Questions and Answers Episode 46

In this latest First World War Q&A episode we tackle some of the most intriguing and overlooked questions about life, strategy and survival on the Western Front and after the guns fell silent.

Why did the British Army so often attack on ground not of its own choosing, at places like Loos and the Somme? If British commanders could have picked the battlefield, where might they have fought instead, and why? 

We then explore the everyday realities of the British Army by looking at the role of regimental cooks: were they safe behind the lines, or did they have to fight as front-line soldiers too? And if so what examples do we have of this?

Moving beyond the Armistice, we examine what happened when civilians returned to their shattered towns and villages after the Great War. Did governments help rebuild devastated communities, or was the burden carried by charities and local people? How were homes, farms and businesses reconstructed across the former battlefields of France and Belgium, and who actually paid for the enormous clean-up of the Western Front? We look at unexploded shells, wrecked trenches, barbed wire and battlefield debris, and ask whether German reparations really covered the cost.

Finally, we investigate one of the visual trademarks of First World War battlefields: blasted woodland reduced to splintered stumps. If forests offered little cover and tangled roots made digging trenches harder, why were woods and copses fought over so fiercely?

A deep dive into strategy, soldiers’ daily lives, post-war reconstruction and the scarred landscapes of the Western Front, this episode sheds new light on how the First World War was fought and how its aftermath reshaped Europe.

Main Image: 'This Place was Hooge' - Provisional housing at Hooge in c.1919/20 (Old Front Line archives)

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

We've discussed the rise of the use of artificial intelligence, AI, quite a few times on this podcast, and its application to our understanding of the First World War and many of the issues around it in terms of accuracy, detail, and exaggeration, and I'm sure that is something that we will continue to do because we can't get away from the fact that AI is becoming bigger and bigger, and we're seeing it being used right across all kinds of platforms online to tell different stories, including those stories of the First World War. But in this past week, I've seen the development of a number of new Facebook groups where they're telling stories from the First World War that look on one level credible, but once you do a deep dive into them, you quickly discover that they're completely made up. And there was one that stood out for me this week, which was the story of a gravedigger, a civilian gravedigger who was brought across to the Western Front to prepare and construct and dig the graves of soldiers on the Somme battlefields in the lead up to and at the beginning of the Somme offensive in July of 1916. And it named this person, it named his wife. He died in the process of creating the cemetery at a specific point that was symbolic, and that was then relayed as a real story, claiming that the documents relating to what he'd done had been given to the Imperial War Museum and was part of their archive. But as soon as you began to scratch the surface, very quickly quite a few things stood out. For a start, civilians were not brought over to France to work on, to prepare graves, to construct cemeteries. There was no civilian workforce that was brought over to do that because there was an existing workforce, soldiers, to do that very job. And even if he had, and some civilians were brought to base areas like Rouen or Etapler, and they died there. So if this chap had actually died, then he would have War Graves commemoration and he would have a grave. Now, considering that I've been travelling to the Somme battlefields for over four decades, and I lived there for a big chunk of that time too, and before me was Martin Middlebrook and Rose Coombs and Lynn MacDonald. How come they have never unearthed this story before? And when you look at the names of the sites in the story, none of these people existed. So essentially, the whole thing is made up. Now, what's interesting is when you go onto sites like this and you correct this duff history, you then get people defended. And that is incredible to me that they can't see through it, and it shows the danger of AI and the importance, ever-growing importance of real history, credible history, delivered by people who understand it, who have empathy with it, and are faithful to the historical truth. So, what I'm saying is beware of what you see. It's not just AI created images, it's entire stories now, and I'm sure that this is only going to get worse. And we may well end up doing an episode about AI, specific episode about AI and what's happening in terms of historical research, knowledge, and the spreading of that knowledge through this new piece of technology. But for now, we'll move on and let's get down to this week's questions. Question number one comes from Mark Huckabee. Mark asks My question is a more general one. We hear a lot about how Luz in nineteen fifteen was not a battlefield of the British Army's choosing, and neither was the Somme the following year. Obviously circumstances and events dictate all wars, but hypothetically, in a best case scenario, where would Britain have chosen to fight on the Western