This episode we'll go out over the Christmas period, a time when my mind drifts away to Flanders and those fields along the British sector of the Western Front, which experienced the Christmas truce in nineteen fourteen.

Back in the eighties and nineties, I interviewed men who were there who took part in that Christmas truce, and my uncle Dan with the Essex Regiment, he too was one of those that went out into no man's land and experienced peace that day, just a few weeks before he was wounded for the first time.

For me that event will never be about football or any of the fanciful ideas that Hollywood and dramas have often forced upon us, but the simple idea of ordinary men from two different but similar cultures staring at each other on a shared day that meant something to them both.

For a moment in december nineteen fourteen there was peace in no man's land, but the war was still in its infancy, and honour perhaps still meant something then, and ahead were long years in which warfare would truly emerge into the industrial age of both production and death, death on an industrial scale, which might have removed all honour, and itself a microcosm of the history of the century that would follow.

But for me the shadows of men in no man's land, swapping food and drink, cat badges and buttons, and curious looks at each other, warriors together, connected in a way that few back home that Christmas will understand.

This was their shared peace on that day more than a century ago.

So now to this week's questions.

Question number one comes from Thomas on Discord.

I've heard that very few officers were shot at dawn during the Great War.

How come?

Well, we've done an episode on those soldiers who were tried by Field General Court Martial and subsequently executed.

Three hundred and six for military crimes, about another forty for civilian crimes, and I'll put a link in the show notes if you want to get an overall view of the whole subject of the soldiers who were executed who were shot at dawn, and that phrase comes from the headstone of one of them.

In terms of those who were executed in the Great War, 346 in total, three were officers, a much smaller number.

So why was that?

Well, I think we'll go on to talk about that.

There isn't really a simple answer.

On one level, you could say perhaps the army treated officers differently, and it did.

Perhaps it was more lenient towards the actions of officers, and there's plenty of examples of that very thing.

But as always, the subject is complex, and I think it's best to look at who those men were, who those officers were who were executed.

The first of them is Eric Skeffington Paul.

He was born in Canada in 1885.

The family had emigrated to Surrey before the Great War.

When that war broke out, he enlisted as an ordinary soldier in the Honourable Artillery Company, and then he was commissioned into the West Yorkshire Regiment in May 1915.

Eventually he was posted to the 11th Battalion, the West Yorks, on the Western Front, and he fought in the Battle of the Somme in July and October 1916, and during that latter stage of the Somme Battle, when they were over on the eastern edge of where the fighting was taking place, he was found absent from his platoon and was found wandering around behind the trenches by military foot police who were posted near to the battle area.

He couldn't really give a good enough account as to how he was there, why he was there, and they could see that something was not right, so they didn't just challenge him, they arrested him, and he was taken off, and eventually a field general court martial followed, at which his company commander and the regimental medical officer both gave evidence in his support, stating that he was experiencing some kind of battle fatigue, had shell shock, and they were expressing, I guess, leniency in his case.

But the commander in chief, this is towards the end of the Battle of the Somme, there have been hundreds of thousands of casualties in the British and Commonwealth forces, many of them officers.

The army marches on discipline, and senior officers felt that ordinary young officers, platoon and company and battalion level officers had to set a good example to their men, and Sir Douglas A, Commander in Chief, stated Such a case is more serious in the case of an officer than a man, and it is also highly important that all ranks should realise the law is the same for an officer as a private.

Now, this particular officer was what they would have called a hundred years before a jolly jumper, he'd come up through the ranks, perhaps by the war office, not seen necessarily as a proper officer in inverted commas, but the circumstances of him leaving his post, quitting the battlefield, leaving his men behind, and the seriousness in that of the wider aspects of military discipline meant that he was found guilty, and that sentence was confirmed, and he was executed at Popperinger on the 10th of December 1916, about two months after that incident in the final stage of the Battle of the Somme, and he's buried at Popperinger New Military Cemetery.

The next officer to be executed was Edwin Dyot.

Now he was not in the army, he was in the Navy.

Born in Cardiff in 1895, his father was a naval officer.

He joined the Royal Naval Division, that infantry division formed from naval personnel in 1915.

He served with them at Mudros and then Egypt and finally France with the Nelson Battalion of the RND.

And he deserted after the attack at Bocor on the 13th of November 1916.

So about a month after the incident that Sir Eric Skeffington Paul was involved in.

And one account says that in the field on the 13th of November 1916, when it was his duty to join his battalion, which was engaged in operations against the enemy, he did not do so and remained absent from his battalion until placed under arrest at Engel Belmare on the 15th of November.

