Questions and Answers Episode 34

For our latest questions submitted by podcast listeners, we examine what my first visit to the battlefields of the Great War with my school meant to me, ask what the Wiltshire Regiment did in the First World War, what sources in English can we look at to understand the German side of WW1 and what did British veterans think of their German foe?

Brigadier E.A. James book - British Regiments 1914-1918. 

Main image: Group portrait of officers of the 1st Battalion, Wiltshire Regiment, after their return from fighting at Thiepval, photographed at Bouzincourt, September 1916. (IWM Q1151 - photo by Ernest Brookes)

Got a question about this episode or any others? Drop your question into the Old Front Line Discord Server or email the podcast.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

Welcome to some more questions and answers here on the old front line. These are questions submitted by you, the podcast listeners, and each month we select some of the best questions that have been submitted via email and the Discord server to answer here and hopefully give us all fresh perspectives and new knowledge of this vast subject of the Great War. So let's begin. When this edition of the podcast goes out, we'll have actually had two Q&A episodes in a row and I've done this just so I can kind of position the order of the next few podcasts so I can set up a sequence and we're going to have a whole month devoted to the war in the air, the war above the trenches of the Western Front involving the men of the Royal Flying Corps and latterly the Royal Air Force. So the next episode from this will be the beginnings of that mini series and as part of it I'm going to have a special RFC RAF Q&A so if you've got a question relating to the war in the air send it in and I'll pick the best four questions and I'll answer those in a special edition of the Q&A's for that air war month that we're going to have as a kind of trial really for something new on the podcast so let's get down to this week's questions question number one comes from John Anderson of the Grove Academy in Broughton Ferry John asks as a teacher I'm always intrigued when you speak of your own experiences of visiting the battlefields with your school for the first time in the early 1980s August will be my 15th battlefields trip with young people from the east coast of Scotland So what actually was it about that first trip to the old front line with your school that got you hooked? Well, a brilliant question, John. And in some respects, it wasn't that trip that got me hooked as such because the Great War was already there in my life. Having a father who'd been in the Second World War and two grandfathers who'd been in the first and my grandmother who spent a lot of time with me and me with her during my formative years. She'd been a young girl in Colchester during the Great War. She could remember the wounded coming back to the stations in Colchester. covered in some mud she could remember all of her cousins marching off to war and her brother too my uncle dan and only uncle dan coming back all the others were killed so she had this whole host of stories that inspired me as a youngster and in those days there were really good local libraries i mean there are still some now thankfully but i relied really heavily on going to the library and they had a very big first and second but in particular a very good first world war section and i kind of read every thing often multiple times and growing up as well comics was a big part of my childhood and then battle comic came along with charlie's war we've done an episode on charlie's war for the podcast telling the story of this teenage tommy from the som through to the end of the war indeed beyond that so there was already a bit of an interest there and finally having this chance to go with two of my teachers roger bastable and les coats les coats went on to write several books to help students go to the battlefields, the guide to Ypres and the guide to the Somme and having them to organise a school trip to take students across they did that several times a year I think in the school minibus and on that particular trip there was a very enthusiastic bunch of us who went and apart from myself there was my buddy Steve Chambers who himself went on to write several books about the Great War his speciality is Gallipoli and he's also very prominent in the Gallipoli Association there was my old pal Andrew he was there too and we still travel to the battlefields together and several others who I know are still interested in the Great War so that was kind of a defining moment not just for me but a group of people who perhaps for them with lesser knowledge or connection to the Great War at that time we went across and we saw that landscape of Flanders and something kind of changed and I'm sure you've seen this with your own students they possibly have an idea of what they might see and I remember driving down that road from Popperinger to Eap expecting any minute to see in the fields this kind of mass of trenches and shell holes and of course not realising as a teenager that pretty much all of that had gone but the first stop on that tour was at Hopstor Cemetery that is the first Great War Cemetery that I ever saw and one I go back to regularly because of that kind of connection it has with me to those early years of visiting the battlefields and on that trip We went to two trench museums, Sanctuary Wood, Kroonart Wood, as it was then, Bamval today, but a very different kind of museum then. Again, I've spoken about that in previous episodes of the podcast. And going out into the fields, the area where the bluff is at, it wasn't planted with trees in it, it was open farmland. And I remember us walking across that, and one of the students picking up something and throwing it at one of the teachers, saying, what's that, sir? And at the corner of my eye, I saw a German potato stick grenade fly through the air and land at the teacher's feet and you can imagine the kind of conversation that followed but all of this really