Remembering the Forgotten Front

What was the “Forgotten Front” of Northern France? In this episode, we explore the stretch of battlefield from Armentières on the Belgian border through La Bassée to the ground near Loos, scene of the Big Push of September 1915: fought 110 years ago this weekend. We uncover the history, walk the landscape, and share the stories of the men who fought and fell on this often-overlooked part of the Western Front.

The Road to La Bassée Poem on the Great War Forum: The Road to La Bassée

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:10

This weekend the podcast goes out marks the 110th anniversary of the Battle of Loos in 1915 and a decade ago I was on that battlefield commemorating the centenary of Loos and visiting dozens of locations with people who had family connections to them and that's always a privilege to do. This wasn't just people who had family members who were killed at Loos in 1915 but in many cases the there were people where grandfathers and great-grandfathers survived, and the stories of their deeds have been passed down through those families, and a century on, they wanted to stand on that same ground. This year, I won't make it out to Luz, but Luz and those wider battlefields across northern France have always particularly fascinated me, and we've covered quite a lot of them in episodes of The Old Front Line. They've area that has become commonly known as the Forgotten Front, the battlefields between Flanders and Arras, and an area generally much less visited. There are, of course, many Forgotten Fronts of the Great War, from Salonika to Mesopotamia and Palestine, but this is not those. This is a part of the Western Front. So, what is the Forgotten Front and what does it mean and what does it tell us I guess about the battlefields of the Great War and the experience and history of the Great War on the Western Front. Back when I started my original old frontline website which is way back in 1999 in the early days of the internet and I was still living of course then at Corselet and in those days we accessed the internet via dial-up believe it or not and I'd been reading something during the preparation of putting that website together, which contained information about the battlefields and what to see, what you could find, and reading some material on that ground between Armenteers and Lewes, I saw a reference to it as a forgotten part of the former battlefields. So I added a section to that website called the Forgotten Front, and that term kind of took hold, and I've seen it used frequently ever since which is great because it gives an area part of that landscape of the first world war an identity and it also perhaps provokes people to go and study it and visit it too but when we refer to the forgotten front what do we mean what area does it cover so in this episode we'll have an overview of the forgotten front look at some of the areas it covers and look at its geography if you like and hopefully this will push me on a bit this coming winter I'll get myself back to working on my book my Battleground Europe book on the subject of the Forgotten Front and finally finish it off especially as I've been promising this book for so long but but and this isn't an excuse there is a thing called the Old Frontline podcast and that has somehow gotten in the way way of me finishing this book. Writing a book is a mighty task and a time-consuming one as well. But the book's about 80-85% finished so I'm going to try and crack on. Anyway, back to the podcast and it's time once more to strap on our virtual boots, pull on our virtual pack and head out onto that area of northern France that overlooks the Belgian border, True North. on that forgotten front and begin our journey there. In the years after the First World War, the Battle Nomenclature Committee divided up the battles of the Great War so that historians, future historians, current historians then, could make sense of those four long years of conflict. And this is what historians do to understand the past. They often use names that to the men on the ground at the time probably wouldn't have made much sense, but those are the names by which we know these battles more than a century later and in some ways when we look at a part of the western front like this it's good to do that with the forgotten front so what we'll do here with this podcast is divide it into two battlefield areas and one area behind the lines because that part of the old front line away from the main battlefield area is just as important as the main battlefields themselves as as we've often said on this podcast. The first area that we're going to look at covers the ground from near the town of Armentiers down to the ground around the town of La Bassaye. And that makes sense, I think, because to the north, to the northeast of the town of Armentiers, there is a border, the border with Belgium, where we're kind of beginning our virtual journey. And to the south, near La Bassaye, is a natural feature, in fact a man-made feature canal, the La Bassée Canal which divides that bit of ground, divides it from a military point of view as to where the British lines were in the early period of the war but also the geography of that part of northern France because beyond the La Bassée Canal into the next sector you begin to see a change in that geography as we'll discuss so starting in this northern area what are the key features when we look at this part of the Forgotten Front. Well in terms of the geography from Montmartre down to the La Bassée area from the Belgian border you've got an area of farmland there moving out across what is essentially the flatlands of French Flanders and long Roman roads in this area which is typical of this part of northern France criss-crossed in places by rivers and streams and all also canals and then when we look at the the wider geography coming across what is essentially a very flat landscape we see the dominance of any kind of high ground that's there and when we speak about high ground in this area like we would do if we were in Flanders in Belgium we're looking at high ground that is only tens of meters above sea level and whoever occupies that high ground in this kind of landscape will have dominance And this area, this first area, from beyond Armentier down towards Le Basset, is dominated by a low ridge, in this case the Albers Ridge. Now when we look at the establishment of the line here, looking at the history side of this, there's heavy fighting here in October 1914. This is the period of the German so-called Race to the Sea, as German forces are moving through northern France and also to the north in Flanders as well, heading towards the Channel Coast. The British and the French, what's left of the Belgian army is fighting in all of those areas and here around Armentier there are British soldiers in this case utilising that low ridge, that Albers Ridge as part of their defence taking over farmland and villages just beyond it as the Germans advance from the direction of the city of Lille and the eastern side of that ridge, the other side of it essentially is where a lot of small and some quite considerable engagements are fought in that early period of October 1914. Now, the Germans have numbers behind them. The British being pushed back, losing heavy casualties in some of these battles, means they can't hold on to this ground indefinitely. So in that early phase of the fighting here, that high ground is