At the subsequent Field General Court Martial, Dyatt said absolutely nothing in his defence, nothing at all at the trial, and as a result he was sentenced to death.

The court, however, recommended mercy based on his young age, but Major General Shute, commanding the Roman over division, recommended otherwise, and the sentence was confirmed by Hague, and Diet was executed on the 5th of January 1917, and today is buried at Le Crotoy, close to the Bay of the Somme.

It is said that there was a huge amount of controversy over this field general court martial and about the sentence that was carried out.

His father kicked up a lot of fuss over the matter, drew in the Admiralty, and a decision it seemed at that stage was made because of what was essentially potentially a bungled court martial, resulting in a miscarriage of justice to this officer.

It was decided thereafter that officers would only be shot by firing squad for murder.

So that leads us to the third and final example.

Second Lieutenant John Patterson.

He served with the 1st Battalion, the Essex Regiment, and he was executed on the 24th of September 1918, so quite late on in the war, but in this case for the murder of a military policeman who was attempting to arrest him.

In civilian life, he would have been hung for that murder.

Patterson was born in 1890.

He'd attended civil service college before the war, and he'd worked in a trader in Africa before 1914 as well.

In April 1915, he joined the 17th Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment, that was the football battalion, and he was shell shocked while serving with them at Delville Wood, and then later wounded at Red Ann Ridge in November 1916.

He was then commissioned from the ranks into the Essex Regiment in late 1917, deserted his unit soon after, and was missing for over three months from March to July of 1918 until he was challenged by some military foot police near Calais.

When trying to avoid arrest, he then opened fire and shot and killed Sergeant Collinson of the military foot police.

He was arrested subsequently at St.

Omer.

There was a field general court martial, and he was executed for murder, which of course was a capital crime at the time.

So illustrating these three cases, these are the three known examples of officers executed in the Great War, out of that total of 346, two for desertion, one for murder.

And what they tell us is what the military authorities felt about executing commissioned officers.

It went from Hague's view of treating them all equally to a bungled field general court martial, and the only other one to be shot was for what was a capital crime.

And we have to ask ourselves, what message did this send to the rest of the army?

And I think after Diet, with that decision made to only shoot officers for capital crimes, that meant that the officers were given a free pass to behave as they wished, no matter how they failed on the battlefield, they would never face the same penalty that an ordinary soldier would do for the same military crime.

And I remember interviewing veterans in the eighties and nineties who occasionally brought these things up and felt that the army was soft on these officers when it certainly wasn't soft on them.

Discipline, crime, the whole view of where your position was, not just in the military but in society, of course, was very different more than a century ago.

And one thing I would say is I think the army learnt from the experience of having an army that was made up initially of huge numbers of volunteers and then eventually vast numbers of conscripts.

It learned from that experience and it learnt from how discipline should be implemented and that there had to be a sense of justice in it.

And I think when we look at this with only three officers executed compared to all those ordinary soldiers for similar crimes, then you don't see much justice going on there.

But of course there is the wider idea that none of these men should have been shot for these crimes, which eventually led to them being pardoned under Tony Blair's government in the early 2000s.

So it's a complex subject, Thomas, and I hope really kind of illustrating those three cases gives you a bit of an insight into the kind of thought process behind how and why and the circumstances under which those three officers were executed and what that meant for the wider army.

And I'm sure military, well I know military discipline is something that we are going to return to in the podcast in the near future.

Question number two comes from Glenn Townsend.

From researching the exploits of various family members in the Great War, I'm aware of the work of the Australian Red Cross, especially that of the Australian Wounded and Missing Inquiry Bureau led by Vera Deakin, the daughter of Australia's second Prime Minister.

I'm interested to know more about the work of the Red Cross and this unit during the First World War and whether the British Red Cross and their other Dominion branches did something similar to their Australian cousins.

Well the Red Cross worked from all of these different British and Commonwealth nations during the Great War, and obviously centrally from the International Red Cross based in Switzerland, and one of the tasks that it did was to work within military hospitals.

For example, in terms of the Australian contribution, they worked in Cairo, helping to treat the Australian wounded coming back from Gallipoli.

The Red Cross provided comforts, medical supplies, and members of the voluntary aid detachment, VAD, which included a lot of female nurses, volunteer nurses that would go along to assist the professional nurses who were working in these military hospitals.

But even in 1915, when they were doing that basic Red Cross hospital-related work, there was a huge problem, and that problem was the missing.

