Questions and Answers Episode 50

We are now 50 Q&As in, and the questions keep getting better, sharper, and more human! This milestone edition of The Old Front Line is built around four listener prompts that take us from the small, intimate scale of one soldier’s photograph to the vast, uneasy scale of a battlefield that never fully stops giving things back to the surface.

We start with the stories that first hooked me on First World War history: individual men whose faces, medals, and graves became “beacons” I return to again and again. From Ypres to Plugstreet to the Somme, we talk about why researching named soldiers and walking the Western Front still matters, and how personal connections can turn into serious historical work.

Then we shift into regimental identity and military tradition by unpacking what “Light Infantry” really means by 1914. Were these units deployed differently in the Great War, or is the name mainly heritage? We look at rifle regiments, status, old titles, and the sheer scale of their contribution across the war.

Finally, we zoom out to the landscape of memory itself: comparing American Civil War battlefields like Gettysburg with the old front line, touching on Franco-Prussian War commemoration, and finishing with the gritty reality of post-1918 farming, ordnance clearance, Graves Registration, iron harvest, and why reburials still happen today.

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Main Image: soldiers of the KRRC while in training c.1915 (Old Front Line Archives).

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Transcript

Fifty Q And A Episodes

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Two years ago I launched an episode called Your Questions Answered, where we looked at six questions submitted by listeners to the podcast. This start of a new questions and answers section of what we do with the old frontline came about following a question from a listener in Kent who had seen many other podcasts do the same and thought the old frontline should do it as well. I wasn't sure whether it would quickly fizzle out, but it didn't, and it gained momentum. And here we are two years down the road commemorating fifty episodes of questions and answers in total, well over two hundred of them now. The thing I like about it is that it makes each episode different. We cover many different subjects, many different niches and corners of the Great War, lots of them not big enough for their own episodes, yet important just the same. And it challenges me each time to sit down and think about what has been asked and what a good answer might be. I approach them in the same way as the very first Q ⁇ A episode. I read out the question and then answer it in real time. The only thing I've changed of late are these little introductions to it, which hopefully you find of interest. These episodes aren't scripted, but I often do what I do with the main podcast, which is lay out a running order so I don't go off on tangents. Spoiler, I often do. And hopefully we get a meaningful answer out of it all and it is of interest to the wider podcast audience. To share knowledge like this is at the very heart of why I started the old frontline, and I love the interaction with you, the listeners, and the many emails I get because of these episodes. It makes me realise that there is still so much interest in the Great War. We can't be complacent, I don't think, but it makes me hopeful as many of the questions that have come in are from people under thirty five, the next generation who will take this all forward. So here's to the next fifty Q ⁇ A episodes. We've had fifty, and here's to the next. Thanks to all of you who have submitted a question. Keep them coming and keep on challenging me to think deeper and wider about this subject that binds us all together. And collectively we'll learn. But for now, to this week's questions.