lost, the Germans take control of it, and the British pull back into similar situations kind of farmland beyond, crisscrossed by these streams and rivers with roads and small villages and dig in in that area. That is where, in this part of northern France, British troops begin to dig their first trenches as their comrades to the north beyond Armentier, across that border, are doing exactly the same thing in Flanders near to Ypres. And this season, that early phase, that first winter of 1914-15, the of the initial British line on the Western Front and the deadlock essentially of trench warfare as the mobile war comes to an end. And that deadlock, that static warfare would mean that this sector becomes one of the main British and later Commonwealth Empire areas of learning about the static nature of trench warfare on the Western Front. It becomes what some units call a nursery sector where units arriving on the western front for the first time from training in Britain in the early phase of the war are put into what is a static front like this with no major battles going on they can learn to take over trenches understand how the trench system operates what happens on a day to day basis and they can do that while limiting their casualties if they were just thrown into battle for the first time they then that would probably be a disaster. But if they're on a quiet, so-called quiet front like this, they can understand what trench warfare, in theory, what trench warfare is all about. And that was done a lot in that early period of the war, and continued well into 1916, when Australian and New Zealand forces, for example, came to France from Egypt, having served in Gallipoli the previous year. So it's an important part of the in that respect because it saw a high rotation of units and many many soldiers who went on to fight in the big battles like Somme and Ypres and Arras and many other places besides did their kind of grounding if you like in trench warfare in sectors like this if not this actual sector that we're going to virtually walk down now it was also aside from being for a big long period of the war a quiet static front it was also the scene of some of the initial British offensives on the Western Front between March and September 1915 the British faced with static trench warfare didn't intend just to sit there and do nothing and what you see in that early part of 1915 is an attempt to get to grips with trying to break the deadlock of the Western Front and sometimes achieving small breakthroughs often at a high cost but learning the lessons of that kind of offensive fighting as it develops, as the whole front develops and the way of fighting on the Western Front develops in that early period of the Great War. And while after that there are long years with no major battles with one or two exceptions taking place, fighting returns to this front in 1918 with a vengeance with the German offensive in what became known as the Battle of the Lys in April 1918 and although the Germans didn't effect the breakthrough the total breakthrough that they wish they push the lines right back into areas where they'd never been any fighting at all and there was a period of static warfare again until the allies mustered for a counter-offensive and this ground saw fighting again in September 1918 leading to the breakout of trench warfare in this area and the advance over open ground to roll up cities like Lille which had been behind the German lines since October of 1918 So that's a kind of overview of what we find here from a geographical point of view and from the kind of history point of view. Not untypical of many of these quieter fronts along the Western Front in the Great War. But what do we find on these battlefields today as we make our way along this first part of the Forgotten Front from Armentiers down to the La Bassée Canal? Well first we have to kind of step over the border a bit into Belgium because there is a memorial between 1914 October 1914 and the end of the war now the area that it covers is denominated by two rivers one in Belgium just to the north of Ploegstert and near to the town of Messines and then to the south it is the Leys River the Leys Brook and in that area the missing from that sector are pretty much all commemorated on the Ploegstert memorial to the missing I say pretty much much all, because there is another memorial to the missing in this area, the Le Touré Memorial, and that commemorates 13,500 British soldiers who fell in this grounds. We're going to travel along now from Armentier down towards Le Basset, but covering a narrower time frame, in this case from October 1914 to the 24th of September 1915, when the Luz Memorial, which we'll also see, takes over. Now there's a bit of a crossover in this area, this first area between the Ploegstert Memorial and the Le Touré. In some respects there are some men commemorated on Ploegstert who probably should be on Le Touré and some men commemorated on Le Touré who are commemorated on the Ploegstert Memorial. And this kind of thing happened quite a lot. The vast casualties that were suffered in the Great War and the attempt to get this right wasn't always successful in the days where They relied, of course, on paper records. But for this initial area, these are the two memorials to the missing that dominates. When we look at those early British offensives like Neuve Chapelle, Vesterberg and Albers Ridge, this is where we find the missing on those two great memorials. Now, in terms of Armentier, the front line was just outside the town in small little villages close to junctions of roads and sometimes railway lines and in that typical landscape crisscrossed by these small rivers and streams and you'll find there quite a lot of battlefield cemeteries which are sited close to where quite a lot of the front lines were located this flat landscape there was a big problem with digging in here if you dug deep trenches they would often flood so a lot of the trench systems here were breastworks with positions built up above ground level and in In Armentiers itself, Armentiers, home of the famous Mademoiselle from Armentiers, this was a place which the British Army used in this northern sector as its main route to the front line, its kind of command and control area. So there were headquarters here, medical facilities, ammunition and supply depots to take material out onto the front line area on the outskirts of the town. Men came and went from the trenches through the town itself through the main square today not as famous as Ypres or Albert but the main square was known as 11 o'clock square because the clock tower of the town hall had been hit by a shell and was stuck on 11 o'clock until eventually of course that clock tower and the clock with it all came down with the amount of shells that eventually dropped on Armenteers so for the soldiers in this sector for the veterans that I interviewed back in the 80s and 90s for example they would often refer to this as the Armenteers sector that's what they kind of identified they didn't always know the names of the villages where they actually were and when we get out into those areas there are some names that stand out more than others there's Bois Grenier which was an area where the British took over in 1914 having been pushed back by the German advance dug in there took over that village and we kind of see an echo of the of the landscape and the infrastructure of front line with some cemeteries right out where the forward trenches were and then others in the town itself and typical of the cemeteries in this area in that they don't contain the graves of men killed in big offensives necessarily in fact the majority aren't they're men killed in those day to day activities of trench warfare snipers, rifle grenades, trench mortars coming over, random artillery barrages, both sides tunneled on this sector quite a lot there was a lot of mining activity beneath the battlefield and in some cases mines were blown soldiers were killed in the explosion of those so the kind of reasons and causes of death that we find amongst casualties buried in these cemeteries are much more varied than if we went to the big offensive cemeteries in places like Ypres and the Somme and when we get down to the ground beyond these villages and up onto the Albers ridge we can begin to see the dominance of that so-called high ground. Again, we're only tens of metres above sea level, but we can see down into villages like Bois Grenier and Fleur Bay, and we can see why the Germans were so keen to possess this kind of high ground here, because of the view that it gave them. And up on top of it, when we travel along the roads that take us across that Albers Ridge into, for example, Albers Village, which is the village that gives the ridge its name. We find a lot of German concrete structures from the First World War, from fairly small shelters that sheltered men and equipment, to artillery positions, to mortar positions, to much bigger concrete structures that were observation posts, to concrete towers that were built up inside silos and factory buildings, many of which are still there. The concrete towers, the buildings themselves, long since blasted away. And as you're coming to Albers for example, I remember the first time I went there the sun was on the other side of the village and as we drove in there looked to be this old kind of cottage on the outskirts of the village itself and as we got nearer to it we realised that it was a bunker that had been built inside a cottage, the cottage long since blasted away but the shape of it was still there in concrete and that was quite accessible in those days and we went in there, got up into the upper sections where the Germans had an observation post and the wooden mount for periscopes or a telescope was still in there in those days. Little had it changed since the time of the aftermath of the First World War. So there's a huge number of these concrete structures. I was once told that there are at least 2,000 of them between Armentier and Le Basset on the German side of the battlefield. And the interesting thing, on the British side, who traditionally didn't build concrete structures because this was a static front, you see quite quite a lot of British bunkers here which is a kind of testimony to the fact that the British accepted that there probably wasn't going to be a great advance here until that point in the war when fronts like this would collapse and the war was probably coming to an end and that was true because all of this was finally broken and traversed and pushed back and moved beyond in those final months of the conflict in 1918. Now we've said that after the British offensives here in that early part of 1915 from Neuve Chapelle through to Albers and Fester but it was a quiet sector for such a long time but there were occasions in which there were major battles and engagements Frommel is a good example of that where in 1915 the British attacked as part of the Battle of Albers Ridge towards the left flank of that assault and there were a lot of casualties in the fighting here, mines blown some breakthrough into the German positions but those attacks forced back and then the Australians had a second advance in this area in July of 1916 when the 5th Australian Division alongside the British 61st Division made an attack on Flamel Village as part of one of those diversionary battles for the Battle of the Somme. For the Australians this was one of the most costly periods of their military history with a staggering number of Australian casualties leading many years later to the memorialisation of this ground with the construction of an Australian memorial park with ground given by local farmers and the formation of an association here to build a monument the stunning Cobbers memorial that bronze figure of an Australian soldier carrying in one of his mates over his shoulders that was part of the stunning work by Australian sculptor Peter Corlitz and an area that I think focused quite a lot of Australian attention and study into this period of the Australian involvement on the a kind of a forgotten battle within a forgotten front and it led as well to the incredible search for the missing in this area and the discovery of a mass grave of Australian soldiers and the construction of the first Great War Commonwealth War Cemetery Pheasant Wood Cemetery since the 1930s when the bodies of those soldiers who were recovered many of whom were identified were laid to rest there and there's a fantastic museum alongside that as well which you can visit as part of traversing this sector of the Forgotten Front but as we come down off the top of the ridge into the area beneath it we come down into some of those key villages that key ground connected with those early offensives on the Western Front Neuve Chapelle being a good example of that we've done some previous podcast episodes about the Indian Corps at Neuve Chapelle this was one of those areas where they went into battle for the first time and in 1914 and then in the March 1915 battle played a massive role, a major role in the attack here in sweeping up the German ground and breaking through into the positions beyond. Neuchapel was in fact quite a successful battle for the first British offensive on the Western Front but the success couldn't easily be exploited. This is one of the great problems for First World War commanders was breaking through the enemy lines. How do you exploit exploit it by bringing up enough men, enough ammunition, enough equipment to push that on to wherever it's going to take you. In most cases, it ended with a small amount of sudden success and then back to stalemate. And the line then settled down around Neuve Chapelle for a big chunk of the rest of the war. And just down the road, beyond the crossroads, La Bonne crossroads at Neuve Chapelle, you come up to the ground where the Boer's Head is located. Something I've spoken about many times. The day Sussex died, the South Downs Battalions diversionary attack there on the 30th of June 1916. And again, that's also in an area where troops attacked on the 9th of May 1915 in the Battle of Albers Ridge. The 5th Royal Sussex Async Ports Battalion famously advanced there into the German positions and that with the Battle of 1915 with the 2nd and 5th Battalions advancing at Albers Ridge and then the South Downs in 1916 with the attack on the Boar's Head it became a corner of the Forgotten Front that was certainly forever part of Sussex and certainly forever part of that Sussex heritage leading during the centenary in fact in the approach to the centenary I think the twinning between Wadhurst which had lost so many men there in 1915 and the village of Albers which gives the wider area and the battlefield its name and then around the corner you have Festerbert and Givenchy in that final part of this sector leading down towards the Lebasay canal and it's quite easy just to drive through those areas they're pretty unremarkable really and in fact what we find on some of the buildings in those villages is more evidence of the second world war quite a lot of battle damage from may 1940 as british units pulled back towards the coast towards dunkirk for example but of course the whole area if you look at the commonwealth war graves commission maps or if you look at google maps you'll see a unit memorials the landscape has not really changed so with trench maps or with the digital trench maps like linesman you can get out onto these battlefields and make a lot of sense of them in terms of their early war history and when the whole front became static here and as you get down towards givenchy the terrain begins to change it moves out of that kind of flat land that ground where a lot of the trenches were breastworks built up above ground level givenchy givenchy Givenchy-les-Labassais is near to the Labassais Canal. It sits on a bit of a rising bit of ground and was a position that was especially suitable for the war underground, for tunnelling. And it became an area choke point for that, where mine after mine after mine was being blown there, including some very sizeable charges. The Red Dragon Crater, the Red Dragon Mine, blown by the Germans underneath the positions of the 2nd Royal Welsh Fusiliers in June 1990. 1916 described in some detail by frank richards in old soldiers never die that's where he was decorated with the distinguished conduct medal for his bravery and also the place where beneath that battlefield at the same time william hackett was down there the royal engineers with his tunnellers the tunnel system that they've been working on was collapsed by the explosion of the red dragon mine and he stayed at his post trying to get the lads out until the whole system and he was killed and eventually awarded the posthumous Victoria Cross for his bravery the only tunneller in the Great War to get that distinction commemorated today by a modern memorial that overlooks the site where the Red Dragon Crater was it's quite an effective memorial in that it's got the symbol of the tunnellers which is the T in a bit of glass and as you look through that glass it takes your eye out to the bit of the field where the Crater was crater was and beneath it where Hackett and the other tunnellers were doing their work and where his brave deed took place. So there's much to find really as you traverse this and again in some of these areas like Festerbutt there is a good example of a British bunker there, a massive one, covered in ivy these days but still discernible and if you look at some of the early editions of Rose Coombe she shows pictures of a French woman still living in that bunker in the 1960s and 70s. It's quite a sizable command headquarters signals bunker I suspect but one of a number and the 55th West Lancs division who operate in this area quite a lot in both 1917 and 18 and we see their service reflected in the dead from that division that we find in the cemeteries in this area but we also see quite a lot of concrete structures that their engineers built with the divisional flash the Rose of Lancaster kind of carved into the concrete that's something that you'll in quite a few locations here and for them in April 1918 during that German offensive this was part of the front that they were defending at that time and while the whole front to the north from north of Givenchy all the way up past Armentiers up into Belgian Flanders while all of that collapsed the 55th West Lanks Division held the ground here around the Labasse Canal and in this sector the Germans did not affect a breakthrough so when it came to memorializing the division territorial division so a lot of local connections battalions recruited locally with a good old comrades association after the war one of the earliest divisional histories that was published in 1919 only a small one but really good one fold out maps and photographs and that as i've often said leads to a divisional memorial which where are we going to build the memorial to the 50 55th West Lancs Division, our finest hours at Givenchy. Givenchy is going to be the place where it goes up and that's where you'll find it today. And there was a huge commemoration when that was unveiled with a lot of ex-members of the battalions of the 55th Division and men who were still in what was by then the Territorial Army came out in uniform and the memorial was unveiled. Not as well known as others but nevertheless it kind of marks an important period in the history of territorial units in the Great War, and also the incredible battle that was fought here in April of 1918 as part of the Battle of the Lys. Now in terms of La Bassée town, we're coming up to our dividing line now in this first sector of the Forgotten Front, divided as we've said by the La Bassée Canal. La Bassée is the nearby town. It was swept up in the until that final phase of the war in the autumn of 1918. But it was a town that could be seen from many of the British trenches. So again, a little bit like Armenteers, when soldiers spoke about the front that they were on, if they were down here, they often called this the Labasse Front. And you'll read that in memoirs by Frank Richards, who we've already mentioned, and Robert Graves, goodbye to all that, and many, many others besides. But whenever I come here, whenever I've brought groups to this area, I don't always read a lot of war poetry to groups because not everyone likes war poetry certainly some of the more complex poetry by Sassoon and Graves and Owen it's difficult for some people to understand but many years ago I came across a poem written about this part of the front and it was written in 1934 by two Great War veterans Bernard Newman and Harold Arpthorpe they had come back and they wrote this poem subsequently and it's called The Road to Le Basse and it reflects on what they found in the 30s, 20 years after the Great War, and how that made them feel about what had happened there in the four years of the Great War itself. Now, it's quite a long poem. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I will put a link to it on the show notes for this episode if you do want to read it. I would recommend that. But this is the two stanzas that I think really kind of stand out for this, and this is the first of them. I went across to France again and walked about the line The trenches have all been filled in. The country's looking fine. The folks gave me a welcome and lots to eat and drink, saying, Hello, Tommy, back again. How do you do, Insy Pink? And then I walked about again and mooched about the line. You'd never think there'd been a war. The country's looking fine. But the one thing that amazed me, most shocked me, I should say, there's buses running now from Bethune to La Basse. And I wondered what they'd think of those mates of mine who died. They never got to Le Basset, though God knows how they tried. I thought back to the moments when their number came around, and now those buses rattling over sacred, holy ground. Yes, I wondered what they'd think of it, those mates of mine who died, of those buses rattling over the old pavé close beside. Carry on, that's why we died, I could almost hear them say, to keep those buses always running. And it's written in very simple language, but I think it expresses a lot about what some veterans saw as the meaning of sacrifice. That they've come back, as these two men did, 20 years after the war, found the landscape changed, life gone back to normal, buses running across the old battlefields, and when they stand in the cemeteries, they can hear the voices of their mates saying, that's what we fought for, for life. to return as normal. And we'll stop now on this boundary of this first part of the Forgotten Front and then resume our journey just beyond it into the second area of Battlefield. Having crossed the Lebassé Canal, we've now come into the second and final area of the Forgotten Front on the actual battlefields themselves, which extends from here, where we are now, to the ground around the Bethune Lens Road to the south. Now, these are delineations made by me. They're not any official delineation of this front, but when I came to look at this and when I came to write the early part of the book that I'm working on still, I thought, how can I divide this front up and these are the kind of obvious boundaries the Belgian border to the north and then the ground from Armenteers to the Labasse Canal and then from the other side of the Labasse Canal down towards the Bethune Lens Road and then beyond that you're getting closer to Arras in the next part of the front essentially. Now this was an area taken over after those early battles on the northern area of the Forgotten Front in 1915 as the size of the British Expeditionary Force grew It was put under pressure to extend its line, extend its position along the Western Front, and gradually in 1915, the length of the front that the British held, which initially had been about 30 miles from Saint-Éloi, just the south of Ypres, down to that area close to La Bassaye, that was then extended to take in this area that we're coming into now, into the ground close to Lens, Lens, and near to the villages of Loos, which is in German hands. which was in British and prior to that French hands so this became a new part of the British line and some units were detached from this area of the western front and sent further south because the intention was to move the British line further and further south as possible and some of those units in 1915 as the front was being established here were down on the Somme for example some south of the river Somme and others in the area around Albert for example but that's a story for another of the day. Now prior to this becoming a British sector of the Western Front this is an area where the French army had fought in 1914 and 1915 in those early battles in this part of the front but involving the French army so when we look at the names of the villages here and they become synonymous with long periods of trench warfare and some of the offensives here in 1915 there are also places where French soldiers were falling often in great numbers in those earlier battles like Combray Quincy, Vermeule and Mazingarbe for example and we find evidence of that French part of the war here, the involvement and the casualties in memorials and cemeteries in this area where the French dead are buried and the French dead are commemorated on unit memorials in one or two locations here as well. So again like the northern part of the front what are the key features when we look at this part, this next battlefield area of the Forgotten Front, well it's different terrain for a start we've previously been in a kind of flat area dominated by a ridge here we're at the start of a chalk seam and also a very deep coal seam here, it's one of the richest coal fields in France and we can see evidence of that coal mining industry right across this landscape today just as the soldiers of both sides could see that over 100 years ago in 1914-15 it's very flat and open there's not much woodland here the fields are vast vast open spaces and to the south beyond that lens Bethune Road is the start of even more high ground towards the city of Arras and the beginning of the rolling down land that extends east of Arras towards Combray and to the south down towards what became known as the Somme battlefields. In the northernmost area where we've our journey now close to the Le Basset Canal there were the villages of Combrin and Quincy and in front of Quincy were the brick stacks this was a massive brick factory with huge undelivered piles of bricks we've done a previous podcast episode on the brick stacks and the brick stacks suddenly became part of the battlefield these massive towers that both sides took over and fought over on and off for a big chunk of the rest of the war with assaults on individual brick stacks with going up the sides of them on ladders and men fighting each other on the top to very deep trenches here because you could be spied on from the top of the brick stacks by the enemy and you could do the same to your enemy so soldiers need to be in much deeper trenches here to avoid detection from movement and anything else and we see an attempt to try and break the stalemate here push back from these brick stacks with French memorial to the units that fought here in 1915, and quite a big plot of French dead in Cambryn Churchyard, which is also a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery from the next period of the war. And that then takes us across to the area where the Battle of Loos was fought in September and October of 1915, taken over by the British in the months before that, and we've got that vast area of open fields where the battle was fought in 1915, dominated at the time by key German features, the Hohenzollern Redoubt, as the British called it, this massive German defensive system near Osh-le-Mine, where there was a big network of trenches, there were slag heaps, the Germans had observation posts in, dominating the ground there, and there'd been a lot of mining activity there in the early period of the war, carried on up to the beginning of the Battle of Loos. It was part of the northern, main northern area of the assault, where the 9th Scottish Division, part of the 1st 100th thousand of Kitchener's army the first men to enlist went into action on the 25th of September 1915 with the other units that attacked that day but this was their kind of battlefield with huge casualties with staggering losses with ordinary soldiers killed right through to their divisional commander being killed in the battle here Major General Thessiger whose body was never recovered and his name is on the Louvre's memorial to the missing and as we come to the south of where the Hohenzollern Redoubt was we're those big open fields we can see, I mean one author described it as unfavourable ground and when you see these fields as they are today and you try to imagine units attacking across that open ground you can see what kind of difficulties there were and here we've got some of the kind of famous features like the Routoir Farm the farm that was just behind the British lines where a lot of units assembled in the middle part of the assault on the Loos battlefield in September 1915 and in the fields just beyond it was a single tree known as the lone tree it was a kind of landmark on the battlefield soldiers could see it from the trenches when they went forward in the battle they were attacking close to it Harry Coates who I've mentioned many times on this podcast went over the top of the London Scottish near that position on the 25th of September 1915 and was gassed as he went forward saw his best mate gas beside him and killed and he always remembered his cold dead eyes staring out through the gas mask eyepieces and realising the best mate was gone then he took a whiff of gas himself and was evacuated back and when the battle moved forward a bit and that ground was taken a lot of soldiers souvenired bits of the lone tree I think the London Scottish Museum has got a chunk of it in their collection for example not swiped by Harry Coates and it disappeared by wars ending and then jumping on many many years some members of the Western Front Association who had got a personal connection to that bit of ground replanted it and it's still growing there today and there's a little memorial plaque in front of it and it's one of those kind of landmarks really on the Loos battlefield today again 10 years ago for the centenary I stood there with a group and we had fantastic weather fantastic visibility across that ground and you can really kind of bring the Loos battlefield to life I think from that location and seeing as you can because there is no cover all of the key features from the Routoir Farm behind you Vermell beyond that and then back out onto the battlefield area you can see Dud Corner Cemetery in the Lewes Memorial to the south the Bethune Lens Road you can see the spire of the church and the town hall in Lewes Village and see how that village sits in a bit of a hollow and then you can see the rising ground beyond it leading up to what was known on the maps as Hill 70 where the next phase of the battle took place and where the Guards Division went into action for the first time in the Great War having brought all of the guards units into one formation they went over the top in that battle took part in the attack on hill 70 and one of the more famous casualties amongst the Irish guards who were with them in that battle was John Kipling the son of Rudyard Kipling one of those incredible stories of grief and the great war with one father's search for the fate of his son and where his son might be buried he does have a marked grave today but his name remains firm on the Louvre's memorial, and again that's a kind of tale for another podcast another day. The area to the south of the Lens Bethune Road, which we've kind of said is a demarcation line, we can't entirely forget because that was also part of the Louvre's battle in 1915. The village of Cité Maroc, Nuit-les-Mines, Aix-Noulet, that kind of is the southern boundary. Once you get beyond Aix-Noulet, you're getting much nearer to Notre-Dame de Lorette, the beginnings of the high ground around Souchet, the start of Vimy Ridge and then of course beyond that Arras so you're really moving into the next bit of the Western Front but just to the south around Cité Maroc in that area there where there was a very large slag heap known as the Double Crassier that was where the southern part of the Luz Offensive went in the 47th London Division London Territorials went into battle there and it was a scene of for example footballs being kicked forward into battle by the men of the London Irish Royal rifles, a famous incident and one of many times during the Great War in which football was featured in an assault on German positions. This, I think, probably one of the earliest written examples of that taking place. And this southern area is where we get a very, very good kind of evidence of the coalfields which dominate this part of northern France. The double crassier was reduced, I And then the coal mining continued beyond right up to the 1970s. So the size of it is much bigger than it was in 1915. And then there are other slag heaps in the distance beyond it. And we can't disguise the fact that we are in a former coal mining area. You can get up onto the top of the double crassier today. And there are incredible views from there. It's a bit of a walk coming around the back of it. But it's well worth it because you get this incredible view right across the whole expanse. of that loose battlefield now what do we find on this part of the forgotten front this next battlefield sector of this part of northern france well similar kind of things in many respects the landscape is different but we see evidence of the great war with cemeteries and memorials of course i mean as i say many many times they're not there by accident they are beacons really to the history of the great war and the cemetery is kind of pointing to the fact that that is often where the fighting was at its fiercest so if we go back to that northern area where the brick stacks were located the brick stacks have long since disappeared over the years locals have told me that they were used to fill in the shell holes and trenches and repair roads and all that kind of stuff but I must say in walking the fields where the brick stacks were once located I have found bricks that are obviously from that period so they haven't entirely disappeared but it is quite a small area and it's on the edge of a kind of urban urban area now there was a big power station built there many years later and the geography of that has changed but when you walk the pathways there and you've got a map a trench map with you you can see how incredibly close the front lines were you can literally walk along a track on the edge of where that power station was look across a field and only tens of yards away that's where the walking the ground and then when you get down to the Hohenzollern Redoubt area now that has changed a lot over the years that I've been visiting that part of the battlefield there's a big clear up there in the 90s where they took away a huge amount of ground huge amount of archaeology was exposed I remember seeing skips full of trench shields and rifles with bayonets still on and all kinds of battlefield detritus and a lot of very small kit just lying about all over the place I mean there was no battlefield archaeology in those days sadly so I'm sure a lot of stuff was lost I don't remember reading about the recovery of too many human remains so whether there wasn't really much diligence in that I don't know but it's an area where you can still walk and still again get some sense of the terrain there a lot of the mine craters that were part of that landscape have been filled in by rubbish over the years but when you go out to Quarry Cemetery it was just behind where the British Front Line was located and the dead were buried in a quarry there. You are right on the British front line and you can see again how exposed that position was and units like the 9th Scottish Division and then latterly the 46th North Midland Division who went into the attack there in October. You can see how unit after unit could easily get chewed up there as indeed they did in those 1915 battles. And although there isn't the kind of density of cemeteries here they tend to be on the larger scale once you get out into the main battlefield area with a very high proportion of the dead at the Battle of Loos in September, October 1915, having no known grave and being commemorated on the Loos Memorial to the Missing. Nevertheless, you can go to St Mary's ADS Cemetery and find Kipling's grave there, John Kipling, if indeed it is his grave. You'll see the high percentage of unidentified soldiers buried in there and just across the fields is Lone Tree Cemetery and the Routoir Farm, which which has still got some of its original walls, some of its original structures. It's a very interesting British observation bunker in the grounds of the farm. It's not on public land, but very often the farmer will open it up and let you have a look. And just from beyond the farm itself, you're back into the next bit of the battlefield, looking up towards where Dud Corner Cemetery and the Lewes Memorial is located. And again, you've got this kind of sense of the vastness of the fields there, and you've kind of look and you imagine those units going into battle in September 1915. As you come down into Lewes Village past Dud Corner and the Lewes Memorial where the the dead are commemorated the missing commemorated on the walls of the memorial and many casualties within the cemetery itself. Lewes Village sits in a bit of a hollow there's a small museum in the town hall that's worth going to see there is the Lewes British Cemetery which has now got a new extension which we've on a previous podcast on and as you get beyond Luz coming up onto Hill 70 you're coming into that ground that was known as the Field of Corpses where some of the follow-up units in September 1915 went into the attack men from the 21st and 24th divisions and suffered terrible casualties from the German defences that were in a kind of a U-shape with these Stutzpunks these strong points that looked down onto this open ground laid down heavy fire and caused catastrophic casualties to so many many of the men and the units that tried to advance across that ground in 1915. So again, it's an area that I think we can get a lot from. I'm working on this book, covering this bit of ground myself, but there are other Battleground Europe books covering the Loos area, covering some of these places that we've spoken about. The late John Cooksey wrote some really good guides to this part of the Western Front as well. So this is kind of different ground, not as well known, not as well trod, as Ypres or the Somme but really worth getting to grips with I think to understand how war fighting on the western front the development of the offensive began with these early battles reaching a pinnacle with the battle of Luz in September 1915 and the lessons learned from that would then obviously be applied onwards towards the next offensive which would be the Somme in the following year in 1916 and as we stand on this southern boundary and we're close to Lens to Long just beyond that urban area is Vimy Ridge and if you're on top of the observation platform at Doug Corner Cemetery or standing on top of the double crassier you might get a glimpse of Vimy Ridge and Notre Dame de Lorette beyond that's the next part of the Western Front again bits of that not as well visited as other parts but I think we've come to the end the edge of the Forgotten front where the fighting was and now it's time to look at the ground behind the lines. When we discuss the landscape of the First World War in places like France and Flanders, it's easy just to focus on the areas where the fighting was, the very front lines. But the battlefield more than a century ago did not exist in isolation. It was only made possible by those long lines of logistics that fed it with men, with ammunition and war material. When I started looking at the Forgotten Front for the book that I'm writing on this part of the Western Front, I wanted to include something about those behind the lines areas because they are so important to our understanding of how the war was even possible and I found myself drawn into a fascinating aspect of the Great War that when I came to write about it, so far it's one of the longest chapters in the book because there's just so much there. So when the British Army came to France in August 1914 some of its earliest units that arrived on French soil were not infantry, they were not cavalry, but they were support units like the Army Service Corps and the Royal Engineers. It invested in that infrastructure to make the front line possible from the very beginning and continued to do so for the rest of the conflict, creating this vast network of supply by 1918 from roadways to canals to railway transport systems and enabling the British Expeditionary Force, which by 1918 didn't just include men from Britain, but from every corner of that vast British Empire, now the Commonwealth, and it enabled the BEF to move everything it needed to fight and sustain its war and its units easily and fluidly across northern France. When the British sector of trench lines was established in 1914-15, as we've said, running from Saint-Loire, south of Yves, to the Le Basse Canal area the army looked at that area behind the front to find what it needed to keep its men in these newly dug trenches in this static war that the Great War had become that meant it needed ports to bring shipping into to bring new men to fight that war and to bring ammunition and supplies and everything else that would be needed it needed main towns in that area that it could use as jumping off points to get to that battlefield area to create command and control centers signaling and also use buildings that could be made available to treat the wounded for example it needed transport networks whether that was road rail or canal and it found them all in plentiful numbers in this area beyond the forgotten front back up towards the coast from the ports of Boulogne and Calais, to the town's inland like Saint-Omer, Lilles, Ayers-sur-Lalise and Bethune, to the old Roman roads that had once taken legionnaires from Gaul to Britain, to the often medieval canals which would become the waterways of supply and medical evacuation, to the railways which crisscrossed the countryside and the coal mining areas and industrial landscapes of this part of France, railways which would carry British trains manned by special British personnel from the railway operating division it was an area that the ordinary soldier found he could get lost in too so it wasn't all about fighting soldiers didn't spend all of their time in the very front line they spent a lot of time out on rest even from the early periods of the war and the quiet towns and the villages behind that front with their estaminets and the French people that they met which to boys from Barnsley or country lads from the South Downs would have felt like they were from a world apart meeting these people from rural northern France so different to them in many respects but a lot of commonality as well in terms of human nature kindness and the way they treated each other but these soldiers when you read their memoirs they valued their time there they valued that time away from the front in this vast area between the front and the coast exploring, discovering, talking to people and forging relations of all kinds and perhaps finding an escape from the war for a while. It became a part of the front, behind the front that perhaps meant just as much if not more to them than the battlefields where so many of their comrades had died. The towns and villages proved that they had everything that the soldiers of all nations that would come there as the wider empire came to the Forgotten Front too. It had everything that they needed, from food to young women, shops to buy extras, and studios to have your photograph taken on active service. And those photographs taken in places like Bethune, where there were a lot of photographic studios, they look very different to the images of British Tommies that we see in training. They're images that I've always been drawn to in decades of collecting original images of the first world war coming across those active service photographs where the men are in one of these studios behind the front i think it gives us an insight into how they looked and how they felt about being there