Questions and Answers Episode 44

In this episode, we explore the role of British Army Chaplains during the First World War, examining who they were, what duties they performed at the front, and how effective they were in the brutal conditions of the Great War. We also ask whether chaplains are commemorated on their own permanent memorial today.

We then tackle a persistent myth of the First World War: were German machine-gunners really chained to their weapons, or was this story a product of wartime propaganda? Using historical evidence, we separate fact from fiction.

Next, we investigate why certain sectors of the Western Front were far more heavily mined than others, looking at terrain, strategy, and the evolution of trench warfare. Finally, we discuss how war graves were photographed by the Imperial War Graves Commission during and immediately after the conflict, and whether these powerful images still survive in archival collections today.

This episode delves into lesser-known aspects of the Western Front, combining military history, myth-busting, remembrance, and the legacy of the First World War.

Long, Long, Trail website: British Army Chaplains Department.

Book's on Army Chaplain's Department:

“Muddling Through: The Organisation of British Army Chaplaincy in World War One” by Peter Howson (Helion 2013)

“God On Our Side: The British Padre in World War One” by Michael Moynihan (Leo Cooper 1983)

Books on Wargrave Photography:

Photographing the Fallen: A Wargraves Photographer on the Western Front by Jeremy Gordon Smith (Pen & Sword 2017)

Sign up for the free podcast newsletter here: Old Front Line Bulletin.

You can order Old Front Line Merch via The Old Front Line Shop.

