Questions and Answers Episode 45

In this latest Questions & Answers episode, we tackle some intriguing, and often misunderstood, aspects of life and fighting on the Western Front during the First World War.

Who actually decided what a battle was called? Did the ordinary soldier know, at the time, which battle he was fighting in – or even when one battle had ended and another begun, during almost four years of near-continuous combat? We explore how battles were named, dated, and defined, and what that meant for the men experiencing the war on the ground.

We also examine the introduction of the policy that 10% of a battalion was held back during attacks, particularly on 1 July 1916, the First day of the Battle of the Somme. When did this practice begin? Was it standard throughout the war? And where were these men actually positioned? Was it in support trenches, reserve lines, or further back with transport and logistics?

For those who engage with the First World War through the landscape itself, we answer a listener’s thoughtful question about walking The Old Front Line at Ypres. Thinking about the surviving terrain, memorials, and traces of trench warfare, we recommend one particularly powerful walking route in the Ypres Salient that still tells the story of the war in a way that just maps and books sometimes cannot.

Finally, we address a sensitive but important topic: did British Army officers really receive more leave than their men? If so, how was this perceived by the ranks, and what impact did it have on morale within the British and Commonwealth armies?

Main image: British troops arriving on leave at Victoria Station, London. (IWM Q30515)

The Battles Nomenclature Committee Report 1919: Naval and Military Press website.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

During my Christmas break, taking time to pause and take good stock a bit, I heard the sound of my local church bells drift across the fields from the heart of the village near where I live, and I realized I don't talk about this area perhaps as much as I did when I lived in Elsicre in South Yorkshire. My home now is in East Kent, close to Ashford, but in the parish of Kings North, an ancient settlement, with the moat of a medieval manor house now the centrepiece of my local park. Before the Great War, the 5th Battalion of the East Kent Regiment, the Buffs, recruited in this area, with their headquarters, their battalion headquarters in Ashford. Of its local eight companies recruited in the wider area of this part of East Kent, they often looked to draw in men from the kind of farming community that Kings North was then. And as a unit when the Great War began, they went on to serve in India and then in Mesopotamia in the second half of the conflict. Now when I first moved to this area, I visited my local church, St. Michael's. I walked across the fields where there was evidence of the last Great World War with concrete bunkers from one of the stop lines in this area, and in the churchyard I found quite a number of war graves from the Great War, which is not uncommon right across Britain. I think there's something like 12,000 grave locations that the Commonwealth War Graves Commission are responsible for. And when I went into the church, I found a plaque listing the local men who were killed, got talking to some of the church wardens there, and they proudly showed me the research that they'd done during the Great War centenary where they'd discovered the story by know all of the men who were commemorated on that war memorial. But as I heard the bells drift across the fields this Christmas, it made me think of the village a hundred and ten years ago and what lay ahead in that great year of nineteen sixteen. The rector of Saint Michael's then was the Reverend Henry Furley. He was a father of six children with roots in Canterbury, privately educated, had entered the church, and two of his six children were about to take part in those momentous events of a hundred and ten years ago in nineteen sixteen, with the tragic death of one of his sons, Robert Basil Furley, an officer of the first Bucks Battalion, who had previously served in the ranks of the sixteenth London Regiment, the Queenswissminster Rifles. He was killed on the Somme on the 25th of January 1916, almost a hundred and ten years to the day that this podcast will go out, and he's buried in Hebutern Cemetery. And while I've not been to specifically visit his grave since I've lived here, it is a cemetery that I've been in many, many times, one of those crisscrossed paths of the Great War. His brother George Frederick Furley had emigrated to Canada and he joined the 31st Battalion Canadian Infantry, the Alberta Regiment, and he was serving in France in 1916, would go on to take part in the fighting Corsulette, in the advance on the village and the fighting just beyond the village, another one of those crisscross paths because of my connection with Corsulette. He wouldn't die in the Battle of the Somme, he'd be killed the following year in the Third Battle of Yape, the Battle of Paschendale, when he died of wounds on the eighth of november nineteen seventeen, aged forty one, and is today buried at Lissenherk. Their father, the Reverend Furley, sadly passed