you can sense a great deal of pride you can sense that they're now part of a wider army and they've been on active service they've done their training but they've now proved themselves and you can see that sometimes in their demeanor i think when you look at these photographs and again that's kind of a subject for another podcast perhaps but as well as soldiers having free time to roam the army when it looked at this area it needed it as part of its infrastructure as we said so it created vast depots here to store food to store equipment war material and ammunition and then having the means by which to move them and if you'd have come into this back area at any point during the war it wasn't just the rumble of gunfire in the distance that have told you that a war was going on. You'd have seen evidence of the war everywhere with columns of men marching to and from the front line and vehicles of all types moving this material, ammunition, food, water, everything, moving it around. But it wasn't just one-way traffic. It wasn't just about feeding the war, although that was its principal reason for all this infrastructure, to give them any ammunition, to give them the bombs, the bullets and the bay it's to continue to fight and then when there were losses put more men into the field and continue with the fight but of course when there were losses this is when it becomes two-way traffic because those losses those casualties the wounded and then in periods when there's not a lot going on the sick as well because when there were cold conditions in the front line many soldiers would get sick they came back to this area back through this area to be treated in the medical facilities so as the war was fed the casualties the broken men from the battlefield would be brought back the other way to the dressing stations the casualty clearing stations and the field hospitals nearer the coast established right across this region and it became an area from the very beginning where women did their bit too from nursing in the medical establishments to later labouring with the Queen Mary's Army Auxiliary Corps and tending to the graves of the fallen and I think in 1940 when the British army first moved into this area the thought of so many women being involved in military units serving on this area behind the front would have been unthinkable really but by 1918 the war had changed everything including women's role in the military and because of the medical facilities cemeteries abound in this area too of men who died of their wounds women some of those women who served in the different units that were here killed in bombing raids in the latter part of the war or who went on to die of influenza as influenza swept across Europe in the autumn of 1918 on into the spring of the following year and these are cemeteries that often when we visit them in this area behind the lines reflect the culture of the day in the way that front line cemeteries don't so when you are constructing a cemetery that is near to a field hospital, you can create different plots. And what you find is cemeteries with Jewish plots, with separate plots for officers, so kind of keeping up the class system. And when women are killed, they're normally buried with the officers because they're seen in that same kind of status. I remember reading an account that said, oh, we can't have women just buried with the men. That wouldn't be right and proper. I mean, that's obviously the kind of culture, the mindset of more than a century ago. And the cemeteries also tend to be in chronological order. So you can often see the effects of the fighting on the medical establishments in these areas by coming across rows and rows of graves, all with dates very, very close together, often indicating, reflecting an offensive taking place on the front line. Because the cemeteries contain a much higher proportion of identified soldiers, so on a battlefield, many soldiers, their identity discs, their pay books will have been removed bodies are found later there's no way of telling who they are and they're buried as unknowns these are cemeteries created largely from medical facilities so a man comes in from the front and he's still got his dog tags on he's got his pay book he's got his personal papers so the chances of him being unidentifiable are pretty slim now there are some but that's a pretty rare occurrence so because of the fact that these are mainly identified soldiers what they do when we look at them because we know who they are what kind of backgrounds they came from what units they were with it gives us this fascinating insight into the men and women and units that operated behind the lines in this sector during the Great War and indeed the nationalities involved which become more and more numerous as the war goes on and by 1918 just about every corner of the British Empire is represented amongst those who are operating in this area behind the Forgotten Front and as well this area was a place where commanders commanded. It was a place where, for example, Sir John French, the original commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force in 1914-15, had a headquarters in Saint-Omer, and across the region, army, corps and division headquarters were set up in all kinds of different buildings, from old barracks to schools to old citadels, and they were all used by these different units as the war progressed. And by 1918, within those headquarters, many had women personnel working as clerks. So again, this was a massive turning point in the history of the British Armed Forces. While many believe the army never really learned anything during the Great War, especially when we watch things like Blackadder, great comedy, it's not a documentary, this vast area behind the Forgotten Front also contained large numbers of training schools. The artist's for example established one of the first machine gun schools near Santa Maria in 1915 but later as training became much more formalised specialist schools were established which trained soldiers to use weapons from rifles to machine guns to bayonets trench mortars to train them against the effects of poison gas so there would be gas training schools where soldiers went to learn about the latest gas equipment that soldiers carried from masks the small box respirators there are areas where they'd learn tactics trench fighting trench clearing trench raiding all that kind of stuff and then specialist schools to enhance their skills such as signaling schools that were established behind the front and much much more so you can see how big and complex this infrastructure was getting as the war went on and training in the army that needed training like this to fight and win the battles it fought in those final weeks of the conflict but while those crisscross paths in this region of northern France behind the front line of the forgotten front could have taken a Tommy everywhere and anywhere in the distance that far distance like a long forgotten thunder was the rumble of the guns the rumble of the barrage the rumble of the War, that massive engine of conflict fed by men and metal, that forgotten front, that part of the old front line. you've been listening to an episode of the old front line with me military historian paul reed you can follow me on twitter at somcor you can follow the podcast at old front line 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 old front line 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.