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

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

It's clear that our first episode of 2026 discussing whether we are forgetting the First World War struck a chord with many of you, and I really appreciate all the comments that have come in. It's also clear that many are working hard to tell the story of the Great War in all kinds of different ways, and while it might not be forgotten as such, as I mentioned in the podcast, there is a danger of drift, with the subject being so far in the distant past, somehow people lose connection with it. So I think it's beholden on us who care about the subject to ensure that it has a safe harbour and the means to grow. And what's clear is how much you do care from the comments that I've received, how much the subject of the Great War means to all of you who listen to this podcast and how it covers a wide spectrum of people too. And that makes me very optimistic for the future. Indeed, some of the comments to that episode raise so many interesting points, I'm going to think of a way of doing something with them. Not sure what that is as yet, but perhaps it'll be here on the podcast or possibly on YouTube, but keep those comments coming in. And while we're here on the subject of YouTube, we had our first live stream on the old frontline channel on the 1st of January. Start the year as we mean to go on, and it's on the channel there. If you missed it, you can go on and you can watch it again. I called it the Road to the Somme because it kind of builds a journey that we're going to take together over the course of this year as we move into the 110th anniversary of 1916, and we look not just at the Somme but at Verdun, some of the lesser known battles at Saint Loire and Hill 62, and a few other places besides. And when we get to the anniversary of the Somme, then there'll be some material coming from there, both for the podcast and for the YouTube channel, and there will be more live streams on there to follow. So it's going to be an exciting year ahead. We've had our first podcast episode. This is our first Q ⁇ A of 2026. So now to this week's questions. Question number one comes from Dave Evans. Dave says I visited Quimper Cathedral in Brittany today and discovered a beautiful mosaic memorial on the war which commemorates French chaplains who lost their lives on the battlefield. This was a list of fifty or so priests and seminaries from the diocese who had lost their lives during a conflict. Is there any such memorial for British chaplains? Is there any interesting reading on this subject as well? I've recently revisited Robert Graves' goodbye to all that, and he mentions the merits of the Catholic chaplains on the battlefield over others. A brief Google search seems to back that up, but it feels very subjective though. Well, I think a lot of things in Robert Graves' goodbye to all that could be described as subjective. I don't think that the religion of an army chaplain dictated their performance on or off the battlefield during the Great War. So let's look at a bit of history behind this to start off with. British chaplains were part of the army, part of the Army Chaplain's Department in 1914, with only a few hundred serving in the military on the outbreak of the war. By 1918 that would rise to over 5,000 chaplains within the British Army. Chaplains were non-combatants. Their job was not to fight on the battlefield, not to go over the top in battles. Their duties on and off that battlefield were to assist men with religious requirements, so to provide services based on the religion that the chaplain represented behind the lines on that battlefield, so soldiers could attend it. They often worked with medical units, so field ambulances and dressing stations close to the battlefield area where chaplains would be there, not to carry out any kind of medical duties, but to be there to comfort soldiers, to talk to soldiers, perhaps write a letter for a soldier. One of my great uncles who was wounded at Eap in October 1918 and got admitted to the casualty clearing station in what is now Lissenhirk, it was Remy Siding, it was number three CCS in those days. I have a letter sent to his mother by an army chaplain on his behalf, presumably because he wasn't in a position to write one himself, and those kind of duties was commonplace for padres for chaplains close to the battlefield area. Now that didn't mean that they didn't go into the trenches themselves. Many of them felt that the parish was the battalion, and if the battalion or the unit was on the battlefield or in the battlefield area, then they would go there and they would be there amongst the men. So there are many stories of chaplains during the Great War seen in the trenches, living in the trenches alongside the men, and sharing the same problems and privations and dangers of those men as well. Now there were others who chose not to do that. They were not required to go onto the battlefield. There was no one forcing them to do it, and many felt that that was not a task that they should undertake, so stuck to the area away from the main battlefield area. And if you look at again some of the memoirs, what you see is people's attitude to religion changing during the Great War, often fuelled by how they see these chaplains carry out their duties and carry themselves. So if they then see a chaplain going into the battlefield, going into the trenches like them, they have a great respect for that chaplain and the religion that he represents. Perhaps it reinforces their idea of how important religion was. And then for those who saw chaplains in their eyes skulking behind the lines, keeping away from the dangers, that took them in the other