One of the things I've come to learn by doing the old frontline podcast over more than five and a half years now is how popular the episodes are where I talk about veterans of the Great War.

If you've been listening to this podcast for quite a long time, or perhaps you've only joined us recently, you may have realized that back in the nineteen eighties and nineties, I spent a lot of my spare time tracking down and interviewing Great War veterans.

I was kind of in one of those right place, right time movements.

There I was coming out of my teens into becoming a young man, being a student, being in the southern part of Great Britain, close to quite a lot of retirement areas where there were retirement homes, retirement bungalows, and in some cases places, specialist places for disabled ex-servicemen.

And so being at that time when the last vestiges of that Great War generation were still alive, being in a place where a lot of older people had moved to to retire, I literally had these guys on my doorstep.

And while I never tracked them all down, I missed so many, often just by a few days, I was privileged, honoured really, to interview hundreds of Great War veterans during that period.

Now at the time I understood how it enhanced my wider knowledge of the Great War, and as I began to make more and more visits to the battlefields, how I could connect what those veterans told me with places on the ground that I knew today, and places that I was yet to discover and did discover through speaking to these veterans.

So when one mentioned a village like Fampu, off I went to track that village down, to visit that bit of ground, to walk that battlefield and understand it, and see it often through the lens, the prism, the experience of those veterans that I'd just interviewed.

And very often when I went away on trips, and this is one of the things that I eternally miss really, is that I come back from a visit to the battlefields, and that would prompt all kinds of questions about different aspects of First World War history, and I would get on the phone to George Butler, Malcolm Vivian, to Harry Coates, to whoever it was, and ask them questions which shed light on the subject in a way that book research, archive research just couldn't possibly do.

And as I've said before, I didn't quite take it for granted, but I did presume that lots of other people were doing the same thing, and it wasn't really that unusual if you were interested in this subject, surely you'd go and track down these men just like me.

And I know there were some professional authors at the time, like Lynn MacDonald and Martin Middlebrook doing this, but I just presumed that those with an interest in it like me were doing the same kind of thing.

Now I was a young man then, and often when I look back on it, I kind of amazed myself that I was able to do this with these very old men.

There was a literally not just one generation, but really several generations separating us, but I was able to speak to these men in a meaningful way, in a way that they could learn to trust me, and from that trust came the conversations that then shed light on so many aspects of this Great War history.

So how was I able to do it?

Well, I I don't really have an answer to that question, but I did have older parents.

My dad was a Second World War veteran, he'd fallen ANSIO, and I kind of grew up with the military, the whole concept of the military, so I understood military language, military thinking, and having older parents and grandparents who were around me for almost all of my childhood, I was used to having older people around me and could converse with them in a way that was completely normal to me.

So I could be running in the street with my pals and be a kid, but I could sit there with my grandmother, talk about rationing, talk about her brother going off to war and seeing the wounded coming back from the Battle of the Somme covered in chalky mud, arriving at one of the railway stations in Colchester, being one of her kind of undying memories of the Great War.

So I I guess I learnt to speak the language of an older generation which gave me a way into these men and into their war and into their past to try and understand it.

And when I look back on many of the conversations that I had with these veterans, often they were extraordinary.

Now, oral history, this type of history that I gathered by speaking to these veterans is only one part of the history of any subject, and often an unreliable one, because I was speaking to these men seven decades typically from the actions in which they had fought, and so they could be forgiven for forgetting some of the detail.

But what I found is that many of these men they didn't have a total recall, I don't think that's possible, but they had a very full recall of what they'd gone through, and that then enabled me to delve deeper into those subjects.

And we have to ask what is the value of oral history like this.

I mean you're not gonna get the official history of a war, even the official battalion or regimental level kind of history of a war through the eyes of one man, what one person saw on a battlefield, five hundred others might see it differently.

And there is that element of this.

So you're not necessarily going to see these men as universal soldiers in terms of the experience of the conflict, but what by talking to people who were actually involved in something like the First World War, what you get from it is a wider sense of that experience, what being in combat meant to these men, how they experienced it, how it changed them, how they lived with that experience for the rest of their lives, what they thought about the army, what they thought about the country that they were fighting for, what beliefs took them to that point where they could go to war to kill other men, which was not a normal circumstance for anybody really, particularly in Britain during that period.

So what I was getting from it really was a kind of social history of warfare, which is very, very important because those are the kind of subjects today, over a century later from the Great War, those are the kind of subjects that people are interested in that want to understand what it was like to be in a trench, what kind of food that they had, what did they do with their time in and out of the trenches, how often did they write home, how could they get hold of creature comforts from their family, all of these kind of things.

And one of the things that I was able to really understand, I think, through talking to these men and some women, was to get a glimpse into that.

So oral history is just part of the story, but it shouldn't be dismissed, and I do occasionally see it being dismissed by some historians, perhaps some who actually have never undertaken any kind of oral history with someone that took part in conflict like the First World War.

It's part of our understanding, not the only part, but certainly an important part, and I know it is something that fascinates you.

Um back in the nineteen eighties and nineties there were difficulties in in really tracking down these men, but then actually interviewing them, how to make notes, how to record those interviews.

I was a young man with limited funds, I didn't have top-end recording equipment.

If only I I'd have had an iPhone back in those days to record these men and video them.

I mean, you know, what kind of material would I have now if that had been possible back then?

But it wasn't.

I did record some on a very cheap tape recorder.

I have some of those tapes.

Unfortunately, some were lost in France over the years, and quite a few often ask me, have I digitized any of these recordings?

Well, I have done some snippets here and there.

Some of the recordings are just not good enough to digitize because they were so poor.

I could use them to transcribe what these men were saying, but they aren't broadcastable.

Later on, through a friend who had a stereo tape recorder, I was able to gather some quite high quality interviews, and at some point I will digitize those and put them onto this podcast or put them onto a platform where they can be listened to.

But believe me, that is not an easy or quick task, and I do have a full-time job running a battlefield tour program, and the other full-time job keeping this podcast going as well.

So those kind of projects are unfortunately for further down the line.

But one of the other things that I have through knowing these veterans and conversing with these veterans and making contact with them in the 1980s and 90s is a whole series of supplementary material, letters that they wrote to me, where then they sense their war experiences written out often in kind of essay form.

Some had actually typed up their experiences, some went out and bought notepads, and especially for me, sat down and wrote their memories of whatever it was, the Battle of the Somme, the Third Battle of Epe, and I have this material, and I've been going through some of it recently, and that's what's brought us to this episode, and indeed the recent episodes on Malcolm Vivian, the siege gunner officer, who was one of my closest veteran friends, who I went to see on many occasions and was in contact for many years until he sadly passed away, and I have this vast archive from him of material which I've only really just begun to tap into in terms of the episodes that we've already done.

So rather than just do another episode about Malcolm, I thought in this one we'd have the tale of two veterans, two men that I interviewed fairly early on in my period of tracking these men down and speaking to them.

And both of these men, the commonality between these men is they both lived in Sussex, as we will discuss.

So in this episode, we're not gonna hear them talking except through me.

We're gonna hear their accounts that I transcribed from the recordings that I made at the time and then typed up or wrote up, and I'm gonna read them for you now, with in each case some supplementary information about them and what they've done and what these accounts I guess tell us.

So this week we're gonna hear that tale of two Great War veterans.

The first of these two veterans was actually the very first one that I went to interview, and this was Jack Aston.

He lived in Crawley, the town where I was born and where I'd grown up.

He lived in Pound Hill, which was one of the housing estates in Crawley New Town, and I came across him through my mother.

My mother had lots of friends throughout the town, could see this interest in the First World War developing, and I'd spoken to her about her memories of her uncles that had been in the Great War, who she'd spoken to when she was very young, and I'd said to her that I really wanted to speak to some veterans and wasn't really sure how to start tracking them down.

And through a friend of hers, she casually mentioned this and they said, Oh, go and see Mr.

Aston.

He was in the First World War, he was in the Royal Flying Corps.

So I tracked him down.

In those days you could get hold of phone books.

My parents had one right by their phone, and once I found out where he lived, what his name was, I could look him up in the phone book and I gave him a call.

And he was expecting this call because the friend of my mum had kind of alerted him to the fact that someone would be ringing him about his great war experiences, and he was quite surprised that anyone was really interested.

But we had a chat on the phone, he seemed okay about me going round to see him, so off I went, and we sat there for several hours chatting away, and I did a recording of him talking about the kind of wider element of his war.

Now, this is my very first interview.

I'm still at school, I was in the sixth form at the time, and really I had no idea what I was doing, but I went with an open mind, and I'd learnt one of the things about talking to older people was not to make the conversation about me, but to make sure the conversation was very much about them.

And this seemed to work with Mr Aston as it did with pretty much every veteran that I went on to speak to.

And one of the first questions I actually asked him was, you know, do you have any souvenirs of the war?

Because I'd come back from Eape, I'd been to the Somme that same summer with my dad, and I'd come back with various souvenirs myself.

I was finding things in junk markets and car boot sales, and I was fascinated to see if he had any of his own souvenirs of the Great War.

But I discovered that he had almost nothing.

He didn't have any photographs of himself in uniform, but the one thing that he did have was a holy bible that he bought in a shop in Amiens when he was on local leave, and that was very precious to him.

And one of the commonalities that I came to understand about meeting these veterans and quizzing them about their war was that when I asked them, have you got any photographs?

Do you keep any maps from that period, any aerial photographs, have you got your medals, any cat badges?

And I would get them to get these objects out because that would be another way to get them absorbed in the past, thinking about the past, taking them back to that past through these very powerful objects that they had kept as souvenirs.

But what I discovered with quite a few, particularly those that were living in the southern part of Britain in the Second World War, is that they didn't have any photographs of themselves in uniform.

And as I got more confident in doing this, I asked why, and quite a lot of them said that they destroyed their pictures during World War II, mostly in 1940, when they believed that the Germans were about to invade, and there was this widespread belief that if you'd been a serviceman in the previous war, that when the Germans got there they would line you up against a wall and shoot you, and if you had pictures on your mantelpiece or a photograph of yourself in uniform hanging on the wall or whatever, then you were basically lining yourself up for the firing squad.

So a lot of them got rid of these souvenirs.

They didn't, like Mr.

Aston, they didn't always have anything tangible of their war, but of course they had their memories.

So we sat there chatting generally about the war.

I told him about my trips to EEEP and the psalm and some of the things that I'd seen, and he was amazed that there were still shells at the corner of a field where they'd been doing ploughing and that the iron harvest was very much part of the legacy of the first world war.

He was amazed by all that when I showed him some photographs of it.

And then I thought to myself, we need to tell a story here, we need to bring this together and get Mr.

Aston to tell me a story about his war.

So I literally got him to start at the beginning and run through his war in his own words, and occasionally I would kind of butt in and interject with additional questions, particularly when he found himself kind of slightly going astray, and that wasn't uncommon when these men very often were being asked to talk about a war that they'd kind of hidden away in the background for most of the rest of their life.

So what we're going to have next then is his account of his time going into the army and eventually becoming part of the Raw Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force.

And this is his account as transcribed from the conversation that we had in that autumn of 1982.

I was eighteen years old, the year of the Great War, and I was working in industry as a mould maker, and later I'd been apprenticed as a toolmaker.

Once the war was on we'd come out of the factories and the girls used to give us white feathers because we were not in uniform.

To overcome this a scheme was started called the Derby Scheme.

You signed on when you were eighteen and called up when you were eighteen years and seven months old.

During that time you wore a car key armband.

This told people you were due for call up, no more white feathers.

When I got my final call up, I should never forget it.

I had to report to Pontifract Barracks, and I was sent down to Woollich.

I shall never forget that outside was a watchman's tent with a blazing fire in front, and the old watchman asked me where I was going, and I told him I was going to Woolwich.

How are you getting there, lad?

I replied by train to London, then by tram to Woolwich, and it will be there, I proudly told him, I shall join the Army Service Corps.

But on arrival I had a trade test, and I found that they were overstaffed, and I was then put in the infantry and joined the second battalion, the London Regiment, the Royal Fusiliers.

I went through training as a machine gunner with the infantry, and then went home on leave before going out to France.

And when I came back to barracks, the sergeant told me to look on the notice board because there might be something to interest you.

When I looked at the notice there was a chance to transfer to yet another unit.

I would have to have another trade test and in all probability I would then be posted to the Royal Flying Corps.

I passed and then I went for three months training at Croydon Polytechnic, and after passing my trade test I reported to Farnborough, where I was sent home on a weekend's leave, and when I reported back I went to France to a place called Etaps Etapler, where there was a transit camp, a place where they shipped you out to your units.

They gave me some iron rations, just for one day, bully beef and biscuits.

We were then three days without rations when the initial supplies gave out.

We found carrots to eat, but eating so many of them on empty stomachs we all got dysentery.

I eventually got to a place called Doulon, where I joined my unit, a Flying Corps depot.

We were about ten to twelve kilometers from the front line.

We knew just where the front line was, as we could see artillery shells bursting in the sky.

I hadn't been with a unit all that long when one night we were bombed by the Germans.

It was all due to the type of fighter we were using, an FE two, which was a slow plane, and the Germans followed our fighters back to their base.

I was not on duty that night, and when the alarm went up, we made our way to the trenches that were dug to protect us from the bombing.

There were fifty eight killed that night.

I shall never forget a chap I met down these deep trenches during the raid.

His name was Sergeant Pierce.

He was afraid like the rest of us, but he kept saying I wish I was up there, not down here.

After the raid was over, it transpired he was one of our pilots, and he had shot down three German aircraft.

I then joined number twelve squadron Royal Flying Corps, and at that time the Germans put in their big push in march nineteen eighteen and got to within four to five miles of our unit.

Fortunately, they were stopped, but I certainly had my part in it.

The Germans at that time were four to five miles from where we were.

That was a terrible day that was.

I've never seen such a mass of injured people and people with blood and that.

But we nearly lost the war, you know.

Jerry came through, right through.

I got up in the morning, and I could hear the heavy noise of the artillery, but of course we always heard that noise of the artillery in the distance.

But you could hear a very different noise entirely that morning.

Jerry was pushing forward, you see.

One morning we were all right, a base away from the front line.

The next morning we were a dressing station.

The troops were coming in from the line with their wounds.

That's the nearest I ever got to the Germans.

And after this, we drove them back until they called for an armistice.

We celebrated, and I was ill for three days.

An officer called us together and told us we were to be disbanded, and I was to go and join the army of occupation in Germany at Cologne.

We were the first British troops into Cologne, and the local people were all over us after food as they were starving, and hadn't had any food for quite a considerable time.

After six months doing guard duties in Germany, I was demobilised.

So that was his way of telling me his story from start to finish, from being part of the Derby scheme, from going into the Army initially to join the Army Service Corps, being transferred to the infantry in the second London Regiment, training as a machine gunner, and then seeing a transfer to the Royal Flying Corps and joined them as ground crew, serving with number 12 squadron in the RFC and later the Royal Air Force as well, and ending his war as part of the Army of Occupation in the Rhineland.

And then having told me that story, what I would do, and this is something that I did frequently when I spoke to these veterans, is then I'd go back over some of the things that they'd told me.

I was making notes at the time, and then I'd asked them for some more detail.

So in his case, as this was not just the first veteran that I'd ever spoken to, but this was the first time that I was kind of considering what the Royal Flying Corps did in the Great War.

I went back to him and asked him as ground crew what was your job.

And that's when he went on to tell me a little bit more about the kind of task that he was involved in when he was in the ranks of the RFC on the Western Front.

And he said When I joined 12 Squadron, I was on the recovery of aircraft shot down.

We would take a recovery truck to the position of recovery where the aircraft had crashed, and all along the area Jerry had targets they'd requested with their artillery, so we only had a short time to get in and recover the plane before the shelling started again.

The shelling was so regular you could time the shells almost.

One of the things that struck me was how little training some of our pilots seemed to have.

Pilots were using Bristol fighters in England with only six months training, going straight into action as soon as they arrived.

One pilot who spent a long period with us asked me to go up in the plane with him after I had done some repairs.

I didn't fancy that, so I put a sandbag in to make up the wait for him.

I chickened out of that one.

When I look back, I consider myself very fortunate.

When I realized when I initially joined up I was to go into the Army Service Corps as a tradesman, I found myself then in the infantry.

I was dreading going to France as an infantry soldier, but I got that lucky break and joined the Royal Flying Corps, and then I was nearly killed during the bombing raid on the airfield at the time of the German push, our unit then became that field station, so all in all I was very fortunate to survive the Great War and live to my present age of ninety years.

So having spent a few hours with Mr Aston, I did go back and speak to him again.

He was a nice old gent.

I kind of lost contact with him.

I didn't at that point understand the importance of staying in contact with the veterans, which I did with a lot more of them as time went on, and of course eventually that would bring me to the point where I was attending quite a lot of funerals of these chaps who had come to mean an awful lot to me.

And there isn't a massive amount of detail in his account.

It gives us a kind of snapshot into the life of a an ordinary ranker in the Royal Flying Corps on the Western Front in that latter part of the war and what aspects of his war service meant to him.

And again, that's all part of that kind of social history of conflict that oral history gives us an insight into.

But that was my first attempt, and I was very pleased, fascinated, absolutely became even more obsessed with this subject after speaking to someone like him, and decided that I needed to find more of these veterans, put the feelers out, found a few more, and then when I went off to university, began to approach this somewhat more scientifically.

I realized, for example, that in the back of Martin Middlebrook's book was this long list of veterans, and as I'll describe in a moment, that was one of the ways into finding some more of these men.

And also the joining of the Western Front Association in 1982 opened some massive doors for me because I'd go to their meetings in London, I'd meet veterans there who would then agree for me to go and visit them and talk to them about their experiences.

Veterans would often write pieces for the magazine, stand to, or put little adverts in there, asking for bits of information, and I would then write to them, going up to the Imperial War Museum Library, looking some stuff up for them and sending it on to them, and it kind of grew organically through that.

And that kind of leads me on to the next of these two veterans that we're discussing in this podcast episode.

This is a a few months, a few years down the line from Mr.

Aston, where I'm now doing this properly in Inverted Commas and perhaps getting a little bit more out of some of these conversations with these men.

So we're going to go from the Flying Corps to the infantry in the trenches with the second of our two Great War veterans.

Moving on from finding Mr Aston kind of accidentally, really, as I said, I became a little bit more scientific in my approach to tracking these veterans down.

And one of the sources that I found incredibly useful in doing this was Martin Middlebrook's first day of the song book.

Now I'd got this for Christmas, I think, in 82, 83, something like that.

And in the back of the book, aside from it being an excellent account of the first day of the song, which led me down all kinds of different paths, and I sat there reading it, wanting to get back to the battlefields and walk that ground at Ovalers or at Chapval or wherever it was.

At the back of the book was a list of all of the veterans that he'd interviewed as part of his research, and against each one it gave their rank and their details, the unit they were with, and then he put the town in Britain where they were living when he went to interview them.

And I will never be able to thank Mardin Middlebrook enough for that.

I said it to his face many times, and he was delighted that that little snippet of information had helped me and no doubt others all those years before.

Because again, using the phone books you could get in libraries, I could take the information that was in the back of the book, name and place, look them up in the phone book, and then ring that person up or write to them and ask if they were agreeable to me interviewing them about their Great War experiences.

And that led me to a gentleman called Aubrey Rose.

He was listed in Middlebrook's book.

He'd served with the 16th Battalion, the London Regiment, the Queen's Westminster Rifles.

I was particularly interested in the battle at Gommercore, which his unit had taken part in, and he lived not far from me down in Hove.

And I rung him up, spoke to him, spoke to his wife.

He was a little bit perturbed that some stranger had rung up and was asking to speak to her husband about something that had happened so long ago, but gradually they kind of understood where I was coming from and very kindly agreed for me to come down and meet them.

And if they were happy, then we would proceed in having a chat.

And that's often was the case, that people were initially a little bit suspicious, understandably so, and then they would meet me and hopefully see that my enthusiasm for the subject, desire to understand and learn shone through, and that would open the right doors.

And certainly it did in this case.

So I went to their lovely flat in Hove, right on the seafront, overlooking the sea, and We sat there for quite a few hours talking about his great war experiences, and again he was one that I went back to to speak to a few times on top of that.

Now he was different to Mr Aston in that he'd been living in London during the Second World War, not right down on the south coast, facing a potential German invasion, so he had quite a lot of souvenirs of his war service and he got those out.

He had photographs of himself, of the men in his transport section and his platoon, and some of the officers in his battalion as well.

He had his 1914 tin, which he kept his medals in there, which was a First World War trio, and I'm pretty sure he had the Territorial Force Efficiency Medal, which was a long service medal for service in the Territorial Force, Territorial Army, as it later became during the Great War, because he was a pre-war member of the Queen's Westminster Rifles, and he'd served on till the post-war period as well.

And this was a long service medal.

It was the first time I'd ever seen that medal, and he could see me looking at it, and he explained what it was for.

And all of these medals were named to him, of course, and they were a great talking point to kind of trigger memories and things like that.

So that's that's why I think these souvenirs actually were a really essential part in the kind of conversations that I had with these veterans.

And by this stage, I was a little way into my period of interviewing these veterans, and I'd like to think that I'd got better at it, I understood it a bit more, I'd read a lot more material, a lot more books, and probably my perspectives of how I viewed what they told me were changing as well.

And I knew more and more the right kind of additional questions to ask to get them to really give me the most in terms of getting something out of that chat with them.

Now, men like Aubrey Rose, I went to see a few times.

Sometimes this was going to be my one and only opportunity to speak to these men, and I kind of realised that that could be the case.

It wasn't just that they might not want to do the whole thing over again, and once was enough, but these were men who were in the final stages of their life, and quite a lot of them I spoke to, and the next time I rang up to make an appointment to go and see them, a family member answered the phone, and that veteran had passed away.

That was sadly all too common, and it was quite a hard thing really for me to do.

I wasn't doing this dispassionately as just a kind of non-participant observer.

These men meant a lot to me.

What they stood for meant a lot to me, and it was hard when they suddenly went, even if I'd only met them the once, because often they'd tell me incredible things, and I'd go away and think about it and think I must go back and speak to them more about that, and often would not get the chance, sadly, not get the chance to do it.

So I realised increasingly how precious time was with these men, and I had to try and make the most of it every time I went to their house, to their flat to see them whatever it was.

And one of the other things that I'd learned gradually as I'd done this was the importance of taking notes.

I'd done that from the very beginning with Mr Aston, but I I think now that my note taking by the time I got to Aubrey Rose was taking on a slightly new dimension, I would sit there and write copious notes while I was listening to what he was saying, and occasionally one of them would peer over and tap the notebook and look at me and probably wonder what the hell I was doing.

But the notes were really important, and some of the accounts of Aubrey Rose that I'm going to read for you in a moment, I'll actually be reading from one of my old school Holy Trinity School in Crawley notebooks from the 1980s that I then used, some spare ones that I picked up to sit there and transcribe the stuff that I'd recorded in interviews like those with Aubrey Rose.

And by then I was a regular at the Imperial War Museum Library that used to be up in the dome in those days, in the top part of the IWM building, and also at the public records office as it was in those days, the PRO, the National Archives it is today, and I would interview one of these veterans, take a load of notes, there would be key elements of their story that I was interested in, and then I would go into the sources, the regimental histories, the divisional histories, the war diaries, and lots of other things, and I wasn't checking up on them, but I was seeing how what they had told me fitted into the historical record, and in most cases it fitted in pretty well.

I mean there were some stories that were completely unbelievable, stamina stories I often call them.

They never checked out, but in terms of how a man described his route to a battlefield, his experiences on that battlefield, the experience of his battalion going into action, often that would check out pretty much exactly.

And these were men that didn't actually have their regimental history, some of them didn't even know that their unit had published a regimental history, and in some cases I was able to get the book and take the book to them so they could read it subsequently after our interview, so it didn't kind of interfere with the narrative that they were telling me that was kind of fresh when we first spoke.

And of course, what all of this was doing, because at the same time I was then doing more and more trips to the battlefields, living in the southeast of Britain enabled me to get to Dover very easily, and in the 80s there were lots of cheap day trips where you could go over on the ferry for a pound, and groups of us would go over together, and I would have my little agenda of visiting some places connected with the veterans.

They'd often go and do a bit of field walking or cemetery visits, and it would work quite well really.

And all of this came together to help me build up this knowledge and experience and begin in a very small way back then to understand those different layers of the First World War, those jigsaw pieces as it all gradually came together.

Probably thinking at the time that I would piece that jigsaw together completely one day, but realising now, all these decades later, that I will never get to that point, and that's part of the beauty of the subject because there is always something new to learn.

So let's now move on to Aubrey Rose's account of his service with the first sixteenth London Regiment, the Queen's Westminster Rifles, and his involvement in the fighting at Gomacor on the first day of the Somme.

I joined up in february nineteen fourteen, so the time war broke out I was a trained soldier.

The territorials at that time were forces assigned to guard England.

We weren't to go on active service.

You had to volunteer for active service, and I was very keen in those days, and I was down in Luxhore on Salisbury Plain when war broke out for a week's camp.

That would be about the end of july nineteen fourteen, you see.

On the Sunday, by the way we were only about three hundred strong then.

We were not a full regiment.

We came down and the next day we all marched back to London because war had broken out on the fourth of August, and we went back to London and I was quartered in the Palace School in Westminster.

Our HQ was at Buckingham Gate, bang next door to the London Scottish, and we were on the parade ground.

It must have been about the beginning of september nineteen fourteen, and our colonel, I don't know if you've heard of the Shawl Breds of Tottenham Court Road, they used to be house furnishers, curtains and that.

Our colonel was Colonel Shulbred, and our A Company was made up of men who worked for him, and after war broke out a lot of old soldiers rejoined the battalion, so we were now well over a thousand strong, and we were attached to the King's Royal Rifle Corps, and I remember Colonel Shulbred coming on parade and saying The regiment's been asked to volunteer for active service, and of course the fellows in civil clothes didn't want to go with good jobs and wives, but we chaps and youngsters willingly said yes, and Major Flower turned round and said to the Colonel The Regiment volunteers to a man, and there was poor old Colonel Shawbread with tears streaming down his face and saying This is the proudest day of my life.

If only we'd all known.

Anyway, we were there, and they formed the regiment and split it up into different sections.

They wanted volunteers for regimental transport.

I'd never been on a horse in my life before.

So I thought, This sounds good, larking about with horses, so I volunteered for the regimental transport, and our regimental officer was Major Bradley, an our sermon major of the transport section.

I don't know if you've ever heard of Sir George Byrd, he was an MP after the war.

He was our sermant major.

We used to play bridge together.

Our job when we went over to France in the transport section was with pack horses, and we first went up to Eape.

We were in reserve, we were the only territorial regiment in the eighteenth brigade of the sixth division.

We were brigaded with the regulars, the Knots and Derbies, the East and West Yorkshire's and the Durham Line Infantry.

Eventually we were withdrawn from Eape, and we went up to rest.

The next thing we knew we were forming the fifty sixth London Division.

That was the cream of the London territorials, and I remember coming up a hill at a place called Pazon Artois, and we came into a village called Saint Namand, and we were there for three days and we drank the village dry.

So at this stage, Auby Rose has been a pre war territorial in the sixteenth London Regiment.

He's gone over to France as part of the transport section.

He'd served at Eape at a time when Torbett House in Popperinger was coming into being, and the Queenswestminsters were very heavily involved in that.

And when I finally went to Torbutt House in the 1980s, not long after I'd interviewed him, he was certainly one of those that I thought of when I climbed the steep stairs to the hop loft and saw the badge of the Queenswestminster Rifles on the wall there, and mention of their role in helping Tubby Clayton and Neville Torbot get everything together to make Torbett House what it would eventually become.

So there was a nice little connection there, another way in which talking to these veterans connected to the layers of the landscape on those battlefields of the old front line.

So he's now in the transport section, he served at Eape, they've moved down to the Somme in that back area in the northern part of the Somme front, and they've moved up to near the village of Hebutern as part of the 56th Division, and his battalion was getting ready for the coming Somme offensive.

And this next part of the account is his description of what happened in the lead up to and on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

In the first three weeks of June it poured incessantly.

The trenches were a quagmire of mud, and we were walking on duckboards.

We had no dugouts, and so a large amount of men had trench feet.

One day my company officer came to me and said we were going over the top the next day, and he wanted me as his runner.

This meant I had to carry messages from one company to another.

On the day of the attack I remember we got our rum ration about three thirty in the morning.

It was real navy rum, and got me saying Up boys and atom.

We went over the top and eventually arrived at the German trenches.

The smoke barrels were so thick you could not see where you were going, and we didn't know it was a trap.

They had withdrawn all their troops from the front line and only left a few.

Many of these were either dead or dying.

They had deep dugouts and had set traps in them.

The first dugout our chaps went down had these German helmets which they thought would make nice souvenirs, but as they touched them, they were blown up.

The word soon got round, and after that when we came to a dugout, we didn't ask who was down there.

It was just take that Fritz with a hand grenade.

Eventually we landed in the German third line trenches.

It was here I saw my company officer killed, Captain Mott.

He'd been killed with his batman at the side of him.

I'd gone on a message, and when I came back, both had gone, blown to pieces, although Captain Mott was already dead, being shot in the head by a sniper.

I had the job afterwards of going to his parents to tell them what had happened.

The only officer left now was the bombing officer, and he was wounded.

We were getting surrounded as the division on our left had never left their trenches, so our left flank was left open, and the officer asked for volunteers to go back for reinforcements.

I didn't volunteer to go back because I was brave, I volunteered because I saw it as a chance to get back to our own trenches.

So I went back into no man's land, and it was then that the shock of seeing my officer killed got to me.

I dropped to my knees and I burst into tears.

Eventually I pulled myself together and I got back to our signalling headquarters.

I was told to report back to my battalion HQ in Hebuturn.

To get there I had to go back through the communication trenches.

There was an up and a down trench for the traffic to come through.

Owing to the fact that Jerry had opened up with a barrage, dropping shells all over the place, the up trench was blown in, and so all the traffic was just in one trench.

Then another two chaps turned up and we had to crouch down under a part of that trench to let the reinforcements go through.

While we were there, shrapnel was bursting all over the place.

Then all of a sudden, bang, I'd been hit in the back, in the lung.

I knew immediately because I couldn't breathe.

One of my pals saw the tear in my tunic, got out my field dressing.

It was no help because I was bleeding internally.

However, I went three quarters of a mile up this trench before I got to the rear, and there were military policemen there making sure you weren't dodging the column.

I simply said that I was wounded in the back and they immediately put me on a stretcher, and I was taken to a waiting ambulance.

About a hundred yards from me there was another two stretcher bearers with a wounded man.

Suddenly a shell burst, and when the smoke cleared there was nothing.

I was laid down in the casualty clearing station for four days as they were afraid to move me.

I remember a padre coming round to ask if I'd been injected for tetanus, and he put a cross on my wrist.

Then an orderly came round, asked if I wanted a drink, and I said no.

Before he gave you a drink, he wanted to know where you were wounded, and when I said in the back, he said no drink for you, chum.

However, he got hold of a chap's great coat and put it under my head so that I could sit up a bit.

This chap was lousy, and before you could say Jack Robinson, there were lice all over me.

The sister came in to clean us up and she said it's alright, don't worry, we don't think any less of you, but I was trying to impress on her that it wasn't my coat.

They gave us a carbolic solution bath and I must have gone into a coma, as the next thing I knew I woke up with pajamas on and I was in a hospital train.

This hospital train went as far as La Have, and from La Have there were ambulances waiting to take us to Etrita.

This was a seaside resort, and the hospital I was in was an old hotel called La Roche, which in French means the rock.

The reason was that out in the bay was a big rock which for hundreds of years had been separated from the mainland and the sea had washed a hole right through the middle of it.

I stayed here until I was fit to return to England and by nineteen seventeen I was out of the army.