Front? Well 1915 was the year really of learning what static warfare on the scale of the Western Front was all about. And Britain for a big chunk of that year was the junior partner on the Western Front. The bulk of those 450 miles were held by French units. The size of the French Army was much bigger than the British Army at the beginning, so it was logical that that was the case. But as the year grew and the size of the British Army with the arrival of more territorials and then the arrival of the first new army troops, Kitchener's volunteers, it meant that Britain took on a much bigger role, leading to increased offensives, including Luz that you mentioned, and later the Somme in 1916. And these were joint offensives with the French because the French being the senior partner put Britain under pressure to fight these joint offensives. The British were not averse to them. There was logic in them. If the British attack at Luz and the French simultaneously attack near Arras at Notre Dame de la Rette, Suchet, Hill one hundred and four five, and also in the Champagne, then you've got a three-pronged attack on key points in the German defences, and perhaps it will rupture the German line and bring the war to an end. But it was never going to be as simple as that. Joint offensives were important because no one nation on the Western Front was capable of defeating the Germans on their own, and victory right at the end of the conflict in 1918 was about coalition warfare. It's coalitions that win massive Titanic struggles like the First and Second World War, not nations on their own. So that's an important factor in this. And what it meant was, as you intimate in your question, is that British troops end up fighting in areas that the British Army might not have chosen to fight because of circumstance, and that is very true. So what's the alternative? Where would Britain have fought instead? And there's an easy answer to that, and that is the Eapsalion, Flanders. Because Britain had gone to war for gallant little Belgium in 1914, there was that tiny pocket of Belgium that remained around the city of Yape and up to the north towards the Flanders coast. Initially Britain had held just a small portion of that line, but by early 1915 it had extended its front, and now by the end of the second battle of Eap, in April, May of 1915, the Eap salient was predominantly a British sector. A lot of British and Commonwealth, particularly Canadian blood, had been shed there during that second battle of Epe. And although the ground was really of no strategic value, it was the symbolism of Eape, that tiny pocket of Belgium that remained, that was defiant against the German occupier. And once all that British and Empire blood had been spilt there, it took on a greater symbolism, a greater importance, and almost had to be held at any cost. And British commanders were focused on that sector for a big chunk of the war. So following the Battle of Luz, there was a change in command at the British higher level. Sir John French, the original commander of the British Expeditionary Force, was sacked. Haig then took over. He had ideas to launch an offensive in the Eap Salient on the Messines Ridge, using the tunnelers in the summer of 1916. But the British Army was now taking over a longer part of the front in France at the same time, and the French were not interested in the Eap salient. That's in Belgium, not in France, and their duty is to expel Germans from French soil. And that leads to the joint Anglo-French offensive that would become the Somme in the summer of 1916. So Haig has his plans for the Messines offensive whipped away from him, and the British Army fights on the Somme in 1916. That focus on Eape would then return in 1917, with the Battle of Messines, that offensive plan for the previous year would be put into operation, the tunnels would do their work, blow the charges across the Messines Ridge, and in a single day the whole ridge would be captured, and then the continuation of that offensive with the third Battle of Eape, the advance towards Passchendal, the idea of sweeping up to the coast, getting rid of the German submarine bases on that Belgian coast that were harassing British shipping in the North Sea and the Channel. That was what 1917 became about. So it sees a return to that focus of the ground around Eape. And while the British Army fought in many other places, at Arras and the Hindenburg line at Combray, and in the German offensives of 1918, it was fighting in northern France, down on the Somme again in March, Chemende Dame in May, and in the Second Battle of the Marne in July of 1918, nevertheless the British commanders were always focused on the importance of the Yppsalian and the importance of the wider British front as it became in 1918, extending from Flanders to the Somme and resulting in that continued British pressure on the Germans which would eventually make them buckle and break. But an achievement not done on their own. British and Empire troops were not capable of doing that without the arrival of the Americans and without the contribution of the French army on the wider Western Front. But for the British, the focus for much of the war was that city in Flanders, EAP wipers to the British troops by 1916, Epres to the old contemptibles in the earlier period of the war, where by November 1918, by the conclusion of the fighting, Britain had lost with the Empire a quarter of a million men killed in defence of Eape, as