direction, perhaps pushing religion into the background. I mean, that is a complex subject to discuss and slightly off the curve here, but it gives us an idea into the kind of roles that chaplains performed on the battlefield itself. And to do this, they had an honorary rank, so they looked like officers, they dressed like officers. The most common chaplain was a chaplain fourth class, which was the equivalent of the rank of captain. Those are the ones that you would commonly see attached to the field ambulances and at the dressing stations and close to the medical facilities, and there was about a dozen or so in each infantry division of different denominations, not just Church of England, Church of England being the most common, then Roman Catholic, Jewish, Presbyterian, Methodist, and it goes on. Pretty much all denominations were covered by the recruitment of chaplains into the army from 1914 onwards. And many were decorated for bravery, like Theodore Bailey Hardy, VC D S OMC. He was the most decorated chaplain of the Great War, multiple gallantry awards, not a young man by any means. He was in his 50s and he was wounded in the Battle of the Cell in October 1918 and died of his wounds at Rouen, age 54, on the 18th of October 1918, and he's buried in Saint-Sever Cemetery Extension. So that tells us a little bit about chaplains and some of those and the brave deeds that they carried out. I mean, many, many chaplains were decorated for bravery in the Great War. But in terms of your question about a memorial based on the one you've seen to French chaplains, there is a memorial in the All Saints Garrison Church in Aldershot, which was the home of the British Army for so many years, which are wooden panels which list the names of 112 British Army chaplains who died in the Great War. Now, what the inclusion was to be added to that memorial, I'm not entirely sure because some of the figures I've seen for the deaths of chaplains in the Great War put the total figure much nearer to 200 than 100. So what the criteria to be added to that memorial or not added to it was, I don't really know. So that's one in the UK. Out on the battlefields themselves, the only one that I can think of is I'm pretty sure that there is a plaque, a brass plaque, on the walls of the St. George's Memorial Church at Eape. This was the Pilgrims Church built and designed by the same architect as the Meningate, a place for pilgrims to the battlefields in that interwar period to go to, in the very heart of Eape, close to St. Martin's Cathedral. The walls of it are covered in memorials with memorial plaques still being added to this day, and I'm pretty sure there is one of them that covers army chaplains. Perhaps some of our listeners living in and around Eape the next time they're in St. George's can check this out and feed back to it. Now, in terms of resources to understand more about the role and experience of chaplains in the Great War, as always, Chris Baker's The Long Long Trail website has a good little kind of overview of the service of chaplains, and I'll put a link to that onto the show notes and the podcast website for this episode. And in terms of books, there's a recent one by Peter Hausen called Muddling Through the Organisation of British Army Chaplaincy in World War One. I'm pretty sure that that's based on a PhD or an MA thesis. It's published by Helian in 2013, so more of an academic history than an anecdotal history of the chaplains. For that, you need Michael Moynihan's God on Our Side, The British Padre in World War One, which was published by Leo Cooper in 1983. And I remember going into my local bookshop when that came out and buying it. It's got a painting of some chaplains on the front cover with the backdrop, it's actually Connort Cemetery at Chapvale. You can see that quite clearly. It's not a rare book, very easy to obtain through the usual sources, but I'll put links to both of those again into the show notes and onto the podcast website. And in addition to those, there are lots of autobiographies and biographies of chaplains in the Great War. There's a really good book, for example, by David Raw on Theodore Hardy VC. And I had an email just the other day with details of a new book of some chaplains' diaries that have just been published. I've got that on order at the moment when that comes through. I'm going to have a look at it. And I'll put some details of that once I've had a read of it into the podcast bulletin, which is the email that we send out every couple of weeks, which you can subscribe to through a link in the show notes or on the podcast website. So there's quite a lot of material out there. It's a really important part of our understanding of the Great War, and yet again, I'm going to promise another podcast, but it is something that really does deserve its own episode, and I'm sure we will return to it. So I hope that you, Dave, can track down that memorial in order shot, and we'll get the plaque to the chaplains confirmed to be in St. George's. And perhaps it's long overdue for there to be something, perhaps a little bit more, out on those battlefields, although I'm always kind of cautious when it comes to suggesting adding new memorials to that landscape of the First World War. Question number two comes from Tim Fairbairn. Tim asks, Some while ago I read in John Macefield's book The Old Front Line that it was reported that the bodies of some enemy soldiers were found chained to their guns. Having just finished Michael Palin's Great Uncle Harry, which I also enjoyed, I also found his reference from Harry Dampier Crossley's diary that German machine gunners have been found chained to their guns. Is there any evidence pictorial or otherwise that this did indeed happen? Or is it more