Incredibly, this is our fortieth question and answer episode.

Forty episodes of the QA's staggering.

It's something that I started after a suggestion from a regular listener who lives in Tunbridge Worlds, who spoke to a friend of mine and mentioned that in some of the other podcasts that they listened to, unconnected to the First World War, they had regular Q ⁇ A sessions, and would that be something that I'd consider?

And I wasn't really sure how it would be received, but I was already getting a lot of questions which I was answering by email, and this is something that happens on battlefield doors, obviously not by email because the people are sitting in a coach with me, someone at the front asks a question, and the answer probably will be of interest to a wider audience.

So I then get on the microphone and I talk to everyone.

And this is kind of the same thing, but to a much bigger audience through the podcast itself.

But the QA episodes have become incredibly popular.

Some of our highest peaking episodes in terms of listener figures have been QA episodes.

So I think that what people like is having essentially four different elements of Great War history in one episode.

A lot of diverse topics that probably wouldn't necessarily make an episode in their own right, but it gives us a chance to talk about those subjects.

And I must say that the quality and diverse nature of the questions that you've sent in are really what makes these episodes.

So thank you for that.

Thank you for helping me reach this milestone of 40 QA episodes, and please, please keep those questions coming.

And this week as well has been a week in which the BBC on BBC 4 have repeated my very first television programme that I made for mainstream television, and that was the Forgotten Battlefield, which was filmed in the summer of 2001 following the work of the diggers and then broadcast the following March.

And following the BBC setting up a YouTube channel and putting extracts from some of their factual programmes on there relating to history, a clip of Forgotten Battlefield got 1.7 million downloads in just a few weeks.

So that prompted the BBC to engage in a conversation about Forgotten Battlefield and them showing, re-showing that episode from 2002, which has not been on mainstream television since I think about 2007.

It's currently, as I broadcast this in mid-November, it's still on iPlayer, and I think it is for about a month.

So if you haven't already had a chance to check it out, I would recommend it.

It's an archaeology program showing the archaeology of the battlefields at Eap, that area uncovered by the diggers all those years ago, and showing things that really have not been seen before or since, and probably will not be seen in that kind of documentary again.

And for me personally, it was incredible to kind of think back over all those years and remember what I saw there.

And not long after it was rebroadcast last week, I nipped over to EAP with John Hayes Fisher, who's the producer director of that program, who we've worked together for many years in other television projects and are now working together on the Old Frontline YouTube channel.

And we popped over on one of our regular day trips and we went to EAP and we revisited the Forgotten Battlefield and stood at some of the graves of those that the diggers recovered, including the two Royal Welsh fusiliers.

So it felt as if that whole story really had kind of come full circle.

Anyway, that's a bit of catch up on the podcast.

Now let's move on to in this special fortieth episode, let's move on to this week's questions.

Question number one comes from Ian Henley.

Ian asks I once went to a site maybe in the Reims region called the Mandamassage, an amazingly preserved hillside trench system that could have been abandoned yesterday.

Do you have a list of top sites that perhaps are overlooked for a visitor?

I'm always trying to find something I've not visited before, so on our last trip we went into the trench system in Thieved Val Wood.

Well thanks for this one Ian.

It's always good to start a Q ⁇ A session with something relating to the battlefields themselves and especially this fortieth episode.

And you've raised a really interesting point there about sites where we can find the archaeology of the Great War, the remains of the Great War, and what that then tells us about the history of the Great War.

Where can we find those kind of sites beyond the very well-known ones?

And even on that British sector of the Western Front, you've mentioned Thief Val Wood, which you have to visit by appointments with a guide from the Ulster Tower who takes you into the reconstructed trench system on the edge of the wood, and you see mortar pits and dugout entrances.

It's a fantastic visit, and I'm glad you got a chance to go in there.

And if any of you are over on the Somme battlefields, go to the Ulster Tower, make that appointment, join the tour and take a visit into the wood.

It is absolutely fascinating to do so.

But in terms of some other sites, I've looked at this in a few podcast episodes, particularly on what I call the French part of the Western Front, that area beyond the Somme.

And indeed, there is an episode called Beyond the Somme that hopefully inspires people to take that journey beyond the British sector of the Western Front to see what was really the bulk of that Western Front, to see some of these amazing places.

But if I'm going to look at kind of an overview and let's say pick five locations that perhaps are not as well known where we can find a connection to the First World War, we'll start in Flanders, not near to Epe, but much nearer to the coast to the north, along the old railway line at Parvise.

Parvise was a village north of Yape, about halfway between Yape and the coast itself, where that section of the Western Front, held at different points by French troops, and then the Belgian army ran across the flat lands there, the flat ground, which had been flooded following the opening of the sluice gates up on the Issa Canal, which had flooded the Issa Plain and flooded that wider area of North Flanders.

And on a flat landscape that was flooded, any kind of rising ground gave you some kind of advantage.

And trench systems, of course, could not be dug, not as such.

And what both sides in that area did is they used elevations on the terrain to occupy them as outposts or static lines.

So the railway line at Pervise, north of the village, was on an embankment, and that could then be defended.

And you can walk this.

The railway line was, I think, torn up in the 60s or 70s.

It doesn't run up to the coast anymore, it's a walkway, it's a cycle path, it's a bridle way, and it takes you up onto that bit of the landscape of the First World War in that area.

Now, Parvice was an important village just behind the front line, and there were two British nurses who worked there, Elsie Knocker and Marie Chisholm.

They occupied the so-called cellar house of Parvise, which was a cellar in one of the buildings there, where they had their own kind of private medical unit really to help the Belgian soldiers in that part of the front because the Belgian army had lost a lot of its medical units in the early phase of the First World War.

I mean, that is a subject for another day for its own podcast.

But the area around that village, when you walk up along the railway line, you can see the importance of even a slight rise on an embankment like that, and more importantly, there's a lot of remains of the defences there, concrete structures that were built by Belgian soldiers from headquarters through to firing positions, and as you get further up that railway line towards Ramskapel, you'll find some bigger and bigger concrete structures.

And in some of the villages like Parvice, there are observation towers which you can still visit as well.

So that is a really important part of the front.

That Belgian sector of the Western Front, north of Eap, where you will reach out and touch quite a lot of the past on that landscape, and it's actively now preserved, which is a really good thing.

Coming down to the Somme, which many people visit on a regular basis, and they go to the trenches at the Newfoundland Park or book a tour to Tiepval Wood.

What visitors do less of is cross the river Somme and go to places like Soyer Corps, for example, which is a village in that flat Sonterre plain, where in a wood there there is a German trench system from 1916, which was actively preserved in the 1990s, and where you can walk around a section of the battlefield where the French fought the Germans in that 1916 battle, and that is managed by the wider Somme Tourist Authorities and the effectively the County Council, and it gives us a good insight into the fighting in that part of the Somme battlefield.

So that's on that northern part of the front that we would more closely associate with the British and Commonwealth forces.

Once we get into that French part of the Western Front, beyond the Somme, there are so many places to choose from, really.

And if I was to say what are the best places where we can find really interesting, meaningful, and incredible trench systems from the First World War.

I mean, there are lots of them if you care to look, but let's look at three of those to complete a kind of list of five with Parvice and Sawyer Corps, and then these next three in the French sector.

One would be the Bois Brule, that is near to the village of Marbot in the Saint Miel salient, and this was where the French met the Germans in the fighting at the beginning of the First World War, where a trench system was established in that Bois Brule, and there were quite substantial attacks there in 1915, which resulted in heavy losses on both sides.

And when the front went static and remained static for quite a long time, the Germans reinforced their trench system there with concrete positions, so you can go into that Bois Brule and you can walk through those German trenches with concreted fire steps, firing positions, parapets.

I mean it is really quite incredible to see.

And the wider wood beyond, if you follow the German line up through that forested area there, there are bunkers, further trench systems, it just goes on and on.

And there was a German hospital built into a bunker system there that was later damaged.

That is also preserved.

There's some original German cemeteries in that area as well, where you can see some of the early graves and even some unit memorials as well.

So it is a place where you will literally be tripping over the past of the Great War on that modern landscape.

And also in the Bois Brule is a section of recreated French trenches, and that's the image that I'm going to use for the thumbnail for this episode, where the French army some years ago went in there, the modern French army, and created a early war system of French trenches to give the visitor an idea of what the French positions in that area look like facing the German ones that which have kind of not quite preserved themselves, but because there's a lot of concrete there, they've lasted much longer.

The French trenches, which were shallower and more basic, have kind of disappeared into the wooded area.

There are shallow depressions, but here they've actually recreated part of the line.

So it's a place you can go to to literally see both sides of the battlefield.

And if we continue beyond that Saint Miel salient, heading towards Pont à Mousson, you'll come to the Bois de la Pret.

And the Bois de la Pret, a name probably unfamiliar to most of you, was again the scene of heavy fighting at various points during the First World War, an area where there is a vast French cemetery from the Second World War full of prisoners of war who were brought back from Germany to be buried there, but there are First World War burials in the area too.

And once you go into the Bois de la Pret itself, there are some original memorials, but the whole wood there, almost the forest, is literally full of trench systems with original barbed wire, barbed wire pickets, positions everywhere.

When I first went there in the 1980s, the amount of ordnance lying around was quite staggering.

There were helmets and water bottles and mess tins and all this kind of stuff lying around in shell holes.

I mean, all of that has gradually gone over those nearly 40 years.

But the site itself really is quite incredible, and there are literally miles and miles and miles of trenches in the Bois de la Pret.

There are probably more trenches in that one wooded area than on the whole of the British sector of the Western Front preserved within wooded areas there.

So it just gives you an idea of how vast and how important and how dense the trench systems are in some of these places.

And the Bois de la Pret is something that we will definitely be returning to, and I'm hoping to make a visit down there to record some stuff for the YouTube channel in the near future.

But we're going to end towards the end of the Western Front with our fifth and final location, Le Lange.

We're sticking with the subject, the theme of trenches, because Le Lange is up on the Vosges Mountains, where the trenches there are cut into the rock.

It is really absolutely incredible to go there and see the views across that mountainous region.

I went there once, and most of the high points around me were covered in snow.

It's a position which was on German soil in 1940, and it was one of the symbolisms, the importance of this is the French took the war to German soil by invading that bit of Alsace-Lorraine by attacking it, and French troops came up this incredible slope towards the Germans on the high point at La Lange, captured part of the German line.

Both sides shared one trench and they gradually fought their way over that trench system.

The whole area on the crest of that part of the Vosges Mountains was then preserved, and you can walk through a massive trench system with loopholes and firing positions and communication trenches, and there's a fantastic museum close by which tells the story of the Great War at La Lange and in that wider area of the Vosges, that end, if you like, of the Western Front.

So there's much more I could say and many more places that I could recommend, Ian, but hopefully that's given you a little bit of a taster, a little bit of an insight, and hopefully prompted you to perhaps go and find at least some of those places on your next visit to the old front line.

So moving on to question number two, and this one comes from Dan Fettel.

It's kind of following on with that theme of trenches.

Dan asks, I was wondering what happened when an enemy took over a trench, what changes would they make in the immediate aftermath to make it their own?

How would the support and communication trenches affect their ability to defend it?

Now you make a really good point here, Dan, because when an attack goes in and it's successful, the German positions, if it's an attack by the French or the British, or the Allied positions, if it's an attack by the Germans, they would be captured, and you've now moved your line forward.

What do you do to the trench or trenches that you've captured to turn them into your new positions?

And this is something that happened many, many times on the Western Front.

If we'd take just one area and followed that through with trench maps, we would see how part of a line would essentially develop over the course of the four years with the establishment of the line, with localized attacks, then perhaps a big attack, and the line would be pushed back at times, then following later offensives, it might be pushed back again, and there's this kind of pendulum effect, the toing and throwing across many of those first world war battlefields right along all 450 miles of the Western Front.

But in an attack, when a force has captured an enemy position, they've captured a trench which is then set up to face their positions.

So the bit where the enemy would fire from, the parapet, is facing towards their old lines.

So that has to change.

So the first thing that would happen is they capture that forward trench, that first line trench, and then immediately set about making it defensible by turning the parapet into the parados, and the parados, the back of the trench, into the new parapet, because that's now facing towards the next line of enemy trenches where the enemy will no doubt still be.

So the attacking in the early phase of the war, the attacking troops probably had that responsibility.

They'd go forward, capture a trench, and immediately work on that trench to make it defensible.

But as the war went on, it was realized that if you give one unit all of the tasks, the chance of success is reduced.

So units would go forward with attacking troops to help them with those kind of tasks.

So what you see, for example, on the first day of the Somme is British units going over the top with elements from their divisional pioneer battalion, often broken up into companies.