coming together as a young impressionable person walking in trenches picking up artifacts being given a handful of shrapnel balls as we were when we went to Crunart Wood this was history coming alive and it certainly it sparked something in me and I came back from that I remember my dad picking me up at the school and us walking back across the fields to my house and me literally kind of waxing lyrical to him and I knew something had changed in me on that trip and it didn't stop thanks to my dad within a couple of months it was the school holidays and I was heading to the Somme with him in the summer of 1982 and we walked those battlefields together for the very first time and it never stops I went back on more school trips and then back on trips of my own and of course it took me on that life long path and I think it shows all kinds of things really but certainly the kind of less traditional methods of learning which a battlefield tour is can inspire students can inspire young people as it inspired me as it inspired those who travelled with me on that trip and I've seen that myself when I've done schools battlefield tours with groups in the last few decades as I've worked as a battlefield guide and very often it's interesting to talk to teachers because they say that children that have problems in conventional classroom settings somehow come alive on these kind of trips and they often were the ones that asked the best questions had the best kind of insightful views of what you were talking about and in particular responded very very strongly to that idea of reaching out and touching history whether that's a bunker whether it's a trench whether it's holding a Lee Enfield rifle or a bayonet or putting a steel helmet on whatever it is and I think that tells us a lot really about how people react to learning about history and what they need to get something from it it's not just about the dry dusty pages of history there's nothing wrong with books I'm sitting in a room completely surrounded by them now but I think for young people with minds that are still forming it's really important to give them that opportunity to do that and it's great that you do it with your students from the east coast of Scotland and there are many many schools across the UK that do this I know that there are many teachers that listen to this podcast who do amazing work in inspiring their students to grasp history and run with history and love history and that is fantastic and I'm always really pleased to hear about that and it's been really great for me to be asked to go into the some virtual classrooms with students to talk about the First World War and hear their questions, because I'm always amazed at the kind of questions that young people throw at you. It's really, really interesting. So I think for me, I mean, I don't know whether destiny kind of paths the way of your life. Who knows? But for me, already when I went to EAP for the first time, having previously gone to Pegasus Bridge in Normandy with my dad to look at the D-Day beaches, I kind of feel that that was the direction of travel quite literally of my life for the rest of my life and it's something that has carried me through ever since and I feel blessed and privileged really to have had that opportunity so young to be inspired to go in a particular direction because it is something that has changed and enriched and given so many layers of my life really from researching and reading about it to meeting veterans of both world wars traveling across so many parts of the world to visit battlefields understand battlefields connect to battlefields I'm so lucky and it just shows what one school trip can do and every time I'm out on the battlefields this week I was on the SOM and I saw two coach loads of students visiting battlefield sites one at the Devonshire Cemetery one on their way to Delville Wood I think I look at those coaches and think who in that group is going to be inspired to go on and take this further is the future of Great War history in one of those coaches I'm sure it is so thank you John thanks for giving me that opportunity once again to talk about what the Great War means to me and how my pathway to it began through trips like that and they are so important and thank you John as well for the work that you do to inspire and take young people to the old front line Question number two comes from Matt Hale in Devizes. Matt asks, I live in Devizes, Wiltshire, home to the old Le Marchant barracks. I rarely hear of any stories around the Wiltshire Regiment during the First World War. So my question to you is, what was the role of the Wiltshire Regiment during the Great War and were they involved with any of the more famous battles we talk about nowadays? Well, the British Army had a huge number of regiments in the First World War and all of them fought at many different parts of the battlefields, whether that's the Western Front or other theatres of war. And a good starting point to understand what these individual regiments did is a book that kind of became my Bible as I began to expand my knowledge of the First World War, and that's Brigadier James's British Regiments 1914-18. It's still in print. I think Naval and Military Press do an edition of it. And Brigadier James wrote this book, compiled information about all the regiments, and more importantly, the battalions that were part of those regiments. Because a regiment didn't serve as a regiment on the battlefield, it served as individual battalions. And James lists all these, indicates if they were pre-war regulars or territorials, then if they were wartime raised units when they were formed, and then which formations they went off to join, brigades and divisions and so on. And although on one level it's micro-history, it builds a framework for you to understand how a regiment developed during the war and where its battalions went and therefore which battles they fought in so if we look at his entry for the Wiltshire regiment and at the back of the book there's a table that lists all the regiments and for each one it