Questions and Answers Episode 42

In this episode, we delve into a lesser-known but essential aspect of First World War life: the use and organisation of latrines on the battlefield. Where did soldiers actually go to the toilet, how were these facilities constructed, and did men really need permission to use them?

We then explore the history of the Military Police in WW1, from the Military Foot Police and Military Mounted Police to the Military Provost Staff Corps, looking at their varied roles — from traffic control and maintaining discipline to operating military prisons.

Next, we examine the long-standing question of German trenches on the Western Front. Were they truly deeper, stronger and more permanent compared to Allied positions, and what does the archaeology and evidence show?

Finally, we focus on the Boy Soldiers of the Great War — what happened when their real ages were uncovered, how the army dealt with them, and how to trace their stories in surviving military records.

A wide-ranging episode exploring the daily life, policing, engineering and human stories of the Great War.

Richard Van Emden's book: Boy Soldier's of the Great War (via Amazon).

Main image: Military traffic control signal post at Blendecques, 6 May 1918. Note signboard pointing way to No. 7 General Hospital. (IWM Q8802)

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

This year is coming to an end and we're in the final few episodes of 2025. And as we move towards the sixth anniversary of the Old Frontline podcast, I'm beginning to look ahead to next year, 2026, which will be the hundred and tenth anniversary of nineteen sixteen. And I'm aiming next year to be covering aspects of that year's conflict, from Verda to the Somme, but also some of the lesser known actions that took place that year, including, for example, the Battle of the Saint-Loire craters in March of nineteen sixteen and the fighting involving the Canadians at Hill 62 in June of that year. And perhaps next year we'll have some special Q ⁇ A episodes covering 1916. It's certainly going to be an interesting year, and while the hundred and tenth anniversary is not the Centena, it's not like it was a decade ago, and interest in the Great War has undoubtedly dropped a little bit since then, but the podcast statistics tell me that there is an ever increasing audience that is interested in finding out about the history of the First World War, and long, long may that continue. And in that respect, the Q ⁇ As continue to come in thick and fast, and once more astound me with their depth and breadth of the kind of things that you want to know about, that you're inquisitive about. It's just brilliant, and it and it sets me a fresh challenge every time. So please keep them coming via the usual methods. But let's get to this week's questions. Question number one comes from Daniel Prosser. Daniel asks I have a question that has interested me for a while, but I hope it's not too base or vulgar a topic for you. It's perhaps understandably not something that you often hear about in accounts of the war. But how did latrines work in the front line on the Western Front? Presumably there must have been provisions for this basic hygiene. Were there specially made subsections of trenches within close reach of the front, and were soldiers free to use these latrines at their own discretion or was permission sought from superiors? Well, this is not a vulgar question, Daniel, because we've kind of covered this a little bit before in an episode that we called Tommy Tucker, which looked at food on the Western Front, because, as I'm sure I stated there, what goes in must come out. And if you've got an army essentially living in ditches right across northern Europe and in static positions for long periods of time, whatever they eat must result in human waste, and you can't just let them go anywhere because armies will be literally living in that waste and the chance of disease spreading and causing problems to your army will be much greater, and that is the kind of thing that had hampered armies in previous centuries of campaigning right across the world. Now in the army toilets were officially called latrines in the British Army, and in the nineteen eleven Royal Army Medical Corps manual, which is a thick green book that was published by the Stationary Office for RAMC personnel, it states every soldier should remember to ease himself only in the authorised places, that is, in the latrines and urine pits or tubs provided. On no account should indiscriminate or casual easement be permitted. It merely means fouling of the ground with possible infectious matter. So that was the army's way of saying this is how you must go to the toilet, how you must ease yourself. You must use a specially prepared area, whether that's a physically constructed latrine or a pit or tubs, buckets, whatever it is. Now that was prepared in peacetime long before people considered trench warfare on the kind of scale that would exist in the First World War. And once the Great War did go static in that first winter of nineteen fourteen-15, this of course became an immediate issue. And I'm speaking here pretty much solely from the British side because that's where I have access and have knowledge of the records concerned. I'm sure there must be a similar story for the Germans and also for the French who were obviously holding most of the Western Front at that point. But in a British infantry