Questions and Answers Episode 37

In this WW1 Q&A episode, we explore the lives and social backgrounds of British Army officers, ask whether First World War veterans hated their German enemies, and share the remarkable stories of soldiers who were discharged but re-enlisted to fight again. We also look at how people living on the Western Front battlefields today connect with the war, and whether interest in the Great War is fading—or still as strong as ever.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:10

We're already a few episodes into season nine, and thanks as always for your continued feedback. It's always good to hear what you think of the podcast and indeed individual episodes. I get quite a lot of emails every week and they're always fascinating. You give me information about your trips to the battlefields and what you've seen and how you've listened to particular episodes in the field, literally on those battlefields that the podcasts are about. And it's great to have that kind of level of contact with you. So please, please keep that going. It was also good last weekend to be up in Buckinghamshire at the We Have Ways Festival. Of course it's a Second World War festival. I kept hearing about the wrong war, as people would call it, this phrase which I guess relates to conflicts that aren't World War II. But of course, one thing that you learn the more you study any of these periods within that first half of the twentieth century is how they always interconnect. And we've had quite a few episodes here about how the first world war meets the second, and in some respects vice versa as well. But what was great is to see people's enthusiasm for history at a festival like that, and also have an opportunity to talk to so many of you who listen to the old frontline podcast, and I was very impressed to see three people who were wearing their old frontline t-shirts. So well done on that. Now we do have a merch shop now. Due to popular demand, people asked about this. So a shop has been put online and you can order stuff and it will ship it to just about anywhere. And I'll put a link to that merch shop which has got t-shirts and tote bags and tin mugs. I'll put a link to that in the show notes for this episode. Also in the show notes is a link to the old frontline bulletin, and this is a regular bulletin that I put out every two weeks. It's a way of me talking to you as an audience to tell you what's going on, just to flag up a few things, highlight a few past episodes, and also talk about a particular aspect of the battlefields in every bulletin. It's free to subscribe to, follow the link, fill in your details, and you'll be getting it every two weeks in your inbox. So on to this week's questions, and we've got four via the usual methods of email, but also some from fan mail as well, and that's where you can send a kind of text message to the podcast, but always remember to put your name in it. And our first question is from Neil Babman, who indeed sent it in on fan mail and remembered to put his name on there, so thanks for that, Neil. Neil asks, were officers in the British Army commissioned on the basis of social status in the First World War? I read that paying for commissions in the British Army was ended by law in eighteen seventy one. Was a good question, Neil, and you are absolutely correct in what you say that as part of the Cardwell Army reforms, paid commissions where families paid for a son to be commissioned into a particular regiment, perhaps a regiment that there was a family connection to, that ended in January 1871. So if we go back to that kind of Victorian period where we can read fiction or true accounts of officers in the Victorian Army, getting to where they were in that army, rank and status, and purchasing that as they went along. And ordinary men could never become officers because you needed money to be a commissioned officer in the army in that period. So the Cardwell Army reforms changed all that. However, if we kind of jump on to 1914 and we look at the composition of the British regular army, in some respects the type of men who were officers hadn't really changed since the Victorian period. So although you didn't have to pay and there was no question of paying, and you couldn't pay to necessarily advance yourself in that peacetime army before 1914, you nevertheless came generally from a privileged background, a privately educated background, and often a moneyed background as well, because the army paid you essentially a salary that was pay for officers, but that wouldn't necessarily pay for everything. And officers found that to live the life of a regular officer in Britain or an active service in India or Burma or South Africa or wherever it was, you needed a bit of extra tin, a bit of extra money to continue to have that kind of life and status that you enjoyed as an officer in the British Army. And when men went for commissions to be commissioned in that army, they were asked a series of questions. There was an interview. One of the principal questions was, What is your educational background? Where did you go to school? So the vast majority of replies were Eton College, Harrow, and you know so many other public schools that existed at that time, and in fact, there was a book, an approved list that the Army used that listed the schools that the Army accepted as the right criteria for your background and education. So if you went to your interview and said I was educated at Eton, you were going to become an officer of the British Army. But if you went and said I was educated at Bogner Regis Council School, I mean not that I think that existed before 1914, but you kind of get where I'm coming from, then