tells you how many battle honours they got how many VCs and how many dead and for the Wiltshire regiment there were 60 battle honours which was about average for a Regiment of that kind of size. They had one soldier awarded the Victoria Cross and lost over 5,200 men killed in action, died of wounds, died on the battlefields or on the home front during the Great War. And then when we look at the main entry for the Wiltshire Regiment in the book, we see that there, as was common with all regiments of the British Army, there were two regular battalions that went overseas and a third reserve battalion. So the 1st and the 2nd Battalion were the regular ones they became part of the BEF the British Expeditionary Force that went across in 1914 one of those the first battalion of the Wiltshire Regiment they were in the retreat for Mons both of them were in the first Battle of Ypres which was where the bulk of the old contemptibles as they became known fought so men in both those battalions were old contemptibles and they were two units that went right through the war from beginning to end and fought in all of those key battles from the early battles like Mons and First Deep through to Arras and the Somme and Loos and all of the other major actions that we often discuss. In the Wiltshire Regiment, which was a bit unusual, there was only one Territorial Force Battalion, so one battalion of Saturday Night Soldiers, as they were called, which indicates it's a slightly smaller regiment compared to others. Most county regiments, Royal Sussex, where I grew up, for example, they had three Territorial Battalions. The Wilts, they only had one, the 4th Battalion, and they spent the entire war pretty much in India and ended up, I think, on the northwest frontier towards the end. So we're not involved in some of the more famous related Great War actions that we think of when we think of 1914-18, but nevertheless played a really important role in the far-flung corners of places where there was conflict in the Great War. And then we move on to the wartime raised battalions. So the 1st the 2nd with their reserve 3rd battalion of the Wiltshire Regiment plus the Territorial 1 the 4th, they were all units that existed when the war broke out and then as was common in county regiments of the British Army new army battalions and wartime raised battalions were then formed and in the Wiltshire Regiment there were 4 new army battalions, the 5th battalion that fought at Gallipoli in 1915 and then went on to serve in Mesopotamia the 6th battalion that was in the 19 Western Division and went across to France in 1915 and then served in all of the major battles that followed that the 19th Western Division were involved in. So in 1915 they were holding the line, 1916 that was the Battle of the Somme, 1917 they were in the Battle of Messines and then the Third Battle of Ypres and in 1918 actions from the German offensive, fighting up in the Lys and so many other places besides. So they went right through the kind of key stories of the Great War in terms of a single battalion's experience on the Western Front. The 7th Battalion was with the 26th Division and they went off to Salonika, one of those lesser known fronts of the Great War and then later came to France themselves and the 8th Battalion stayed at home and by the looks of it the 8th was used as a training battalion to train up soldiers to send out as replacements to the others. So what you've got there then is three battalions that served pretty much from beginning to end on the western front the first and second the two regular battalions and then from 1915 the 6th battalion of the Wilts serving in some of these key battles but also battalions quite interestingly that go on to serve in other theatres of war key theatres of war like Gallipoli Mesopotamia Salonica and India so essentially your regiment your little county regiment the Wiltshire regiment did a lot and covered the kind of whole experience of the First World War from a soldier's perspective and sometimes we know perhaps a little bit less about some of these regiments because not so many books were published about them. I'm not even sure if there is a single dedicated history of the Wiltshire Regiment in the Great War. I remember the Wiltshire Regiment Museum publishing some kind of paperback books in the 80s and 90s about some of the battalions I think drawn perhaps from the war diaries and the war diaries will be online on the the National Archives website, or perhaps on Ancestry and Find My Past as well. So there's quite a few sources where you can kind of look this up. And sometimes these small regiments can slip through the pages of history. So it's important to highlight them. I mean, I do try to mention a lot of different units in the podcast. I try to avoid making it a list of units. You can't mention everyone. But I do like to feature some of the lesser known stories. And within the history of the Wiltshire Regiment, there are many of them. And I think it's good. I've said this before, I think, about the Royal Sussex Regiment. For me, focusing on a regiment for which I had a personal connection to a place, an area, a region, helped me connect with those men because I knew the towns and the villages and the downs where they grew up and lived. But it also gave me, through the eyes of one regiment, a perspective on the Great War. And I think that's what this kind of research can do. so I really hope Matt that's kind of inspired you perhaps to go out and find out a little bit more about the wheelchair regiment yourself and perhaps find your own connections and maybe on a future trip along the old front line visit some of the places where they fought and see some of the graves in the cemetery because you will see their cap badge pretty much everywhere you go symbolising the kind of loss that even a small county regiment could have in the Great War So thanks for that, Matt. I think a great question, always good to talk about regiments of the British Army during that conflict. So let's move on to question number three. And this comes from