountains of Slovenia getting massacred by Austrians. So we'll see you then. Bye bye.

1:17:42Dominic Sandbrook:Bye bye.

1:17:50Dominic Sandbrook:Hi, everybody. We are back with another absolutely colossal update about the Rest is History Festival.

1:17:56Tom Holland:Well, it's massive. So on the 4th and 5th of July, we will be at Hampton Court Palace. We have a weekend of brilliant talks, live music, exclusive access to historic Royal Palaces collections. And yes, Dominic, most exciting of all, this is the thing I have been pushing for. And I'm so looking forward to it. We have medieval combat, a terrifying, brutal, yet completely thrilling sport. It is going to be an unforgettable two days. It is indeed.

1:18:25Dominic Sandbrook:and at the core of the festival of these talks we've got some more talks to add to the lineup so i will be talking to the brilliant tudor historian tracy borman about the secrets of the six wives of henry the eighth i'll be talking to a friend of the show and irish national treasure paul rouse about whether there is an alternative universe in which islands could have remained part of the united kingdom we'll be talking to katia hoyer about weimar germany and in particular the town of Weimar through history. And Professor Adam Smith will be telling the story of America through three presidents.

1:19:02Dominic Sandbrook:And on top of all that, I'll be doing a special event with Ian Hislop about the history of satire.

1:19:10Tom Holland:And I will be on stage with Mary Beard, and we will be talking about just how strange, just how alien, just how different to us Rome was, or maybe it wasn't. I will be talking to Helen Castor about Elizabeth I, and we'll be discussing whether she truly was England's greatest ruler, or maybe whether that title should still be claimed by Athelstan. I will be talking to Ali Ansari about all things Persian, with Dan Jackson about the pit of death. And I will be talking to a friend of the show, Willie Dalrymple, about the links between ancient India and Greece and Rome.

1:19:49Dominic Sandbrook:absolutely incredible scenes and of course on both days tom and i will be on stage doing a show together as well so on the first day we'll be answering all our club members questions and then to close the festival we will do a definitive ranking of the all-time top friends

1:20:05Tom Holland:of the show so lots to look forward to and beyond that there is so much else that will be happening across the weekend. So think of it as the ultimate summer history hangout. And your tickets will give you full access to explore the great Tudor Palace of Hampton Court and indeed the Royal Tennis Court. So that'll be very exciting. There'll be food and drink fit for a king,

1:20:29Dominic Sandbrook:which sounds very enticing. I picture the very glamorous people that are our club members in their summer garb. They're on the lawn at Hampton Court Palace. they're chatting about history and delightful surroundings sipping on a refreshing gin and tonic and it's probably the most civilized festival there's ever been i mean that's what

1:20:51Tom Holland:i imagine anyway just a reminder the tickets are exclusive to club members and if you are not a member now is the perfect time to join so head over to the rest is history.com to sign up and grab your tickets and of course have access to a whole range of supplementary benefits once you have signed up to the rest is history.com all you do then is log into the members area and you select

1:21:18Dominic Sandbrook:festival and it's all very obvious but you know what there is a twist if you do this you will be entered into a genuinely unbelievable prize draw and that prize draw if you win you and three other people it's like the golden tickets in charlie and the chocolate factory because you will be given the chance to be upgraded to the premium experience and the premium experience will give you among other things unlimited food and drink for free all day do not miss it can't wait to see