you were not going to be accepted. And you might ask yourself, you know, is that the right kind of question? What is your educational background? Should they be asking, what is your ability to lead men in battle? Now you've got to remember that for the War Office, they were the same question that if you went to that kind of school where there'd been an officer training corps, where certain virtues and values have been instilled in you, then that was the kind of criteria that the army was looking for. So if we look at a kind of cross-section of British Army officers in 1914, we aren't going to see too many ordinary men in commission ranks. Now there were some who'd been commissioned from the ranks, often through an incident, perhaps in the Second Boer War of 1899 to 1902, where they had carried out a particular deed on the battlefield that had got them essentially what was often referred to as a battlefield commission, but those kind of men were very, very small in number in the 1914 army. Now we can see that really readily on the old front line today when we go to somewhere like Zillabeek Churchyard, which has got men who were killed at Eape in 1914, officers and buried in that cemetery close to where they were fighting. And when we look at the kind of backgrounds to them, there are English lords in there, there are barons, and we see a kind of whole plethora of English public schools represented amongst those casualties. So that was the army at the beginning of the war. And when we look at the territorial army, sometimes that's not always the same. You look at Yorkshire, when I studied Yorkshire territorial battalions, a lot of the officers were drawn from families that had money in factories or were connected to the colleries, the pits in that area. So it's a kind of different perspective there. And when the new army came along, there was still that criteria to have been educated in a certain way, but you begin to see that breaking down as the army expands. But generally speaking, in those first two years of the war from 1914 to 16, while you couldn't pay to be commissioned and you couldn't pay to advance yourself as an officer, generally they were drawn from a fairly small niche of British society. What of course changed all that was losses on the battlefields. And those kind of men who had been taught from the very beginning at schools like that to set an example were not the kind of men that told their troops, their soldiers that they were commanding head off over their chaps. They were the kind of men that said follow me, and because of that they suffered tremendous casualties on the battlefield. They were often the first to be killed and wounded. So by 1917 there was a requirement to change all this, and the army relaxed its conditions on what your educational background could be, and essentially just about anybody could apply for a commission. So in those last two years of the war, when a conscript army was kind of reaching its crescendo in terms of how it reflected this huge swathe of British society, conscripting people from 18 to 55, the officers reflected that too, and were drawn from all kinds of backgrounds. And many men who had served in the ranks as working class soldiers in the early period of the war put in for commissions and got them, and many men who would not traditionally have been commissioned were given commissions. Walter Tull, black British footballer, one of the first black officers in the British Army, is a classic example of this. In 1914 he would never have been commissioned because of his background, not just because of his skin colour, which technically he was restricted in becoming an officer because he was black. We've looked at that in a previous episode on Britain's black army and the First World War. But that's not just the issue, it's his educational and his kind of upbringing background that would have excluded him from being an officer. That all changes in 1917, which is when he's commissioned. But of course there's many, many other examples besides, and I could go through dozens and dozens of such men that I've researched. I'll give you one quick example, Lieutenant Leonard J. Brown of the first East Surreys, who was killed attached to the second Royal Fusiliers on the 19th of August 1918. He was someone whose papers I acquired many years ago. He was an ordinary working class lad. He went over to Ireland, changed his name, joined the regular army as a private soldier, came up through the ranks, served overseas as another rank in the early period of the war, and when the army changed its approach to educational background and people who could apply for commissions, he got a commission in the East Surrey Regiment in 1917 and was killed as a lieutenant on the battlefield in 1918, having spent nearly four years at the front at that point and having been wounded multiple times, experienced many battles and was a very qualified soldier in terms of his regular background, but also an experienced soldier as well. So all of this kind of reflects the changing nature of the army in the Great War, and it was a I think a turning point in the history of the army, so that a generation later, while there were still restrictions on the educational background of officers and who could apply, it was much more of a grammar school army in terms of officers when it came to 1939. But that's a subject for another day and another podcast. So thanks for that, Neil, and hopefully that's given everyone a bit of an insight into officers in the Great War. Moving on to question number two, this 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, and again, kind of the parallels with the Second World War, going back to attending