QnA Special: On The Battlefields

In this special Q&A episode of the Old Front Line podcast, recorded on location at Hooge, near Ypres, we answer questions about the battlefields of the Western Front and the legacy of the First World War.

We begin by exploring what happened to the woods and forests on the Western Front during World War One. Were they completely destroyed by shellfire? Did they naturally grow back after the war, or were they replanted? And more than a century later, have these landscapes ever truly recovered?

Next, we look at the remarkable rebuilding of Ypres after the devastation of the war. Who paid for the reconstruction of the city? Was it funded by the Allied nations, or did it come from German war reparations after 1918? We uncover the story behind one of the most famous post-war rebuilding projects on the Western Front.

We also discuss the history of German memorials built in Belgium after the First World War to honour their fallen soldiers. Do any of these memorials still survive today, and how were they viewed by local communities who had lived under German occupation during the war?

From there, we turn to Messines Ridge, examining the history of this important area of the Ypres Salient before the famous mines of June 1917 during the Battle of Messines. What was this landscape like earlier in the war, and why did it become so strategically important?

Finally, we tackle a question many people ask about the First World War: is there any genuine film footage of actual Western Front combat? We explore the challenges faced by wartime cameramen and why capturing real battle scenes during the conflict was far more difficult than many people realise.

If you’re interested in the history of the First World War battlefields, the Ypres Salient, and how the landscape of war still shapes the region today, this episode offers unique insights recorded right on the ground where history happened.

Walking The Trenches YouTube Channel - Ongoing Destruction: WWI didn't end in 1918: The Ecological Consequences.

Main image: Delville Wood in 1918 taken by a German soldier with a private camera. (Old Front Line archives)

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:10

I've been travelling across that landscape of the Western Front over the last few weeks, and this week I'm on the very front line. I'm literally on the old front line at Hoog, just outside of Epe in Flanders. I'm staying in a cottage here, thanks to Nick at Hoog Crater. This is a cottage, cottage de Vink, that he rents out for people who want to come stay in this part of the battlefields. And it is literally close to the German front line overlooking the British front line, where there was static trench warfare for two years. And as we've had a lot of battlefield-related questions come in in recent weeks, I thought being here on the old front line, it was a good excuse to have a special battlefield QA. And on one of my recent trips, I was reminded how important the landscape of the First World War and what we find in it, often for the first time, can be to people. We've all got our connections to the First World War through our relatives who served, and I have mine, some of whom I've spoken about on this podcast. But back in 2011, when they released the 1911 census, and that eventually came online, I discovered that there was an ancestor in my family tree that I didn't know anything about, Frank Rose. Rose is a French name. My grandmother was a French ancestry, and this man, this man who suddenly leapt out from the past at me, Frank Rose, transpired that he was killed in the Great War. He'd served initially with the 10th London Regiment, the Hackney Gurkhas, eventually transferred into the 1st Battalion, the Hampshire Regiment, and was killed in an attack on a small village in October 1918. And just a couple of weeks ago, I took a journey across that landscape northeast of the city of Combray, in the ground where some of the final battles of the Great War took place. An open landscape cut by hedgerows. There was a stream running in front of the village of Monshaux, a place that few will have heard of. It saw a brief encounter between French and German troops at the very beginning of the Great War. It was then occupied by the German army for the next four years. And on that one day in October 1918, the 24th of October, British troops attacked it and took it. The Hamches did an assault towards the village across that river, swung round to the right of the village, and then cut off the German troops within, captured a large number of men, large number of machine guns and trench mortars and other equipment, and then the battle moved on until the armistice on the 11th of November. But there were casualties, there was about 50 or 60 casualties, I think, in the attack on that village, and one of those was Frank Rose. So on that February day recently, I drove across that landscape with some friends I worked with on Ledger Battlefields. We went into this tiny little village, kind of timed capsule, unchanged, I suspect, really, in many ways, since 1918, seeing fighting only really for one day. It wasn't wiped off that landscape by the bombardment of the big battles of the Great War. And then cutting round to the back of the church and swinging open the metal gates of the civilian cemetery and walking past the graves of those who had lived in the village over centuries, the families that had dominated the history of that small little French village in the department of the Nord, we came to a gravel plot with a row of Commonwealth headstones, and there was Frank Rose. And although I go across to the battlefields on a regular occasion, for me that was the first time that I'd stood at his grave. I'd always been meaning to get there, always been meaning to take that road to that village. And then somehow on that trip, I was only ten, fifteen minutes away, and it was crazy not to go there. So I stood at his grave, I thought of my grandmother, I thought of all those ancestors, the Roses that I'd never really known, and here was one of them French ancestry now buried forever on French soil, and his ancestors, looking back further into the family tree, had once fought for Napoleon. So it it seemed as if history had kind of gone a full circle there in many ways. But it it reminded me of that deep connection that perhaps all of us have in one way or another to the Great War through these men, through our own family members, or perhaps men that we've researched because we've bought their medals or their papers or we found a photograph of them, or on a trip to the battlefields, we've chanced across their grave, read something that has inspired us, and then that's taken us through the records, through the history, through the stories to bring that name out of the past and make them live again. And I guess that's what the essence of some of these visits that we make across that landscape of the Great War are all about. And it again reminded me really of the power of visiting a place for the very first time. So with that in mind, we'll begin our special battlefield QA's. A slightly longer episode and one more question than normal. Our first question comes from Grant Pinkerton. Grant says, A battlefield question of sorts. I'm thinking you may have partially covered this before, possibly on the bird life episode, but it relates to the re-establishing of woodland in the post-war environment. This came to me last summer when I was walking between Maricor and Montaba on the Somme while using linesmen. Marked on the trench maps were machine gun wood and Germans wood, two small cops, maybe fifty meters square and only five hundred meters apart. Giving their respective positions on the front line, I assume they would have been all but obliterated. Was there a deliberate effort to replant all woodland exactly as before? And not just the working woods like Mamets and Highwood and Delville, even tiny areas like these with their potential inconvenience to farmers, or was it more a case of Mother Nature finding a way to recover? Well, landscape is is a massive part of what we talk about on the old frontline grant, as you know. And when we look at the landscape of the First World War in these areas where the fighting was at their fiercest, there is often total destruction. The bombardments, the huge amount of firepower, that industrial war that developed and began to reach its peak from 1916 onwards, could literally transform a landscape with the power of industry and the power of artillery to obliterate. And wooded areas could just be very easily reduced to matchstick woods, and we've got plenty of images to show us that from the archives of the First World War on both sides of the battlefield. But how did those woods recover? And that's the kind of essence of your question, Grant, I think. Well, when we look at it again, contemporary images, and we look at some images taken perhaps only just a year, for example, after the Battle of the Somme. So Delville Wood, which saw almost two months of continuous fighting, was reduced to one of those matchstick woods. Only one tree of the original wood survived, and that is still there today. But the wartime wood was damaged seemingly beyond repair. However, if we look at some photographs taken in Delville Wood about a year later, the South Africans who had fought there in 1916 came back on the first anniversary of the battle to remember their fallen comrades, and a series of photographs were taken in the wood, including some touching ones showing people visiting particular graves that were amongst those stunted trees. And what we see just a year later is nature beginning to recover. The undergrowth is growing up amongst those shattered trees. There appears to be a few saplings here and there, but of course the Delville Wood story and so many of these woods, the wartime story was not yet over. With the years of war that followed, it was so common for woods to change hands and be fought over again, time and time again. And we see that on the Somme and we see it in Flanders and across the Hindenburg line and right across those battlefields of the French army in that area beyond the Somme. So everywhere really was smashed to bits, not just once, often on many occasions. So when the war ended and the landscape finally could begin to recover properly, there was no more battles ahead, no more poison gas, no more flame, no more artillery, we see just like the case of Delville Wood a year after the battle, nature does begin to recover, but woods will, I think, over a period of time perhaps naturally recede. I mean, I'm not an expert on that, but they do need assistance. So during that period of recovery after the Great War, many wooded areas were deliberately planted. Woods are used commercially in France, they still are today on the Somme to plant timber for to forest an area and then to reclaim that timber for for use, for people to burn wood in their homes, for timber for timber yards. I mean all kinds of different things. And also to shoot in. There's a the sport in woods. The the rights to go and shoot within woods is still something that's highly regarded in France to this day, for example. So there was a commercial element to this, the recovery of the woods. So while nature was able to kind of push that along, it would need the assistance of man to help to replant many of those woods after the war. But even though there was a plantation, and even though nature recovered, it didn't fully recover. There's a YouTube channel called Walking the Trenches, and they had a very interesting video recently called Ongoing Destruction, how the ecological consequences of the Great War is still an ongoing issue. And I'll link to that in the show notes and I'll put the video itself onto the podcast website. And it's an interesting idea that although these woods did recover, they didn't recover fully, and they're not as species-rich, for example, as they were before the Great War. But what we see is when they were replanted, they were pretty much replanted in the same way. So we can take a 1914 map of the Somme, compare it to the French IGN maps of today, and the landscape is very similar indeed. And it means that just as you did with Linesman, the digital software, that you can use GPS to work with trench maps and see where you are on that First World War landscape, you can travel across that landscape today and you can pick out those key features which remain pretty much unchanged in terms of where they are and what they look like. Not completely. The landscape here, and we've just spoken about the woods on the battlefields of the Somme and the wider Western Front, the landscape here at Eap after four years of war was completely devastated. And when civilians began to return after the armistice in November 1918, in that winter of 1918-19, they came back to a landscape covered in the detritus of war, trenches and barbed wire, wreck tanks, woods blown off the map, villages just smudges in the mud. I mean, to come back and see it like that, it must have been incredible when it would be a community, a farm, a village that you'd known all your life, and you come back and it's literally reduced to dust. And there was nowhere for the civilians to live on that battlefield. So this kind of shanty town developed around Epe. It was a bit like the Wild West, these wooden huts and structures went up, cafes, hotels, because already some of the first battlefield visitors were coming across to come out to these battlefields. Amongst the people trying to reclaim their lives were those trying to make sense of their lives. Now a loved one had been killed. But the civilians were living in this temporary accommodation, very basic, the the minimum amounts of furniture, basic beds, big pot boiler stove to keep warm, that kind of thing. And during the day they would come up to the villages where they'd lived, the farms where they'd farmed, try to work out where the buildings had been, where the land had been, the delineation of the land, try to work all that out, but they couldn't stay up there at night, and they would come back to Eape in the evening, and the battlefields would be deserted. Henry Williamson made a trip about that time and spoke about how quiet the battlefields were at night, devoid of human beings, just nature and the birds and the owls sweeping across that overgrown landscape, gradually being reclaimed for human habitation. It must have been a very strange place to come to in so many ways. And this was all kind of higgledy-piggledy, really, in terms of how this was arranged. There was no one overseeing what the civilians were doing, and they were kind of scraping away at the dirt in in many ways, and there was no sign of any immediate funding. But then there were declarations that funding could be available, but you had to go to your town hall. Now, where I'm sitting here at Hoog, it's a small hamlet, had a chateau and a few buildings, farms, and Baron De Vink, who was the mayor here and also the owner of the chateau and the ground around the wider kind of bellowder area there, he needed to establish a building pretty quickly so that he could help the people who were coming back here to reclaim their property. And he was able to tap into a fund where the Canadians had sent over prefab buildings made out of concrete, and he was able to secure one of these for his residents. Now, this is not himself skipping the queue to make sure he got a house, it's only a basic concrete block, basically, with concrete walls, basic roof, and a place that you can actually shelter and live in, but more importantly, you could open up the town hall and make that available for people to come to to get aid, to get money, to get help. So that was really important. And that wasn't provided by the Allies as such, it wasn't provided through German money or even Belgian money, it was an aid program from Canada, having lost so many of their sons in Flanders during the Great War, they provided through a charity essentially some provisional housing. The government then began to do this with wooden huts that could be placed in some of the locations on these villages as they were going to be eventually properly reclaimed and the buildings rebuilt with brick and stone and everything else, and government money began to trickle through. But after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the Germans were forced to pay war reparations, and some of that money went to the rebuilding of places along that old western front, but not totally. So it's not a case, although you can look at the buildings here, you know, look down to some buildings just toward Tug itself. The cottage that I'm sitting in now was rebuilt in the 1920s, the Coth Hall and St. Martin's Cathedral and all the great buildings in Eap rebuilt using their original medieval plans. In some respects, when you look at those, there is that connection between German war reparations, the collapse of the post-war Weimar Republic, and the bankruptcy of that republic, and the rise of extreme politics on the left and the right, and a route, essentially, I guess, to another world war. But it certainly wasn't the case that the war reparations caused another world war, but they were just one of those many factors in that mid-war period that contributed to the rise of the possibility of another conflict by making Germany solely responsible for it. But it wasn't just government aid, German war reparations, locations in Britain adopted places on the old Western Front, more in France than Belgium. It was less common here in Belgium. But Worcester, for example, helped Gellerveld, just up the road from where I'm sitting now, where the Worcestershire Regiment had fought in the first Battle of Epe in 1914, and where there is a memorial to the Worcesters. It was once on the wall of a building that was on the main Menin Road, and then it was moved to another location next to the South Wales Borderers Memorial, and those two regiments had fought side by side there in October 1914. And within EAP itself, a lot of places wanted to associate themselves with Eape, that symbol of the sacrifice here over those four years. But Sittingbourne in Kent twinned with Eape, and that twinning still remains today. So it was a complex period, really, that post-war period of the Great War with the rebuilding. There initially was no kind of central direction to it. The villagers had to come back and literally kind of scramble in the mud in so many ways and live in very primitive conditions. But eventually, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Eape and all the surrounding villages and farms and churches rose once more, and a century later we're a hundred years on now from this rebuilding process. They recovered, the Belgians went back to their lives, and I guess some thought perhaps because of that the sacrifice had been worth something. All of these subjects intertwined as ever. And I hope that's helped answer your question about how Eap and the cloth hall and all these places here in Flanders were rebuilt after the Great War. Question number three comes from John in Tumbridge Wells. Some years ago while I was in Sedan in the east of France, I noticed a memorial to a German tank unit from 1940 and was slightly surprised to find that the French were happy with a memorial to forces which not only invaded their country but killed many, including civilians. Are you aware of any Great War German memorials dating from the First World War which still survive in France and Flanders today? Well, during the war there were memorials everywhere. If we look at the Western Front with the front line area running across those four hundred and fifty miles, with the Allies to the west and the Germans to the east of that battlefield area. Behind the German lines, there were places where they buried their dead. There were Heldenfeld, Heroesfield, Soldatenfriedhof, Soldiers' Cemeteries, and many of those contained memorials, and the Germans built memorials to units and to divisions and sometimes to individuals close to those battlefield areas. So if we took a snapshot of what was there in 1918, there would potentially have been hundreds of German memorials right across that landscape of the First World War. And if we take the Somme as a good example of this, if we look at all the villages and That were behind the German lines in 1916 before the battle began. Pretty much all of those had a German cemetery of some size in them. They'd often attach an extension to the existing French communal cemetery, bury German soldiers there, in some cases built brand new cemeteries in the countryside around those villages. There were memorials placed in some of the villages that were the rear echelon of German divisions or units, and there was a great presence, if you like, of the German army in those areas. Now, as the Battle of the Somme crept across that ground, some of those cemeteries then lay in the path of bombardments and the fighting and were damaged or destroyed, and almost, in some cases, almost obliterated. Corsulette is a good example of that. It was a big German cemetery there, and the bombardments of the battle when the Canadians captured the village and the fighting moved on to Regina Trench. The cemetery, the German plot, was pretty much blotted out by the artillery fire in 1916 and the return of the fighting there two years later in 1918. So when the war ended, the landscape contained many German cemeteries, some of which were recovered, the dead within them recovered and moved to other cemeteries. But if we look at that interwar period, there was a much greater profusion of German cemeteries across the landscape. In the 1950s, the Volksborn, the German War Graves Commission, made that decision to close the vast majority of German cemeteries from the First World War and move the dead into mass graves, Kameradengraben, and create these big cemeteries that we know today: Langemark and Menin and Vladzlo here in Flanders, and the big German cemetery at Fricor and Vermandervilliers down on the Somme and La Target near Arras. I mean there are still quite a few German cemeteries, but they tend to be on this bigger scale with this mass commemoration in a mass grave with names commemorated on plaques. And in some cases, when smaller German cemeteries were closed and they contained memorials, they were then moved into some of these German cemeteries, these new or expanded German cemeteries in the 1950s. So a few survived that way. But actually on the landscape itself, there are relatively few. And I mentioned just a few connected to some places. So on the Somme, there are a couple of German memorials that still survive. One that's easily found is at La Sarre. LaSar captured by the British Army in October 1916, had been the rear echelon of the 111th Reserve Infantry Regiment. And there was a cemetery there as well where they'd buried some of their dead. They'd held the line around Free Corps and near to neighbouring Mametz, for example, for quite a long time in the lead up to the Battle of the Somme. And the men who'd been killed, first facing the French, then later the British, had been brought back there for burial, and they built a memorial to their regiment, to the dead, their heroes, their comrades of the 111th Reserve Infantry Regiment, and placed that as part of the kind of entrance, if you like, to the cemetery. Incredibly, it is still there. The cemetery itself is gone. I'm not sure whether it was concentrated or just obliterated, so there could well be German burials still remaining in that ground beyond that edge of the village of La Sars, but the memorial remains tucked behind some farm buildings, out of view, barely known, but it is still a survivor. And I guess behind your question, John, is the kind of thought, how do French people feel about that? I mean, they see British cemeteries, British and Commonwealth cemeteries everywhere, French memorials, American memorials. Then that is accepted, I guess, because they were the Allies who liberated France from German occupation and pushed the Germans out and ended the conflict to allow, to continue to allow the German memorials to be there, I guess perhaps is a little bit extraordinary. And I think there's no rhyme or reason to this. There is some clear evidence that German memorials were damaged and destroyed at the end of the First World War. When French people come back, they didn't want a German memorial in their village or on their land, and it was destroyed. But not all of them, and some survive, and that one of the SARS is a good example of a Somme survivor. And within German cemeteries across France, particularly in northern France, in that area just behind the Albers Ridge, where a lot of original German cemeteries from the First World War still survive. Why those ones were kept and not concentrated, I don't know, but there is a very big provision of them in that area south of Lille, coming down into that rear area behind the German lines in that top end of northern France, and many of those contain unit memorials and memorials to the fighting. So that's something that is interesting as well, that they remain. I mean, they're within German cemeteries, but they are memorials, contemporary memorials, commemorating in some cases German victories, German battles, and of course the German dead as well. And you mentioned Sedan, John, St. Charles Cemetery there at Sedan, which is a big German burial ground from the First World War, has got a very impressive German memorial in it. And how do the French feel about it? Well, during the First World War centenary, there was a project in which the French, the Germans cooperated to restore the First World War memorial there. So I think a century later, perhaps opinions are very, very different. And at Saint-Contin, St. Quentin, kind of on the edge of the Hindenburg Line battlefields, an area that was behind the German lines for most of the war, big German cemetery there with over 8,200 burials, and there is this very impressive German memorial there that was built during the war when Kaiser Wilhelm gave money for the construction of a Prussian memorial with two bronze warrior figures from the ancient world of warfare and the dead and the fallen, the gefallon listed on the panels behind it. And that survives too. It was damaged by a bit of artillery fire in 1918, but has been repaired and is still there, and that is a memorial that dominates that site, which contains not just German burials but French burials as well. And there are many others. I mean, I've come across a few over the years. There are probably many, many more, particularly on that far end of the Western Front, in places that were once part of the German-occupied Alsace Lorraine, which was home territory, and I'm sure that they exist there. And this again, I guess, is all part of those pages of the Great War continuing to turn. And if you've come across a German memorial somewhere on the battlefields of the Great War, then leave a comment in the comment section of the website or in one of the other platforms where you can leave a comment or contact the podcast through email and let me know, and we'll see what we can discover about the surviving German memorials on the battlefields today. Question number four comes from Andrew Meldrum. My first visit to the World War I battlefields was in 1975, Andrew says, and although I live in Australia, I have been back six times, including the first of July 2016 and 11th of November 2018 for the anniversaries. Two of my great uncles were killed, and every year I deliver a talk to the University of the Third Age in my hometown focusing on a World War I battle, particularly one that involves AIF soldiers. This year I'm doing the Battle of Messines in june nineteen seventeen. So may I ask, what was the history of the Messines Ridge area between the German occupation in nineteen fourteen and the attack on the seventh of june nineteen seventeen? Well thanks for this question, Andrew. Messines is such an important part of the Flanders story, the fighting around Eap, and a place special to me because I spent a lot of time there about a dozen or so years ago when Simon Vertigum on his first big archaeological project did this massive dig around the town of Messines, uncovering, peeling back the landscape and uncovering the history of the Great War there. So, in terms of the Messines story, in 1914, during the first Battle of Eap, the Germans were advancing, pushing towards the Channel ports, coming down the Menin Road, coming through the villages to the north and northeast of Yape, and also to the south as well. And there was a bitter struggle for the Messines Ridge. It saw, witnessed the first Indian troops going into action there in October 1914. There were a lot of French and French territorial soldiers fighting alongside the British there as well. The London Scottish, the 14th Battalion of the London Regiment, were the first territorial infantry battalion to see action in the Great War at Messines, when on the 31st of October, Halloween, they went into action near to the Messines windmill and stopped that part of the German advance in the positions there. And cavalry, dismounted cavalry, fought in the on the edge of the village of Messines as well during that first battle of Eape. But the Germans in that area were kind of unstoppable. The small number of units that were there, the manpower that was available, the size of the BEF facing this onslaught of German troops couldn't hold every bit of ground. East of Eat, northeast of Eape, the ground was held, the Germans were stopped. To the south, the Germans were able to sweep over the Messines Ridge and capture it in that first battle in October and November of 1914. But that ended their advance. Both sides dug in, the initial trenches were dug, British trenches beneath the ridge, to the west of the ridge, and Germans occupying the ridge and having their trenches on the slopes of the ridge, looking down on the British and French positions that were there. French troops attacked German positions on the ridge in that period as well. Bahn Velt, Kronartwood, where Hitler's regiment was, they were up against the French, and there were some minor actions there. At Messines, in the village of the town itself, there were British units there, and just to the north was one of the very first attacks on trenches, German trenches in the Great War by British units, when some British units from the 3rd Division made an assault in December 1914. The Gordon Highlanders, for example, going forward, going out into no man's land, unsupported attack, cost a lot of casualties, and the bodies of those men lay out in no man's land until the ground was cleared after the Battle of Messines in June of 1917. And what that attack showed is that a direct assault on world dug-in infantry without much artillery would result in one thing a massacre. So they had to kind of reinvent the will, really, think about the type of warfare that they were now faced with. It was not open warfare, this was static warfare, siege warfare on a massive scale, and then come up with ways to try and break that. But the following year at Messines was a time when the British Front gradually expanded along the wider Western Front. More and more units came to the Western Front, and when they did come, they would be put into sectors of the line that were considered quiet in inverted commas, places where there were no big battles going on. And they were often referred to as nursery sectors, where you'd put a new unit into the line, they could acclimatise to the conditions of actual trench warfare, learn how to take over a trench, hold a trench, get their rations up, bring up supplies, and then be relieved by another unit and get out safely without losing a lot of men. And those nursery sectors were really important in continuing to train British and Empire forces, Commonwealth forces in the whole art really of trench warfare. So machines in 1915 was a typical nursery sector where new units were sent to. And for a big chunk of that year, it was also part of the Canadian, the newly formed Canadian Corps sector, where Canadian units from the first and second Canadian divisions held that part of the line. I mentioned in a recent uh episode of the podcast about winter in Flanders how the Canadians had a Christmas truce in a couple of locations with the Germans in December 1915, a year on from the more famous, wider Christmas truce. But it was very much a period 1915 in terms of the Messines story that was dominated by the Canadians. And when you go to the small battlefield cemeteries beneath the town of Messines today, Russian Farm, for example, and the small battlefield cemeteries there nearby at Wolvergurham and places like that where they brought the dead back to from the front line, you can follow the progression of units there in that way. So when the Canadians in 1915 on into 1916 pull out, other units are then replacing them. And for example, after the Battle of the Somme begins, the Ulster Division who'd fought at Thiepval has moved up to the macine sector and they're now holding a much quieter sector in a place where there's no big attack going on, and gradually they recover from the terrible catastrophic casualties that they'd had on the first day of the Somme and the attack on Thiepval and the Schwaban Redoubt. And again, that's reflected in the burials in the cemetery there. So as we come into 1916, again it remains this nursery sector, there's still new units coming to the Western Front, but now because there's a wider part of the front and more units, and they take casualties in big battles, there's a rotation of units, and machines becomes a place where units pulled out of a big attack, having suffered losses, are sent to before they can recover and then be used again for the next big attack. And the Battle of Machines that you're talking about to your University of the Third Age was planned a year before in 1916, and the work of the tunnelers began at that time. So in this sector around machines, the men of the Royal Engineers and further to the north, Australian engineers, Canadian engineers that were tunnellers, were working on the vast tunnel systems that would be prepared to take the tunnelers underneath the battlefield up to a point where a charge could be laid, and those charges were put eventually put in place, resulting in the big mine offensive, the explosion of those 19 mines on the 7th of June 1917. But while that was going on underground, up on the trench level, on the battlefield level, there was day-to-day classic kind of trench warfare with men being killed and wounded every single day, no big battle, no going over the top, no bayonets fixed, no charges in no man's land, but men holding a trench in a place like Messines, doing their duty and suffering casualties every day. It was called natural wastage often in some of the contemporary documents. I think a term that the politically minded generals of today probably would not use, but it was the consequence of warfare on a large scale, with large numbers of men holding the ground, you're going to lose men every single day. And there was a big phosgene gas attack in that area of Messines in June, on the 17th of June 1916, when the Germans launched a massive gas attack on that southern part of the Yape salient sector, and a lot of the units included battalions of the Northumberland fusiliers and the Durham Line Infantry from the 50th Northumbrian Division. They took a lot of casualties just to the west of Messines itself and the northwest and then further south. Units like the Royal Sussex, 9th Royal Sussex took a lot of casualties there, holding the ground directly beneath Messines itself. And this gas took the British by surprise, caused a lot of casualties. It drifted quite some way beyond the actual battlefield itself, and the scale of the casualties was quite high, and you can follow the deaths from that phosgene right back to cemeteries way, way behind the lines. So that was 1916. But as 1916 began to come to its end, the preparations for machines begin as we move on into 1917, in those six months before the attack. This is when you see the whole infrastructure of the battlefield being prepared and built so that the offensive there is possible. The preparations, the infrastructure, the logistics of battles are just as important as the actual battles themselves, because those battles could not possibly be successful without that preparation, without that infrastructure, and without that route of supply to keep that engine of war moving. And all part of that as well was the wider development of the mining offensive, choosing the targets, working out the charges that would be laid, and then making sure that was all in place. And it was with a huge amount of artillery moved into that area as well. That was the other thing in the six months leading up to the Battle of Massines in June 1917, was the preparation of gun sites for the amount of artillery that would be required to saturate the German lines. Messines was successful not just because of the mines, and you'll know from your own study of the Australians in the Great War that Monash, who commanded the 3rd Australian Division to the south, decided not to use all of the mines that were available on his sector, and the role of artillery in places like that were just, if not more, important. So the preparation of gun sites and the supply for those gun sites in those months leading up to the battle were just as important as the tunnelers working underneath the battlefield. So I I hope, Andrew, that's given you kind of an overview of what happened at Messines from the capture of the ridge in 1914 up to the eve of when those British and Commonwealth forces, New Zealanders and Australians to the south, and British units to the north up to Hill 60, were about to go over the top and fight one of the most successful battles that were fought in the trench war period of the Great War on the Western Front, when the ridge was captured in a single day and held against counter-attacks. A battle that I know we will return to once more uh in the future of this podcast. And good luck with your talk, Andrew. A fifth and final question comes from Anthony. Anthony asks, I've always wondered whether there is any genuine footage of any Western front battle scenes. I know a lot of the footage we see was staged for the newsreels, and given how heavy and fragile film cameras were early last century, it makes me suspect that no genuine footage could have been filmed. Well, the whole art of cinematography on the Western Front really only began properly with the Battle of the Somme and the Battle of the Somme film when the War Office, the British government realised the importance of film as a propaganda weapon, a tool to inform people, to tell them what was happening, and in nineteen sixteen, with the whole change in the armaments industry and the production of shells and the workforce being asked to do far more, to produce more and more shells. Part of the purpose of the Battle of the Somme film was to show them what their work had contributed to. So it's dominated by a lot of film of guns firing, of ammunition being brought up, of huge piles of shell cases showing how many shells had been fired, to tell those munitions workers the job you're doing is worthwhile. Now it couldn't just be about the artillery a film like that. You had to show lines of men marching to and from the battlefield, parades, but of course battle scenes as well. And as you suggest, Anthony, the nature of cameras which were large and fragile and heavy and difficult to manoeuvre, then to film actual battle scenes was very difficult indeed and could possibly cost the life of the cameraman himself. So a decision was made to go to some of the training schools behind the lines where they would practice these kind of things, where there were trench systems, dummy trench systems built, and men would be put into those, the camera could be safely set up, and they could be filmed going over the top. So those sequences of that Battle of the Somme film that show men in that. Shallow trench, which doesn't look like really any typical British trench from that period of the First World War. There they are sheltering in that trench. The officer gives the indication, they go up the bank over the top into the mist, and one of them fakes being hit and slides down. And if you look, he can't he falls badly and he can't get comfortable, and he he moves slightly. So you know he's not a very convincing battle casualty, let's put it that way. So all of that is it's not faked, it's reconstructed because they simply couldn't film something like that in the very front line. The close confines of those trenches, the nature of what was about to happen, the the often the timing of offensives, it was better on the Somme because it was pretty much broad daylight when they went over the top, so the cameras would be able to cope with that, but they couldn't be in those very front line positions. It just wasn't possible in that way with the equipment that they had. If they'd have all had GoPros, then we'd have a very different account of the Battle of the Somme. Having said that, Jeffrey Malins, who was one of the official photographers, did capture some actual footage of battle, and he set himself up initially in the sunken lane of Beaumont Hamill, where he went in the early hours of the first of July, where there was just enough light for him to film, and he filmed those men of the Lancashire Fusiliers, some of the men from the Brigade Machine Gun Company and the Trench Mortar Company, who were in there waiting to make their initial assault from the sunken lane, having come up through the tunnel from the British front line into the lane. Mallins had come up that tunnel too with his filming equipment. He filmed them there, and that has become a classic piece of film from the First World War. He then went back through the tunnel, Malins, and he met up with Lieutenant Brooks, Baby Brooks, who was the official photographer, and they'd found a position along the edge of an embankment where they could look up onto Hawthorne Ridge. Malins set up his camera to take the film, and Brooks set up his stills camera with big glass negatives to take the stills, and they waited for the offensive to begin. And what Malins captured was the explosion of the Hawthorne mine, the eruption of that explosion, ripping the top of that ridge apart, coming up in this huge mound of debris and earth and everything else, and then settling back down to the smoke. He captured that. The initial attacks were then probably slightly out of view as the first assaults by the Royal Fusiliers went in, but then there was a subsequent attack by the 16th Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment, who went up the slopes of Hawthorne Ridge towards the mine crater, and from his position he was able to capture that from a distance. And we see in that film these ant-like figures going up the slope towards their objective, which is the crater and the trenches around it. We see this massive men, these ant-like figures, disappear into the battlefield, and then later he captured the survivors, that battalion having been ripped apart by that advance by the German fire, and so many killed and wounded, only one of the officers, Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton Hall, the commander of the 16th Middlesex, he's the only one that walks away from it. The battalion is shattered, and those ant-like figures return, but in much smaller numbers. So that is all genuine. And whether Malins realized it, whether the people that processed the film subsequently realised it, what had been captured there was one of the many tragedies of the first day of the Battle of the Somme. So that is real footage of real battle and footage of the consequences of battle as well. As the war moved on, there were sequences that were done, but when we look at images of any battle, the real footage is always from a distance for the very reasons again that you state, because of the equipment. Although Jeffrey Malins in his memoirs, How I Filmed the War, it's kind of a boy's own account of it. I mean, he did put himself at considerable risk capturing the images of the Great War and the that film that he took, but they were never able to really get in there at zero hour for a battle and watch a real battalion blow the whistles, go up the ladders, go over the parapet, and get out into no man's land. I mean you couldn't follow them. The weight and size of the camera would mean that you'd have to then stop filming, climb up those ladders yourself, set up in no man's land. I mean, you can imagine the consequences of this. So it wasn't really possible. I still think though, that even the reconstructed film gives us an insight into the mindset, I guess, of how they wanted the war to be presented and what they felt was palatable to a civilian audience, and also the kind of reactions when men themselves saw it, because the Battle of the Somme film came out a couple of months later in the early autumn of 1916, and there's a memoir of an officer in the 16th Irish Division who recalls going to Dernan Corps to watch it. It's a silent film, he's watching it, and there's the rumble of barrages and bombardments in the distance, which kind of gives it its f its effect, really. But they were critical of some of those battle scenes where the men were seen going over the top, but knew themselves how could you present and should you present the reality of trench warfare to an audience while the war was still going on, could they take it? Could they really take what cameras, what film could portray? And that's a question of perhaps for another day, but certainly there is real footage, but it's always looking at it from a distance, anything close up had to be staged, had to be reconstructed, because cameras had not caught up with that, and we only really see that kind of real sharp, edgy footage of real combat a generation later in the Second World War, when cameras had moved on considerably, and then you know, coming up to the present day, you don't have to go very far on YouTube to find GoPro footage from Ukraine showing modern trench warfare there. And the horrors of some of that gives you a bit of an insight into what potentially could have been shown to audiences more than a century ago. Audiences a lot less media savvy than the audiences of today. So film, an important, essential part of our understanding of the Great War, and thanks for that question, Anthony. So that's where we end our special battlefield QA. Bit longer than usual, but I hope that's been of interest. Keep the questions coming in. I've still got plenty in the pots for future QA's, but it's always good to get new ones to keep that going. I really enjoy doing these question and answer episodes, so keep them coming in via the usual methods of email or the Discord server, and there's a few others besides, and we'll be back again soon for some more QA on the old front line, but this one, and I can just hear the birds singing out in the garden near the old shell crater in the garden of this cottage here at Hoog. I'm literally on that old front line. So until we meet again.

SPEAKER_00 51:51

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.comslash oldfrontline, or support us on buymea coffee at buymeacoffee.comslash oldfrontline. Links to all of these are on our website. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you again soon.