Even at just Gallipoli, there was a substantial number of Australian soldiers whose fate was unknown.

And once they moved to the Western Front, with over forty-five thousand dead in France and Flanders, and at least half of those missing, that task was even bigger.

This was unprecedented.

This type of warfare where men went into battle and literally disappeared on the kind of scale that you saw in the First World War was completely unprecedented, and it really hampered a family's ability to have what we would now call closure because they just weren't sure what had happened to that man, and for many of them it led to them having difficulty in accepting that they were dead.

So a Red Cross Information Bureau was created to investigate the fate of the missing Australian soldiers in this case and then report to the families.

And that's where who you named in your question, Vera Deakin, that's where she enters the stage, the 23-year-old daughter of the Australian Prime Minister, Alfred Deakin.

She arrived in Cairo in 1915 and helped establish this first bureau to deal with the Australian missing McGallipoli, and then they moved the organisation to London, and when they were operating on the Western Front, they did the same kind of task there, but on a much bigger scale, when they handled, for example, over 25,000 inquiries from their London office.

And how they worked was to first look at sources.

They interviewed wounded soldiers in hospitals, went to ask them if they were looking into a soldier of the 8th Battalion, Australian Infantry.

They would find out if any 8th Battalion men were in hospitals in Britain.

They would go and interview them and ask them if they knew of this soldier or that soldier and take some witness statements.

They would look at the records from casualty clearing stations, field ambulances, hospitals and bureau units.

They would get reports from chaplains and officers of the units that they were investigating.

And later on through the International Red Cross, they were able to access captured German lists, repatriated prisoner of war lists, and then official Australian Imperial Force documentation.

And the process that they followed was to receive an inquiry from the family, open a case file, tens of thousands of these were created, dispatch the investigators to the hospitals and the camps and the records, cross-check conflicting accounts, and then write a detailed, compassionate letter to the home, to the family of the soldier who was missing.

And it was a good system, a good approach, a good process, but they couldn't always come up with the answers.

They found that there were many cases in which all of the witnesses to a soldier's death were themselves dead or missing.

So often, really, they couldn't add much to what was already known, which was hugely, hugely frustrating.

But for many families, and when you look at the surviving records, you can see that they were given information because Private Brown had seen Private Smith go towards the German wire, get caught by a burst of machine gun fire, and then his body could not be recovered.

So that then gave a definitive answer to that family.

The records where you'll find the kind of work that they did have now been digitised.

They're available on the Australian War Memorial website.

So if you're researching an Australian soldier and he has no known grave or he was posted missing during the war, you are likely to find one of these records and you can download them and see the kind of information they were able to ascertain at the time.

Some of it is very limited.

Sometimes there are pages and pages of eyewitness accounts as to what happened to that individual.

And coming back to their work during the war, it was recognised through the award of the OBE to Vera Deakin for her dedication to this work, her compassion, and her ability to ensure that many Australian families had answers that they otherwise would not have had.

It was said of her she was composed and directs with a disarming kindness, a woman who could quiet a room by listening before she spoke.

And I think those kind of skills were absolutely essential in this really quite difficult work.

And the story of Vera Deakin and the Australian Wounded and Missing Inquiry Bureau is a reminder really that war is fought not only on the battlefields, it's fought in offices, in hospital wards, and through the relentless pursuit of answers by those who cared to ask the right kind of questions.

Long before the existence of modern databases, you've got to remember all of this kind of work was on a card index basis or paper records.

Women like Vera Deakin built a system that gave many families hope.

It gave them honesty, dignity, and answers, and what we would now call a degree of closure.

And in doing so, women like her and the people that worked alongside her left a legacy of compassion amid one of the darkest chapters of Australia's history in that early part of the 20th century.

But was this work unique?

You asked that in your question.

It wasn't.

There was a British Red Cross system doing the same kind of thing.

There was an international Red Cross system looking at the missing and looking at the burial of the dead and perhaps trying to identify the dead.

I remember some years ago the historian Peter Barton coming onto BBC television and saying that he'd uncovered records in the Red Cross archives that showed how the Germans had recovered dead bodies, for example, during the March 1918 offensive, and they had apparently taken close-up photographs of British dead soldiers, hopefully sent them to the Red Cross, and hopefully these photographs could be used in the identity of the soldiers.

But that never that bit never happened.

Where these records are now, what was done with them, there were promises of them being opened up to a wider public, that never came.

And when you go on the Red Cross sites for prisoners of war for the First World War, you will find some details of men who died in German hands, but these kind of missing records are.