away in nineteen seventeen, in his seventies, but who knows if his end was hastened by the loss of two sons in those two key years of the Great War. And it's thoughts like this as we approach that anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, of all those events across the Western Front and indeed other fronts in nineteen sixteen, that perhaps somehow the beginning of a new year is a way to focus our minds. And this and many other aspects of this conflict are things that we will discuss and discover along those crisscross paths over the course of this coming year. So now on to this week's questions. Question number one comes from Simon from the podcast website. Simon asks who decided what to call a battle? Did the soldier know what battle he was in at the time and what it was called? And who decided the end date and how could the soldier be aware that one battle had ended and another one had started? Because it was almost nonstop for four years. I feel like this question is like Baldricks on how the war started, if so I apologise as I'm laughing myself. Well Simon, I mean this is not a crazy question and certainly not a Baldric like question, it's a really good question. Who did choose the names of First World War battles? Did soldiers know that that battle was called by that name at the time? And tied into this is another question from Michael in Toronto on Fan Mail who says My question is about the Somme campaign in nineteen sixteen. Why is it called the Battle of the Somme? In my opinion, this was more of a campaign, not a battle. Well, first of all, who gave the battles their name? Now at the time there would have been the sense that there was fighting taking place in given areas, and operation orders sometimes refer to more likely a localized area, and there was a British military tradition, particularly in the First World War, of naming battles after rivers. So that's why you have the Battle of the Somme. The fighting in Arras was at the time called the Battles of the Scarp, the main river that runs through that area, and in 1918 you have battles like the Lees, which is named after the river Lees, where much of the fighting as the Germans pushed through that area of northern France and Flanders took place. But when the war was over, and it came to that point where historians and military personnel had to begin to make sense of four years of conflict and look at it, what historians do is they label and categorize things, and that was no different in the aftermath the outcome of a war like the Great War. And what was formed was the Battle Nomlicature Committee, and it was their job to analyse the war, the papers, talk to senior commanders, and come up with a credible framework of how to categorize and label the events of the First World War, not just on the Western Front, but in other theatres of war as well, and part of this was to help develop battle honours that could then be added to the battle honours of the regiments and corps that had taken part in the wider conflict, but also to help the official historian when it came to the writing of the official history, the official story of this conflict. And that battle nominature's work was indeed used by several aspects of that creation of the official history, from the actual volumes themselves that started in 1914 on the Western Front, go right through to the end of the conflict there and look at other theatres like Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Salonica. But not just about writing the history, there was a separate set of volumes that were called the Order of Battle, and this was by a former officer called Beck, Major Beck, Beck's Order of Battle, and in that he started at the highest echelon with the armies, the five armies on the Western Front, and then worked his way down to corps level, then all the individual divisions, and within each entry for each army, corps, division, there are the actions in which that unit took part, using the framework built by the Battle Nom Licature Committee. And to touch on Michael's question about the Somme, was it a battle or a campaign? It was both really, because when we drill down on what the framework was that that committee had constructed, for example, of the Somme campaign, we find not just one battle, but a whole series of actions that make up the wider aspect of what the Battle of the Somme, the Somme campaign was about. And you see both of those names being used in contemporary newspapers and accounts and in subsequent publications on that battle. So to give you some idea, I pulled a copy of Beck's Order of Battle, the volume for the higher echelon of command with the armies and the corps in it, and I looked at the entry for the Fourth Army, commanded by General Rawlinson, the main army that fought the main thrust on the Somme in 1916, went to the pages for the actions in which it participated in in those months of the Battle of the Somme from July through to November of 1916, and we see quite a breakdown of different actions. And I'll put the pages from Beck's Order of Battle with these individual names on onto the podcast website so you can have a look at it. But I'm looking now at the page for 1916, battles and engagements, battle of the Somme, and then it begins with not just one battle but a whole series of different actions. The Battle of Albert from the 1st to the 13th of July. Also on the 1st of July was the capture of Montaba, the capture of Mametz. On the 2nd of July, the capture of Free Corps, 2nd to the 4th of July, the capture of La Boisel, 3rd of July, capture of Burnafe Wood, and it goes on. 14th to the 17th of July, Battle of Bazentan Ridge, the capture of Trones Wood, 14th to the 18th, and the 29th of July, the capture of Longevau, 15th of July to the 3rd of September, Battle of Delville Wood. We move on into September and we get to the 15th to the 22nd, Battle of Fleurs Corsolette. We move on into the latter stage of the battle, and 26th of September, the capture of Combals, 1st to the 18th of October, Battle of the Transloy Ridges, 3rd to the 11th of November, Battle of the Onkre Heights, and then the 13th to the 18th of November, the Battle of the Onk. And what we see, I mean I've only listed a few that are mentioned in these pages, but what we clearly see here is a much more complicated construct of what the Battle of the Somme was. And to answer your question about the men themselves, would they have known all this? No, no way. When I think about the veterans that I interviewed, very often they weren't even a hundred percent sure exactly where they'd been. And I remember asking one of them about this, and he said, Well, very often we'd walk into an area and there would be this smudge where a village had been, a mass of shell holes and trenches and barbed wire. We had no idea where that really was, except it could be beyond Albert, near to Poziers, facing Chiapval, things like that, but they didn't know precisely where they were often, and they had no idea about these individual names. So on the fifteenth of september nineteen sixteen, the Canadians who were about to attack Corsulette village, probably if they called that battle anything, it would have been the attack or the assault on Corsulette. They had no idea about Fleurs, and they had no idea that that battle would eventually officially be called the Battle of Fleurs Corsulette, which would become a Canadian battle honour. So they would not have known what these battles were called then, except for very kind of vague names. They would have had no idea about the dates. The first of July is kind of different because all of the units that went over the top that day had been preparing for this, and I think the symbolism of the start of a new month, the weather that day, everything that that day became to mean, fix that date in their minds. But as the the battle moved forward and the soldier was fighting in the Battle of Delville Wood, when just down the road the capture of Jonchi and the capture of Guillemont was taking place, he had no idea about those parameters or the importance of the dates surrounding it. All he knew is that he was in the thick of the fighting, doing his bit, hopefully pushing the Germans back and winning this battle, whatever it was called and whatever dates it had. So at the time, unless you were an officer, you were probably only vaguely aware of this kind of stuff, and I don't think it really mattered. And what soldiers, when we look at contemporary accounts or in letters of the period, we see that they are very general about where they are. But they really have only the vaguest ideas of precisely where they were. And many of the veterans that I spoke to, I was able to show them regimental histories, maps in those histories, and it answered a lot of questions for them. So essentially, they weren't all experts on this, and they certainly weren't experts on the dates, the parameters, and the outline of all those things that an organisation like the Battle Nominature Committee decided. And when we look at something like the Battle of the Somme, if you look it up just about anywhere, you will see the dates that are stated, is it began on the first of July and it ended on the eighteenth of November, but again, the men at the time who were in that final attack, the men of the 18th Eastern Division over towards Chapval, just beyond it, or the Canadians at Corsolette, they were probably completely unaware that that battle was effectively coming to an end, because if they were in units like both of those formations that stayed in the line subsequently, they would have just seen the next few months as a continuation of that battle, and even with the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg line, and then the subsequent fighting across that Hindenburg line may well have felt to them at the time as just a continuation of the Battle of the Somme. That that Somme battle, that Somme campaign was just continuing but in a different place. So far from being a Baldrich esque question, Simon, this is really I think gets to the essence of part of the soldiers' experience in the Great War when it came to them, those who survived, looking back and trying to make sense of it. And it must have taken all of them, well I in fact I know it took many of them a lifetime to really comprehend what it was that they'd been through in terms of the bigger picture. And I've seen exactly the same with veterans of the Second World War when I've taken them to