We Have Ways and the idea of the wrong war. In my mind, all these things kind of come together. But in the First World War, I obviously I did not know those veterans when they were young men, so I don't know what their contemporary view of the Germans were, but we can have an insight into this when we look at the propaganda of that period, which in 1914-15 was obviously very, very anti-German. There were cartoons depicting the Hun of German soldiers raping and pillaging their way through gallant little Belgium. They were crucifying everything from kittens to nuns to Canadians on church doors, and all kinds of bedlam was going on and all kinds of war crimes were being committed by the Germans. Now, from the distance of over a hundred years, we know that the Germans in Belgium in 1914 did commit war crimes in quite a lot of towns and villages and cities within Belgium in that early phase of the First World War. But the propaganda was all aimed at creating hate towards Germany to get soldiers to hate their new enemy. And you have Henry Williamson talks about this when his battalion, the 5th London Regiment, the London Rifle Brigade, are about to head off to the Western Front, the Bishop of London gives them a talk to the whole battalion, tells them that every word of atrocity that they've read about the Germans, every account of them doing these terrible deeds across France and Flanders, all of it is true, and they were off to fight almost a holy crusade against the Germans to rid Europe of the Hun. And it's that kind of language that you see. So I would guess that many of these men at the time, before they joined the army, during their training, and perhaps even in the early period of their experience on the battlefield, possibly felt that way because of that high level of propaganda. But of course, from the very beginning, soldiers begin to meet the enemy, whether that's prisoners captured in a battle or for the regulars and territorials of nineteen fourteen, Christmas Day, that Christmas truce, where men like Henry Williamson and many regular soldiers went out into no man's land, and suddenly the enemy became human and they swapped cat badges and buttons and food and drink, and they acted like they would have done as civilised people before the war. And while that only temporarily kind of broke that down, I think the more men were exposed to how the enemy conducted themselves, and that that would be true of course of the Germans' view of the British and the French, then the opinions of those soldiers that changes too. And although I can think of a couple of veterans describing incidents where stretcher bearers went out to pick up the wounded and the Germans started sniping and shot them, that of course happened. We know that there's many, many accounts of this. But you've got to remember that stretcher bearers only wore a very small brassard, a very small armband, that indicated that they were stretcher bearers, and maybe it was easy to miss that, not see it, not understand what it was. I'm not making excuses for them, but there could be reasons for this. So while there were things that soldiers did see that perhaps changed their views, perhaps it was almost like a roller coaster. One minute they'd see the enemy as human, then they'd witness something like this, and perhaps their view would change, and then perhaps they'd meet some German prisoners, particularly in that last phase of the war, and it was quite clear to many men who were capturing the enemy, capturing German soldiers, that they were starving, that their rations were very poor, and that if they were quite happy to eat tons and tons of bully beef that British soldiers had been chomping on for years, then obviously something was was wrong there and the condition in their army were poor. So I think generally though, and this is something that a lot of them expressed to me, a lot of them said that they felt a kinship to the German soldier. When they came back, the gap between soldier and civilian in Britain was huge. Most people did not understand what these men had gone through and really didn't want to hear it. And they knew that the men on the other side of No Man's Land who'd gone through the same experiences, the same privations, the same conditions as them did understand it. So a lot of them used to express this idea that the Hun, old Jerry, Fritz, whatever they called him, was someone who understood their war as well as they did, and they didn't feel a great degree of animosity towards them. What they often expressed was a necessity to do their job. They were there to fight the war, end the war, rid Belgium of the occupation, rid France of occupation by the Germans, and then come home. It was a job. That was their job, and they were there as part of their job to fight and kill the enemy. And quite a few of them kind of related how officers often reminded them of this. One had been decorated for bravery on the Sombe and awarded the military medal. They had a medal parade, they didn't actually dish the medals out, it was the ribbon, and the general commanding this division went round, and as he went along the line of men pinning on the ribbon of the military cross or the DCM or the military medal, he would push it hard onto their tunic so it didn't fall off, and then say to them and look 'em in the eye, kill more Germans. And he'd go along this line, kill more Germans, kill more Germans, kill more Germans. And of course, again from the distance of a hundred years, it's sometimes difficult for us to understand that that is the purpose of a soldier, to fight and kill the enemy. Now these men didn't relish that, it was their job, and when that job was done, they came home. And