Andrew Caesar Gordon on fan mail. Now fan mail is another way to send in a question, which you can click a little link in the show notes and you send a kind of text message via Buzzsprout to the podcast. It doesn't tell me who you are. I don't see your number. So if you want me to answer these questions and mention your name, you need to put your name at the bottom of that little bit of fan mail. So Andrew asks, listening to your fascinating trench chat with Philip Cross about his German ancestors' frontline experience, you briefly discuss how little literature from the German side is available to English language audiences. We have, of course, the writings of Eric Maria Remarque, Ernst Jünger and Rudolf Binding, but I wonder if you can recommend any books written by German World War I historians in the mould of Lynn MacDonald and Martin Middlebrook that have been translated into English that catalogue the first-hand experience of German soldiers alongside the bigger picture as they saw it well this is a really good question Andrew and there's an easy word answer it pretty much doesn't exist. The stigma of service in the German army in the First World War that followed that war with Germany's defeat, and then the later experience of Germany in the Second World War, the division of Germany into East and West, I think removed a desire for any equivalent of Lin MacDonald and Martin Middlebrook to track veterans down and interview them. I spent a bit of time in Germany in the late 80s and early 90s on and off, and one of my kind of missions on that was to track down some first world war veterans i failed completely no one wanted to know the veterans didn't want to know and i ended up speaking to a lot of second world war german veterans but none from the first the only veterans that i spoke to from the first world war german veterans were ones who were largely jewish who had fled nazi germany in the 1930s and come to britain to escape that and one of those was herbert saltzbach who wrote a book called With the German Guns he was a gunner officer in the First World War and then he served in the British Army in the Second World War as a Jewish volunteer a fascinating book and I met him several times he gave a talk at the National Army Museum at one of the early Western Front meetings an incredible, incredible individual now you mentioned Remarque and of course Junger I mean two great names in the kind of record of the German Army in the First World War and Rudolf Binding as well But in terms of someone going out to interview a group of veterans and then putting that into print, there really isn't anything like that as such. Now, jumping on to the 1980s, when I joined the Western Front Association, there was a little advert in the magazine there for a new English language magazine, regular magazine, about the German army in the Great War which was written and produced by a chap called Richard Baumgartner and it was called Der Angriff I have a fairly complete set of those and he published this in the 80s with a lot of material he was an American who was descended from Germans spoke fluent German himself he went to Germany and he more successfully tracked down a lot of German veterans he interviewed them he translated the interviews and he put them into this material magazine now it's very difficult to find now and I suspect probably scarce and therefore costly but worth looking out for even for the odd issue because there's some really fantastic material in there by German soldiers about German soldiers and from the perspective of German soldiers as well with articles about particular units and trench weaponry and some amazing photographs that were published in there as well of the like that at that time it was really unusual to see those things and for me it kind of inspired me on my travels within Germany trying to track some of this kind of material down and in those days it wasn't too difficult in junk shops to find albums of postcards and photographs and individual postcards tucked away in often the dampest corner of some of these junk shops so he was a kind of trailblazer in that and then he went on many years later in 2010 to write a book called This Carnival of Hell and it was about the German army on the Somme. He self-published it and it didn't do particularly well and it is still available out there but again it's quite costly. I've seen copies go for quite a lot of money and then occasionally one might pop up on eBay and you'll get it cheaply but one worth looking out for because again with the kind of material that he was able to put together it It is full of amazing interviews and accounts of German soldiers during that Somme battle. And I think his intention was perhaps to write a whole series of these books. But it never happened, unfortunately. And I don't even know if Richard Baumgartner is still alive. I'd like to think that his collection is preserved out there somewhere because it was, I know, an amazing archive of the German experience of the First World War. And he was very, very unusual in that. I'd like to believe that there was someone like me in West Germany, let's say in the 80s, who did go around and speak to some of these old boys and did record them. There's the odd interview in places like YouTube where there's kind of really early video cameras recording old men with pickle halvers talking about their experience, but that's pretty rare. I've never come across young German historians who have done this. I've known a few German historians over the years. My friend Alex is a good example of that, but he said that there was There's this kind of stigma about the First World War. It was sometimes even worse talking about the Great War than it was Hitler's war. So it was kind of pushed into the background. And if you think of East Germany, a country under Soviet domination for all those decades, I suspect the chances of getting people to discuss the First World War was pretty slim. And knowledge within East Germany and amongst East Germans about that war is also pretty slim as well. I think I've told this