The Soldiers Who Shaped My Interest

SPEAKER_00 2:44

Question number one comes from Andy Kinsey. Are there certain stories, soldiers, airmen, sailors that really influenced your interest and fascinate you still to this day? Well, Andy, I mean this couldn't be a better question to start the fiftieth episode of Q ⁇ A's, because it kind of cuts to the heart of probably where many of us begin our interest in the First World War, which was researching individual soldiers. For some of us it's family members, and for those that perhaps collect memorabilia militaria connected to the First World War, it's the soldiers whose artifacts that we find. And as I've described many, many times, I was lucky to begin my interest in that period when the south of England where I live was covered in junk shops. Every town, every village in some cases, had junk shops and secondhand bookshops. There were postcard fairs, military affairs, I mean all kinds of things. So over those years I've collected artifacts and with them the stories of those that connect us to the wider history of the First World War. So I'm going to take four examples now of people and things that are literally around me as I describe them, as I'm sitting here now recording this episode. Above me on the wall is a photograph, a frame photograph of Private William Baldwin of the 11th Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment, who was killed at Eape on the 1st of August 1917. That picture which I first acquired from a friend in the 1980s has hung on the wall of every house that I've lived in ever since. William Baldwin has looked down at me from all corners of Britain where I've lived and overseas as well. And now living in Kent is almost come home because as I sit here and look at him, he was from a farming family from the village of Flimwell, which is only about twenty odd miles from here, just across the border in Sussex, in that kind of East Sussex area as it borders on Kent. And he was part of my journey discovering the history of the South Downs battalions of the Royal Sussex Regiment, those Louthers Lambs. At that time in the 80s, I was interviewing the last veterans, finding photographs and medals and diaries, material in the local archives and newspapers, and gradually pulling this story of these men who at that time were largely forgotten into something a bit more meaningful, and his picture came along. A friend bought it in a junk shop, knew that I would be interested in it, and I've had it ever since. And he's buried at New Irish Farm Cemetery, not far from the outskirts of Eape, in that area where the Third Battle of Eape began on the 31st of July 1917. He was killed on the second day in the fighting near St. Julian, and his grave was concentrated to New Irish Farm after the war. But one of the commonalities between all of these and many, many other stories that I could tell, is that these are kind of like waypoints, these men and their stories and their graves, like waypoints on that landscape of the First World War, which I returned to frequently. So each one of them has influenced me and fascinated me in a different way, and like markers on that landscape, I return to them as if they were beacons calling to me from the past. And I think that perhaps anyone who collects this kind of stuff will understand what I mean by that. So the second one, I'm just looking just beneath William Baldwin now, and there's a framed group of medals, a photograph of a young man, and then his British war and victory medals, his cap badge and his shoulder titles of the Royal Fusiliers, and that's Lance Corporal Hamilton Goodridge. He was in the 32nd Battalion Royal Fusiliers. He'd only just come to France in the early part of 1916. They went straight into the trenches at Plugstert or Plug Street near to Plug Street Wood, and he was killed in action there on the 21st of July 1916. It's a date more associated with fighting on the Somme, but he was holding a so-called quiet sector of the line on the day that he died, and he was killed in those day-to-day activities of trench warfare that I often talk about on this podcast. His parents ran a shop in Farnham in Surrey, and he's on the war memorial there. And he's buried in Bark Cemetery Extension, right next to the Plugstert Memorial. And again, I've been to his grave many, many times, and anytime I'm back there, it's a regular kind of feature on our ledger battlefield tours. I always pop over to go and see him. I can remember very clearly the day that I acquired his frame group of medals. I was down in Brighton Market, one of the places I went to regularly. It was every Saturday morning, and I'd got there quite late that day and walked almost to the end and found almost nothing. And then sitting on a table on a pile of books was this frame with the photograph and the medals in. And I knew it was one of those things that I hadn't found that it had found me, and he's been with me ever since. Just to my left, hanging on the wall, near to the bookcases there is two frame photographs in an elongated frame, one of which shows Atherton Harold Chisholm Marsh. He was an officer in the Ninth Lancers. He went to war with them in August 1914, was a pre-war regular. They were in the cavalry barracks at Canterbury. And then they went off to war. He took part in the cavalry charges or Dregney's just west of Mons in August 1914. Then up at Messines. He fought there in later in 1914 in the first Battle of Eape, and then was involved in the operations on the Frasenberg Ridge when the cavalry was dismounted and moved up as infantry. Later on he became a staff officer, and then he was killed as a staff officer with the 34th Division in the attack on Witsharter on the Messines Ridge, right at the end of those four years of fighting at Eape on the 28th of September 1918. So he'd been at the front by then for over four years, been in almost every battle, and somehow had managed to escape that without being wounded only to be killed in that final phase of the fighting with Eape in September 1918. He'd been educated at Eton, he appears on the Eton Roll of Honour, he was from Gaines Park at Epping in Essex, and the other photograph in the same frame with him is his son holding a teddy bear and a little ball. And he went on to become an officer in the Guards and the Guards Armoured Division and fought in Normandy and North West Europe in 1944-45 and went to Eton just like his father, but he survived. He went on to live a long, long life. And how that frame photograph ended up in a junk shop in Eastbourne, I'll never know. But again, it's been on the wall of everywhere that I've lived in ever since. These say kind of beacons to the Great War looking down on me. And I can't finish this chat off without mentioning someone whose artefacts I don't have. I have one artefact connected to him, which is a photograph of him, but someone whose story that I've researched and followed, and his pathway across the Great War I've followed too, and that of course is Eric Rupert Heaton. Eric Heaton, that young officer of the 16th Middlesex Regiment, killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, buried in Hawthorne number one, and I've told that story many times here on the podcast. A young officer writes home to his family on the eve of the battle, terribly moving letter. His last letter home saying that if he falls, do not let things be black for you. Remember me, basically. And they went there to visit his grave as a family, his sister, Irene, who I knew, his brother who'd been an army chaplain, and both the parents, they went there when that was a wilderness in 1919 and were photographed at the grave. Again, an image that I've used in the podcast and on the YouTube channel quite a few times. And I think with just these four examples, just by looking round the room that I'm in now, it kind of gives you a bit of an idea, Andy, just how much these stories can influence you, can fascinate you, possess you almost in a way, in a positive way, to remember these men and women connected to the stories and to see them, to view them as these beacons to your journeys across that landscape of the old front line. I think it's all part of those layers of the history that we often talk about. So those are just a few of my stories. Let me know some of yours in the comment section of the podcast website. And a great question, Andy, to kick off this fiftieth episode.

What Light Infantry Meant In 1914

SPEAKER_00 11:53

Question number two comes from Hendrik van der Sleeker in Belgium. During my visits to the cemeteries of the Great War or in the books I read, I regularly come across various unit names that contain the term light infantry. Durham Light Infantry, Duke of Cornwalls, Raw Marine Light Infantry. Having read some of the books on the Napoleonic Wars and also thinking of the fantastic Sharp series in the 1990s, I know that during the 18th and 19th century these units were deployed as skirmishers in front of the main infantry units, used rifles instead of muskets, and sometimes wore other uniforms. Were light units still deployed differently during the First World War, or did the use of the name light infantry primarily reflect military tradition? Well, essentially yes. The army'd moved on in a hundred years since the Peninsula War, which is depicted in those fantastic sharp novels and the TV series as well. But of course the traditions that had developed during that period before and since were all part of what the British Army was in nineteen fourteen. But that was a tradition, the use of light infantry in the way that you describe, that had ended by the Great War. There were no skirmishers, no light companies' tactics had changed, shaped of course by that experience of a century from the Peninsula War to the point where Britain goes into a European conflict in 1914. And light infantry regiments like the Durham Light Infantry and the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, King Shropshire Light Infantry, Ox and Bucks Light Infantry, King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, but also others like the Rifle Brigade and the King's Royal Rifle Corps and certain individual battalions that were considered rifle regiments or light infantry regiments like the Bucks Battalion, the Liverpool Rifles, the London Rifle Brigade, the Post Office Rifles, these were all part of what were a large proportion of the army in 1914, some of them very big regiments, like the King's Royal Rifle Corps and the Rifle Brigade. And these all kept on the traditions of those light infantry rifle regiments. They had black buttons, unlike the shiny brass buttons that most units had. They marched faster, and they called a bayonet a sword, for example. So those kind of traditions were kept on. But skirmishing in that way, that kind of fire and movement that we see depicted in sharp episodes and in the books was something that was part of the wider tactics of infantry by the outbreak of the Great War. That kind of warfare obviously had changed. But those regiments still occupied a certain status, I would say, within the army. There was a certain snobbishness in terms of status of some of these regiments. Not necessarily all of them, but certainly some of them. And some considered a few of these, like the Rifle Brigade and the King's Royal Rifle Corps, as elite. Now that's not in terms of how we would describe elite soldiers today, part of special forces, but a kind of socially elite unit. And regiments like the Rifle Brigade and the KRRs often attracted officers from moneyed and wealthy families. If you look at the roles of honour of public schools, of which there are many, you will see quite a dominance of the rifle cap badges from the Rifle Brigade and the King's Royal Rifle Corps. But the eliteness of these units and the perceived status of them, in some respects, was based on the past rather than the present reputation that would be gained during their operations in the Great War. And some, like the Rifle Brigade and the King's Royal Rifle Corps, to kind of push this idea of them having status, a perceived status, used their old 19th century and before titles. So up until the 1880s, every regiment of the British Army was a numbered regiment. The Royal Sussex were the 35th Foot, for example. The Rifle Brigade had been the 95th Rifles, and the King's Royal Rifle Corps were the 60th. And in even in contemporary Great War documents, you often see units of the Rifle Brigade being referred to as part of the 95th, and the regular battalions of the King's Royal Rifle Corps being called the 1st 60th and the 2nd 60th, a tradition and a kind of status that really hadn't existed for some decades by the time of the Great War, but that old identity, part of who they were, was still very present, particularly in the regular army that went to war in 1914. Many of the new army battalions of these rifle regiments and light infantry regiments were then brought together to reform light divisions. The light division is part of the history of the Peninsula War, which you can read about, but they decided to reform that so the 14th Light Division and then later the 20th Light Division were created. That was 12 battalions of rifle or light infantry battalions from different regiments in each division serving in this case on the Western Front. But battalions of all these different rifle and light infantry units were scattered across divisions of the British Army and fought on every front from Gallipoli to Salonica to Palestine to Mesopotamia and others besides. Collectively, they had a staggering contribution to the British Army's success in the Great War and the pages of its history that were created through those four years of conflict. And if we look at just a few of them, the Rifle Brigade, for example, had 28 battalions, 52 battle honours, ten men of the regiment were awarded the Victoria Cross, and over eleven and a half thousand men of the Rifle Brigade died in the Great War. The Kingsray Rifle Corps, they also had 28 battalions, 60 battle honours, seven Victoria Crosses, and nearly 13,000 dead. The Durham Light Infantry, much bigger regiment, they had 42 battalions, 59 battle honours, six Victoria Crosses and 12,500 dead. But even a small regiment, like the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, the DCLI, for example, with 15 battalions, they had 57 battle honours and over four and a half thousand dead. So when we travel that landscape of the First World War today, it's something just as you have done, we see reflected in the memorials. There's two memorials to the 20th Light Division, one on the Somme and one near Langemark. Harry Patch was a soldier in that division with the DCLI in 1917. There's the memorial to the 14th Light Division that was once on Railway Woods at the Belawada Ridge, now is at Hill 60, and we see of course the cap badges of all these units in the rows and rows of soldiers' headstones that we see in the silent cities. So while after the passage of more than a century, since that conflict with so many of these regiments disbanded and amalgamated, something of that history, I guess, has been lost. But when we look at them and their status in the Great War, we see that they kind of carried on the traditions that we see described in Bernard Cornwall's books as he looked at his beloved ninety fifth and sharp's rifles and all the other names that they have collectively got as a consequence of that literature. But nevertheless, in the Great War, while there was no Sharp, there were plenty of brave riflemen and light infantrymen who served across those battlefields of the Great

Gettysburg And Ypres Compared

SPEAKER_00 20:09

War. Question number three comes from Jennifer Marie McQueen in Illinois, USA. Jennifer asks, What similarities or influences might we find between American Civil War battlefields like those here in my country and the old front line? Have you been to a battlefield of one of the other conflicts that influenced the First World War? I have visited several here in America and sometimes can catch some similarities. I hope one day to tour some of the First World War battlefields, but I'm curious about your thoughts. Also, if you haven't been, I can't recommend enough the World War I Museum in Kansas City. This is a really interesting subject, the kind of memorialization of that landscape of the First World War. I guess is it unique? Well I have been to the American Civil War battlefields quite a few years ago now in the nineteen nineties, with for example a visit to Gettysburg, that kind of iconic battle of the Civil War. I've always seen a lot of similarities and connections between the American Civil War and the Great War. And that kind of, like so many aspects, when we talk about World War I meeting World War II, I guess you can say that about previous wars before 1914 as well. And in that civil war, you see trenches, you see barbed wire style defences, you see tunnelling and mines placed under positions and then blown, you see casualties on a staggering kind of scale, and a movement away from an old style of warfare towards a new one. So again, that's kind of parallels what would happen in the Great War. And when I went to see those battlefields, having of course already been to the Western Front, I could see similarities, I could see parallels there. I mean, we did a podcast recently where one of The people on it described how memorialized Gettysburg was and how he didn't want the Western Front to quite become like that. And it's true, as I'm I don't have to tell you, that Gettysburg is literally saturated with memorials to individuals and units and kind of everything else, but I think that's kind of all part of the story. Whether the first world war battlefields could ever be like that, they're not national parks in the same way that civil war sites are in America, I don't know. They are still communities where people live and go about their business and nations thrive because that land is now free. So there's a kind of different perspective to it in terms of what those battlefields mean to people who live there today than perhaps to someone who lives in Gettysburg. I mean, maybe not. But did it influence the Great War commemoration? Well, I guess it must have done. I mean, certainly that war influenced regular soldiers in the British Army before the First World War. Edmonds, who became the official historian, wrote a single volume history of the American Civil War, which is almost identical in structure and form to the volumes that he would go on to write after the Great War of the history of that conflict, and aspects of the Civil War were taught to young officers to give them an idea of, I guess, the power, potential power of modern war, which the Civil War was perhaps the first pointer to that. But in terms of the commemoration side and what we find at Gettysburg compared to the Somme or EP or any other battlefield of World War I, I guess the American Battle Monuments Commission, which was founded because of the Civil War to create cemeteries and memorials and everything else, and its subsequent commemoration of America's dead from the American Expeditionary Force after the end of the Great War, then it must have influenced their view of what those cemeteries and memorial sites would be like. I mean, recently I went up through the Mers Argonne battlefield area on the trip up towards the Maginot line, and we encountered memorial after memorial after memorial to American troops that fought through there in September and October and November of 1918, and none of those memorials would have really been out of place at Gettysburg or Fredericksburg or Antietam or wherever it is. So there's definitely a kind of influence there, but as you hint at, it's not just a civil war that potentially could influence what we see on the landscape today. Europe's most recent conflict was the Franco-Prussian War, which had been fought in 1870 to 71, had seen the defeat of France, the creation of the nation of Germany, had kind of emerged from that victory, and had really kind of paved a path to what would happen a few decades later with the Great War. But what it meant as well was that there were these battlefields across France and now Alsace-Lorraine, which was now German soil, which then commemorated that conflict as well. And again, recently I was on some Franco-Prussian battlefields, not for the first time. I mean, I lived on the Somme and there was fighting on the Somme in 1870, just down the road towards Amiens from Albea, and then just up the road in Bapome, and in the centre of Bapome, there is a memorial to General Faye Herb, who fought there in the Battle of Bapome in 1870. But on this trip, as we were in Alsace Rahane, we were again moving up to another part of the Maginot line to have a look at that, and we visited the battlefield at Wirth and Froschweiler. And this was for me quite an eye-opener because this had been German soil. The Germans had created a huge number of memorial sites there, massive statues in bronze, with Bavarian soldiers being cradled by eagles, for example, Bavarian lion on the hillside. There was a trail that you could follow that went right back to those decades after the Franco-Prussian War. There were burial sites of both French and German soldiers, most of them mass graves, and there were quite a few museums there as well. Now I I don't think they've been there for over a century, but already you've kind of got this infrastructure of commemoration, and that was an interesting kind of insight as to how those two nations would go on to represent their dead in the next big conflicts with each other in 1914. So I think there's quite a lot to learn. Learn from these earlier battlefields. But the peculiar circumstances of the Great War, for particularly Britain and the wider empire, now the Commonwealth, the scale of the dead, the scale, particularly of the missing, unparalleled in the British military experience, really formed a new landscape of commemoration in my mind, a new language, really. And while we can see influences from places like Gettysburg and other battlefields, and perhaps even the burial of the dead in the Crimean and the Boer Wars from a British perspective, the Great War changed everything. Then it kind of changed people's perspective of what commemoration should be. And we see that reflected in the cemeteries and the memorials, the description of those sites, Roger Kipling calling the cemeteries the silent cities, and then the whole idea of earlier architectural influence creating these new monuments in stone, from the cenotaph to the Chapval Memorial to the Meningate, and all of the culture that was then wound into that through ceremonies like the last post at the Meningate, or even simple veterans' pilgrimages there in the interwar period. I mean, this is a fascinating aspect of the history of the Great War, how these sites of memory were commemorated. And when we look at them, certainly from a British perspective, if I contrast those battlefields of the Franco-Prussian War that I was on recently, where both sides are pretty much well represented on that former field of battle, we contrast that to the Somme, which is heavily in the favour of the Allies when it comes to commemoration. You have to search out the German commemoration of it, and the whole kind of culture and language and essence really of that commemoration of Germany's role in the Great War is something very, very different indeed. So it's been great for me to kind of travel across that landscape, and I hope you, Jennifer, get a chance to see the First World War battlefields, and I would love to see the First World War Museum in Kansas City. That's something I haven't yet had a chance to get to.

Farming After War And The Dead

SPEAKER_00 29:22

Question number four comes from Ryan Aines in British Columbia, Canada. A question regarding farming. Did farmers have to wait to reclaim their land until the Greys registration units had done a sweep of the area? Or how did that work? They must have had some grisly stories of working the land post war, not so much the iron harvest, but the amount of human remains still present and a sense of duty to collect those remains, or perhaps not. Well, as we described a few times on here, when the civilians returned at the end of the Great War, a few on some battlefields began to return just after the armistice in November nineteen eighteen. A few were there for that Christmas nineteen eighteen nineteen, but most didn't start to trickle back until early nineteen nineteen, when the movement of displaced people began to change and they thought about returning to where they'd come from. Not all came back, of course, many stayed where they'd ended up. Huge numbers of Belgian refugees stayed in places like Birmingham and Manchester, for example. Some had gone up into the Netherlands and never returned from there. But when civilians came back to places like Eap or the Somme or Arras, they found this devastated land, the places where they'd once lived, the villages and the farms and the farmhouses and the barns, all literally blown off the map. And for many of them, it took quite a few years to even really work out where they'd been, decide what land was theirs, decide whether land that was now unclaimed because people had not come back could also be added to their land. I mean it was a complex, complex process. And within all of that were other things happening at the same time, the search for ordnance, the clearance of ordnance and war material from the surface. And all of this, plus the recovery of the dead, really takes at least a decade before proper farming can take place. So while people were farming, probably within a year of returning, it was fairly primitive and often interrupted because of the dangers that it would unearth. Shells, munitions, barbed wire, I mean all kinds of things. Working around that were the graves registration units and the recovery units, going out to look for the dead that had not been recovered, going to look for the places where graves had once been made and the markers had been damaged or partially or in some cases completely destroyed, and then the kind of wider search that then looked for the missing as well. Now that was never ever finished, as we know, because remains are still being found to this day. And all of this was kind of weaving in and around each other: civilians and farmers, war graves registration units, men tasked with the recovery and disposal of ordnance, those who were then charged to remake roads, help rebuild buildings. In places like Northern France, most of the brick houses were rebuilt from about 1922-23 onwards. So all of these people are kind of winding themselves round each other and letting civilians do their bit, military, former military do their bit, and eventually from the kind of mid-1920s onwards, the war dead clearance that had been made by different units, including the Chinese Labour Corps being tasked with this, had largely ended. But farmers were encouraged, continued to be encouraged, to declare the finding of human remains. Because once the farmers had reclaimed their land, rebuilt their farmhouse and their barns, proper farming, I guess, then began, and in the work that would be required to make that operate effectively, they would often uncover human remains when ditches, drainage ditches were constructed, when water pipes might be put in, and all kinds of other things that would result in digging down to a level at the bottom of a shell hole or trenches or burial sites and human remains would be found. Now we'll never know how much of this wasn't declared, but there was talk of giving payments to farmers to encourage them to declare human remains. It's not clear if that ever really happened, but certainly when we look at the burial reports, if you look at cemeteries where there's a large number of post-war concentrations, you'll see that they continue to trickle in, being found by farmers and workers and construction sites right through that interwar period and well into the late 1930s as another war was approaching, particularly on some battlefields more than others, where there was a kind of development, but it then seems to have declined a little bit in the post-second world war period. And what's interesting then that there were two cemeteries that remained open from that period right up to the 1990s, one in Belgium and one in France. In Belgium it was Cement House near Langemark, and in France it was Turlington British Cemetery, not far from Boulogne. And what that meant was if a soldier, the remains of a soldier, was found on the Somme, which is in France, that would go to Turlington Cemetery, and if they were found near Passchendaal, it would be reburied in Cement House. Smaller burial sites that were then closed, particularly civilian cemeteries, were moved into the respective cemeteries as well. And there are entire plots of periods when in the 1950s and 60s and on into the 70s when graves were found and moved. Now I don't have any figures to say how many were found during that period. My guess would be that it would be a lot less than the 1930s, for example, and perhaps one day an analysis of the burials in those two cemeteries might tell us how long this kind of thing continued and what kind of scale it was until archaeology took over, because that's the next phase of the recovery today, where archaeology from the 2000s, early 2000s onwards, amateur archaeology like the diggers at Eape, through to professionals like Simon Vertigum and many others doing this kind of work have recovered the dead on a large scale, in some cases, such as the project at Fromel, all those years ago. So it's something that kind of hasn't gone away, but in terms of that post-war period, as you suggest, Ryan, it became, I guess, part of the everyday culture of civilians who returned to those battlefields. The dead, the munitions, the construction of those sites of memory that we spoke about in the previous question were all part of the new culture that returning civilians had to really become a part of, and if not a part of, they had to certainly deal with it. And in many respects are still dealing with it to this day. And I think that period of the recovery of the dead created another of those legacies of the First World War. There were so many of them. The landscape changed, the landscape polluted, the iron harvest, the recovery of the dead, and so many more. Besides, this was all part of that new world that the Great War had created. A world that resonated amongst those people that had to live with that legacy in that interwar period, and the echoes of that still continue over a century later. And just today I was reading about the reburial of some soldiers on the first world war battlefields this week, and I'm sure a century from now they will still be recovering, still reburying soldiers from this conflict. So some aspects of that legacy never go away.

Where To Send Questions Next

SPEAKER_00 37:26

So that's where we bring this episode, our fiftieth episode of the Questions and Answers to an end. Thanks for all your questions for this one. Keep those questions coming by the usual methods of email or the Discord server, and there's a few others besides. There's links to those in the show notes, and I'll see you again soon for some more questions and answers here on the Old Frontline. You've been listening to an episode of the Old Frontline with me, military historian Paul Reed. You can follow me on Twitter at Somcor, you can follow the podcast at OldFrontline Pod. Check out the website at oldfrontline.co.uk where you'll find lots of podcast extras and photographs and links to books that are mentioned in the podcast. And if you feel like supporting us, you can go to our Patreon page, patreon.com slash oldfrontline, or support us on buymea coffee at buymeacoffee.comslash oldfrontline. Links to all of these are on our websites. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you again soon.