jumping on again to that period in the eighties and nineties, when I first joined the Western Front Association, I used to go to the meetings at the National Army Museum in London, and John Giles and the other members of the committee used to put out the first couple of rows for veteran members. And I can remember that many of those veterans, of course, had fought in all kinds of battles against all kinds of enemies, and on one occasion one of their former enemies was sitting there with them, Herbert Sultzbach, who wrote the book with German guns. He was a gunner officer in the First World War and served in the British Army in the second, he was a German Jew who had fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and people like Don Price, who was a veteran of the public schools battalion, Rolf Fusiliers, and he fought with them at Highwood in July 1916. I can remember him and Herbert Saltzbach talking and laughing with each other. And although that was many years after the conflict, I think they would have done that in the twenties and thirties. It's in stark contrast to my experience with veterans of the Second World War. I think something that I've said on this podcast before, the vets, the infantry soldiers that I took to Normandy, Arnhem, into the Rhinelands, to Italy, and so many other Second World War battlefields, those men would not have happily sat and talked to the Germans. They wouldn't have shook their hands, they wouldn't have had drinks with them, they wouldn't have socialized with them, and they would not go into German cemeteries. They didn't want to go in there and honour the German dead because their view of that enemy in World War II and what the German soldiers stood for was very different to the veterans of the Great War. Many of them said to me, you know, did you know, Paul, they'd say that those German soldiers had a little belt buckle and on it it said Gott mit uns, God is with us, and they believed that just as much as we did. So I think they identified more with their enemy in the Great War than those soldiers, those veterans of the Second World War did with their enemy, who had done things that made those atrocities that the Germans, those terrible atrocities that the Germans had carried out in nineteen fourteen look mild by comparison. But again, I think we've demonstrated how important it is to understand these two great conflicts and how important it is to see them in context to each other. So thanks for that great question, Steve. We're moving on to question number three, another one from Fan Mail, and this one comes from Richard Tatterton. Richard asks My great uncle James McGuire served with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and he was wounded in nineteen fifteen and discharged due to wounds, but later re enlisted and served with various regiments and worked in the Graves Registration Unit. How common was it for pensioned out men to re enlist without using a pseudonym? Would this have only been possible post war as it was a non-combatant role? Well, you might think if you look at the history of the Great War and the experience of soldiers on the battlefield and how often terrible those battlefields were in terms of the experience of soldiers, the physical conditions, let alone the actual fighting, battlefields like Passchendale, 3rd Epe in 1917, where this vast swamp smashed to bits by shell fire, and men had to try and live in that and fight in it. You might think that once they'd gone through that and they had a an opportunity to be discharged due to a wound or sickness contracted on active service, then they would be done with the army and they would walk away. And many did. That was it. They'd done their bit, they'd been injured, they couldn't fight again. But others, they wanted to go back, they wanted to return. And I've come across this a lot in many, many years of researching individual soldiers. Now, if they were discharged, no one's going to force them to re-enlist, they couldn't be re-conscripted. So if you were discharged in 1914-15, technically you wouldn't be conscripted later on in the war, although again I've seen some examples where soldiers were erroneously conscripted and then had to show their discharge papers, their civil war badge, whatever it was, to prove that they'd already been in uniform. So that that did happen, but that's not really what we're talking about here. What happens? Men get discharged, and that's it, they're done, their war's over. But there were some who, I guess, had an itch that needed to be scratched again and they wanted to go back into the army, or they left with discharged for all kinds of reasons. So I once came across a lieutenant in the Royal Marines, for example, who had served at Gallipoli with the Royal Naval Division in 1915, and he was discharged the following year, then re-enlisted in 1916 as a rifleman in the 18th London Regiment, the London Irish Rifles, and then transferred to the Machine Gun Corps as a private and was killed in 1917. So he went at the beginning of the war from an officer to being another rank and then was killed in action on the battlefield. And that is not the only example of that that I've seen. And there's another officer that I researched from my book Great War Lives, and although he's not discharged due to wounds or sickness, he was cashiered in fact in 1916, so kicked out the army. He went back and he re-enlisted as a private soldier in the 2nd 20th London Regiment, the Black Heath and Woolwich Battalion. He served with them in Palestine and then on the Western Front, and he was killed on the Hindenburg line, storming a German machine gun post in 1918. So there's lots of reasons that men would re-enlist