division there was an ADMS, an assistant director of medical services. And what those senior officers, senior medics did during that winter of nineteen fourteen-15, is took their already acquired knowledge of the problems of creating facilities for soldiers to go to the toilet to use latrines, and then adapt that to the evolution of trench warfare and from the point of view of toilets, the evolution of trench latrines. They realise again that going back to these notes in the REMC manual, going back to the knowledge of military history over many, many periods before the Great War, men couldn't go to the toilet in their own trench, not even urinate in their trenches, because that would create vast areas with lots of body fluids in them, which would increase the chances of disease within whatever unit was holding that part of the line. So one of the earliest type of latrines that was constructed in the trenches was acquiring a nearby shell hole, normally at the back of the trench. So behind the trench somewhere a shell had pitched over and created a ready-made hole. And at night they would dig a trench to that and initially just probably put a plank or a section of duckboard across it, a bit of walkway, so that the men could sit on that and go to the toilet. And the problem with that was is that during the day, particularly as the weather began to change from that winter period on into the spring, is that then the human waste that was in that shell hole at the back of the trench could result in flies, the collection of flies around the hole, and when someone walked into that hole to go to the toilet, the flies would disperse. The enemy on the other side of the battlefield could and did see this, and then would often send over shell fire, mortars, machine gun fire, whatever it was, and there were men killed going to the toilet. So that was an early way of dealing with this, which had its problems, and those problems were soon realized. So it got more technical. Let's appoint men to be in charge of these lavatories, these latrines. These were men from the sanitary section, and in an infantry battalion there would often be a sanitary corporal whose job it was to oversee these latrines, and the types of latrines that then were gradually employed as the war moved on got more and more sophisticated. So there's a contemporary drawing that shows, for example, a schematic of a frontline trench system. It shows urinals in the front line, which were buckets or pails in a little side bit of trench with a lid to stop the collection of flies, and men could then just go at their own discretion to those and utilize them, and it would be the sanitary section's job or those that were on detail, they were on kind of general labouring jobs, often because they'd been crimed for misdemeanours either in or out of the trenches. It would be their job to collect these buckets and dispose of the human waste. And then also in the frontline area, this drawing shows a proper toilet down in a shallow dugout. So not a deep, deep dugout, but a shallow kind of dugout et which you'd go down a few steps to a toilet facility, which would be a box with a self-closing lid, usually made out of wood, and there might be some other materials employed to make it more rigid and to support the weight of soldiers regularly kind of plunking themselves down on it, and that then would be used, and again the waste would be collected in something and then disposed of. Sometimes burned as well, and in the back areas there were flyproof box seats over much deeper pits for the main camp areas with short shallow trench systems for the troops who were on the move or in camps until flyproof boxes could be obtained for the use of soldiers in an area where there would be a permanent camp, for example, and then waste would go off for incineration at casualty clearing stations that had big incinerators for the burning of blood stained webbing equipment and uniforms and other kit, and that human waste could be burned in there as well, and the same for field hospitals much, much further back. So it was a thought-out, considered system for the realities of trench warfare, holding a front that got bigger and bigger as the war moved on, with greater and greater volumes of men eating more and more food, and obviously going to the toilet on a more regular basis as well, and creating unparalleled levels of human waste that the army had to deal with. And diet was a part of that as well, because the kind of food that the army would feed men was to a certain extent to make them a bit more constipated so they weren't going to the toilet all the time. And one of the elements of your question was about going to the loo. Did men have to ask permission? Now I think in the front line the urinals appear to have been given for free use. If you needed to go to use a urinal, you just went there. But for the toilet in the little shallow dugout, I suspect you either had to ask your platoon sergeant or your section corporal or possibly the officer, but more likely one of the NCOs, and then he would give you permission to go down there. Because they wanted obviously in the front line, the very front line, as many men on duty as possible, and not people lingering in toilet facilities. The further you got back to the support and reserve trenches, that I would guess would be probably a bit more relaxed. But again, it is one element of the First World War that we don't know