story before of going to a small village which has once been part part of East Germany, just behind the internal German border, and seeing a fantastic Great War war memorial in the middle of the village with a Stahlhelm still helming on it, and somebody from the village coming over and saying, you know, what are you looking at? So I said, well, we're looking at this, this Kriegerdenkmal, this war memorial. What war memorial? This one here, to the First World War. What do you mean by the First World War? He said, there's no such thing as the First World War. There's only the war against fascism, 1941-45. and it was like he was kind of trotting out a piece of propaganda. And this guy, in his 50s, had no sense of what the First World War was at all, despite the fact that he's standing in front of a war memorial which listed local men killed in date order with the names of the battles and everything like that included as well, and possibly one of his own relatives on there. I mean, who knows? So that wasn't going to happen there. So really, the equivalent, the German equivalent of Lin Macdonald's Martin Birber book doesn't exist as far as I'm aware, and I would love to be proved wrong. If anyone listening to this, I know we have quite a few Germans listeners if you've got a comment to make please please please get in touch or put something onto the podcast website because i'd love to hear what you think so that's richard baumgartner look out for der angriff look out for his book this carnival of hell but of course on top of that is jack sheldon jack sheldon wrote a whole series of books called the german army on the So from Mons to the battles of 1915 to the Somme to Arras to Passchendaele and all of those actions on the Western Front, a whole series of books looking at the Great War from a German perspective. Now, he didn't go and interview people. He used a lot of the material that existed and that was published in the 1920s and 30s. And a lot of this was unit histories that had been published by regimental kind of committees and groups of veterans which are often really detailed and Jack Sheldon being a fluent German speaker could access this material, select what was particularly good and use it to construct these books looking at different aspects of the battles of the First World War through German eyes. So those are really important publications that help us understand the Great War from that German perspective. Now some of those were published quite a few years ago now and I'd don't think they're all in print. They were published by Pen and Sword. You can have a look on their website and I'm sure you'll find copies of some of them. But again, there are quite a few copies available on places like eBay. eBay is a good source to get books quite cheaply sometimes. And Jack Sheldon really needs congratulating for producing that remarkable series of books in the English language that helped us understand the war from the German perspective. I think using the type of material that he had wasn't without its problems because particularly once you got into the 30s and the arrival of the National Socialists they provided funding for the publication of quite a few of these unit histories and they're not critical of themselves so when we assess this from an historical point of view we can look at some of these stories and perhaps think there's a bit of an element of self-aggrandisement in there and we've got to be wary of some of the accounts but But nevertheless, I mean, that's true of pretty much all history. If you read any of the material in Middlebrook and Le Macdonald, you can say the same about some of that, really. But in my mind, Jack Sheldon's books are really essential if you want to get even the smallest of insight into the German experience. The best way, of course, is to learn German. There's no other way around it because the vast majority of German material that was produced was in German. There are loads of other memoirs that most people have never heard of that are only available in German language. And that is obviously difficult for some to access. Perhaps as we move into a world in which AI, as well as having lots of problems for historians, can also provide potential solutions, perhaps AI will help us help us acquire German language material, perhaps French language material as well, and so many other different language material that's out there to do with the First World War, digitise it, and then accurately translate it. So perhaps in the future, there will be a lot more of this material available. I don't think we'll ever see a Lee Macdonald or a Martin Middlebrook of the Germans, and I don't think if you were aspiring to be as such in Germany today, that many German published as kind of being interested in publishing that kind of book I think that moment may well have passed during the centenary I did see some really good German history books published during that period but nothing like this so Andrew a great question I can't entirely answer it to your satisfaction I know but hopefully that's given you a bit of direction with Richard Baumgartner Der Angriff Carnival of Hell and of course Jack Sheldon's incredible series of books about the German art army in the Great War. So we'll move on to our fourth and final question and it's kind of tied into the previous one in a way. This one comes from Steve McQuaid. Steve asks of all the veterans you met did any still hate the Germans or did they to a man see them in their later years as people who were unfortunate enough to understand exactly what they went through? Well that's a good question. So if I think of those veterans of the First World War that I met and particularly in that early period where I'd met a few and then started going to the Western Front meetings in London at the National Army Museum where John Giles and the others who organised that would lay on the first two rows of the seats for veteran members I mean in those days it wasn't remarkable to get one veteran coming along We were getting a couple of dozen coming along to all of these