the phrase went. Four years of war and the symbolism of Eape as the anvil of sacrifice, the place where in many respects the outcome of the war might be determined rightly or wrongly, really can't be underemphasized, and it extends into the post war world with the symbolism of Eape as the place of pilgrimage seen in the construction of the cemeteries, the building of the Meningate, the playing of the last post, and so many other things besides. So I mean that's only a brief answer to a much bigger question, but hopefully gives a bit of insight into the British mindset on the Western Front in those four years of the Great War. Question number two comes from David Ward. I've read in a number of books about how battalions had company cooks who would be just behind the front line making vats of tea or stew with specially designed equipment. My question is what was expected of cooks outside of moments preparing for breakfast, lunch or dinner? Were they required to take part in stand two and other parts of the day like that? And would they be required to pick up a rifle and join their comrades in the event of a big attack? It would be great to hear if you have any insights into this from your own research. Well, David, it's an interesting story, and we've looked at food generally in the British Army in an earlier episode called Tommy Tucker, where we looked at how soldiers were fed. And in the Great War there was no Army catering corps. Cooking was done within an infantry battalion or within any unit that existed anywhere on the battlefield. And to find the cooks that were required in peacetime, they were trained up by the Army. So my grandfather, who was in the Rifle Brigade in 1918 and went on to serve in the Royal Army Medical Corps until 1941, he was trained as an officer's cook, for example, and had certificates from the Army to do that. But when the war began and huge numbers of volunteers were brought in, that wasn't possible. So men were selected on a number of bases, I would guess. The ability, you would have thought the ability to cook would be one of them, and men who had come from backgrounds where cooking was a part of their trade, so perhaps they'd worked as cooks in country houses or on estates or for big companies, factories, mines, I mean all kinds of things, had canteens where men were responsible for creating huge volumes of food for a lot of people. And obviously, from a military application on a battlefield, those kind of skills would be useful when it came to the cooks. And generally, yes, there were cooks that were available for the battalion, they would not be in the front line. So if we move on to let's say 1916 with a unit in the trenches, on the Somme or up in the Eap salient, their cooks would not be in the very front line. They would normally be even beyond the reserve line. So typically a battalion would be occupying the front line with a company, the support line with another company, and the reserve line with a third company, and this fourth company would be in perhaps a village like Zillabeek just behind the front line, and somewhere along Zillabeek Lake, on one of the embankments there, would be the battalion cooks with the battalion cookers, so they had mobile cooking facilities that were horse-drawn, they would be established there, the food would be prepared, and then working parties from the individual companies would take that food from the battalion cookers in canisters up to the front line, whether that was tea or stew, both of which you mentioned, and all the other kinds of food that we spoke about in that episode on Tommy Tucker. And what it meant was that the cooks rarely went into the trenches. Officers' cooks who were part of the officers' servants, they would have to go in the front line because the officers would be occupying dugouts and they would be preparing food for them there, but some of that would be brought from the cookers. A lot of officers though, being paid differently to the men, provided food to their cooks to prepare much better meals. And if you watch the film or have seen the play version of Journey's End, you'll get a bit of an insight into that in the interaction between the cooks and the servants and the officers in that fictional infantry battalion on the eve of the German offensive in 1918. But what it meant for the cooking staff is that being away from the main area of battlefield, they were not required to do most of the other military duties. So they weren't going into the trenches to work on the trenches, they weren't doing tours in the front line on Stand Two, on Century Go, they weren't doing wiring parties in No Man's Land or patrolling or trench raiding or anything like that. Their role was to feed the men within that unit, and they needed to be slightly away from the battle area to be able to do that. So you could argue that it was a bit of a cushy to use a contemporary term, it was a bit of a cushy number that they could get away from doing all those things that ordinary PBI poor bloody infantry soldiers had to do. But that didn't mean that they were out of danger. There were periods in the war in which the war suddenly went mobile. So the static nature of trench warfare, where men would be in a forward area of battlefield and the cooks would be in a reserve area could quickly change when, for example, the Germans broke through in the spring of 1918. And if you look at a number of incidents during that period, you get a bit of an insight into cooks and officers servants and those other kind of auxiliary staff involved in this kind of work suddenly become combatants. Now it's not that they've never been trained going into the army, they would have done the equivalent of a basic training right at the very beginning before they were selected to become cooks. So they knew how to march, they knew how to wear their uniform and equipment, they knew how to operate a firearm, so they were capable of being, in verdict commas, proper soldiers, not just cooking food. And if we just pick two examples to illustrate this, one might be Manchester Hill on the 21st of March 1918. We discussed a little bit of that story in a recent QA podcast. That was the defence of that ground in March 1918 by one of the Manchester Powell's battalions. They were firmly ensconced in the redoubts, the defensive position itself, completely surrounded by the Germans and the cooks who were in there with the battalion staff. There's a quarry at the back of where the redoubt was located, and that appears to have been the point in which the battalion cookers were installed there, and they were dishing out the food to the men in the unit within the redoubts. Under those circumstances, I've read an account of the cooks coming up out of their dugouts, abandoning their cookers, and then going into battle alongside Colonel Elstorb and the other men of the Manchester Powers in defence of that position on the 21st of March 1918. And another example that I know of is one of my favourite units or part of one of my favourite units, the South Downs Battalions, the 13th Royal Sussex Regiment, who in April 1918 were defending the bluff against the German offensive there in what became known as the Battle of the Lease. They were defending the position right on top of that bluff alongside the Yp Come Canal, where the battalion command post was located, where Lieutenant Colonel HTK Robinson, who had recommended Nelson Victor Carter for the VC at Richborg in 1916 and was now commanding the battalion, he had his command post there. That was overrun, and in a couple of the accounts that I've read of that, again the battalion cooks came up out of their positions there, and they were fighting alongside the Colonel as the position was overrun, and almost all of them were killed or taken prisoner. Robinson himself was killed, his name is on the Tynecott Memorial. But as there is no rank of cook in the British Army during the First World War, when I look at the casualty lists for that action, there's no way of telling which of those men were part of the establishment of cooks that were part of that headquarters at the bluff in April 1918. So what it meant was that if you ended up with the cooks of an infantry or artillery or engineer unit, then your chances of being killed on the battlefield were obviously a lot less than the men in the front line. And I'm sure some soldiers resented that. But food was essential. Somebody had to cook it, and the cooks were a really important linchpin in a unit like that for ensuring that morale remained high, and the provision of food sits hand in hand with the morale of a unit. And when you read reports of officers who reflect on this, they often see battle performance, soldiers going into action and performing well, is linked to the provision of hot, decent food on the eve of the assault, and a reward with another meal once that fighting is over. So the role of cooks is really, really important and not to be sniggered at, not to be laughed at, and not to be underestimated as well. They were as much a part of the route to victory as anybody else, because an army, as we know, from Napoleon marches on its stomach. Question number three is a really interesting one from Guy and Wendy Hovey. After working for many years supporting displaced people and refugees to return to their war damaged and destroyed homes, I was wondering how people return to their homes in France and Flanders after the Great War. These days we demine and diffuse unexploded ordnance before anyone comes back, select those we can help, check cadastral records, supply building materials and technical know-how to families who can then rebuild their own homes, help people to restart their pre-war businesses and rebuild schools, clinics. All of this is done in coordination with local and regional authorities, whether recognized or de facto it's a lot more complicated and convoluted than that, but you get the idea. So when people returned to their villages after the Great War, did the government help them? Were they helped by charities? I've heard they lived in temporary housing. How did they rebuild their homes, livelihoods and lives? And what was done with the unexploded ordnance and the detritus of war? And who paid for it all? German reparations? Well I mean this is part of that aftermath story of the First World War, something that's interested me for a very long time, something we've spoken about frequently on the podcast and again will continue to do so. So when the Great War came to an end during the conflict itself civilians could not be kept in the battle area. It wasn't safe for them. The British were often shy about moving civilians out but with the arrival of gas and all kinds of other weapons that gave them an excuse to move civilians as far back as possible from the battle area. The Germans did the same on the other side of No Man's Land because they didn't want civilians in an area where there was German military activity taking place because they could pass on information to intelligence officers for example who might be working in those areas and also they couldn't guarantee their safety either. So during the war civilians were kept away that didn't mean civilians didn't get killed they did but what was the wider issue that you hint at there Guy and Wendy was the destruction of their communities. So how did people come back? When did they come back initially? Well populations of places like northern France, eastern France, Flanders were scattered all over the place, just in Belgium. Some went across the border into the Netherlands. There was a refugee camp just west of Arnhem at what became one of the drop zones in the Second World War. There's a little plaque to it there wooden huts constructed for people from Flanders who fled into that part of the Netherlands. Some were sent as refugees to Britain. There were big Belgian communities in places like Birmingham and Manchester for example and then others fled into northern France as well and when the war came to an end and it was clear that the armistice was going to remain effective civilians began to creep back to those areas that had seen the fighting to discover that their communities had not just been destroyed but in many cases completely erased from the map. Now when we bought our house at Corcelet and I think I've told this story on the podcast before but when we bought our house the owner of the house in Corcellette there was a document that came with it saying that he'd been born on a farm in the fields near Groncourt. So when I met him I said which farm was it? He said oh you've probably never heard of it it was Faum de Muquet and that of course is Much farm, Mucky Farm, Mukow Farm. And so I asked him, you know, when were you born there? He said 1913 he said I have no memory of the pre-war farm but when we came back in 1919 when I was six I remember returning to this wilderness my father spent the first few weeks that we were there trying to figure out where the farm had been and then gradually decide on how we would rebuild it. And they'd lived in old British Army Nissen huts with a big pot boiler stove where they burnt scrap wood that they could get their hands on bits of duckboard trench signs I mean who knows what else and that's how they lived and that is not untypical if we look at the wider battlefields initially not a lot of facilities were put in place for these returning civilians so just as you describe in your question a number of things happened. Charities got involved places in Britain for example twinned with locations on the battlefield to help them rebuild. The town of Maidstone in Kent is not far from where I'm recording this they had lost a lot of men from the Royal West Kent Regiment in the fighting around Montaba so they stepped in and they provided money for the establishment of the first water tower Chateau d'eau in the village to pump water up from a deep fissure that was not polluted by war material so that the people of Montaba as they gradually rebuilt had fresh water and there was quite a lot of that kind of thing that went on. There was a Canadian charity that supplied concrete prefab homes that were sent to for example Flanders one of those possibly the last one that exists is just up from the Who Crater Museum you can actually rent it out now as a 1920s or kind of Edwardian period house but when Nick who owns the museum there first bought it it was just a shell of a building it had been put up just after the war for the Burgermeister the mayor of that part of the battlefield Baron de Vink not so that he could use his privilege to get the first house but so he could set up the town hall there and help the people who had returned by acting as a repository for funds and assistance to get their rebuilding moving and of course this took a lot of time and initially they had men who were still on the battlefield so a lot of British units were still based in France and Flanders and they were then used to help with the clear up the Chinese Labour Corps in tens of thousands were there as well and they did a lot of clear up work so that helped remove the UXOs I've got a a photo album of an officer who served in the Chinese Labour Corps whose job it was to clear the battlefields just after the war with huge stockpiles of stuff that they'd found that the Chinese labourers had moved from the battlefield area to an area to be essentially blown up that's exactly what they were doing. So that kind of work was going on there and also I mean just think about the barbed wire the amount of barbed wire that was out there on the battlefield that had to be dragged into shell holes or old trenches and covered over to get rid of it because you couldn't just blow that to pieces you had to dispose of it by burying it. So all those kind of things were going on and then the governments of Belgium and France reacted by providing additional provisional housing. So in Yape no one could live in the villages because they were so badly damaged and a kind of shanty town was built in Yape itself wooden huts that people could live in often multiple families in one hut and then provisional houses that could be built in the villages to provide some initial shelter until the main houses were properly rebuilt. And those wooden buildings that stretched right across Flanders right across northern and eastern France there are examples of them still out there. You'll find