So four companies can be split between four different attacking units, and they go forward to help with this kind of work because they're soldiers, they're infantry soldiers, they're trained to fight, but they're pioneers, so they're carrying equipment with them, picks and shovels and other engineering equipment that they can then use to quickly turn that captured enemy trench into, in this case of the first day of the song, into a new British trench which can then be defended against the counter-attacks.

So while the infantry have captured the trench and now defending it, the pioneers have gone forward and they're helping to make that a properly defensible position.

And in some cases, field companies of the Royal Engineers would also be used to do these kind of tasks as well.

And there were three of those field companies in every infantry division, so they were always available to assist in this way.

And I think what it shows is the importance of tools.

We we looked at the kind of weapons of trench warfare in one episode, and it's not just about the bombs and bullets and the bayonets, tools are just as important.

If it's a war, a troglodite war where you're digging in, the ability and the tools that help you dig in are just as important.

So the shovel becomes just as important as a personal weapon, especially in situations like this where you're capturing enemy ground and you're turning those trenches into your own.

Now, if you've captured the enemy front line, as you've mentioned in your question, Dan, ahead of you are the support lines and the reserve lines and the communication trenches.

So the next task, because you've probably got two former German communication trenches, if it's a British attack, coming into the line that you've captured, you need to block those straight away.

So a bomb block would be created.

They get rubbish, detritus, sandbags, tear them off the parapet and the parados, and create two blocks which they would immediately post men to.

And some of the guys that I interviewed in the 80s were involved in this kind of work.

One of them was a Lewis gunner, and his job was when they captured one of these positions to set his Lewis gun up, facing straight down this communication trench on a slightly elevated position.

The bomb block was created.

There were men behind it defending it, but he had a clear line of fire.

And when the Germans launched a counter-attack to try and take that bomb block, knock it down, get back into their old trench, he was able to lay down automatic fire that stopped them from doing it.

So what we see then are these kind of mini battles taking place as these positions are then captured, turned around in terms of the defence, and then held against enemy attacks.

And that then gives them a staging point to carry on this attack.

Later on in the war, other battalions would have passed through them in this leapfrog manner to go for the next line, and when they got to the support line, the next line of trench, they would have done exactly the same thing, possibly had some more pioneers or engineers attached to them to do those kind of tasks, and the whole thing would be repeated until the whole line or whatever the objective was captured.

And I recently, too, the podcast supporters gave a talk about the Battle of Messines, and that's a classic example of this, where the whole ridge is captured in one day effectively, and unit after unit leapfrogs their way through, captures the ground, and importantly, most importantly, holds it against German counter-attacks to allow more units to come up to give them support to keep the momentum of the battle going, and the exploitation of having broken through the enemy lines can be maximized by doing that kind of thing.

So it was something that was developed essentially in reaction to what trench warfare was.

It was fairly primitive in the early years of the war, but it got better as that trench war developed, and both sides fought battles within those trenches and learned how to do this kind of thing.

And one other final element of it is once you've captured an enemy position, behind you is the old no man's land, and beyond that is your original front line, and you need to join that up.

So again, pioneers or engineers or perhaps men detailed from your unit are then sent forward to dig a new communication trench across no man's land to connect up your old front line with the position that you've captured.

Occasionally they would use tunnellers or mining and boring companies to place a pushpipe mine under that old no man's land, blow a charge and create an instant, often shallow trench, which could then be expanded upon to create a new communication trench linking these two positions.

So again, this was all part of kind of perfecting the way of warfare in that trench warfare, those trench battles, those classic trench battles on the Western Front during the Great War.

And I hope, Dan, that's given you a little bit more insight into how that kind of fighting took place.

Moving on to question number three.

This one comes from John in Kent.

John asks, a recent article in the London Times newspaper quoted research by Microsoft, which suggested that the role of historians was one of the jobs most at risk from artificial intelligence.

In fact, it was listed as number two under the threat below interpreters and translators.

I'm playing devil's advocate here as I'm a big fan and subscriber to the old frontline, but what do you think it is that makes the podcast AI proof?

Well, that is a really good and interesting question, John.

Essentially, I guess the easy answer is me.

I guess that I make it AI proof because AI hasn't lived my life, it hasn't had my experiences, it hasn't spoken to all those hundreds of veterans, walked probably the equivalent of thousands of miles across battlefields of the First World War and done all that research in dark and dusty archives and just about everywhere else that I've been.