meetings, and that included people like Herbert Sulzbach, who I mentioned, a German veteran, sitting there with British veterans of the Great War. And there was absolutely no trouble in this at all. And for me, that was a little bit strange because my dad was a veteran of the Second World War. He'd fought at Anzio and through the rest of the Italian campaign. And to say that my dad still had a hatred for the Germans is a bit of an understatement. And when I came to meet far more of that generation and travel with that generation to the battlefields of the Second World War, I mean, hatred is a strong word, but these were men who hadn't forgiven the Germans. And that was very different to my experience of interviewing men who had been in the Great War. Most of those veterans had respect for their German foe. They knew that on the other side of no man's land, those German veterans shared the same conditions the same privations the same problems as them and they felt a bit of a kinship to those men and they respected them as fighters they'd seen them fight cleanly as much as war can ever truly be clean and some of them have been captured by German soldiers and said that on the battlefield they were treated very well but then the further they went back to prisoner of war camps to men who'd never been near the front line guarding them the attitudes were a lot harsher and a lot less sympathetic and I think the same probably could be said if you could interview a German veteran talking about his experiences of being captured by the British and ending up as a POW in a camp in Britain but probably not a good experience compared to the men who took him prisoner on the front line so there was this kind of feeling of kinship and when you read the memoirs there's the same thing I mean they were there to fight and kill the Germans that was their job I mean that is the job of a soldier it's not there to go and debate they are there to fight and kill and destroy the enemy and end that conflict victoriously and that's of course the view on both sides but from the British perspective that was their place and I think they did that with what they believed to be a degree of honour they fought the war, they prosecuted the war, they fought the German army, occasionally had to kill the German army and then when the war was over that was it and while I can't speak for an entire generation as I often say and I know that there are stories of people who did have hatred to the Germans because they'd seen a brother shot by a sniper in front of them or they'd seen something that they didn't like and they blamed the Germans for that and others blamed the Germans for the introduction of flamethrowers or poison gas all that kind of thing generally though these men respected their enemy and if i'd have said to them come with me we're going to jump in a van we're going to go over to the Somme and i'm going to take you six veterans and introduce you to six german veterans they'd have been up for it they would have liked that experience and they would have wanted that experience but then contrasting that with veterans of the second world war as i mentioned earlier Totally different. Those men did not want to know the Germans. And there were occasions in which I was with British veterans where we did meet German veterans, particularly in Italy. they didn't want to know and most of those that I ever went to the battlefields with would not even go in German cemeteries to pay their respects but if I'd have taken Malcolm Vivian or Harry Coates or one of those kind of First World War veterans that I knew very well over and gone to Langemarck or Menin or the huge German cemetery at La Targette they would have gone in and they would have had their moment of reflection but the Second World War veterans those that have been at the sharp end of war particularly those that have been in the infantry or in tanks or as gunners. They didn't want to know. They really didn't want to know. And that was the difference, I think, between perhaps the sharp end of war and the experience of that sharp end of war and what soldiers in the Second World War saw of how the Germans prosecuted their war compared to that of the First. I mean, the Germans committed atrocities in the First World War. We know that, particularly against civilians. But I think that kind of in the round, most veterans that survived that war look back And they felt perhaps more of a kinship with those on the other side of No Man's Land than the civilians that they'd left behind and returned to, who had no concept of the kind of war which they'd fallen in. I mean, this, again, Steve, like so many things, is perhaps a subject for a podcast in its own right, but a fascinating kind of element to our understanding of the experience of war and how soldiers see their enemy. So thanks for that, Steve. Thanks for all of the questions this week. You can send them in via the traditional methods of email or the Discord server or also via fan mail. And remember, we've got that Royal Flying Corps, Royal Air Force special Q&A coming up, and you can send in questions for that, and I'll pick the best four coming up next week. is the start of the War in the Air month, with an introductory episode looking at the history of the Royal Flying Corps and the RAF on the Western Front in the Great War, and then we'll take it from there. Thanks to all the questions, keep them coming, and I'll see you again soon for more Q&As on the Old Front Line. You've been listening to an episode of the Old Front Line with me, military historian Paul Reid. You can follow me on Twitter at Somcore. You can follow the podcast at Old Frontline Pod. Check out the website at oldfrontline.co.uk where you'll find lots of podcast extras and photographs and links to books that are mentioned in the podcast. And if you feel like supporting us, you can go to our Patreon page, patreon.com slash oldfrontline or support us on Buy Me A Coffee at buymeacoffee.com slash oldfrontline. Links to all of these are on our website. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon.