Questions and Answers Episode 41

In this episode, we unpack the meaning and origins of the term Downland, and explore how this distinctive landscape helps us better understand the geography and terrain of the First World War.

We take a closer look at the Lewis Machine Gun, examining how it worked, how a Lewis Gun section operated in battle, and its role on the Western Front.

We also consider the influence of the Franco-Prussian War on both the military thinking and physical landscape of WW1, before turning to the decorations and medals awarded to British and Commonwealth soldiers, explaining how they differed and what they reveal about service and recognition in the Great War.

A wide-ranging episode connecting landscape, weaponry, military history, and remembrance across the First World War.

The Vickers Machine Gun Association: The Lewis Gun on the Western Front 1916-18.

Main image: German offensive on the Lys. A Lewis Gun-post in Marquois, 13 April 1918. (IWM Q6528)

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Thanks for all the kind comments about the question and answer podcasts following our fortieth episode. It's good to know that this part of the old front line seems to be as popular as ever. And I think the question that we had about artificial intelligence, AI, and the use of it, and the potential dangers of it for historical research and the projection of history through rich media like podcasts and videos, it really seems to have hit the mark with many of you, and I had a lot of follow-up comments about that. And it's clear, like me, many of you are cautious, if not a little bit fearful, of AI. And I noticed that a recent Channel 4 documentary about Hitler's DNA, which some of you may have seen, used AI imagery and film in the production of that documentary, which, as far as I'm aware, is a first for mainstream television. So it's already quite concerning really that artificial intelligence is being used to produce material for serious documentaries and it's being presented as if it's an actual source. And I've seen a few interesting videos from World War II channels on YouTube recently discussing this very issue about AI, and I'm sure it is something that we will return to in this podcast, perhaps on the old frontline YouTube channel at some point in the near future, because I kind of think it is something that we need to keep an eye on and keep discussing so that we are aware that material is being put out there that has not come from the archives, that it is artificially produced from a source that really only has a bare minimum often of the facts. But anyway, that's the discussion for another day. For now, it's time for this week's questions. Our first question comes from Robert Knapp in America. Robert asks you often refer to downland in the podcast. As an American, we don't have that term here. Could you describe what downland is? Well this is a really good question, Robert, and I guess as someone who grew up in that downland in the south of England, it's something that I could take for granted. So to those who are not familiar with the concept of downland, what are we talking about here? And it is something that I have referred to a number of times in the podcast. Well I grew up in an environment in a landscape in the county of Sussex in southern England, in southern Britain. It's not just restricted to Sussex, this concept of downland, because Britain as an island, and I'm not a geologist, going to leave that to Professor Peter Doyle and many others, but Britain as an island has quite a lot of chalk landscapes along its coastline, f much further inland, and not just, as I've said, restricted to Sussex, but we can go across the downland into counties like Hampshire and Wiltshire. When I lived up in Yorkshire, east of York was the Yorkshire Wolds, going from York across towards the coast at Bridlington. That landscape is very much a chalk landscape with downland very, very clearly part of it. So what is this downland? Well, essentially, Robert, it's a kind of a rolling terrain, and the chalk formed over many, many thousands of years, shapes that terrain into a kind of rolling landscape. And for example, I've read quite a few American accounts, American written accounts of the First World War that often refers to places like the Somme as a billiard table because it's flat. Now I suspect compared to many of the rocky parts of America, it is seemingly quite flat, but it isn't actually like a billiard table. The downland part of it, this rolling landscape, is what gives its shape and is what gives its form, and it creates high points that then become crucial in the conduct of the battles fought over that landscape in the First World War. And one of the things that I hope that many of you learn by listening to this podcast is about the importance of landscape and the importance that landscape has, how it affects the conduct and outcome of battles in this conflict. So a landscape, a chalk downland, creating this rolling terrain where there are high points means that the high points become the focus of the fighting. And in many parts of the Western Front, really the whole conduct of operations there becomes about the possession and repossession of this so-called high ground. Now chalk downland is traditionally slightly higher than, for example, the flatlands, the wet Flanders plain up near Epe in Belgium. But it is still not a kind of rocky ridgeline, it is this rolling, softly, gentle rolling terrain that creates these high points which become the focus of defence and then attack. And for me growing up in Sussex, and I believe it's the same chalk seam that goes under the channel up into northern France towards that area of what became the Somme battlefields of 1916. So the terrain in Sussex where I grew up and the terrain on the Somme is very, very similar. For me, it was about walking an incredible landscape with so much to see, the way it drops away into escarpments and rises to high points on the coast, these vast chalk cliffs that are often at the beginning of river valleys or close to them. That is the kind of landscape that I knew. That does exist in northern France as well, but in terms of the battlefield area, that's much further inland. So while the rolling land that we've described is there, the kind of chalk coastline is not really part of the First World War story. And in terms of the nearest kind of thing that you've got to this in America, and I must confess I had to look this up, there are several areas which, according to online sources, you could describe that are in America, you could describe them as downland. There is the Austin Chalk in Texas, and when I looked at photographs of that, it's a lot starker than the chalk landscape in Europe, and I couldn't see evidence of much downland rolling terrain around it. There's a place called the Selma Group in Southeast America, which seems to me, the photographs of that look much more like it, with a kind of rolling area of contoured ground with a lot of meadowland, which is something that in the landscape of Sussex and the Somme before all the bombardments and then after the war, it very much is like that. And there is a place called the Niabrara Formation in Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, which again looks a bit more stark to me, but there is grassland around it with this kind of rolling terrain. Now, I don't know, Robert, if you're familiar with any of those areas, but I hope that at some point you get a chance to compare perhaps what they look like with that rolling downland of the Somme. And one of the elements I think to me using this description of the landscape as downland is an emotional one as well, because the Sussex Downs, the South Downs where I grew up, and many other kind of areas of downland across Britain being so similar to the Somme, I can see these connections between home and the stark reality of where the battles were once fought more than a century ago. And the similarity is is not just a physical one in terms of what they look like, it's what those landscapes create. On downland with rough grass pastures, you have skylarks, skylarks being the birds that bring us into each episode of the podcast and take us out, and are very much part of that chalk downland landscape in Britain and also that chalk downland landscape in northern France, in particular on the Somme. The Skylark is a bird that takes me whenever I hear it wherever I am straight back to nineteen sixteen, straight back to those rolling chalk hills of Pigardy and the long chalk dusty roads that took the troops there and back from the front and everything that happened there. And of course I can see that, but many thousands of men who were there in nineteen sixteen saw that as well and commented as to how the Somme looked like the downland that they had known wherever that was. So it's a geographical, a geological term really to describe a type of landscape which I guess is much more European than American, although you do seem to have some similar kind of landscapes there, but it is that connection, that wider connection of landscape and how, as we often talk about in this podcast, how landscape is very much a part, an essential part really of our wider understanding of the Great War. And I hope that's kind of answered your question, Robert, because it was one quite hard to answer in some respects because having grown up in that type of landscape, it's as familiar to me as breathing, really, and to try and quantify it and describe it and explain how important it is in the context of the Great War is perhaps not as easy as it sounds. So thank you, Robert, for that excellent question. Question number two comes from John Sanderson. John asks My grandfather was in a Lewis gun team in november nineteen seventeen with the fifty first Highland Division at Fleskier. His pal was next to him, noted as advancing towards the trench while firing a Lewis gun. I don't think our grandfather would have been operating and firing a Lewis gun at this point, so I am presuming that he was carrying ammunition for his pal. However, during the German offensive he was awarded the military medal for something to do with a Lewis gun. How big was a Lewis gun team generally? How did they operate in the field as a team in terms of advancing and attacking? Also, for the part of the team who were carrying ammunition, what were they armed with? And finally, could those who were carrying ammunition instantly be called upon to transfer to firing the gun and vice versa? Well this is a really good question. The Lewis gun, the Lewis machine gun, an American invention adopted by the British Army in nineteen fifteen and became the standard light automatic weapon used by British infantry in the Great War in increasing numbers as the war went on to a point where by nineteen eighteen it became a really important weapon on the battlefield, with infantry companies moving forward with a substantial number of Lewis guns in each one, being able to lay down automatic fire to suppress an enemy, to allow the other elements of that infantry formation to move forward, to attack an enemy that was now taking cover, and once an objective was captured, the Lewis machine gun could then be used to defend it by laying down automatic fire towards any German counterattacks. And it's a good moment to talk about Lewis guns and the use of Lewis guns and the Lewis gun teams because there is a new book just come out on this, produced by the Vickers Machine Gun Collection and Research Association. And some of you may remember that we had Richard Fisher from that organisation on the podcast talking about Vickers guns, and they've produced a whole load of material through their website. This new book, which is called The Lewis Gun on the Western Front, tells the story of the development and the use of the Lewis Gun by British forces and then how it was implemented on the battlefield, the equipment that they carried, and the training that was required to make them an effective part of a fighting unit. It's a really excellent little book, and I'll put a link to it into the show notes of this episode and also on the podcast website. And if you're interested in that element of the First World War, or you two have a relative that was in the Lewis Gun section of an infantry battalion, it's really worth getting your hands on. Now, the Lewis Gun, when it was introduced, they created Lewis Gun sections of men that would operate the guns, commanded in an infantry battalion initially by a Lewis gun officer, whose job was to oversee this, to oversee the men, to oversee the training. Generally, when you look at the kind of men that were asked to step forward and join part of an infantry unit like that, they tended to be slightly more intelligent men who could act on their own initiative, that they were men who could take on technical training and really be successful in that because it wasn't a particularly complex weapon to use, but it wasn't a bolt action rifle. So you needed some of the pick of your company of your battalion to actually be part of these Lewis gun sections. And a Lewis gun section consisted of seven men. There was a section leader, he was armed with a short magazine Blienfield. There was then the number one and the number two on the Lewis gun. So the number one actually fired the weapon, he carried it, he put it into action, he fired it. The number two assisted him with this, carried extra ammunition, but always made sure that there was one of the Lewis gun drums available for a reload when you ran out of ammunition. I think it was something like 47 rounds in a Lewis machine gun drum, and with a rate of fire of something like 500 rounds a minute. Obviously, they wouldn't be firing that amount of rounds in a minute, but it had quite a high cycle rate, so it fired a lot of rounds in one go. You could, if you weren't careful, quickly run out of ammunition, and the drums would need changing. So the number two was there to carry some extra ammunition and also assist the gunner, the firer, the number one in changing the drum if required. And I guess as part of his job as well, he was a kind of a spotter for the machine gunner. He was observing the ground around them, looking for targets of opportunity, and then directing the gunner to those targets if he hadn't seen them. So both of these men had quite an important role in the Lewis gun section. Supporting them, they had an additional four ammunition carriers, and these were men who had set a webbing gear with the special Lewis gun pouches, which you could slot the Lewis gun drums into, and they were quite heavy, obviously carrying a few of them, but these men would carry a number of these drums in these pouches. They would be armed with a short magazine Lienfield, and part of the role of all the men with rifles was to protect the machine gun because there might be a situation where they're in action, where the machine gun is blazing away, taking out the targets that are on the battlefield. The Germans would be the enemy, whoever it was, would be trying to outflank them, perhaps take them on, knock them out, and the rifle teams, the ammunition carriers and the section leader with short magazine the enfields would also be there to provide additional firepower to essentially protect, act as kind of security for the two machine gunners, the number one and the number two. Because of the equipment that they carried, the Lewis gun, ammunition, additional tools, they could not carry rifles. So both of them, the number one and the number two, they had side arms, a Webley service revolver or a Colt service revolver of the same caliber. So they had side arms, pistols, effectively, revolvers. Now the important bit is while all the men in the Lewis gun section had specific roles, they were all trained to do other things. So all of them were trained to operate and fire the gun. They weren't just there the ammunition carriers as donkeys to carry the ammo. If the number one and the number two get hit, they can then step in and take over. So it's quite an important little micro unit and quite a highly trained one as well. So coming back to your grandfather's circumstances, it could be that at Fleskier he was the number two on the gun going forward with the main Lewis gunner, and then acting as the ammunition carrier and the number two on the actual weapon itself, and then later on perhaps he became a number one on a gun himself, or there may have been circumstances in which the number one got killed or wounded and he had to take over. And a lot more of this is explained in the book. The book's got really good illustrations, a nice diagram of a Lewis gun section and what weapons each man had and what their role was, and it goes into much more detail about that element of their training and their purpose on the battlefield. And in terms of how Lewis guns were used, they were an automatic weapon that came in during that transition period when the machine gun corps was formed, and the Maxim and Vickers machine guns were taken out of infantry battalions to form the brigade machine gun companies in infantry divisions, which left a gap for automatic firepower, which was replaced by the Lewis gun. And their role and purpose on the battlefield changed and developed as the war went on. It could be used to lay down standard suppressive fire onto an enemy position, it could be used to defend a bit of ground if an enemy attacked, and then once you get to the more mobile battles of 1918, the provision of a lot of automatic firepower with an infantry company as it moved forward towards an objective was quite important. And one of the things that had been developed, the tactic if you like that had been developed to utilize the Lewis gun was to fire it from the hip as the men moved forward. It's quite a bulky big weapon, quite heavy. There was a strap specially developed so it could be carried in this manner and fired in this way from the hip, if you like. But I often wondered for a long time whether that actually happened. I remember seeing images in Charlie's War, the comic, of some of the characters in that doing just that with Lewis guns, perhaps even Charlie himself. But then I met veterans and interviewed veterans who had been Lewis gunners in infantry battalions, and I discovered from them that this was indeed a tactic, a method that they had employed. I remember actually being in Andre Quayo's private museum in Arras one time, and Martin Middlebrook turned up with a little tour group, and he would always have a veteran with him, he'd bring one over, he wouldn't charge the veteran to come with him, he'd bring him over on a pilgrimage essentially, and this chap had been a soldier in the Sherwood Foresters, one of the Bantam battalions, I seem to recall of the Sherwood Foresters, and he'd been a Lewis gunner in the final phase of the First World War in the attacks on the Hindenburg line, and I spent quite a long time chatting to him about the use of a Lewis gun because Andre had one in his collection, and we were standing there with this Lewis gun in front of us, and this old chap went through the whole kind of method of stripping down a Lewis gun, operating a Lewis gun, and the tactics they used in that latter part of the war while being part of a Lewis gun section. I mean I wish in those days we'd had iPhones and I could have stood there and recorded him saying these kind of things. It was a lot more difficult to do that. But hopefully, John, that's given you a bit of an idea as to how a Lewis gun section operated, the role of the men within it. There could be other men attached to these sections if they required more personnel going into action, more ammunition carriers and more men to defend the actual weapon itself. But I think that gives you a kind of structure to it, and I would very much recommend that book by the Vickers Machine Gun Collection and Research Association. And as I say, there's a link in the show notes and on the podcast website. Moving on to question number three, this one comes from Steve McQuaid. Steve asks, On my travels I noticed a monument above Point Noyelle near Amier. I assumed it must be a First World War memorial, but on closer inspection it turned out to be the Colonne Fade Herb commemorating a battle of the Franco Prussian War. It made me think, are there any other such monuments on the First World War battlefields? And did that earlier war influence how each side prepared for World War I? Basically who learned and applied the most from that earlier conflict? Well the Franco Prussian War of 1870 to 71 was a defining conflict in Europe in that latter part of the nineteenth century. This had been a period in which Prussia had fought many wars across Europe. It had been victorious as part of the Allied coalition at Waterloo in 1815, and then had fought against many nations from Austrians through to the Danes, through to the French eventually and defeated France in that Franco Prussian war, and as part of the spoils of victory, Prussia, the nation that emerged from that war, the unification of German states into a new Germany, Germany annexed Alsace Lorraine following the Franco Prussian conflict, and for France it created this bissiness, this resentment for the humiliation of defeat, but also for the occupation of land that they considered French, and that was bubbling away in the background in the many decades leading up to the Great War. In terms of what people learnt from that war, the both the French and of course the Germans, both armies had moved on considerably by nineteen fourteen, arguably the Germans much more than the French. The Germans had really harnessed German industry to create weapons and weaponry that would give them the edge on the battlefield, whether that was the provision of heavy machine guns or heavy artillery like the four hundred and twenty millimetre Big Bertha that fired on the Belgian forts in the opening stage of the Schlieffen plan against Belgium en route to France in August 1914, for example. Whether France had learned as much as it could have done from the Franco-Prussian War is perhaps a podcast in its own right when we look at the tremendous losses amongst the French, huge masses of French troops going into battle in vast open fields in August 1914, leading to days in that Battle of the Frontiers when tens of thousands of French soldiers became casualties, then perhaps as in many conflicts there was an element of looking back rather than looking forward, although following that war of movement and the war going static, you could argue that the French were one of those who reacted most quickly and perhaps most effectively to the conditions of trench warfare by bringing in steel helmets, trench weapons, and many other things besides, but again that's kind of slightly a different subject. In terms of what we find of the Franco Prussian War on that landscape of the Great War, then we find a lot because many of the battles were fought over similar terrain. You took the road from Albert towards Amiens, the old Roman road going through Point Noyelle, and you saw the memorial on the top of the hill there that commemorates the battle in that area of December eighteen seventy when a French force under the command of General Fayed Herb pushed the Germans back. There was a further victory at Bapom in january eighteen seventy-one and there is a statue of General Fayed Herb in the main square of Bapome to this day. And while these small scale French victories during that period were rare and important, unfortunately defeat was close at hand because just a short while afterwards the French forces were defeated near Saint-Contas and Quentin, trying to get towards Paris to relieve the French defending Paris during its siege, and that would eventually lead to the overall French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. So, right across northern France where the fighting during that Franco-Prussian period of 1870-71 took place, there are memorials and indeed burial grounds where the dead are buried, and you've seen the Colon Fade Herb at Point Noyelle. In fact, when I first used to go to the Somme, when I first lived on the Somme, not only was there a memorial in Point Noyelle, there was a Franco Prussian museum there as well. It was a private museum by a local collector who went out to metal detect not for First World War Detritus, but for items from the Franco-Prusan War, and he had this incredible collection in his house there. He died sometime in the early mid-90s, and that collection was sadly dispersed. In Bapome, we mentioned the statue to General Faye Herb, that appears in quite a lot of the wartime German photographs of Bapome, and pretty much everywhere that you travel across that landscape that we see as a landscape of the First World War, you will find some locations connected to the Franco-Prussi conflict. So if you went down to Sedan, for example, in eastern France, where there was a battle in 1870, you would find the landscape there reflecting the Franco-Prussian War, reflecting those early battles of 1914, and not far away the early battles of May 1940 at the beginning of the Second World War as well. So it is definitely one of those places where the crisscross paths of history, not just between World War I and World War II, but many other conflicts besides, they all kind of come together in places like that. And during the Great War, Sedan, which was way behind the German lines after the initial fighting, was a big training area. There were battlefields created there where live fire exercises took place. Quite a lot of the standard film that we have of Germans in action with flamethrowers and machine guns doing trench raids and stuff like that actually comes from film that was made at that training area near to Sedan, for example. But having spent a few holidays there back in the late 90s and early 2000s, I regularly came across burial sites connected to the Franco-Prussian War. Small cemeteries where there were small numbers of burials, sometimes French, sometimes German as well, and not far away from Sedan is another Franco-Prussian museum, one that is still there, I'm pleased to say, the Museum of the Last Cartridge, the Muse de la Denier Cartouche, and that tells the story of the bitter fighting in on that battlefield from the Franco Prussian war. And once you get into that region of Alsace Lorraine, you find even more evidence of this there. It's a really important part of our understanding of that landscape of conflict that spreads right across that area of France from north to the east, all part of that region of Europe, that vast area of Europe that often is described as the cockpit of Europe where so many conflicts have been fought over so many centuries. And of course the symbolism of the Franco-Prussi War, what it meant to the French with defeat and annexation of soil that they considered to be French was all part of the feeling that led to the bitterness between France and Germany in the approach to the First World War, perhaps even the desire to go to war again, to write that wrong from a French perspective, and for the Germans the war created Germany. Prussia had fought this conflict against the French, united all the German-speaking kingdoms and nations together into the new Germany, created after the Franco-Prussian War, and of course that was part of the next set of steps that took Europe towards conflict a generation later. And there were still, of course, people alive in nineteen fourteen who could remember the Franco-Prussi War. So lots more to discuss there, Steve, but I hope that kind of answers to some degree what you were hinting at with your question, and perhaps yet again it's another subject that we might steer back to in the future. So let's move on to our fourth and final question that comes from another Steve, in this case Steve Goodall. And Steve asks, I'm a keen genealogist and great war enthusiast. I like to collect great war medals and create family trees of the recipients on ancestry in order to find out a little bit about their lives before and after the war, or in the case of casualties, what became of their families afterwards. I'm lucky enough to have the military medal sets for a few soldiers, but I wondered what was the tipping point that determined whether a recipient received a military medal compared to a distinguished conduct medal or a military cross with a DSO or VC. Well this is a really good question about the honours and awards that were given to British and Commonwealth Empire soldiers in the Great War. And when Britain went to war in 1914, there were three main decorations that could be awarded to soldiers for bravery on the battlefield. The highest of those was the Victoria Cross, which had come about following the Crimean War of the 1850s, and by the time of the Boer War, which is the most recent conflict in terms of the British Army's experience, there was also the Distinguished Service Order for Officers and the Distinguished Conduct Medal for Ordinary Men. The VC could be awarded to any rank of the armed services, and in terms of the army, the DSO was for officers and the DCM for ordinary soldiers. And the DCM pre-First World War was an important award for an ordinary soldier if he survived because it carried with it a pension as well. So that was another element of being awarded a medal for bravery on the battlefield. Now in 1914, the war, the Great War, the expansion of the army, the type of battles that were then fought changed all of that, changed the way the honours and awards were given out to the troops on the ground. The pension for the DCM was quickly removed when large numbers of them were awarded in that early phase of the fighting. And what became apparent at the time is that there was this big disparity between these three decorations. The VC at one end and for ordinary soldiers the DCM at the other. DSOs were supposedly only given to officers of a certain rank and above, although if you look at the fighting in 1914, some were given to very young second lieutenants for fighting at Mons or on the Ain in August, September of 1914. But what became clear initially is that there needed to be another medal that could be awarded to the junior ranks of officers, and that was the Military Cross that was then brought in in late 1914 with retrospective awards given to some men who'd fought in those earlier battles, and some of the first men to get the military cross were for battles around Eape in that winter period of 1914-15, for example. A little while later, the portfolio of awards was added to in 1916 with the introduction of the Military Medal, which was the other ranks equivalent of the MC. So this could be awarded to ordinary soldiers for acts of gallantry that wouldn't get them a distinguished conduct medal. So there was now a kind of pecking order. VC is the ultimate award for the ultimate acts of bravery. For officers, if it's a particular act of gallantry on the battlefield, you're going to get the DSO. If it's unusual, remarkable, then you're going to be a recipient of the Distinguished Service Order. If you're a junior officer and you carry out a brave deed, then you're probably going to get the MC. For ordinary soldiers, the same kind of approach, with the pecking order being the DCM for these incredible, daring deeds on the battlefield, and then the military medal, the MM, for some of the junior NCOs, private soldiers for other deeds on that battlefield. I mean, this is not really rating or ranking the bravery of individual soldiers. I mean that is something that is impossible to do, and who can walk in their shoes. But there were criteria for all of these awards. There had to be witnesses, for example, to recommend a soldier for a particular award, and the Victoria Cross had the highest level of this because they weren't just going to hand out the VC to anyone for anything. So there had to be multiple officers that witnessed an action, and they were the ones that then recommended whatever that soldier was, whether he was an ordinary soldier or commissioned officer, they would be the ones that then recommended them for that award. And once there were recommendations for all of the honours and awards in the Great War on paper, but sadly all of that archive was destroyed in bombing in the Second World War. So when we get to certain medals like the Military Medal, and all of these were published in the London Gazette, many of them, like the VC and the DSO and the MC and the DCM, have the citations of the awards, but because there were so many military medals awarded in the war, they didn't publish the recommendation or citation in the London Gazette. So with the loss of those crucial records in World War II, in most cases we're not really sure why a soldier got an MM, for example. You can occasionally find something in a local newspaper or battalion war diary about it, but in most cases we can only guess at what that award was for. Now, many soldiers, I interviewed quite a lot of Great War veterans who had been decorated for bravery. Several who had the Military Cross, one who had the DCM, quite a lot of military medal recipients. And one of the common things that they would say when you first got to meet them and you first spoke to them and you saw or you noticed that they were wearing a medal like that, you might ask them how did you get that award? And the ordinary blokes would often just say, Oh, it just came up with the rations, mate. And that phrase it came up with the rations is something you see a lot in the accounts of the First World War. Now there were medals that were handed out for non-battlefield deeds. For example, the chief baker of Rouen is said to have been awarded a distinguished service order, a DSO, for fantastic work in baking bread for the army. And stories like that annoyed a lot of men at the time because they felt that these some of these awards were being given out as well done, good boy awards, and after the war, seeing a man walking down the street, you wouldn't know whether he'd been awarded the DSO for baking bread or the DSO for storming a German machine gun position. But when you begin to look into the stories of how some of these decorations were awarded, very few of them came up with the rations. In some cases, the acts of gallantry are really quite incredible, and there are some amazing stories of bravery on the battlefield that you can discover by researching men who were awarded one of these decorations. But I'm always mindful of a phrase that I heard a few times in different variations. George Butler was one to say this regular soldier, he'd gone out in early 1915 and served pretty much continuously until he was badly wounded in April 1918. One of the phrases he used to say when we spoke about men who were awarded the Victoria Cross, and he saw some examples of this at different points in his military career which went on to the Second World War as well. He always used to say there's two type of cross lad, there's the Victoria Cross and the Wooden Cross, and most got the latter. And what he meant and the other veterans used similar phrases, what they meant by that is that most acts of gallantry went unrewarded, unrecognised. Men did some incredible things, but not enough, or perhaps no one but them ever saw them, and those deeds died with them on the battlefield. So when we cast our eyes across the headstones in those vast soldiers' cemeteries of the Great War and see that white splash of stone and the names engraved on there, and we see men who were given decorations for every one of them. Perhaps there are countless others who should have been awarded something, but their bravery, their great deed was never recognised, and I think this is something that I guess we always have to consider when we discuss this subject. So I hope, Steve, that's kind of added some context to this subject. And those symbols that you have in your collection, the military medals to men recognized for gallantry on the battlefield, are such important, powerful objects that connect us to the First World War. I have a few of them to Sussex lads who were in the South Downs battalions, and it's good that people like us preserve those objects and treasure those objects for what they stand for in that wider picture of the Great War. So thank you, Steve. Thanks for that question, thanks for all of the questions this week. Keep them coming in via the usual methods of email and the Discord server, and there are links to those in the show notes for this episode. And I'll see you again soon for more questions and answers 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.com slash oldfrontline. Links to all of these are on our websites. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you again soon.