everything about because this isn't something that soldiers always recorded in their memoirs. And while occasionally I can recall having conversations about this with veterans, it wasn't something that I asked them about on a regular basis, much to my regret now, because I think these kind of little details about a soldier's life are really, really important. And Daniel, thank you for this really interesting question, far from vulgar, which I think is important for us to understand in the wider experience of that war on the Western Front and the social history of that war too. Question number two comes from Chris Hornsby. Chris says, I'm a former Royal Military Policeman, and since I left the army I've been a prison officer. Is much known about the RMP on the Western Front. It appears hard to research to find any decent accounts. There is a saying that the RMP derived the nickname monkeys, as the RMP soldiers would jump off parapets like monkeys near the trenches to arrest deserters. This may or may not be true. And second, at a prison I sometimes work at, there is a roll call for prison officers who were honoured in both world wars. It's fascinating to see what kind of regiments the prison officers served in and their ranks. I just wondered if there was a provost service that covered prison duties on the Western Front. Well, I know that quite a few veterans like you, Chris, of the RMP listen to this podcast, including a couple of friends of mine, so it's long overdue that we talk about the role of military policemen in the First World War. And as I mentioned, I think in a previous Q ⁇ A, at battalion level the war was called regimental police. They had a little armband with the initials RP on, and they assisted with military discipline within that unit and issues of arrest, detention, court martial within the actual unit at battalion level. But there was a much bigger framework of that, and at the time of the First World War, the Royal Military Police as such did not exist. It wasn't its own corps, it was made up into separate sections of military police. It would become the core of military police in 1926 with the amalgamation of these different branches which dated back to the eighteen eighties. So in the First World War there was the military mounted police and the military foot police, and you see MMP and MFP using a lot of records of that period. And as the name suggests, the military mounted police were on horseback, so a lot more mobile and can move from location to location without any need for transport, and the military foot police were just that on foot and would be posted to locations to do their duty. And when war broke out in 1914, from what I can gather, there was about 500 men serving in these branches of the Military Mounted Police and the Military Foot Police in August 1914. Each division that was created to become part of the British Expeditionary Force that then left England for France in the opening stage of the Great War. They went overseas and had an assistant provost marshal appointed to that division to be in charge of military police units, whether MMP or MFP, and to be responsible for discipline and order within that wider formation. And by 1915 the APM was the rank of brigadier general, so quite a senior officer, and it was considered a really important position within an infantry division which could comprise of 20,000 men. You needed someone in charge of discipline, the wider discipline and order within that unit on the battlefield. And that was a practice that then went beyond the original BEF to be the same for all British and Commonwealth units that then served in France and Flanders during the Great War. From the very beginning, the military police, both MFP and MMP, helped with traffic duty on the battlefield, particularly in that more mobile war of 1914, when the posting of military police to main road and rail junction areas to get men off trains, onto the right roads, up towards the battlefield, required a degree of command and control, not just from the officers commanding the units on the battlefield, but assisted by police units, military police units to ensure that the men took the right route to where it was that they were going. So they provided a very useful service in that respect. And also troop control in these areas as well. So if you've got stations with large numbers of men coming off trains, coming out of railway stations, coming through an area full potentially of a civilian population, you needed the military foot police and the mounted police to be there to ensure that order was maintained and that no civilians came to any harm and that there wasn't property damage, whether on purpose or by accident. So again, they were all part of the control of the movement of people on lots of different levels. And again, during that mobile war, particularly the retreat from Mons, the famous retreat, over 200 miles from Mons to the Marne. There were lots of stragglers during that retreat of the BEF, and the military police went out to ensure those stragglers were picked up, moved on, and there's a kind of fine line between stragglers and deserters, and that was part of their duties to work out which men were legitimate stragglers and which men were chancing their luck and were actually deserters. One of the very first men executed after a field general court martial and shot at dawn, as the phrase later became, was a man in the retreat from