likely to have originated from an estaminae setting, do you think? Well, I mean this idea that German machine gunners were chained to their machine gunners is something that you read in contemporary accounts. If you look at newspaper accounts from the opening stage of the Battle of the Somme, and probably if you went back further, you would find other examples of it as well. I guess it was a kind of propaganda message that the Germans were so beastly and awful that they were forcing their machine gunners to carry on fighting until the last round and the last breath, and to force them to do that, they had to chain them to their weapons. And if you look at Martin Middlebrook's The First Day of the Somme, you will find reference to that from the memoirs and the interviews that he did with veterans. So it's not difficult to go out there amongst the archive of First World War experience and writing to find stories of this. So let's look at some history. The MG-08 Maxim, based on that essential Sahira Maxim design that he patented in the 19th century and it became the genesis of very many different types of machine guns, heavy machine guns used in the first world war, was for the Germans, the Maschinengewehr Null Ut, the MG08. It fired 500 rounds per minute and was a heavy machine gun mounted on a sledge, as it was often described, which is a big mount with four legs to give it a lot of stabilization when it fired. It was a water-cooled machine gun, so it needed a condenser. The Germans designed a special condenser tin for the machine gun rather than using a petrol tin that the British use with their machine guns, and it was an effective weapon that gave the German army, particularly infantry units, heavy firepower with machine gun companies providing that firepower from the very beginning. And because it was a heavy machine gun, not just in terms of its ability to lay down sustained fire into a given area, it was physically a very big and heavy weapon, plus the sledge combined. Sometimes it needed to be dragged, dragged into position, dragged out of position if the position that you were defending was beginning to collapse and you had to get the gun away. So to do that, to drag it off the battlefield or to drag it into position, they had a drag strap, which was known as a trageriemann in German. And the early ones were made out of leather, so a big leather strap. I've got quite a few postcards of German soldiers wearing these things, a big leather strap that comes across the front of the tunic, goes around the back of the tunic as well, and meets down below the kind of belt level where there is some buckles that you can then use to fix to the sledge, the mount of the machine gun. Later on, as leather became scarce, there was a webbing version of that as well. The buckles at the end were quite big, and as I say, they were attached to fixing points on the sledge of the weapon so that the team or the number one on the gun, the man firing it, could buckle himself to the sledge and use it to drag it away. Now, in combat, it seemingly wasn't uncommon for one or more machine gunners to have these straps already in place so that if you were firing and the enemy was coming at you and you needed to get that gun away rapidly, you didn't faff about trying to buckle yourself up to the gun to get it away. So they basically buckled themselves in from the very beginning. And of course, during the combat that would follow, they might be killed or wounded, and the body of the soldier, whether wounded or killed, be lying by the gun with this strap, with this buckle, seemingly chained to his gun. So essentially what we're seeing here is a misunderstanding that these German soldiers had this bit of kit, the Trageremann, the strap, the dragging strap, to pull the gun in and out of action, would fix themselves to the weapon, perhaps keep that fixed during combat, and if they became a casualty, it might look as if they'd been somehow tied to the gun, chained to the gun. I think chained from a propaganda point of view would always sound better. And when soldiers saw that they didn't really understand what they were looking at. There was no, as far as I'm aware, British equivalent of this that you see British machine gunners regularly using, so it meant that the British soldiers thought, well, yep, the Germans, they're just as bad as we thought, they're forcing their men to fight to the last, and to do that, they're chaining them to their weapons. And you can imagine a few soldiers telling this story and in the stamina, as you've suggested, behind the lines, or perhaps walking out as walking wounded away from the battlefield in that early stage of the Somme advance, bumping into some press correspondence of which there were many, telling that story, and then it gets published in national newspapers, regional newspapers, and the whole thing escalates and it becomes another piece of the very powerful propaganda that you see used throughout the First World War. So it is, as you probably thought when you asked this question, one of the myths of the Great War, but one that persists almost certainly to this day. Just like it's not difficult to find it in the accounts of the First World War. I'm sure if I hopped across a few Facebook groups, I would probably see this kind of thing being trotted out. It's kind of Facebook in some respects has kind of replaced the stamina for the spreading of these sorts of stories. And we've always got to be wary of them, investigate them, and look further into them. And thank you, Tim, for giving us this opportunity to discuss this important element, I think, of First World War history. And we can see at the time it falled not just John Macefield, the author of The Old Front Line, the book