But that is kind of an easy response, really.

I think that the important thing is to understand that artificial intelligence is here to stay.

We can't turn back the clock on that, but we need to be wary of it.

And I've been a very early adopter of technology from the very beginning.

I had a computer in 1979, and I learned how to program and code, and I've used technology for historical research ever since.

I remember when I was at university, they had some BBC computers which you could run databases on, and I put in details of Royal Sussex men and was able to pull out all kinds of information showing trends in casualties and how certain battles affected Sussex in a certain way.

I put in all my research on the South Downs, and that enabled me to come up with the figures for how many towns and villages in Sussex were directly affected by the losses at the attack on the boarshead on the 30th of June 1916, for example.

So I've used that kind of technology for a very, very long time, and then computers, PCs, Mac, and everything else came along, and all of this helps.

And look at how much material is out there for us to consult online now compared to you know when I first started, which was pretty much all archive-related research, it's so much easier now.

Now, AI, and I looked at it from the very, very beginning when it first came in, does potentially have some use because it can again shortcut this kind of thing to enable us to get to an answer and to discover and understand things perhaps a lot quicker.

But what I realize in the early days of AI is it was incredibly unreliable and inaccurate because it was only based on a small amount of evidence.

So if you asked it things, it would often get things wrong, and it continues to get things wrong because again, its knowledge base, while that's grown, is still only limited.

It doesn't have access to war diaries, it doesn't have access to transcripts, certainly not at the moment, transcripts of podcasts, for example, so it can't crawl those and get information, and there's all kinds of other things that it doesn't have access to.

So what it can tell you is only of limited use, and one thing that you'll see cited in many of the responses to AI-generated material is things like Wikipedia.

Now, Wikipedia is a lot better than it used to be, but it still contains a lot of errors.

So I think we have to be pretty cautious about this.

And one of the things that I did a while ago, I was looking at it from the kind of work that I do in my 9-5 job, which is running ledger battlefield tours.

I thought, wonder what it would do if I asked it to develop and design a new battlefield tour.

So I asked it, I asked it to design a tour looking at the significant places at EAP and Flanders in the First World War.

And because it didn't really understand where locations were, part of its answer took it down to the Somme and Arras, and it didn't understand that they had no connection to EAP or Flanders.

So that was an interesting part of the response.

But one of the things that it came up, it recommended Langamark as a location to go to, and it made reference to the Langamark massacre of British soldiers in 1918.

So I asked it, What is this?

and it came back that on the walls of the memorial surrounding the Camaradengram and the mass grave at Langamark was the names of two British soldiers, and it believed, it it gave this as fact, that they had been part of a massacre of British soldiers there in nineteen eighteen.

So I asked it for more details, it couldn't really pull out much more than that, except that this was an incident during the German offensive of April nineteen eighteen, when German troops had swept across that region, taken British soldiers prisoner, and then shot them out of hand.

Now the two men that it referenced had not even died in April nineteen eighteen, they died much later in the war.

They'd once been buried in cemeteries near to the Belgian city of Tournay, so quite some way from Eap, so they'd not been originally buried at Langamark, so they couldn't be part of any Langamark massacre, and when I asked AI what was its sources for this Langamark massacre, it couldn't really tell me.

Now at the time I just put that down to a misreading of some facts, but I've seen cases of things unconnected to military history or history full stop where AI has kind of invented things, which is a worrying aspect of its implementation, and it's been challenged on this and then admitted that it had made these things up.

So again, this is all part of being cautious about the use of AI.

But going to the heart of your question here, John, saying that historians are at risk from AI, I guess on one level they are.

There's huge amounts of AI generated material already on YouTube to do with the first and the second world war, much of it inaccurate, much of it really of little use, but it's consumed in vast amounts.

And earns the creators a lot of money, and it becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy because of that.

And I think it's important that human historians like me challenge this on a regular basis.

I saw on Twitter the other day someone trailing on, I think near to Remembrance Sunday, a movie that they'd made about the First World War.

It was a fictitious story, it had a kind of fantasy element to it, but it was a very poor depiction of the history and the subject of the First World War, but very quickly could be accepted as fact.

So it's important to challenge that, as I did, as others did, and I think that that is really important to do so.

Now, one of the things that I do see on a positive side as a trend on YouTube at the moment is a desire from the audience of the people who watch YouTube for authenticity.

They're kind of already getting fed up with AI generated material and they want real people.

Now I'm not any kind of TV star or any kind of glamorous-looking individual.

I'm a middle-aged guy, but I know my subject.

And what I've found with my YouTube channel is people respond to me just standing in a field or walking down a lane or coming through a trench and telling them the story of where I am, what it is, how it fits into the history of the Great War.

And that is encouraging because it's saying that an audience doesn't want this generated material, artificially generated material, it wants the authentic real deal.

And what I can bring to it, of course, is all those things that I've done.

The archaeology that I've seen, the places that I've visited, the people that I've met on those journeys, and then going back to the veterans, all of the stories that I can tell that they told me that often link us to these locations that we visit on these battlefields.

And perhaps a hundred years from now, maybe not even a hundred, perhaps AI might be able to replicate all of that, I don't know.

But I certainly think for now, authenticity and the human connection to the subject of something like warfare, which is about humans, which is about ordinary men and women in the extraordinary circumstances of conflict.

I think that an audience will always want that authentic voice telling them those stories.

They might be momentarily entertained by fancy graphics and little short video clips, but most people, if they're serious about a subject, want to take that one step or more further, and I guess that's where the human element, the human delivery of history, in this case Great War history, that's where it comes to the fore.

And long, long may that continue.

So thanks for that question, John.

I'm sure AI and the whole subject of AI and what it can do for us, because it can do things for us.

For example, I've used it to read French handwriting in war diaries.

It's really difficult, even for me as a French speaker, to read some of that original material that's in French war diaries from the period of the First World War.

But AI can learn how to read it, it can then transcribe it into digital text, and then it can translate it for you, of course, but you can then do your own translation of it as well.

So there are uses of it, but we have to, I think, be wary of it and be wary of it not getting out of control in terms of what the narrative of the First World War or any subject that it chooses to explain, we must always, I think, challenge what we see, because challenging and asking questions is all part of what history really is.

So moving on to our fourth and final question in this special fortieth QA episode, we've got a question from Angus Cole on a subject that I've often received questions about, and it's about time I guess that I answered one of these, and that's about generalship in the First World War.

So Angus Cole asks, What are your thoughts on the generals in Allied command, both British and French, and the roles that they played in the Great War?

Were they right to be vilified and viewed as incompetent and thus responsible for the waste of so many lives, or were they strategists trying everything possible to bring the war to a speedy conclusion with as few casualties as possible?

Well, this is a great question that generalship command in the First World War is perhaps one of the most controversial subjects of the First World War, and one that kind of polarizes people in all kinds of ways, and something that has evolved and re-evolved and will no doubt re-evolve again as time goes on.

And going back to our previous question, who knows what AI might contribute or not to this subject.

But it really deserves its own podcast.

I mean, I know I say this about so many questions in the QA's, but this one does.

Generalship is is long overdue as a subject for us to cover in the podcast, and we will get to that.

But in terms of your question, Angus, I think the thing, as I've often said on this podcast to remember, is that in 1914 everybody was prepared for war, just not the war that they found themselves fighting very, very quickly.

They go to war in 1914 for a war of movement, for a rapid war, a war that they'd trained for, with swift movement of infantry, with cavalry playing a role, with railways taking troops to locations to fight battles in vast open plains, and all of that happens in the early months of the First World War, but very quickly, through a whole series of circumstances, the war becomes static, and both sides in the west and in the east dig in very, very quickly indeed, and it becomes this vast siege war, static war on a massive, unprecedented scale.

And the generals who have been trained for the kind of war that they'd gone to fight in 1914 were now faced with a conflict that they really didn't truly understand.

Some understood it more than others, others for a long time refused to understand it, trying to bring back elements of the old style of warfare.

But it was clear that this was not only a new century, the early years of a new century, but the early years of a new way of warfare, a modern war, an industrial war with the capacity to create armaments and equipment on an industrial scale, move industrial scale armies around using industry and railways, and then use the weapons created by that industry to kill and wound people, injure people on an industrial scale as well.

And this was something that a lot of senior commanders on all sides really struggled to get their heads round, and it took those early years of the war, once the war went static, and both sides had attempts to try and break that static nature.

The British with attacks on the northern part of the Western Front in early 1915, the French at different parts on their line, the Germans using gas at Epe in April 1915.

All of these were attempts to try and end that static war.