Mons in August 1914. That was Thomas Highgate of the Royal West Kent's, and his case really I think exemplifies the problem that the military police would have had in working out what that line was between stragglers and deserters. And in his case, it was considered that he was a deserter. He was tried by court martial and executed down on the man front in September of 1914. As the war went static, these problems didn't go away. There was still this fine line between stragglers and deserters, particularly when units were out of the line and men were on rest and perhaps went to local stamina's and drank too much of the local wine or beer. And with the increased size of the army, the occupation of civilian areas for billeting, again the military police forces got involved when there was property damage, when things windows were broken, property was smashed, chairs, tables, beds, I mean just about everything. You read the war diaries of some of the units for this period, you'll see all kinds of things that British Tommies were getting up to, and locals were also kind of making use of because there are quite a few examples of where locals go to the assistant provomar for that particular unit in that area and claim that X number of hundreds of bottles of champagne had been stolen from his cellar. There was no evidence that the champagne had ever existed, but it seems that the army kind of just paid out. So all of this theft, damage, the control of people in a civilian area, the control of people going to and from military zones, battlefield areas was all part of their work. Traffic control remained really important. So if we think of a place like Hellfire Corner at Eap on the Western Front, military foot police were on patrol there, on duty there, posted there. Later on they had a permanent dugout and a concrete bunker to control the movement of traffic across that area. You didn't want all of the guns, all of the limbers, all of the men going across Hellfire Corner at the same time, and the military foot police were there to ensure that that didn't happen, to minimize casualties and make sure people had as safe as a route as they could have to get up to those forward battlefield areas. And as the size of the army grew, and especially post-conscription, the work that they did and the kind of incidents they got involved in reflected the crime of that period, which filtered into military life. If you recruit and you conscript everyone from 18 to 55, as they did in the last period of the Great War, you're going to get a lot of very good men, but you're also going to get some pretty bad men as well, who may well have been criminals or involved in criminal activity in civilian life, which they then try on in military and army life as well. So that was part of the military police, foot police, military mounted police, their role during the Great War. And also they had a lot to do with civilians in the battlefield area as well, both behind it and the ones that tried to venture up to it and had to be prevented from doing so. They had to assist civilians in ensuring that civilian casualties were minimized, and they had slightly more delicate work to do with prostitutes not just regulating them but ensuring their safety, ensuring that nothing terrible happened to those women. And when you read again some of the cases of British discipline during the First World War, unfortunately there were quite a few cases in which women were raped, and that was treated very seriously by the military authorities, just as it should have been. They were also, as the war moved on, in the areas behind the lines, which were largely rural and agricultural. The military police were there to deal with the ill treatment of animals by the military. If a tank ran over a cow, for example, they would have to be responsible for that and write that up as a case. And in the early period of the war, there was quite a scare about German espionage behind the Western Front, and they were involved in the search for and the arrest and detention of supposed enemy agents and anyone else involved in that kind of thing. There were cases where local French people were accused of signalling to the Germans by the kind of washing they put on their washing line. I mean all that kind of stuff. Whether that proved to be actual espionage or whether it was basically local rumour control, nevertheless the military foot police and the mounted police were involved in dealing with that. And essentially at the core of their work was the maintenance of order under all circumstances, and that was quite a broad ranging thing when it came to a vast conscript army by the end of the Great War. Now, by the conclusion of that conflict, nearly 400 men from the military foot police and the military mounted police had died. Many were awarded decorations for gallantry. Something like 13,000 men had served in these branches during the Great War. Gary Sheffield's history of the Royal Military Police, a general history from pre-First World War up to modern times called Red Caps, is a very good source and highly recommended. And just to come to your other point about military prisons and prison officers, there was a Military Provost Staff Corps as well, formed in 1901 as the Military Prison Staff Corps and then became the Provost Staff Corps in 1906. They ran the military prisons at home, and the main one of those in 1914 was at Aldershot, not Colchester. That was