Now one of the things he went on to tell me about how when he was wounded and evacuated down the line to the hospital at Etritar was how he went into a coma and during that time he was in a coma he had this very vivid dream that he remembered and the dream consisted of him being led into this mighty hall where there was a big long single bench with a hooded figure at the far end of that bench, and that figure had a huge ledger open on a pedestal which they were writing things in with a quill pen.

And after having been led into this hall and seeing this figure, he was curious so he walked along that long long table up to the hooded the cloaked figure, peered over his shoulder and saw that what he was writing were the names of the men who had fallen, had been killed in action at Gomacor on the first day of the Somme, and beneath them he started to write a new name which was Rifleman Aubrey Ro and at that point he shouted out no as he saw his own name written in this ledger, and that's when he woke up in the hospital.

I mean, make of that what you will, but it certainly was a very interesting story, and I think already if you kind of listen to the tone of how he's describing this and compare that to what we got from Mr Aston, doesn't diminish what Mr Aston told us, but this is a slightly different account, a different man, of course, a different way of seeing things, different way of experiencing things, but also I think that I had moved on considerably in my ability to speak to these veterans and perhaps was drawing more and more out of men like Aubrey Rose, which I hadn't been able to do at the very beginning.

There's a lot more of his experiences that I could add to this, but just to put in a few little snippets from what he went on to say later, he said of Gomacor, the French had lost a lot of men trying to take Gomacore, so they put us poor sods in to take the place.

Our division was badly cut up, and the whole thing was an absolute fiasco.

The shells that they were using were American and they were not bursting.

The consequence was that when the Rangers who led the attack got to the wire, they found it intact, and in trying to cut through it they were decimated.

The territorials were never the same after that.

The general attitude that day was of elation.

It was our first time over the top, and we were filled with half a pint of rum.

As we went over I was shouting up the Westminsters.

I was in action the whole time, and we went in with fixed bayonets and my rifle was red hot by the time I was finished.

I had used every round.

And speaking of the approach to the Battle of the Somme, he said we had our dugouts facing the wrong way.

Instead of with the back to the enemy, we had them facing the enemy, so any stuff that came over was deadly to the occupants.

I remember one night I was on sentry go and when I came back there was a whole load of shrapnel bullets in my bed.

We were also at this time given anti frostbite paste in tins, and you know what the old regulars in our battalion did?

They sold it as butter to the French.

Now there's much more that I could say about his experiences, more quotes that I could put in.

These are snippets of his war, but I think they give us a bit of an insight into what you could gather, what you could glean by talking to these men, and it's why I realise I was so fortunate in being able to have these kind of experiences.

And it's so great now, all these years later, as that generation has faded away with the death of the last fighting Tommy Harry Patch in 2009.

It's great to be able to share some of those stories, those ghosts of my past, those veterans of the Great War with you, the audience of this podcast, because I think it's really important that their voices continue to be heard and their stories continue to be told.

And I hope that we're not just seeing these experiences of these men in some kind of strange isolation.

It's not there to titillate and amuse and entertain us.

This is part of a man's life, a man's war, the things that he experienced, the death of comrades, the loss of so many important people in their lives during those four years of the Great War.

Captain Mott that Aubrey Rose mentioned in his account.

He went to see Captain Mott's parents in Surrey once he'd recovered from his wounds and was discharged from the army.

He went to tell them how their son had died and tell them what a brave officer he was, and they gave him a portrait photograph of Captain Mott, which was one of his prized possessions.

He was very, very proud to show me that, that there was this officer that he'd only known for a very short time, but he'd been with him when he'd been killed on the field of battle at Gomacore on the first day of the psalm, his body was never recovered.

Captain Hugh Fenwick Mott is remembered on the Chapval Memorial to the missing, and I went there for Aubrey and photographed his name and sent him a photograph of that, which he was delighted to see.

We're dealing here, and I was dealing with men who had lost close friends, people that meant something to them all those decades before, but what they stood for, what they meant was just as strong all those years later, and I think that was something that they definitely passed on to me.

I'm preaching to an audience who no doubt feels the same.

The lives of soldiers and sailors and airmen and everyone else that we research when we research the Great War, they aren't just names on paper, they aren't just names in a roll of honour, they come to mean so much to us more than a century later.

And I think that what the voices of the veterans do is take those names, help us take those names out of the past and shine light upon them and give them depth in so many different ways.

And what the testimony of all those veterans that I knew, what it it always did for me was to strengthen that desire to return to those battlefields, to take those stories, to take those words that they told me and somehow layer them onto that landscape of the past so that for me and hopefully for you, through listening to the podcast like this, where we discuss the memories of these great war veterans, these two become part of our collective understanding of that 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, 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.

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