that gives this podcast its title, but Michael Palin's great uncle. I remember reading that in Michael's preparations for writing the book, which, as you may know, I kind of helped him out with some of that. And I remember reading that in his great uncle's account, and it's wrong, but I think it's important to include those kind of stories because things that are wrong sometimes tell us as much as things that are right, and the whole way that soldiers saw The enemy, thought about the enemy, and viewed the enemy in terms of how the enemy was forced or otherwise to fight, I think is all part of our understanding really of the First World War. Moving on to question number three, and this comes from Jack Robson. Jack says, I do like listening to your podcasts and mapping the area out when you take us on your virtual tours. Interesting to hear about the mine craters at La Boiselle. Why were some areas on the Western Front more heavily mined than others? Was it due to the topography, high ground, or strategic importance? Well, in many respects, and our good friend Professor Peter Doyle will love this, it's all about the geology of the front. That area where the British Army was operating in Flanders and in northern France was particularly suitable for this kind of mining operation for digging down into the landscape and tunnelling and laying charges. We've looked at to a certain degree the history of tunnellers in the Great War. It's a really important part of our understanding of the war underground, and I'm sure it's a subject that we will return to many, many times in the future of this podcast. But mining in theory was possible just about anywhere as the means to dig in all types of terrains was possible. Once the idea of using tunnelling in what had rapidly become a static war, once that idea was set in and specialist tunnelling units were created, the French had them, the British Army formed them out of divisional mining companies into the tunnelling companies of the Royal Engineers. The Germans used their pioneers for a lot of their mining activity, and mining on the Western Front began in 1914, more so on the French German sectors than in the British sector of the front, but rapidly it became clear that this kind of activity could be militarised and used as a weapon on the battlefield. And by the time of the Battle of Messines in 1917, which was the kind of high point of the tunnelers from British and Commonwealth perspective, you see military mining happening on pretty much all parts of the British Expeditionary Force front, which we see reflected on trench maps of that period. If you look at trench maps, particularly secret edition trench maps that include a lot more data about the battlefield, you will see this little symbol, a circle with little gradient lines into it, which indicates a mine crater. And when I first got the Great War digital system, the linesman system, where you can use trench maps with GPS and then map locations and then bring up a modern map and plot places and do traces of trenches to see where those positions were on the landscape today. One of the things I did is I followed the British line down from south of Yape down into northern France using the Secret Edition maps and plotted a lot of the mine craters, and I was surprised to discover how many were still there, tucked away in little copses or on the outskirts of a village, ones much lesser known than the big ones like Spanbrook Molin up in Flanders or Lochnagar down on the Somme. But it showed this massive, massive amount of craters right along the British sector line. And some of those were craters formed by British and Commonwealth Empire tunnelling units because the Australians had tunnellers, the Canadians had tunnellers, there was the New Zealand miners as well. So you see a massive amount of this kind of activity. And the early British tunnelling in Flanders took them into one type of geology, which was the blue clay beneath Flanders Fields, similar to the blue clay underneath Manchester and London, which led to British tunnellers who'd worked in those locations as miners before the war being brought in to work. In those kinds of conditions, you dig down into that clay and everything has to be shored up with timber to stop it from collapsing, and it also enabled them to dig beneath that landscape and plant some of those early charges to blow up German positions. And when the extension of the British sector took the British Army beyond the La Basse Canal into the chalk area of northern France with the Loose battlefield and around Arras and eventually down on the Somme, that also gave opportunities for now the properly formed tunnelling companies to carry out their activities in a different kind of geology, which was the hardened chalk landscape, which required different methodologies to dig into. It didn't require shoring up as such in the same way that you dug into clay did, but it created a lot more noise when you dug into it, and that became a factor in working at that. So all of these different parts of geology that affected the way that the tunnellers carried out their underground war meant that they were always adapting their methodology to cope with those battlefield conditions. And a recent, fairly recent-ish book that I bought about the French tunnelers in the Great War shows exactly the same kind of experience. As yet, there's been no German published German account of these tunnellers, unless I've missed something, and if you know of anything, then do get in touch. But that's one element of our knowledge of the war on the ground that we probably know the least amount. And in terms of choosing an area to carry out this underground war, if you looked at Messines with the Germans up on the high point and the British in the ground beneath that ridge, we would automatically think that the British were at a disadvantage there from holding that ground. Well, probably from that point of view that they were because the Germans are dominating that landscape by being up on that ridge. But when it came to digging the tunnels to prepare the mines to be blown underneath that ridge for the battle there in June 1917, being beneath the ridge gave us an advantage because we could start a tunnel, a tunnel system, a gallery in our trenches, and rather than have to dig 90 foot down and then across and then place the charge, we could dig a slow gradient angled tunnel into the base of the ridge, if you like, until it got to a point where it was beneath a significant German position, and those tunnels are not had to go right down, they just gradually got to a point where the charge could be placed and be effective in terms of what was tens of feet above it on the landscape of the ridge. So the geography and the geology play a massively important part in this, and I think in terms of the significance of places chosen for these mines to go off, I think it was a tactical rather than a strategic decision or in strategic importance that was often the key to where these mines were used. Because again, looking at the huge number of mines that were blown along the British front, often it was a local battle where a German salient had to be wiped out and the tunnelers dug underneath it, placed a charge and blew up that observation post or machine gun or sniper's position or whatever it was. And even with Messines in 1917, I mean that's a really important battle, but in some respects that ground of Messines, the whole Eap salient, had no strategic value. It might have been better from the very beginning to pull out of Flanders, pull back to the high ground on the Franco-Belgian border where the Flanders hills were, and defend those against the Germans. But Britain had gone to war for Belgium, and we couldn't give up that last little bit of Belgium that still existed, and the battles that were fought in Flanders around the city of Yape are all part of that strategically. I'm not sure they have any great importance, but you've shed blood on ground, it suddenly takes on a greater importance, the sacrifice that had happened there from the very beginning. But when it comes to choosing targets for Messengs, this is more of a tactical than a strategic decision in that battle there in 1917. And although the use of these weapons, the mines, the charges blown underneath the German positions could influence, as they did at Messines, the outcome of a battle, they couldn't win the war. Not on their own. It would have to be part of a greater combined effort. And once the conflict later on, 1917-18, post-Massines became a war of movement again, where the line swung like a pendulum in that last year of the war, this type of tactic became redundant because it could only really be practiced in truly static warfare. When the war was mobile again, tunnelers, miners, charges, all of that underground war suddenly became irrelevant because it took time, took resources, and it needed static positions for it to be effective. But it's a fascinating, defining part, I think, of the First World War, and today a defining part of that landscape of the First World War with all those craters along 450 miles of the Western Front, not just in the British part of it. Once you get down to that ground, which I often refer to as beyond the Somme, then you will find huge mine craters down there, some of which are as big, if not bigger, than Loch Nagar. So, as always, there's much more to discover on any of these subjects connected to the Great War. Our fourth and final question comes from Steve on email. Steve asks, I read somewhere that in 1915 the Grays Registration Commission started to photograph each grave with a view to sending copies to relatives, if and when they requested them. Do you know if these photographs or the plates used to take them still exist or were published anywhere? Well, this is a really interesting question. The Imperial War Graves Commission appointed photographers whose job it was to go to the cemeteries on the battlefield while the war was still on and photograph the existing graves on behalf of the relatives. And that work begun during the war continued into the early 1920s. And the photographs they were taken were of the temporary, the original grave markers that were placed there, wooden crosses, sometimes more elaborate than that. I mean all kinds of different graves. And the photographs were then printed, put into a brown wallet with a pocket on one side for the image, and then a printed section on the other side saying who the grave related to, where it was, and some other details about how to get there. For example, now during the war it wasn't possible for the family to get there, but they were already considering travel, future travel for families to get to these battlefield areas. And these wallets were then sent in the post to the families that had requested them. I honestly don't know how many they sent during the war. It's got to be thousands for the considerable number that I've seen over the years. Very often the photograph comes separated from the wallet. Sometimes you find an empty wallet with no photograph in it. There are tons of individual pictures of graves that appear on auction sites like eBay, for example. And a few years ago, I bought a collection of an Imperial War Graves Commission photographer with images that he'd taken of the landscape as it was when he was going around photographing graves, plus photographs of some of the graves that meant something to him or unusual ones. He