after being discharged like that for all kinds of different reasons. There were those who were legitimately discharged because of wounds, who tried to re-enlist with their own names, but the army had a record that they'd served before and had been discharged, so couldn't re-enlist, but that didn't necessarily stop them. So when I lived in Bogner many, many years ago, I researched two local lads who had served with the 1st 4th Battalion, the Royal Sussex Regiment at Gallipoli. And one had got the DCM for his bravery at Souvler Bay. Both of them had got really bad dysentery, which was a massive problem at Souvler and the whole of the Gallipoli Peninsula, to such an extent that they had been discharged from the army as a consequence of that dysentery. They were not happy with that, and they both tried to re-enlist but were refused. So what they did is they went up to Liverpool and they changed their names, and this comes to your point about joining under a pseudonym, for example, Richard. They went up to Liverpool, they lied about what their names were, they changed their names, and they joined the Liverpool Irish, which was a territorial battalion of the King's Liverpool Regiment, and they went overseas. That battalion was in the 55th West Lanx Division, and in one of the actions near Gavinci Givenchy in northern France, they took part in a trench raid where they both were awarded the military medal. Now the interesting thing about them is that they got two sets of medals, one for their service in the Royal Sussex, and another set of medals under their assumed name for their service in the King's Liverpool Regiment. And I came across this because I had the medals of one of these two lads. He became a publican in one of the villages close to Bogner after the war, and this story came out through the research on him. The lad, his mate, his best mate, had been awarded the DCM for Gallipoli. He returned, he'd been wounded later on in the Great War and sadly died in the early twenties of his wounds. So I think when we research these stories, we get a sense of what duty meant to these men. They weren't mucking about, they they wanted to serve. So that's kind of one level. That's when the war is on. And you again, Richard, you kind of point to this in your question. When the war was over, I think these kind of conditions relaxed a bit, and some men did re-enlist. Some years ago I was working on a television programme, kind of Who Do you Think You Are kind of thing, where we looked at the story of one celebrities family member who did just this, who had served, come out of the army, and then he re-enlisted and joined the Graves Registration Unit and served with them at EAP in 1919 and on into the early 20s, going across the battlefield to recover the dead. And I think that a lot of men did do that. They rejoined after the end of hostilities to work with things like the Graves Registration Unit, but also some of them because they were politically motivated to go and fight in Russia, because Britain had sent troops with other nations to fight alongside the white Russians who were still loyal to the Tsar, although he was dead by then, but they were fighting Bolshevism, communism, the Bolsheviks who had risen up in Russia in that latter part of the First World War, and a lot of men didn't like the sound of what Bolshevism, communism stood for, and this was the beginning of that kind of polarization of European politics in the interwar period, and these men re-upped, re-enlisted, and went to go and fight against the Russians, the Bolsheviks, in what was then essentially the Russian Civil War. So there's all kinds of reasons why a soldier might re-enlist, and I and I think this and and so many other stories that we could pull out of the past tell us so much about the men of that generation and what motivated them to serve as well. It's a fascinating subject. I've never seen any figures for it. I guess it's probably unquantifiable because you'd have to research so many individual cases. But thank you, Richard, for giving us a chance to kind of shed a bit of a spotlight on this subject and talk about some of these examples, and I hope that's answered your question. On to our fourth and final question. This comes from Angus Cole. Angus asks, I wanted to ask what countries such as France and Belgium and to a lesser extent Gallipoli think about the Great War in comparison to the UK and the Commonwealth in terms of commemoration, pilgrimages to the battlefields, and the never ending appetite by ourselves for more information relating to every aspect of the Great War and its continued hold and fascination. Is it right to say that Belgium and France in particular would like to see as time goes on a quiet fading of memories because of their countries and populace being ravaged by war in both the First and Second World Wars and are ambivalent about the continued memorialization in the same way that we do? Well this is a really good question, Angus, and I can only give you my own idea. Opinion. I'm not kind of broadcasting to the nation on this here. We've all got our view of this based on our own experiences. And over forty-three years of visiting the old front line in not just France and Flanders but much wider beyond that to Gallipoli, which you mentioned, for example, many times. I don't sense any animosity amongst anybody. Sometimes curiosity, why are we so still obsessed with this in Britain and the Commonwealth and to a lesser extent America? What is the continued fascination of it? But I think also comes along with that respect that we do, we travel to these battlefields to honour relatives that we never knew, or in the case of many of us, we research people