Normandy, to the beaches where they landed or the fields where they fought, they're aware of that bit, they're aware of how that jigsaw piece fits into the perhaps wider British and Commonwealth story. But then when I've taken them to the American sector or we've gone further inland, they've seen the bigger picture that they just were not aware of at the time. So a generation later, it wasn't much different. So a fascinating question, Simon, and thank you, Michael from Toronto, for adding that. I hope that's kind of quantified that. Perhaps not in the detailed way that the Battle Nomicature Committee did, but those pages which I'll put on the website will give you a bit of an insight into the work that they did. Question number two comes from David Adamson on Fan Mail. David asks, I have a question about the 10% of a battalion kept out of the attack that is often mentioned in connection with the first of July 1916, the first day of the Somme. When did this practice start? Was it used throughout the war? Also, where did these men go? Did they stay in the support trenches or with the battalion transport lines perhaps? Well, another great question which has got a bit of a Somme connection to it in this great anniversary year of the Somme. First of all, what was the ten percent? Well, if we look at the experience of the British Army on the Western Front in nineteen fourteen-15, we see horrendous casualties in the battles of the War of Movement from Mons to the Marne and the Ain, and then in particular in the first Battle of Epe, where you read about battalions going into action nearly a thousand strong, commanded by a Lieutenant Colonel, and by the end of the First Battle of Epe there's one second lieutenant left of you know a few dozen men under his command, and that's what's left of the battalion. And when we look at some of the early British offensives, the casualties in some of those offensives were very high, and it wore down some of these battalions to such an extent that they became combat ineffective. Second Battalion, the Manchester Regiment, for example, up at Eape, held the front line for 85 consecutive days in the first half of 1915, and took several months for that battalion to be back in a state where it could go back into the forward positions again. So the army realized that if you throw a unit in and that unit gets annihilated, how do you rebuild it? So this idea of taking 10% of the men, keeping them back away from the battlefield, and then using them as a nucleus in case the battalion gets heavy losses and needs to be rebuilt, then you had a 10% carder, a group of men that could then be used to reform the battalion. And you take some key officers out, some company and platoon guys, and some of the battalion headquarters maybe, and then you take selected men from the different companies. So you wouldn't take men from just one company, you take a nucleus, perhaps literally 10% from A, B, C, and D companies, and they would form this 10%. And the Battle of Luz seems to be the first big occasion in which this 10% was used at Luz with a wide offensive about to take place over fresh ground where the British Army had not fought before against an obviously well entrenched enemy. And given the experience of how battalions had suffered such crippling losses in the early battles, then the 10% was used right across the units that formed part of the British Army that attacked at Luz in September 1915. And in many respects, thank goodness it was because many of those battalions, particularly in some of the Kitchener's divisions that went forward up to Fossate and the Hohenzollern Redoubt area, or across into that ground north of Loose, up towards Hullock, where unit after unit advanced. In the open in broad daylight, with a massive German defences ahead of them, and were literally scythed to pieces by German machine gun and shell fire. Then thank goodness that 10% was there to help rebuild those battalions afterwards. So that's what the 10% was. That's kind of how it operated. You didn't have a choice as a soldier whether you were in it. I mean I suspect you could be cynical and say perhaps every man would try and get in the 10%, but actually I interviewed some men who were in the 10% in certain battles. One South Downs veteran, for example, was put in the 10% for the attack at Rischborg on the 30th of June 1916, and he did not want to be there. He wanted to be back in the front line with his mates. This is their first time in action, and he wanted to be part of that and was absolutely gutted when he was sent to the rear and was not able to take part in the attack. Now most of the men that he'd enlisted with and served with were killed and wounded in that battle, and being sent to the 10% saved his life, but it wasn't something that he relished being a part of, and that's something that I think is quite important to consider. And in terms of where these men went, they were literally taken out of the line and as you've mentioned, they were left at the battalion transport lines. So when a unit was in the trenches, they occupied those three lines of trenches: the front line, the support line, the reserve line, often some buildings or perhaps a bit of a village close by as a reserve position, and then beyond that would be the battalion transport lines where the limbers that carried up the battalion's gear would be brought up to where the food and the rations and ammunition and equipment would be brought to, and then everything would be carried up by the infantry soldiers beyond that. This was a place that was safe, not out of shell fire, but out of direct observation of the Germans, so it meant that it was safe to group people in that area, they would occupy perhaps a series of farm buildings or buildings on the edge of a village, and the battalion transport line would operate there, and that's where the 10% would be when an attack went in. Far enough back, but also probably close enough to hear what was happening. And again, the South Downs veteran that I interviewed, he was just the other side of Richborg St. Vaast, and he could hear all hell breaking loose up on the battlefield, wanted to go, but the officers would not allow them to go forward. They had to wait for the orders of senior officers to require the 10% to go forward to assist or help with some situation that was unfolding on the battlefield, that didn't happen on that day. They were, as the 10% was designed for, they were kept back to help rebuild the battalion once that action was over. And thinking of something like Richborg, the South Downs was a kind of Powers battalion, but if you think of the Northern Powers battalions that went into action at Serre on the 1st of July 1916, they all kept 10% of their men back. And if you think that you came from somewhere like Barnsley or Sheffield or Accrington and you weren't in that battle, and everyone else had gone over the top, and men had been killed and badly wounded, and then some months later you go home on leave, I'm sure there'll be plenty of questions from locals that you wouldn't want to answer based around why weren't you in it, or what was your part in the battle, and you have to explain that you were held back and you didn't go forward. So again, something that we might think a soldier would relish being a part of would actually create more problems than it solved. And it was a policy that the use of this 10% that continued again on into the next conflict in World War II, it was called LOB, left out of battle, and around 10% of the men in infantry battalion in Normandy on D-Day, they would be held back. And one of the veterans from York that I used to take back to the battlefields, Burt Barrett, he was in the LOB of the East Yorkshire Regiment on Sword Beach. He was kept on the mother ship. The main battalion went into action at Sword Beach, took heavy losses there. He was then brought forward later on on D-Day as part of the reinforcements to rebuild that battalion to enable it to continue with the advance forward on Carn. And as he got off the landing craft, he was stepping over the bodies of men that he trained with, lived with, and knew through all those years of preparation leading up to the 6th of June 1944. So again that kind of similar experience of men going over the top on the Somme was pretty much identical a generation later to those going into battle on D-Day in 1944. So a great question, David, and I hope that shed some light on probably a lesser known aspect of the First World War. Moving on to question number three, this one comes from Neil Maxfield on email, and Neil asks, I am an enthusiastic, reasonably well read amateur when it comes to the subject of the old front line. What I lack in terms of granular knowledge of battalions, divisions, and logistics I make up for in the pure enjoyment I get from walking around these landscapes. So with this in mind, what is one walking route in the Eap Salient that you feel is particularly effective at telling the story of the war through its surviving landscape and features? Well, Neil, you don't have to be an expert in every element of the First World War to get something from walking that ground. Connecting to the history through the landscape, as I'm sure you know and everyone listening, is an essential part of what this podcast is about, and an essential part of what my own personal view of the First World War is. We can't understand it, I don't think, without reference to that landscape. And the two elements of this of the history and the research and the battalions and the divisions and the logistics and everything else sit side by side with what that landscape can tell us about the experience and the whys and the wherefores of why those battles were fought there. So, in terms of walking the Eape salient, I'm sure you've chosen that because it's a much more challenging landscape to walk and connect to because of modern development. In the 40 odd years that I've been going to EEEP, I've seen it change dramatically during that period, with a mass of development, particularly in the northern and the northeastern part of the battlefield. Recently we had the reshowing of the film about the diggers, which showed them carrying out rescue archaeology one step ahead of the bulldozers. So, on certain areas, even with modern technology like Lionsman, where you can get a map up and it shows you your GPS location on the First World War environment, it's much more challenging to make that kind of connection in Flanders fields. But to answer your question, what would I suggest as a walk to do this? Well, start in Eape, head out of Eape via the ramparts, go up onto the ramparts. That feature of EAP that survived the First World War, so it's an original piece of the old ancient city of Eape, very much connected to the First World War. Soldiers lived on the ramparts beneath the ramparts, and that takes you round to the Lille Gate, and you can exit Eape from that point on the battlefield to get out onto the ground where the fighting was, just as the majority of soldiers did, particularly in that 1915 to 1917 period, when the men in gate was directly in observation from the high ground, and it was less safe to take troops out through that route. So you're going out through the little gate, taking the road south, and then coming to your first major cemetery after you've passed a road and rail junction, not Hellfire Corner, but Shrapnel Corner, and this again was a main route up to the front line. If you turn left there, that would take you towards Zillabeek. Just up there is Transport Farm Cemetery and Zillabeek Lake in the village beyond. To the right, it would take you down to Kemmel. A lot of gun positions were along that road, field artillery and then later heavy artillery as well. But we're going straight on, takes us up to Bedford House Cemetery, one of the many silent cities, the soldiers' cemeteries that exist around the city of Eape. And in terms of connecting to the original landscape and the evidence of the past, Bedford House is a good one, not just because of the stories that the soldiers' headstones can tell us, but within that cemetery, built around the ruins of an old chateau that served as a dressing station in the Great War, is the original moat, the original ice house, some of the original features of the main building itself, and it's a very unusual cemetery in that respect, that it is formed around a landscape that itself became part of that First World War story. And leaving Bedford House, you continue down to the road and you come to the point where the Epe Commine Canal crosses that road or once crossed that road. You wouldn't really know it if you drove along that road today. The canal was silted up and not used even in 1914, but a section of it is visible to your left and you can walk along there. The British put in quite a few concrete bunkers in this area, and at certain times of year you can see them built into the banks of the canal and near to one of the lock gates. That then brings you out to the next bit of road where you can see some battlefield cemeteries. You've got Spoilbank Cemetery to your left, and just beyond that, Chester Farm, both frontline cemeteries where the men in the ground that you're about to walk into, that's where they brought their dead back for burial, and there's lots of fascinating stories in those. Spoilbank, for example, has an Australian extension at the back of it from when the Australian Imperial Force troops held this sector in the winter of 1917-18 and buried their dead slightly separately to the earlier burials. Chester Farm Cemetery is named after the Cheshire Regiment that served in this area in early 1915. But when we cross the road here, and keeping the cemeteries on our left, come into the continuation of the canal, we're coming into what today is a nature reserve, the Paling Beak, and this during the war was what the British called the Bluff. And this is where the canal ran. And when the canal was built, the spoil from it was thrown up either side of the canal, creating this kind of huge embankment which the British called the bluff, a bit of high ground. I mean not that high, but high in terms of Flanders. And the further we get along here, following the canal, following some of the walkways to our left as we go along here, it takes us into that landscape of the First World War that survives really well here. Now you're not going to see a lot of trenches, you'll see the indent of where trenches and shell holes were. But what you will see here are mine craters. Some years ago, the undergrowth was cleared, wooden duckboard routes was constructed here so you could walk onto this landscape, see these mighty mine craters from 1915, from 1916, when no major battles were going on here, but this was just the day-to-day activities of trench warfare, including that war underground, and it gives us a fantastic insight into what that landscape would have looked like, and seemingly insignificant parts of the front with huge charges of explosive being used to blow up the enemy, whether that was German mines blowing up British troops or British mines destroying German positions and the troops that defended it. So this is a preserved, essentially preserved bit of that first world war landscape. Unusual at Eape, not rare but unusual and well worth coming to have a look at. And it's also the site of one of the so-called entry points onto the Eap battlefield, where there's a little unmanned visitor centre with a film and information that then sheds further light on what this landscape means and what you're seeing and how you can understand it. From there you can cut across where there's some small battlefield cemeteries on the far open