much later, and the term glass house for a military prison is said to have come from the glass roof of that building in Aldershot. Overseas they also ran prisons where men were sent following field general court martials. Not every soldier who was court-martialed was shot, far from it, and men would be sent for prison sentences behind the lines, and prisons were then used. Initially there were two main prisons at La Have and Rouen, and these were in theatre rather than back in Britain. It was seen important that when men did something wrong in the theatre of war where they were serving, if they were sent back home to serve that sentence, it could be seen as a reward. So it was important to keep them in their theatre of war. And later on on the Western Front, there were five main prisons known as number one to number five military prison in different locations, including in an area on the Somme, for example. And not just British soldiers were in there, but all of those men that were part of the British Expeditionary Force from all over the British Empire. And finally, in terms of nicknames for men who'd served in the military foot police, in the military mounted police, in the military provost staff corps, yes, you see the phrase red caps being used. Cherry knobs is another one that I've come across, again referring to the colour of the cap that military policemen wore. And monkeys, as you suggest, was also used, but the reasoning behind the use of that phrase is not entirely clear. Some accounts claim that it was to do with the physical stature of the policemen, that they look like monkeys. There's another story about a monkey, an actual monkey being hung from a tree, and many, many others besides. But I think what this shines a light on, and I've mentioned this before in the podcast, that we are going to have an episode about military discipline on the Western Front and the kind of crimes that British soldiers, British and Empire soldiers were involved in. But I think this is a really important subject that the Great War is not just about the battlefield and bombs, bullets, and baynets. This element of it, the employment of military police forces on and near and behind the battlefield, is a massive kind of element of our understanding of this wider subject of service in the Great War. So thank you, Chris, for your for your question. A great question. Question number three comes from Anita Gallio from Canada. Anita asks, My question is about German trenches. I understand that generally speaking German trenches were well built and more dug in compared to many Allied trenches. However, I've come across photographs from the time showing British or Canadian soldiers in what's described as a German trench, but the trenches look hastily dug or poorly constructed. I'd love to know more about that contrast. Well, when we travel to the old front line the landscape of the First World War today, we come across preserved trench systems or we come across trench systems in the vast wooded areas, particularly on that French part of the Western Front beyond the Somme. And when we compare those German trenches that survive, whether preserved or just in wooded areas with Allied positions, whether British or French or Belgium or American, generally the German ones look far more impressive, far more permanent. And we see this at Vimy Ridge with the concreted trenches that are obviously based on an actual trench system that was there in 1916-17. We see it when we walk through the grassed over Newfoundland Park at Beaumont Hamill, with the fairly basic British trenches on one side, originally dug by the French, and then the far more impressive looking German trenches around the Wire Ravine on the other side of No Man's Land. We see it at Verdun in the wooded areas there. If we go right up to the Bois de Cour where Colonel Drion was at the very beginning of the Battle of Verdun and walk in the wooded area there, we see the fairly basic French outpost line there. And if you cross over into where the German trenches were, you'll see their dugouts, their Stollen, and all their other positions as well. And beyond Verdun in the Samuel Salien and then down in the Vosges, you'll see this time and time again. And what we've got to remember is that once the war did go static, that mobile war was over, Germany dug in, and their war philosophy became about fighting a static war, a defensive war. And the idea was to build these incredible defences so that the Allies would throw men at them, hopefully lose thousands of casualties and then perhaps sue for peace. And you see right across the Western Front examples of just how seriously the Germans took that defensive technology that they employed, whether dug into the landscape or created using modern techniques, they took that really, really seriously. So if we went from between Amentier and La Basse, behind the German lines there or close to the German front line positions on places like the Albers Ridge, we would find a huge number of concrete structures from observation posts to machine gun bunkers to infantry shelters to artillery positions, just about everything. And I think there's well over 2,000 German concrete structures in that area from Armontier to the La Basse Canal, and that's just in one little part of the Western Front. And if we look at the photographs that we have of German trenches on the Somme in 1916, we see these very deep, well dug, well constructed German trenches dug into that chalk landscape. And as the British discovered as they gradually captured those German trenches in 1916, deep, deep dugout, some of them as much as 80 feet beneath the surface. So all of this, yes, is giving us an impression that the Germans constructed their trenches very well, and generally they did. But the war moved fluidly and the landscape changed as well. And after those great static battles in the first half of the war, if we move to the Hindenburg line, which by definition is this incredible system of defences, almost Impregnable, thick belts of wire, interlocking machine gun fire from the bunkers, deep, deep shelters, I mean just about everything you can think of in terms of modern defensive technology. But the Germans believed in defence in depth, and when we look at air photos of the Hindenburg line attacked by British troops, for example, in April-May 1917, we see the forward area of the battlefield complete with these kinds of defences. But the further you get back, the next line and the next line that is incomplete. So the kind of photographs that you've probably seen, particularly from the 1917-18 battles, show these incomplete German trenches. I gave a talk recently for the podcast supporters about official photographs of the Battle of Combray in November 1917, and this is a really good example of it because one of the series of photographs that was taken showing men from the 51st Highland Division in the attack towards Fleskier, occupying captured German positions, crossing captured German trenches, and they are trenches with just a duckboard in no trench supports, there's no sandbags, there's no revitment, there's no proper parapet, they're just very basic trenches because that line, second, possibly even third line position, is not yet complete. So not every German trench on the Western Front was this incredible stronghold. And if we move on to the mobile battles of 1918, where the Germans broke through, pushed the British back on the Somme in March and April 1918, and new trench lines were eventually established east of Amiens, where Australian and British troops stopped the German army south of the river Somme, for example, both sides dug in, and those trenches were very, very shallow. So it again, even though the Germans had advanced to a new position, dug new trenches, they were not building a new Hindenburg line. The trenches of that last few months of the war were often scrapeholes, shallow trenches, and of course by October nineteen eighteen the German trench system had been broken completely on the British and Commonwealth Empire part of the front, with the final trench line of the Beauvoir Fonsom line breached in early October 1918, leading to open warfare. So as I think with so many elements of First World War history, there's a lot more to it. We can say German trenches good, Allied trenches bad, but actually there's lots of examples where the German trenches are pretty poor, the Allied trenches are excellent, and the Allied trenches probably look much more like German trenches, and there are parts of the line where German positions look really primitive. So possibly this is a subject for a wider podcast episode. But I hope Anita that's given you a little bit of a kind of insight into it with this answer to your question. So thanks for that. Our fourth and final question comes from Carl Thatcher. Carl says, I have one relative who we draw a blank on. We know he joined up underage in Newcastle, most likely in 1915, and must have used an alias. We've tried using his mother's maiden name as suggested by the Commonwealth Wargaves Commission. The only thing we know is he didn't come back from the war. No letters from him exist that we know of, there's no living relatives, and we're still searching. What happened to boys in regiments if it was discovered that they were underage? Also, any ideas on how to progress our search? Well, Carl, I mean our old friend Richard Van Emden, good friend to this podcast, we've had on several times, has written about this extensively in his book on this subject, Boy Soldiers of the Great War, Teenage Tommies, we can call them as well. And when Britain went to war in 1914, there were essentially different types of these boy soldiers. There were legitimate ones, and I've mentioned him many times before. George Butler, one of the veterans that I knew, had walked out of his family home, lived as a beggar on the streets of Manchester for a year, and joined the regular army, aged 12 in 1910 as a boy soldier, legitimately. Didn't need to lie about his age, didn't need to give a false name. He joined the Lancashire Fusiliers and after four years training became a private soldier at the age of sixteen. So he was still too young to be sent overseas, and in fact, because of the war, he goes over in 1915 when he's still only seventeen. But he's a legitimate boy soldier of the First World War, and in territorial units it would have been the same, and when you look at those, there were quite a lot of younger soldiers in those as well. But when the war broke out, you had to be a minimum of 18 to join. That generation didn't carry the kind of paperwork that we carry with us now. And if you looked 18, you were going to be accepted. Again, one of the veterans that I interviewed, he went in. Sergeant Major at the table said, How old are you, Sonny? And he said, 16, he was honest, and he said, Well, go outside, march around the block and come back in when you're 18. As long as you said you were 18, you looked 18, then you were going to be accepted. And what Richard Van Emden originally thought back in 2014 is that something like a quarter of a million young men who were under military age had served in that early phase of the war. He now, given later research, more in-depth research that he's been able to do with the digitisation of records, he now believes that it's well over 400,000, which is a an entire army really of boy soldiers. So, in terms of what happened to them, well, I'll give you an example in the South Downs Battalion to the Royal Sussex Regiment. When the first South Downs Battalion was formed, its regimental sergeant major, SD1. He was the first man in the unit, and he was given the regimental number of one, SD for South Downs, number one is he was the top man, the first man in. RSM May was an old soldier who'd served right across the British Empire and in many conflicts and small wars, and he brought with him two of his sons. One of military age, who was sadly later killed at Richborg in June 1916, and another one who was still only a boy, but he wanted to do his bit as well, and he got in. He was allowed in. The RSM made sure that he got in. And he was given a uniform, he was given a regimental number, and he served with the first South Downs Battalions in Cooden Camp and then at Detling and then at Aldershot in 1914 to 1915, and then they were taken over by the War Office. And when the War Office moved in, it looked at these very young soldiers, and some of the photographs I've seen of them all, it's quite clear that there are some very, very young boys in this battalion. And the War Office did a kind of survey like this and looked into it, and if there was any doubt as to their age, they were discharged from the army. So RSM May's youngest son was discharged from the South Downs battalions and then was eventually conscripted at the end of the Great War. But afterwards, although he'd served in the artillery later on, he never considered himself a gunner veteran, he was always a South Downs veteran, and he attended all of their reunions, for example, many, many years later. So when young soldiers were discovered, they were discharged, very often discharged from the army. But they weren't always discovered, and they weren't always discharged. So Lance Catamole, a Canadian that I knew, a veteran who'd served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, his true age of 16 was discovered when he was on the Somme during the fighting at Corsolette in September 1916. He was sent home to the Canadian depot where he remained until he was 18 and able to go overseas in the latter part of the war. So it's quite a complex subject really, and there isn't one clear answer to this. And if the soldier had enlisted under an alias, unless that is noted down within the family, there's almost no way of tracing who they could be. It makes it very frustrating for searches like this, with a name change, and you see names changed by soldiers when you look at the war graves and the memorials to the missing. You see Smith served as Brown, I mean all kinds of different things where men had Germanic names and they changed them to Anglicised names, following the example of the Royal Family, of course, at the time, and all kinds of other things as well. Men were too young, too old, served before, were on the run from something, then they often changed their name, and the fact that that is recorded means that somebody in the family knew about it, knew what that name was and was able to correct it when it came to their commemoration. If your relative changed his name, no one knew what it was, and he was killed, I'm sad to say that there's almost no chance of tracking down who he was. You could work perhaps through the ages, but again, unless the family knew who he was, gave that information about his age, then it will not be recorded by the Commonwealth Wargraves Commission. And we can find plenty of 14, 15, 16-year-olds in the records of the Commonwealth Wargraves Commission, but again, they are ones where the family have supplied that information. So lads like James Condon and Valentine Strudwick are two of the famous ones, Jimmy Condon, 14, or though perhaps he's actually probably 19, and Valentine Strudwick killed one month before his 16th birthday, age 15. There are so many of these young soldiers' stories that are known and are out there and are featured in many books and other podcasts. But it is amazing, tragic in in many ways to think of so many young men in Kharki in that Great War along that old front line. But of course, if we go back more than a century to the Great War, did these young men think of themselves as boys? Probably not. They saw themselves as young men, even at fourteen, fifteen. It was a very different society more than a century ago. But I hope you get your answer one day, Carl, and do keep in touch and let me know what else you find. So that's it, that's our questions for this week. I hope it's been another interesting series of questions and answers, and keep them coming in via email or the Discord server and the other methods that you send these questions in, and we'll be back soon for some more QA's 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 Somcore, 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. 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