one on the battlefields at Eap just down from Whitehouse Cemetery at St Jan. There's a couple in Guimont Gilimont village on the Somme and that'll give you a bit of an insight into the kind of structures that were placed in these villages and locations after the war. At the same time the battlefields were classified with a colour coding system to determine how badly damaged they were the most famous of which was the Zone Rouge, the red zone the area of almost total destruction and this enabled governments to provide money into the areas that needed it most and once war reparations began Germany under the Treaty of Versailles was forced to pay these war reparations they began in 1921 there was an economic collapse not long afterwards the state of Europe was atrocious economically in the 1920s but incredibly German reparations continue until they were finally paid off in 2010 the BBC then reported that the Germans have made a final payment of 70 million euros and that was their final settlement for the war reparations of the Great War. But going back to that period of the 1920s then yes some of these war reparations were used to help rebuild these locations and in terms of the kind of main towns and villages certainly in France the bulk of this was done in 1922. The house that I lived in in Corsolette it had joists with the delivery date still on them and that was June of 1923 so that gives us a kind of bit of a yardstick as to when buildings like that were finally put back up and knowing that the house there was partially rebuilt using German war reparations most of it came from the French government but partially nevertheless those war reparations contributed to the collapse of the German economy in that democratically elected Weimar Republic period after the First World War it led to a period of utter disaster and catastrophe for Germany and then the rise of extreme right and extreme left and that polarization of politics and everything else that followed eventually leading to another world war. So I often mused on looking at the house there thinking was this a contributing factor even if it was a small one towards what happened in the years that follow and in terms of the wider landscape around these communities rising like phoenixes from the ashes the landscape gradually recovers that initial clearance helps but there's still a huge amount of unexploded ordnance and when you read British newspapers and visitors accounts going to the battlefields in the 20s they often describe local farmers being killed cattle being gassed by gas shells that perish and the gas is released underneath a barn and it gasses the entire herd of cows all of these kind of stories and then the landscape itself while remaining full of toxins and full of all the other problems and the legacy of the First World War nevertheless nature reclaims it gradually the ground is never the same as it was before the Great War but the woods and the fields and the lanes and the hedgerows and nature recovers around it all creating a new world on top of the new world created by explosives and gas and that industrial warfare of the Great War between those four years of nineteen fourteen and eighteen so this is a a big subject a fascinating complex subject and I hope that's given you a little bit of insight into it compared to your own incredible experience doing this in more recent times. Question number four comes from Richard Tatterton. Richard asks why were simply tree stumps and splintered ground where woodlands had been so keenly fought over? Surely digging in in a wood would be harder due to the tree roots and there would be little to no cover due to hardly any trees still standing? Well this is a an important question, an important subject to discuss because when we read about the Great War so many of the battles revolve around wooded areas. Even in the first battle of Eape in nineteen fourteen when the guards brigade was defending the ground around Kleinzillebeek that was in a wooded area the brown wood line up on the Menin Road there was Herental Chateau Wood where the Royal Scots fusiliers had fought in the first battle of Eape Polygon Wood where a number of units had defended that an attack from it in that concluding stage of first Eap in November 1914 and when you read those early accounts the woods are still pretty intact shells are coming over a double shrapnel effect is being caused by shells hitting tree stumps or full grown trees smashing them into pieces splinters and they're raining down on the men beneath causing further injuries so that is a kind of double edged sword the wood gives you some cover but the wood can also inflict casualties on top of the shellfire from the splinters from the trees and as you've suggested digging in in woodland is very very difficult indeed because very quickly you come up against tree roots even small tree roots and that makes it difficult for soldiers to create any kind of meaningful trench system without additional equipment. Their own entrenching tool often isn't enough they're going to need picks and shovels and everything else that would be required to dig in properly and in the early stage of the war that wasn't always available. Once static trench warfare came about it was a bit easier many of the wooded areas were not necessarily directly on the front line they were behind it slightly so work could be done more easily under those circumstances and if we jumped to the Somme when British troops took over the Thiepval sector they inherited an entire area of wood the Thiepval wood that was just behind their front line facing towards the Germans on the high ground around what became known as the Schwaben Redoubt and then to the east northeast Thiepval itself sitting on the ridge line there and the wood became a network of trenches prepared initially by French troops and then later expanded by British troops the Harland Division initially did a lot of work there and then the Ulster Division when they moved into that area as well and you can go to Thiekval Wood today book a tour with the Ulster Tower and you can see some of those trenches because they've been preserved and in some cases reconstructed and it shows the problems of digging in defending building trench systems within a wooded area and once the Battle of the Somme began there were many instances in which woods were a pivotal point in the advance. Martin Mirabook called it the horseshoe of woods on the Somme when the offensive in that southern area began it took troops into places like Burnafe Wood and Troneswood and then eventually Mammett's Wood and Delville Wood and Highwood and the fighting raged amongst those. Now I interviewed quite a lot of veterans who fought in all of those wooded areas and this was a great problem digging in remained always difficult under those circumstances but again I think of Albert Chester who was a soldier in the 17th Royal Welsh fusiliers he went into the second assault on Mammoth's wood got into the wood there were no trenches the Germans had not even dug massive trench systems within the wood and the fighting took them from tree to tree smash tree to smash tree the rides cut through the wood were pivotal points in the fighting the possession of those junctions of rides and again artillery fire even mortar fire could splinter the trees or the tree trunks causing further casualties from the wood fragments so that became very difficult fighting indeed and if you read about Delville wood a much bigger area of woodland and the fighting within that again these become hellish places and even today I think to see a big dark area of woodland on a battlefield and high wood sitting on that dominating position overlooking that part of the Somme battlefields even today I think it sends the shivers up us whenever we go there. It's probably a fear imagined but nevertheless I think woodland had its own fear, had its own problems it had its own culture really in the kind of fighting that took place in those wooded areas not just in the Somme if we jump to the third battle of Epe in nineteen seventeen and we look at what bombardments mass bombardments millions of shells would do to landscapes and destroy woods and turn them into just stumps, matchdick woods which has been depicted in artwork the Nash paintings of the men in road showing these smashed woodlands there's incredible photography from that period where we look at those really powerful black and white images and see what modern warfare did to woodland on a battlefield like that then again we can see how problematic it was for soldiers to fight through that. When you add to it a landscape smashed to bits and all the drainage destroyed and the added factor of flooding and liquid mud then these places were literally hell on earth to fight. So going back to your question Richard why did we fight there? Well simply put there was no other alternative these places lay in the path of whichever advance it was a British advance a French advance it was no different on the French sectors and they had to be taken you couldn't go round them. There was no way of going round anything on the Western Front because it was static warfare. There were no flanks the only flanks was the North Sea and the Channel coast at one end and the border with Switzerland and the mountains etc on the other end. So there was no way of going round you had to fight for these wooded areas and often you fought over them again and again and we mentioned in a previous question in this episode about the Royal West Kents at Montaba 7th Royal West Kent fought in the attack on Burnafay and Troneswood in July of 1916 in particular Troneswood and then two years later they found themselves back in the same place in August of nineteen eighteen and if you go to Burnafay Wood Military Cemetery just down the road you will find two plots of 7th Royal West Kent men in there one from the July 1916 battle and one from the August 1918 battle where those units perhaps some of the same men who'd been there in 1916 are fighting to retake a bit of strangled smash woodland that they'd fought over and taken two years before so the woods became pivotal points important locations on that landscape of the Great War and they remain part in my mind part of the power of that landscape today. So thanks for that question thanks for all of the questions this week keep them coming in you can send them in via the usual methods of email or via the Discord server and a few others besides the details of the first two are in the show notes for this episode 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. You can follow me on Twitter at Somcor, you can follow the podcast at Old Frontline Pod, check out the website at oldfrontlineco dot 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 Support us on buyme a coffee at buymeacoffee.com slash boldfrontline. Links to all of these are on our website. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon.