Questions and Answers Episode 48

In this Old Front Line WW1 podcast Q&A episode, we answer listeners’ questions about the history of the First World War  and the legacy of the conflict today. We begin by exploring British and Commonwealth war cemeteries, explaining how the headstones are kept perfectly aligned and why some graves appear in straight rows while others are spaced further apart, including the role of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission of how this was made permanent, 

We then look at the huge stockpiles of artillery ammunition left at the end of the First World War, discussing how millions of shells were stored, disposed of, or destroyed after the Armistice of 1918.

Another question focuses on officers’ servants, often known as batmen, in the British Army during WW1: how they were recruited, what duties they carried out on and off the battlefield, and what their wartime experience was really like.

Finally, we examine salvage on the Western Front and ask whether the famous scene in All Quiet on the Western Front, where Paul Bäumer is issued a dead soldier’s tunic, could really have happened during the war.

The Killing Ground mentioned in the podcast can be found here: Killing Ground on YouTube.

Main Image: Tyne Cotts Pillbox. After capture it became important position and Company Headquarters. Top - Capt Cross MC, 33rd Battalion MGC with runner and batman. (IWM Q56253)

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

The stories of Canadians in the Great War have long fascinated me, and as many of you know, I once lived on a Canadian battlefield at Corsolette on the Somme. This week I re-watched on YouTube The Killing Ground, a Canadian broadcasting company documentary from the mid-1980s about the story of Canada in the Great War, presented by Terence McKenna. McKenna was and maybe still is a controversial character in broadcasting, and while much of the history in this documentary is dated when we look back on it today, its strengths for me are the presentation of Canadian voices from the period of the First World War, from soldiers to nurses to chaplains, and including some of my Canadian Great War favourites, if you like, like Wilbur, Canon Scott and Torbert Papineau. In fact, this film led me to find the books that they wrote or to tell their story, whether in print or eventually here on the podcast. It kind of set me on a Canadian journey across the Western Front that I continue one way or another to this day. And watching it again it struck a chord because it mirrored our recent episode about the Great War slipping out of public consciousness. McKenna in the nineteen eighties noted how much of Canada's Great War art, for example, was just locked away in vaults and never seen by the public. And back then, Vimy Ridge, that magnificent memorial high above the Douai Plain in northern France, wasn't lit up at night just to save a few tax dollars. Today much has changed, and in many respects everything has changed, but seeing the battlefields once more in that film as they were in the nineteen eighties, untouched, rarely visited, it made me reflect once more on General Arthur Curry's statement, Curry, a divisional commander who would go on to command the entire Canadian Corps, and his statement is cited in the film. It reminded me of what he said, which was this If these are the things Canada should forget, what should we remember? And it felt like that applied to so many nations just beyond Canada itself. So in an old documentary that brought memories of the past of walking that old front line when few traverse that ground, I think there was still a lesson within that. Those weren't the golden days. We don't want to go back to that. We've got to keep pushing forward to ensure that this subject never slips away. And now for this week's questions. Question number one comes from Rob Campbell in Canada, appropriately. My questions relate to the work of the Commonwealth Wargraves Commission. Firstly, how is it that the Portland stones can remain in such precise order, not leaning despite a variety of climactic conditions? Are the stones connected to a central underground concrete beam? Also, I noticed at Listenherk, where my cousin rests, that some stones are shoulder to shoulder, while others are anywhere from a few inches to a few feet apart. How was the placement of the burials and thus stones determined? Well first of all, let's kind of think about what the cemeteries looked like when the Great War came to an end. There were many more than there are today, some of them small collections of burials, some of them regimental burial grounds, and some of them like Listenherk, where your cousin is, were substantial cemeteries from the First World War. Listenherk was then probably the largest British and Empire cemetery from the Great War. But what they had on the graves of the fallen were the original burial markers, whether that was wooden crosses or a variety of different things that were placed often by comrades from stone memorials to aeroplane propellers, I mean all kinds of things. And once a decision was made that Great Britain and the wider empire would pay for the commemoration of the dead on the condition that they remain in the places where they were buried, although some graves would be concentrated into bigger cemeteries, once that decision was made, then those original burial markers would be replaced by headstones, and the permanent construction and design of the cemeteries began. And in the post-war world, with the creation of these permanent cemeteries, you see that gradual replacement of the crosses with the headstones, not just Portland, which you'll have seen, but a whole number of different types of stone were used. And if you ever get a chance to go to the Commonwealth Wargapes Commission headquarters and visitor centre in Arras at Bora, then they talk you through the different types of stones that were used, Portland being the most common. But how to keep headstones straight? Obviously, the weight of a Portland stone headstone was considerably more than a wooden cross placed on a grave during the war. And there would be a tendency, particularly in soft ground, for that headstone to move, to topple over, to lean at an angle. So when the architects began to look at the whole infrastructure of how they would create these cemeteries and make sure that they looked as they should do, to keep the headstone straight and linear, they used, as you've suggested, concrete beams or berms that were placed on the row of graves, and the headstones were slotted into those basically and concreted in place. So what would happen is you'd take a typical row where let's say there's ten burials, each one marked by a wooden cross. The area of each grave would be ascertained, then the concrete beam berm would be placed along that row where the headstones would go, then put in place and then stabilised. There might be a bit of a delay between the finishing of the top level of the graves, laying down the concrete beam, letting that settle for a while, and then applying the headstones. The headstones would be delivered in batches, and when we look at a typical grave today, there's about a third more that's in that concrete beam, and at the bottom section, which we don't see today, written in bitumen paint was the name of the cemetery that that headstone was being delivered to, and then the plot row and grave number or however that cemetery was laid out would be added there too. So the right headstone was then placed on the correct grave. And there was a lot of record keeping around this to make sure that that happened because obviously you didn't want to take the grave of Private John Smith, which had a wooden cross with that on, then remove that and accidentally put Private B. Brown's headstone there instead. So there had to be a degree of record keeping to make sure that the right headstone went in the right place. And then those headstones were then slotted in to that beam, cemented into place, fixed in place, and then again there would be a degree of workmanship going on there to make sure that they were all in that direct and orderly linear pattern where there's no movement of the stones, and then gradually that would settle and be permanent. So that was the approach that was carried out in the vast majority of cemeteries on the western front, for example, where large headstones were put in place. There were some exceptions to this, so on the coastal area where the ground was a lot sandier, so less solid, some of the beams would not sit in place and headstones would topple over. They did some experiments with this, thinking that the sandy soil might cause some problems, and it did. So when you go, for example, to Boulogne Eastern Cemetery and just down the road at Wimmera Communal Cemetery, a large proportion of the graves in both those cemeteries are laid flat on the ground because of that sandy soil. So it's a different kind of approach. And in the case of Boulogne Eastern, they're not full-size headstones that you would normally see, they're slightly smaller ones, kind of square ones, a different design in their own right. And a few other places that was changed to that approach as well. Most famously on the Somme, Mill Road Cemetery near Chapval, where the central part of the cemetery had a stone of remembrance, and then just beyond that a plot of normally arranged graves with upright headstones. But not as many guidebooks have said over the years, the movement of the tunnels of the sharp and redoubt beneath caused them to topple over. In fact, there was a large dugout under there which caused a lot of problems, which led to the change of that plot from upright headstones to headstones laid flat on the soil, and then eventually the removal of the Stone of Remembrance itself. And if you look at the original plans of the cemetery, and then what it looks like today, if you've ever been there or you go there, you'll see the difference. So that's kind of how they keep that shape. When we walk into a cemetery, we see these orderly rows of graves, absolutely dead straight, and that is achieved by having this concrete beam in the ground. Now the second part of your question about the arrangement of graves is a bit more of a complex subject because it depends on the type of cemetery. If we look at Listener, where your relative is, that is a medical station cemetery. So there were casualty clearance stations there during the war. And although there are some graves that are slightly wider apart, there's one isolated grave as you go in one of the entrances to a soldier and officer who's probably one of the very first British and Commonwealth burials there, and then there's other nationalities buried towards the back, French soldiers, Chinese Labour Corps, and so on. But the vast majority of that cemetery, as you have noted, are headstones very, very close together, and what that indicates is that these men are buried together side by side, right up side by side. And in places like casualty clearing stations, and this was not just done at Lissenhurk, but many others, Harley Station, Dozingham, Mendingham, all of these kind of places that were behind the lines, away from the fighting area, that had a lot of personnel to work on the cemetery as well as work in the casualty clearing station, then what would happen is they would essentially dig trenches and then backfill those trenches with the dead. They would prepare for an offensive and the casualties that would come in, knowing that many soldiers would die of their wounds, soldiers would die in the medical facilities, be brought out for burial, often in coffins, makeshift coffins, and then laid to rest at one end of the beginning of that trench, and as another man dies, another soldier is buried alongside him, and then that pattern continues until that trench, that collective grave, is full. So what we're seeing there are men buried in long trenches side by side by side. Comrades in life, comrades on the battlefield, comrades in death. If we look at battlefield cemeteries up on the front line area itself, you'll see headstones that are much further apart at different angles, I mean all kinds of things. Again, you will see some commonality with headstones close together in those places, indicating that those men are buried in the same grave. But the wartime arrangement was more about the practicalities of burying the dead than architectural design. So when those cemeteries were made permanent, there was no attempt to move burials, to exhume soldiers, put them in neat rows, they left them in their wartime patterns. So what that means is today we can walk into a cemetery, read that cemetery, and see pretty much straight away if it has original features, if it has post-war concentrations, or if there are graves where men were perhaps killed in a bombardment and all buried together in one collective burial site. So as I often say about the cemeteries of the Great War, they are time capsules, they can tell us so much, and we've spoken quite a lot about reading cemeteries recently. Perhaps that's going to be a subject for another podcast down the line. But I hope, Rob, that answers your questions and sheds a little bit of light on this matter. Question number two comes from Sam Ayers. I was listening to a recent podcast referencing artillery, and that got me wondering what happened to the stockpiles of ammunition when the First World War ended. But that's a great question, Sam. The 1917-18 period, so in that last period of the Great War on the Western Front alone, was one of the most intense periods of shellfire of the whole war. That's when artillery as a battlefield weapon came into play, reached the pinnacle of its importance, with units on the battlefield only being as good as the artillery that supported them, and attacks succeeding or failing based on how good or how bad the artillery plan had been. And if we look at battles from the opening German bombardment, for example, of the Kaiserschlacht in March 1918, when the Germans broke through on the Somme following this massive bombardment, through to the huge Allied barrages that were part of the last 100 days from the Battle of Amiens on the 8th of August 1918, right through the smashing and the breaching of the Hindenburg line, right up to when warfare became open and mobile again in the crossing of the Sombre Canal, for example. All of that saw these massive, massive Allied bombardments. And the exact figures for the use of artillery during this period are pretty hard to pin down. There's lots of material about shell production, shell movement, to a degree shell delivery, but shell usage in terms of particular areas is a little bit difficult to quantify. But it seems that the British Army had well over a hundred and twenty million shells ready to use on the Western Front in that final year of the Great War. The French well over a hundred and forty nine million, and there don't appear to be any apparent figures for the Germans. But given their offensives from March to April to May of 1918, when they broke through at different parts of the front using these tremendous bombardments, then it must have been a similar kind of figure, if not higher. And this reflects the industry of all these different nations geared up to this war footage, producing war material and munitions to keep that engine of war, phrase we've used a lot on the podcast in the last year or so. But that kind of emphasizes what it was. This engine of war, it keeps it moving, it keeps it functioning. Industry supplies the war material, the countries supply the men, and on the battlefield, all this comes together in industrial warfare and industrial killing on an industrial scale, pretty much mirroring really the experience of much of the rest of that century. And when we come back to the shells, we're going to focus on that rather than talking the wider history of this, but many of these shells used in that final year of the conflict in France and Flanders, well, while shell production was a lot better than it had been, let's say, back in 1915, there were still many duds. And I think that's another element to your question here. But as the armistice approached on the battlefield following that war of movement once more, and behind the scenes, politicians met with General Foch, the commander-in-chief of Allied Forces on the Western Front, to agree the terms of the armistice at Compire. That was going to lead to an armistice that came into effect at eleven o'clock on the 11th of November 1918. Now, units in that final 24 hours of the war were given advance notice of this that the war would come to an end at 11 o'clock, and all kinds of different things happened on different parts of the front. The British and Empire experience was different to the American, which was different to the French. But what you read about in a lot of the British diaries of that period, and we looked at some of these when we made last day of World War I with Michael Palin all those years ago, is that a lot of units having been given notification that the war's coming to an end, use those final hours to fire off as much as they've got. Get rid of this stuff. We don't know where we're going next, but we don't want to carry all this ammunition with us. So guns fire and fire and fire, fire out everything that they can get their hands on, no matter what it is, and even down to the kind of infantry level, men are firing off ammunition, Lewis gun teams, Vickers machine gun teams, all of this is going on. There's an account, for example, even on the German side, where a load of British troops witness a German machine gun unit fire off all its ammunition just before eleven o'clock. When eleven o'clock comes into force, the men, Germans, stand up, having fired off all their ammo, salute the British and then march off back to Germany. Now that could be a bit of a stamina story, a bit of an apocryphal story, but I think it kind of sums up an element of this nevertheless. So men knew that they would be off somewhere, perhaps to occupy Germany, perhaps to continue the war in Germany. But soldiers aren't silly. They don't have to carry anything more than they need to, and if they can get rid of this ammunition, they will. So a lot was fired in that final sequence. But the ending of the war did mean that there were these huge stockpiles because the war hadn't ended overnight, but the engine of war that needed feeding needed regular deliveries, and those deliveries were kind of set up, and to slow those down and stop them took some time. So it meant that while in those last few days before the eleventh of November, many people at the higher level knew this was coming to an end, the supplies, the war material, and the shells were still delivered to the fronts that needed them. So that meant once the armistice had been signed and come into effect on the eleventh of November, there were these massive ammunition stockpiles from delivery points from the boats on the French coast right up to the battlefield area. And that would have meant hundreds of thousands, if not more, but hundreds of thousands of shells that hadn't yet been fired. And in my photo archive that I've been collecting over many many years, I have a lot of images of these stockpiles at depots, at railway shunting yards about to be loaded onto trains and taken up to the front, and also on the battlefield area itself. And what you see in the post-war period, so as November moves into December, the winter begins and the new year approaches, then the clear-up of the battlefields begins. The war isn't going to resume. The armistice has brought the war to an end. Many thought it was just a ceasefire. Germany might start the war again, but that doesn't happen. British troops do go and occupy Germany, British Army of the Rhine in Cologne, along the Rhineland, for example, and on the old battlefields, there are units kept there to assist with this clear-up for the movement of the stockpiles of shells and lots of specialist personnel from the Army Ordnance Corps, for example, through to other units that could assist with the donkey work of moving this stuff. There were British units that could do this, there were thousands of men from the Chinese Labour Corps who were there who were working on the recovery of the dead, construction of cemeteries, but also some of their personnel were then moved to move shells from depots to places where they could be disposed of, and also large numbers of German prisoners of war. So prisoners that had yet to be sent back to, for example, Britain and were still in POW cages in France were then employed on the old battlefields to help with that clear-up process. And they cleared it up by blowing this stuff up. And in some cases it was taken out to sea and it was disposed of at sea, but a very, very high proportion of it were taken to locations where it could be safely detonated. Now, again, in my photo archive, I have a photo album of some officers from the artillery that are doing this work on attachment to one of the ordnance units. They've got Chinese Labour Corps soldiers helping them, they've got German prisoners of war, and they make huge stockpiles of this stuff, put their own charges on there and blow this stuff sky high. And it's in locations where you can clearly see there's no civilization there. There, there's no civilians, so it's perfectly safe to do that. And one of the places that I know, for example, that this was done on the Somme was at Caterpillar Valley. Now, not near the cemetery. As you're coming today down into Death Valley towards Mammett's Wood with the Welsh Division Memorial behind you, you've got the beginning of the proper Caterpillar Valley going off to your right, and you can walk along the edge of that. There isn't a footpath there, it is private ground, you've got to respect that. But you can walk along the edge of the escarpment there, and probably about halfway down. There's an area where over the years of walking down there, I've found a lot of bits of munitions that were kind of broken in half by explosions, not caused by the actual explosion of the shell, but where something else had torn that shell, that bit of ordnance apart, and lots of fuses blown apart in that way. And I spoke to some of the locals, and it was well known then back in the 90s that this was a place where the British had taken ordnance to in a valley away from any civilization and blown the stuff up there. So that's a good example of that. But then, of course, coming back to what we were saying earlier about the number of duds from those millions of shells that were fired, that was the next part of the process of dealing with all this ordnance at the end of the First World War, because once the civilians did come back, did begin to reclaim their land, then they were unearthing the ordnance of previous battles, everything from grenades through to German 420mm big bertha shells. I mean, just about everything you can think of, it was still there. And it caused casualties, it caused deaths amongst civilians, amongst personnel. There was a story of some Canadian War Graves guys that were going out to recover the dead, they'd handed in their gas masks, and then a couple of days later put a pick straight through a gas shell, and they were both killed as a consequence of that. And then that continues after the military personnel have left, and it seems that the battlefields in inverted commas have been cleared where a lot of this stuff was still there or had been partially buried. Then once farming went mechanised in the 30s, that unearthed a lot more, and there were casualties then. And of course, if we speak about the iron harvest, that great legacy of the ordnance of the first world war, it is still an ever-present problem on those battlefields today. This time last year, I went over to the Somme for one of my first trips, and at Red Ann Ridge near the crucifix, there was a massive pile of shells, everything from grenades of all different nationalities right up to British 18 shells full of high explosive. So a hundred and ten years later, more than a century has gone by, but still that iron harvest is discovered every single year. And if we look at places like Flanders, small intensive battlefield with millions of shells that were fired, the Belgian bomb squad, I think, back in the 60s, 70s reckoned that shells would still be discovered on that landscape for the next seven centuries. So I hope Sam that's answered some elements of your question there and added a that other element to it, which is the clear up and the recovery of the unexploded ordnance, let alone the stuff that was stockpiled. But again, all of it, part of that fascinating aftermath and legacy of the Great War. Question number three comes from Nick Jenkins. I've always been intrigued by the idea of officers on the front line having servants. What did those servants do? Who qualified for one? Did those servants also have normal military duties? And are there any books on the subject of officers servants? Well, the role of officers servants or batmen as they were known was a feature of the military experience in the British Army going back many, many years before the Great War. It really kind of reflected the class system within Britain during that period, where those from the upper classes had servants to do their daily duties, and that was no different in the armed services, in particular the British Army. And it's true at the time of the Great War, every officer had a Batman or a servant, and of course, as soon as I say that, the first thing you're thinking of, and I know you're sitting there doing it now, is you're thinking of Baldrick in the dugout with Black Adder in Black Adder Goes Forth. Now, Black Adder, fantastic comedy, brilliant series, which I really love, but it isn't a documentary. Not every Batman was like Baldrick, and Baldrick doesn't reflect every Batman. So, what's a better example? If we want a visual one, a better one really is Journey's End. If you've seen the play or the more recent version of the film, then that gives you a better insight into an officer's dugout on the battlefield, in which officers, Batman servants play a vital role in that story, and we see the kind of work that they did reflected more realistically, I think, in Journey's End. So, first of all, how were they recruited? Now there were plenty of volunteers for officers servants for Batman, but who were they really? I mean they were largely generally recruited from people who had worked as servants before the war, as valets, as grooms, domestic staff, because they already had the training to do this kind of work. Again, it's reflecting British wider British society. So you have this vast army, excuse the pun, of domestic servants, grooms, valets, and everything else who have worked in those kind of capacities in civil life, who can come into the army, and when an officer requires a batman, there are all these ready trained men to do that job. And in some units, like territorial battalions before the war, that perhaps recruited from a particular background or even an estate, they would bring the domestic staff into the battalion with them, so the commanding officer would have a man as his Batman, who was perhaps his personal valet or groom in civilian life, and that could be true for Kitchener's battalions, Powell's battalions, when they were formed as well. As the war went on, obviously there were casualties amongst Batman. We'll kind of come on to that. And that meant as the war progressed, Batman had to be replaced, and there wasn't always former valets, grooms, domestic staff to do that. So it was more about choosing soldiers that had a degree of initiative that could operate without direct orders from the officer, could anticipate his needs and requirements, and deal with that side of his duties. So that was a way of selecting them as well. Because an officer had to have faith in his Batman. An officer had duties, he was out there inspecting the trenches, sorting out the billeting for his men in a village behind the lines, organizing the defences in his forward positions, I mean a multitude of different tasks. So when it came to returning to his command post or where he was going to be billeted in that village, he didn't want to have to sit down, cook his own tea, prepare his own bed, get his clothes ready for the next day. That's what his Batman was there to do, and he needed to have faith in that individual to be able to deal with all that. So when he came back, then it was all there ready and waiting for him. So in terms of what a Batman's duties were, one of those was maintaining the officer's kit and uniform. Officers bought their own kit, so it was their own personal possession, it wasn't part of the War Office kit that was given to them, and that meant that the Batman had to clean their boots, look after and clean them, brush down their uniforms, repair equipment, then possibly even liaise with the office about replacing things if they'd become damaged, polish their boots, make sure there was ammunition in their ammunition pouches, make sure that their gas mask was in good order, all of those kind of things. So the kit side of it was a really important one. They had to then prepare their mills and their tea, whether that was in billets behind the lines or in dugouts or positions up in the frontline area, so they could draw on rations for the officers. Officers would often purchase stuff or give the Batman money when they were out of the line. They could go to a shop and buy some slightly better food or slightly better tea and make some stuff with that. So they'd be doing those kind of duties, preparing the grub. They would also have to look after the officer's dugout or billet when they were in it, make sure that whatever they needed was in there, whether that was food, whether that was equipment, whether that was a drink, whether that was whiskey, because officers could buy their own whiskey, they had a mess allowance and they could indent for that, and the whiskey would be given to the Batman and it would be available for the officer to drink. And it was also been if the officer came back and they're running the orderly room, there would have to be furniture in there for them to have a table and a chair so they could sit and work. So there was all those kind of responsibilities as well. So they weren't just a typical domestic servant replicating what they'd done perhaps in civil life, there was a lot more to this as well. And one of those other duties was occasionally acting as a runner or messenger for their officer when required. The officer would write a message out, give it to the Batman, and tell him to take it perhaps to another officer or senior NCO or whatever it was, which would then send them out into the trench system or through the village where they were to go and get that job done. And also they had to manage the officer's personal equipment, everything from maps, trench maps. Officers had all kinds of kit they could buy from different department stores in Britain, just about everything. I mean if they'd bought everything that was in some of those catalogues, some of these officers would never have moved again. There was so much of it. But the Batman had to organise their maps, their paperwork, their field glasses, ensure that their revolver was in their holster, and as like I mentioned before, there was ammunition to go with it, and anything else really that was required. And some of the additional kit that the officer needed then had to be carried by the Batman for him. I remember reading a whole series of letters some years ago of a King's Royal Rifle Corps officer, and he talked about buying collapsible beds and campaign tables from this catalogue, and it was great for him because he didn't have to carry it. His Batman carried it for him wherever that was, and hopefully was able to load it up onto some of the limbers in the battalion transport section, so he literally didn't have to carry it everywhere. And another element to their job, as we mentioned, transport was horses because officers often had horses. In some units, that was part of the establishment of the unit, a cavalry unit or a yeomanry unit, for example, and the Batman was responsible for helping the officer with his horse. So we can see already there's a huge range of different things that a Batman has to really cope with. In practice, a good Batman becomes a trusted personal assistant to that officer, not just a servant. It's a much more complex relationship, I think. Officers relied on their Batman, like I said, they had to trust them, and a good Batman knew his officer's habits, his schedules, and his operational routine so he could properly help them. And for all of this, they were paid higher rates of pay than a normal rifleman in a rifle section in an infantry platoon. They were excused many, if not all, duties went in the front line because their focus was the officer getting everything ready for them. So if there were ration parties or ammunition carrying parties or wiring parties or trench raids, all that kind of stuff, then Batman were excused from that. So it was quite a good job to have because it reduced the level of danger that confronted you on a daily basis, and it gave them an easier life than a man in an infantry platoon. But of course, there were dangers. So Jimmy Lovegrove, James Leslie Lovegrove, who was an officer in the 2nd 4 South Lanks, one of the veterans that I knew. He finally went over the top in the attack on the Hindenburg line in September 1918. His Batman went with him, so they were required to go over the top with their officer and accompany them, often in the kind of vanguard of the assault. The Germans were opening fire on them, and one of the weapons that the Germans were using against Lovegrove's men was an anti-tank rifle. Now, this is a weapon designed to take out British tanks, very high calibre weapon with a massive bullet, about the equivalent of a modern 50 calibre round. It's firing away, and one of the rounds narrowly misses the Batman and goes straight through the leg of Jimmy Lovegrove, thankfully only hitting the fleshy parts. If it had hit the bone, it'd have taken that leg off, and it went straight through his leg and hit a tree, a stump of a tree behind him. Now Lovegrove was writhing on the floor in agony, looking round for his Batman to come up and help him with his wound, and saw him with a jackknife prizing the bullet out of the stump of the tree and then rushing over and giving Jimmy Lovegrove the bullet as a souvenir. So that kind of gives you one idea of the kind of battlefield conditions in which these Batman had to operate alongside their officers. And although conscription changed the army in those final years of the Great War, officers still had Batman, and the practice was still seen in 1939 with a new war, a new army, in many ways not much of a different army in 1939 to the one in 1918 for all kinds of reasons, and I believe that at least one regiment that took part in the Falklands campaign in 1982 still had officers' servants then. Although that is something that I don't believe happens in the modern army today, it largely being phased out in most regiments in the sixties and seventies, I believe. So in terms of books, officers' memoirs are your best kind of source for this because the officers talk about their Batman, whether good, bad or indifferent. And Emmund Blunden, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon would be obvious kind of examples of this. The book Six Weeks about Young Officers in the Great War by John Lewis Stemple is a really good account of officers in the Great War in the British Army, and it touches on this subject as well. But memoirs really, I mean, there are so many memoirs written by officers that if you wanted to get an insight into what it was like to be a Batman and what their tasks and their duties were, then read one of those. I can't think of a of an example of a memoir written by one of these Batman. Maybe there is one out there if you know of it, then get in touch. Moving on to our fourth and final question, this one comes from Wayne Jones. Whilst watching All Quiet on the Western Front, the new version on Netflix, at the start of the film, there's a scene where German soldiers die on the battlefield and their uniforms get recycled for the new wave of soldiers. Did this really happen? And if so, did the BEF adopt this manner? Well, if logistics plays a second fiddle to the bombs, bullets and bayonets on the battlefield, the importance of salvage in the Great War I think is almost unknown. The Great War rapidly, as we've said, even in this episode, became this industrialized war and one where huge amounts of war material and equipment could easily be casually discarded, abandoned, or just left in the fighting area. And some units were better at this than others, the infantry tended to use up a lot of their resources, while the gunners, more mobile with a lot of equipment, would often leave a lot of kit lying around, and we see examples of that in contemporary images. And all of that material costs money. By the end of the conflict, Britain was spending a staggering 1.8 billion in old money a day on the conflict. So you can see how easily countries like even Britain could be bankrupted by this war at this level of spending. So everything had a value, and a lot of this kit had value beyond the kind of wildest dreams of some of the men who had to use it. I think even an 18-pounder shell had the value of about£44, which for the ordinary soldier gunner, loading that into a field gun, that was a lot of money. I mean that probably they never knew what the value was. But anyway, everything has a value. Not just metallic objects, but everything from boots to service caps, uniforms to gas masks, webbing to parties, I mean just about everything. And when we look, as I've said, at some of the images of the Great War landscapes, and we see how much kit is lying about everywhere, whether that's bits of boxes, rum jars, bottles, metal items, I mean you name it, it's there, and we often see it in photographs. Now, while fighting is going on, that can't be salvaged, but as the fighting moves on, and those areas of former battlefields are now behind the lines, then salvage units can then go in and recover this material, which is what exactly what happens. And there are salvage points, you see signs go up on the battlefield about salvage. I mean it's a fascinating, fascinating subject, and it became a really important part of what the British Army did to maximize its resources. And I would guess that the Germans did exactly the same kind of thing on the other side of No Man's Land. And when it comes to uniforms, like we see in that new version of All Quiet on the Western Front, so what happens? We have a sequence at the beginning where the soldier goes into battle, he gets killed, his uniform gets taken off, cleaned, and is handed to the main character of the film, Paul Baumer, who notices another man's name inside and thinks the kit has been incorrectly issued to him. That little label's taken out and tossed away, and he gets given a dead man's uniform. So that's the kind of fiction of it. Well, I'm not saying that that never ever happened, but generally pieces of uniform and equipment that was worn by a soldier were not taken from the dead or wounded soldiers, as mostly the access to those kind of bits of kit that were on those who died was at medical facilities like casualty stations or base hospitals. And normally what would happen, they would bury the soldier in his uniform, it was a mark of respect. If uniform items like that had been removed and they could be cleaned, they were sent off for fumigation, but mostly they were burned. So every medical unit had a massive burner, and this was used to burn these pieces of material. A friend of mine, battlefield archaeologist in France, excavated the site of one of these burners near Balliol, found no trace of the uniforms, of course, because they'd all been burnt. But he found all the metal fittings off the uniform, the little hooks that hold the belt in place, all the buttons, of course, shoulder titles, I mean everything that you can think of, all the metal parts were still there, but the uniforms themselves had been burnt. They were not salvaged, they were not reused. But there were possibly cases where there were uniforms that could be reused, and I'm sure that that was done. The complexity, going back to officers, we were just talking about them, is that officers' kit belonged to that officer, so that could not be salvaged and reused, redistributed, it had to go back to the next of kin, and it would be parceled up, sent to a place at the base, and then eventually returned, often in the soldier's kit bag or flea bag that he'd once slept in with all his kit inside, and that would be sent back to the family. And occasionally I've seen an example of this, it would include officers' tunics that have been taken off a mortally wounded officer covered in blood, stashed in there with the rest of the kit, and then the family opens that up when it's sent back by the war office and there's a blood-stained uniform in there. So what we see in the film I think is a little bit different to the reality of it. Whether it happened more in the German army towards the end of the war, when they were running out of everything, maybe that is more likely, but I don't have any direct evidence to suggest that that actually happened. I do know from talking to veterans, British veterans, that they were issued with Dead Man's Kit or acquired it. So one of the lads I knew who was in the King's Liverpool regiment, Liverpool Pows, after the first of July, was coming back through the village of Maricor, where there was a dressing station. He had 1914 pattern leather equipment which he didn't like wearing, and he saw a big pile of webbing, 1908 pattern webbing equipment. So he went for that, found a complete set of it, swapped over his bits and pieces, put on his webbing this webbing gear that he just found, and then he marched out and got into the next village for billeting behind the lines. And the next day or a couple of days later, when he looked at it, he saw that it had some blood on it, and it had the name of a soldier who he knew had been killed. Killed in the attack on Montaba on the first day of the Somme. So that kind of stuff did definitely happen. And Salvage is a is a fascinating part of the Great War. The man who really brought the subject of salvage and everything connected with it, something that he called the men who did the salvage, the wombles of the Western Front, was Rob Thompson. I'm an incredible guy, incredible knowledge, incredible ability to convey that knowledge as well. I first came across Rob in the early days of the Western Front Association, heard him talk, talked with him at some of the conferences that we went to, and he did appear on TV talking about different aspects of some of the lesser known elements of the Great War, like logistics and salvage. And there's a whole series of these lectures on the Western Front Association YouTube channel. And I'll embed the one about wombles on the Western Front onto the web page for this episode so you can watch it. It's highly, highly recommended. Sadly, Rob passed away a few years ago. Great, great loss to First World War knowledge, an incredible guy and a decent bloke to boot. So do check out Rob's work. It's absolutely, I think, essential to our wider understanding of that industrialised war. So that brings our latest QA episode to an end. Thanks as always for all of your questions. Keep those questions coming in through the usual routes of email, the Discord server, and a few others besides, and I'll see you again soon for some more QA on the Old Frontline. You've been listening to an episode of the Old Frontline with me, military historian Paul Reed. You can follow me on Twitter at Somcore, you can follow the podcast at OldFrontline Pod. 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