photographed Raymond Asquith, for example, he was the son of the Prime Minister killed on the Somme. But what the collection didn't include were all the hundreds of photographs, if not perhaps thousands of photographs that he took over the period he was there of graves on behalf of families. So that's a collection that I picked up myself, but there's a really good book called Photographing the Fallen by Jeremy Gordon Smith. And this was published by Pen and Sword, I think, during the Great War Centenary, pretty easy to get hold of. Again, I'll put details of this onto the podcast website and in the show notes. I think the images that form the bulk of the book are now in the collection of the Imperial War Museum. Some of them are of individual graves, others again show the battlefields as they were, the Coth Hall at E, the Menningate, that smash landscape of the First World War, which would have looked like some kind of alien world in the 1920s, but again, not that many individual photographs of graves because that was his job, and those prints had to go off to the family. Now, in terms of an archive of these images, whether it was thousands, tens of thousands or more, they don't exist today. They did exist, the negatives for them existed. How many survived and were then transferred back to what was then the London, central London headquarters of the Imperial Wargraves Commission, I honestly don't know, but I do believe that they survived up until the point that the Imperial Wargraves Commission, the Commonwealth Wargraves Commission, moved out of those London offices to Maidenhead, and they don't seem to have been brought to Maidenhead, so at that point that archive ceased to exist. What happened to it, what its fate was, whose decision that was, I really don't know. But this would have been many, many decades ago, more than half a century ago, and you've got to remember that the role of the Wargraves Commission in those days was simply maintenance. The maintenance and care of the war cemeteries and the memorials to the missing, they were not an archive, they were not about keeping archives like that. Now, another story when I lived on the Somme, I heard from some retired Wargraves Commission workers that there had been all these different regional offices. There'd been one in Albert, Arras as well. There's the one up at Epe that's been there for many, many years. But within some of these regional offices, they had some archival material, they had trench maps showing the location of graves. I know the ones that were at Arras ended up in the collection of Andre Coyo, who had the biggest private museum in northern France at that time, and that some of the images may well have still been there in negative form, but again, they do not survive anywhere, and what their fate was I have absolutely no idea. So what this means is, and I'm sure that the Wargraves Commission today would like this to be otherwise, but sadly, there is no archive to my knowledge of plates of negatives showing these graves as they were during or just after the war. So it just sadly just doesn't exist. But what you do see is these kind of photographs turning up on the internet auction sites, and it's really common to see them on there. And when I first started collecting images myself, postcards, photographs decades ago, you'd see a lot of them, and initially I didn't really understand what they were until I started picking up some of the paperwork and the wallets that the photographs came in and kind of put that jigsaw piece together. Now there's a another archive of images as well because the photography continued beyond the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission. So when the original grave markers became permanent headstones, there was also requests for photographs of those, and that seems to have been done by the British Legion who had offices in Arras and Eap, and they provided a photographic service where they would go out to a grave, place a wreath on the grave for you, and photograph that headstone. Again, in my collection, I have quite a few of those. If there was an archive of them, it no longer exists. I once asked some people at the British Legion headquarters in London about this, but they have no knowledge of it whatsoever. I suspect it was a temporary thing. They probably had no reason or central location to send these photographs negatives to, and once they were taken, the print was sent to the family. Possibly it was disposed of at the time. So that's a secondary kind of potential archive that also doesn't exist. It's very frustrating in some ways because we would all love to find original photographs of graves that we've researched to see what kind of original grave marker was put on there. What I've found with the ones that I've picked up that the designs vary greatly. I've put an image as the show image for this episode from Listenher Cemetery, for example, and in just that one image, in that one cemetery, you can get a sense of the different types of grave markers that were placed on burials in the First World War. It was quite incredible. Some came home, some were recovered, brought home. There are many churches and buildings in Britain where you'll find original grave markers, but in terms of the photographs, sadly, that type of research into images of those in a central or permanent archive just doesn't sadly exist. But a fascinating subject, and thanks D for giving us an opportunity to talk about that important subject. That ends our first QA episode of 2026. Keep the questions coming in, you can send them in via the usual methods of email, via the Discord server, and a few others besides. And join us again here soon for some 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.