ground beyond the bluff, increasingly forested now. It was all open fields when I first went there in 1982. The first DCLI cemetery, Hedgerow Trench Cemetery, there's the woods cemetery up there as well in an area called Verbrandon Molen, and you can walk down a track there where you are in the middle of no man's land, where to the left of the track was the British front line, and to the right was the German front line, and that brings you out near to Hill 60, and you can go into the mine craters there, the caterpillar on this side of the railway line, a very impressive crater that gives you an insight into the massive Messines mines. Then again, you're walking across a bit of no man's land there. There's a German bunker that you see as you walk into the outskirts of that crater. You can then cross the railway bridge, look down into the cutting and think about how the trenches went across there during the First World War, then go on to Hill 60 and again walk along some of those new duckboards, kind of Alan Tichmar style decking, that then indicates that you're just crossing the British front line. You're now in no man's land where a long line of small craters are, and then you cross over into the German positions. You'll see the 1917 mine on the hill itself, and again, examples of bunkers, German and an Australian observation bunker that's there, perhaps one of the most visited bunkers on the Western Front, the memorial to the Queen Victoria Rifles. Then you can cut across the hill, head down into Zillabeek, where in the churchyard you can visit one of the very earliest military cemeteries that was made at Eape, Zillabeek churchyard, often called the Aristocrat Cemetery, which is where men from the rank of second lieutenant to lieutenant colonel, regular soldiers who were killed in the fighting here in 1914 and early 1915 were buried, and it cuts across the typical kind of backgrounds that regular soldiers of the regular army had. Public school boys came from wealthy titled families. It's a fascinating insight into the life and the background and the service of some of these great aristocratic families, many of which lost multiple sons in the Great War. And from Zillebeek, you can walk up to Hellfire Corner, where the modern world rudely interrupts the old world of the Great War, but nevertheless, Hellfire Corner, a kind of byword for what the First World War was all about. Any visit to Flanders Fields has to include a stop here, I think. And you'll see one of those demarcation stones close to the roundabout here, marking the limit of the German advance in this sector in 1918, and then from there, in just under half a mile, you can see how close they got. You will be at the Menning Gate, back in heap, and at the end of your walk. And I would hope that by doing that walk, Neil, that you would come away having enhanced your knowledge of what the Great War in Flanders was all about from a British and Commonwealth perspective, and also hopefully it would increase your attachment, appreciation, your love, even for the landscape of the First World War, tapping in to that wavelength of what the subject can give us if we only but listen. And that landscape that you've just walked by doing that route, part of that last witness of the Great War, because the landscape can tell us so much, really, as I've said right at the beginning, is the only true way to really understand what the First World War was and what the First World War still means more than a century later. So a brilliant question, Neil, which I've really enjoyed answering. Question number four comes from Stuart Price. Stuart asks, I read somewhere that army officers got more leave than their troops. If this is true, surely this would have caused resentment amongst the troops and would have not been good for morale. Well, it is true. Army officers got more leave than ordinary soldiers than other ranks. And how leave worked in the First World War once the war became static and it was clear that the war would not be over by Christmas, that this was not just some kind of flash in the pan, that this is a war that would go on for quite some time, leave had to be considered because soldiers would be entitled to it while on active service, and the War Office decided that other ranks, ordinary soldiers, would get leave every 12 months, usually based on their original date of going overseas. So if you were a Kitchener's volunteer, you joined up in September 1914, and you were in one of those divisions that went over in say May or June or July of 1915, your period of leave would be a year later in May, June, July of 1916. One of the things that could get in the way was an upcoming big offensive. So if you were unlucky that your leave was due in July 1916 with the Battle of the Somme, there's a fair chance it could be postponed. You could apply for leave under exceptional circumstances that a family member was unwell or died. I don't think they gave too many soldiers the possibility of going to attend funerals. It's something you read about a lot, and the unfairness of it. But when you had that leave after your initial period of service on the front, it would be typically 10 to 12 days. You'd be given a rail warrant for your movement, a movement order, if you like, to take you from the battle area, the transport lines of your battalion to a railhead by train to the coast, by ship across to a UK port. Later on in the war, the main route was to be taken to Boulogne and then by ship to Folkestone and then by train from Folkestone to Victoria, and then from there your rail warrant would take you back to wherever you live again by train at the cost of the War Office. And it was for that set period, you'd have a date on there where you'd have to get back on another train to bring you back to London, to take you down to the coast, and then back to the Western Fronts. And if you didn't show up, then obviously you were in trouble. To compare that to officers, they usually got leave every six months. So for one twelve-month stint for an ordinary soldier, an officer could go on leave twice. And that was unfair in many respects, but the War Office viewed that there was a lot more pressure on officers, they had a lot more responsibility than an ordinary soldier, and therefore deserved more leave. And it was all part of how class consciousness and the class system, I would guess, worked at that period as well. That is very much a factor in this. Officers could also have local leave. So on top of those more regular periods of leave, they could have what was called local leave, where they could go on leave to Paris, to Amiens, to Aberville, all kinds of places where they could go. Further back, have a short period of local leave before they would rejoin their unit. And if you read the memoirs of Robert Graves and Siegfried to Soon and Emmanuel, you will come across examples of this where they get a few days' local leave where they go off somewhere. Now I'm sure all of this caused resentment because ordinary soldiers saw the officers going off on leave quite regularly, and they didn't get an opportunity to do that. And home must have felt a very, very long way away to them. But what they did get was freedom when they were out of the line. Soldiers were not in the forward trenches all the time, they would have periods in the front line, then come out and rest in a village, back up again, and do that several times, and then go back to a place further, further away from the front, like Bethun or To Amia or Abville or somewhere to do some training, be in a camp there. Popperinger up in Flanders was another location, Balliol for units that served on the Messines Ridge. These were towns where although the soldier would be in a camp and he'd have duties in that camp, he'd have to attend parade normally twice a day in the morning and the evening. What he would have is some free time to go off and do what he wanted. And you could go into that town, you could go and get food and drink and all kinds of other stuff, which we've spoken about on episodes concerning life behind the lines. But when again, when you read the memoirs of ordinary soldiers, you discover they went off on cook's tours, as they often called them, where they'd go off exploring to see a windmill or a beautiful stained glass window or chapel in a village many, many miles from the front, just to kind of get away, to perhaps touch on aspects of the old world, the old life that they had once had that was in great contrast to where they were now. And of course, here we're talking about France and Flanders. The close proximity of that to Great Britain meant that that kind of leave was possible. If you were in Salonica or Mesopotamia or Gallipoli or Palestine or some of the many other fronts that British soldiers fought on during the First World War, your chances of leave like that was much reduced. Many of the men from the Buffs Battalion that recruited in the area where I now live, those men who went off to Mesopotamia did not see home again until the war was over. So they did not get regular stints of leave from Mespot back to Britain in the same way that men on the Western Front did. And that's true of other theatres of war as well. And if we look at Commonwealth soldiers who are much further from home, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, they didn't get those kind of regular stints where they could go home on leave in the same way that British soldiers did. There were leave arrangements for them, but it wasn't organised in the easy, easily manageable way that the British Army could do for its troops that were obviously literally almost on the doorstep of their own country. And there's so many other aspects of this, Stuart, in terms of Leave, that I'm now kind of thinking that maybe we should have an episode about what Leave was, what it consisted of, the kind of things that soldiers did, what local Leave was, and how it worked for other nations like Anzacs and Canadians and all the other Commonwealth nations that served in places like France and Flanders and beyond during the Great War. As ever, there is more to discover. So thanks for that and all of the questions this week. I hope you've enjoyed the questions and more importantly the answers. Keep them coming in via the usual methods of email and the Discord server and a few others besides, and I'll see you again 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. 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