that aren't even part of our family, and they become part of us, we adopt them almost, and we go there to put a cross on their grave, or stand there and remember them and look at their photographs, whatever it is. And I sense amongst the people who live on these old battlefields, like I say, a great respect for that. And I can cite a few examples. I remember sitting in a restaurant in Albert many years ago in the 90s when I was living at Corsolette, talking to a French family, and they were asking, you know, why we were visiting, and when they discovered we were living there, why we're living there, and what the fascination was. And I said to them, you know, have you been to the British semantics? Oh yes, when we look out and we visit those places, we stand there, and for us, these are the men who saved Europe. I mean, that is the phrase that they used. And what you see in just about every commune in France in particular, and also in Belgium, but particularly I notice in France, they have the two national holidays of the 8th of May, VE Day for World War II, and obviously the 11th of November for the end of the Great War. But the mayor, in those communes where they have British cemeteries within the commune boundary, they go to the cemeteries on the 11th of November and the 8th of May, and they lay a wreath and have a short service of remembrance. And that has continued for many years, it existed before the centenary, it's carried on after the centenary, and that kind of connection I don't see fading whatsoever. It's not necessarily just an older generation, because some mayors of some villages that I can think of are quite young, it's something that is continuing, and I think that that respect that we see on these battlefields for the fallen of Britain and the Commonwealth and other nations is something that is to be admired and valued because, as I've said very often on this podcast, if we can't get the people who live on these battlefields onside and understanding the importance of that landscape of the past and how it blends into the landscape of the present, we've got no chance to preserve anything from a long-term point of view. And I don't think it's really any different in Gallipoli. There's a different mindset there. Gallipoli is quite literally a legend in Turkey. I mean, millions of Turks visit Gallipoli every year, far more than any English-speaking people, whether that's from Britain or Australia or New Zealand. The Turks really value their past and they value the stand and the bravery and the heroism of Turkish soldiers there. They've built memorials to them over the last few years, and I think that's a really good thing because they value that ground, and they also value the dead, their enemy, in the cemeteries on that ground too, which is something that you see in some of the statuary that exists on those battlefields in Gallipoli today. And I've found the people in Turkey and on that Gallipoli battlefield to be very accommodating when visiting places, very helpful, and very kind, people that will welcome you in a really big way wherever you go. And again, no signs of any difficulty or animosity or anything like that, and certainly not wanting to see non-Turkish visitors not come. They want everybody to go there. So looking at your kind of question about Belgium and France, and would they want to see a quiet fading of memories, again, I don't really see that. I don't see that. I think there is a greater understanding in France now, perhaps, of the first world war, and as we move further away from the second, an acceptance of that, and perhaps an understanding of France's multiple kind of layered roles of involvement in that conflict, which is far more complex than the first world war. But I think that there is a kind of reality to this as well, which is tourism, it's worth a lot of money across these battlefields in terms of the people that visit them. But it's not just about that. These are ordinary people who understand sacrifice, they value how people are committed to remembering those from the past, whether they're relatives or people that they've researched. And we see this, I guess, in sharp focus at the last post each evening at eight o'clock when a ceremony that's nothing to do with the Commonwealth Wargraves Commission, nothing to do with the Royal British Legion or any British Veterans or Commonwealth Veterans Association. It is the last post association, a Belgian organisation, and from the very beginning it is the way that Belgium chose to honour the fallen of what was then Britain and the Empire in those battlefields around Eap during the Great War. And until that last post fades, I don't see any sign of those people who live on those battlefields, no matter where it is, I don't see any sign of their interest, their commitment, and their way of honouring this fading either. But it's a great, great question, Angus, and if anyone's got opinions on this, please post them on the podcast website or send them into email, and I'd love to hear your view. So thanks for all those great questions this week. As always, you can send questions in via email, via fan mail, or via the Discord server, and there's links to all of those on the show notes for this episode. And I'll see you again soon for some more questions on the Old Frontline. You've been listening to an episode of the Old Frontline with me, military historian Paul Reed. You can follow me on Twitter at Somcor, you can follow the podcast at OldFrontline 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 buymea coffee at buymeacoffee.comslash oldfrontline. Links to all of these are on our website. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you again soon.