And one of the things that they often found difficult was the exploitation of a breakthrough.

Breakthroughs could be achieved, but men were often in the wrong place to exploit that.

Reserves were too far back.

There were situations in which troops did much better than expected, but those could not be, those situations could not be exploited because the greatest issue that these men had, not from just the beginning, but throughout the entire war, even when they got much better at this, was command and control.

Without radio, without the ability to talk as a commander directly to your troops in the field, it was really difficult to coordinate things.

They were fighting a modern war with modern weapons, often with modern approaches, but with antiquated communication systems, fixed communications, flags, lamps, all of this kind of stuff, not radio sets.

There was no ability to transmit and receive voice.

So that really hampered the ability of commanders to properly do their job.

And while we see the development of war fighting on the Western Front carry on from the battles of 1915, in the case of the British, on into the experience on the Somme through to the fighting on the Hindenburg line and at Messines and at Passchendale and at Combray, and lessons are learned again and again and again.

There is a cost to that learning, and the cost is always in human lives.

At the time, this was considered acceptable.

It wasn't that people were somehow cold to these losses, indifferent to them.

Far from it.

When you read the papers of senior commanders, they're mindful of these losses.

The losses affect them very often greatly, and you see that in their diaries and in their letters.

But it was considered acceptable in the scale of the kind of conflict they were fighting.

More than a century on from it, we see it as less acceptable.

One of the legacies, I guess, of the First World War is the wider public's inability to accept the consequences of conflict, which are casualties.

That's something that we struggle with in the modern world.

And it's not that the value of life was less a hundred years ago, far from it.

It is just that that attitude, I guess, came out of the experience of the Great War, with that million dead of Britain and the Empire and all the other nations that suffered so terribly, that created a legacy that made future commanders think about those losses in a different way.

But what you clearly see is an army that goes to war prepared for war, finds itself fighting a very different kind of war, learns from that, adapts to it, and in the case of British and Empire troops and the French fighting alongside us, adapts to enable victory in that final phase of the First World War.

They put those lessons that are learned with such high losses and such high cost to practical use on the battlefield, and in the case of the British Army, create a truly modern army that fights that battle at Amiens, for example, in 1918, and then fights its way through the Hindenburg line and beyond to the open warfare of the last few weeks of the conflict.

And in terms, and I'm not going to name individual generals because that really is a podcast in its own right, but in terms of high command, the best generals, in my view, are the ones that enable people beneath them who have combat experience, who have seen and taken part in battles, they enable them to come up with the ideas and the approaches and the tactics and the weaponry required to create victory, to create the ability to smash an enemy line, break through it, and exploit that breakthrough and end the conflict.

The best commanders enable those men.

The men at the very top don't always come up with these ideas or these war-winning approaches, but the best ones enable those beneath them who have some idea to develop those ideas, and as commanders they bring all that together into a unified plan.

It's a complex subject.

There's lots of books that will tell you that commanders of the Great War were butchers and bunglers on one side and some of the most incredible commanders that have ever existed on the other side, and there's a ton of material out there from Alan Clark's ridiculous book from the 1960s, The Donkeys, through to the work of people like Professor Gary Sheffield and my old mentor John Terrain, who wrote Haig the Educated Soldier back in the 60s, I think, which kind of pioneered a new view of the First World War during a time when popular culture, like Oh What a Lovely War, was still pushing that agenda of butchers and bunglers and waste and men being sent to pointless and futile deaths.

And that is something that still is very, very strong to this day, and many will never accept that commanders like Haig or Rawlinson or Goff were good commanders.

I mean it is an endless, endless debate, but there's plenty of material out there for you to get your teeth into, and it's a subject that we will definitely return to in the main podcast somewhere down the line.

So with that, fantastic question.

We've gone on slightly longer than usual, but it is a 40th episode.

I hope you found this week's QA's of interest.

Thanks to all of you who've submitted questions for this episode and for all of the previous episodes, and we've got plenty of material sitting in the inbox waiting to be answered over the course of the next few months.

But keep those questions coming in.

I absolutely love receiving them, and you can send them in via email or the Discord server, and there's links to both of those in the show notes for this episode, and there's a few other ways of doing it as well.

So thanks for those, and until we meet again for some more QAs here on the Old Frontline.

You've been listening to an episode of the Old Frontline with me, Military Historian Paul Reed.

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