Are not on there, and the records created by the British version of this do not survive.

What happened to them?

Whether they were in London during the Blitz and they got destroyed.

I remember in Stand 2, the Journal of the Western Front Association, in one of the very early editions, there was an article about the scale of the records that were lost in bombing in the Second World War.

Every single recommendation for honors and awards, all of the wounded cards, for example, and I'm pretty sure these records as well to do with the missing.

So the Australian archive appears to be unique.

Presumably, there would have been something for New Zealand soldiers and other Commonwealth nations.

I've not seen any examples of these kind of records existing for Canadians.

If any of our Canadian listeners who are very knowledgeable about the records available to CEF soldiers were able to point us in the direction of this, I'll put some more details onto the podcast website eventually.

But I think that this story of the tracing of Australian missing and the gathering of witness statements wasn't unique, but the fact that the records survive is the unique part of it and gives us an insight into the terrible nature, I think, of the First World War and how many tried to overcome it.

So an absolutely brilliant question, Glenn, and thank you for that.

Question number three comes from Angus Cole.

Can you provide some details please as to how an army of predominantly new and raw recruits who had never experienced conflict on such a scale were affected by the intensity of going into battle and how did this affect them coming home on leave and at the end of the war with their loved ones?

There were clearly many former soldiers who were willing to talk at length about their experiences, but like my grandfather who joined with his four brothers in 1914, he experienced firsthand the Christmas truce, was affected by gas and the horrors of lost friends and brothers in battle, he never spoke about the Great War for the rest of his life.

Such was the effect.

On a BBC programme on the Battle of the Somme, the narrator stated that such was the intensity of what soldiers went through at the front that the experience being something on a completely different level to normal life made them forever altered and subsequently different in later life, which was certainly the case for my grandfather for the whole time I knew him.

Well, Angus, I mean you raise a really important point there about the experience of conflict on the kind of scale of numbers and the kind of war that the First World War rapidly turned into, as we've often said on this podcast, this industrial war that drew in industrial scale resources through heavy industry, turned the battlefield into an area of industrial killing, and the casualties were on an industrial scale too.

Not just men killed, but men wounded, men affected, as you suggested, psychologically for the rest of their lives.

And this was something, of course, that I began to tap into when I interviewed those hundreds of Great War veterans in the late 80s and early nineties.

And what was clear to me was that the war had affected them deeply.

For some, they'd buried it and buried it and buried it to a point where they could bury it no more, and someone came along who was enough of a friend for them to trust, but enough of a stranger for them to tell their tale to, and that was me.

And I must have asked the right kind of questions for them to come out with the kind of things that they told me during many of those discussions.

We've had a recent episode on oral history with some of the first veterans that I interviewed, and how that whole process of me talking to them, interviewing them changed over time to a point where I guess I was having really intimate conversations with them about how intense the experience of war had been to them.

Often so intense that George Butler, as I've mentioned previously, I'm sure, would often look up at me and look into the face of someone that he saw as a fellow Great War veteran, because there I was in my mid-twenties by then, of a similar kind of age to the people that he served with, and his mind was so far back in that period that he thought he was looking at a contemporary.

So it was clear that the war had affected them, but they didn't have the language to really always explain that.

Some of the officers that I interviewed perhaps did so better than the men, but Albert Chester's, who'd served with the 17th Royal Welsh Fusiliers on the Somme, I remember going to see him and asked him how he was, and he quietly looked at me and said I fought the Battle of the Somme in my bed again last night, and that was his way of saying that the demon that sat on his shoulder, the experience of that war was ever present, and he couldn't shake it.

No man could go through an experience like the First World War and be unaffected.

Some were affected more than others.

For some it was part of a long, tough life, and they saw it in the same kind of way as they perhaps did by working in the pits or in heavy industry or whatever it was, and saw it on a kind of equal level.

This was just another chapter in what they knew was always going to be a hard life for them, and perhaps they could square it off in that way.

For men who had grown up in fairly modest but civil society and had lived in good homes with good families and were church faring men, suddenly to be thrown into the abyss of the First World War and experience those things that they that they saw and that they went through, and the comrades that they saw killed, not with a clean bullet through the chest, which they clasped and stagger and fall over, but hideous deaths in many cases that haunted them for the rest of their lives.

I mean, again, no one is going to walk away from that completely unaffected.

But of course, when the war came to an end, and the survivors, who were the majority of men who had served, not everybody died, most men came home.

And when those men did come home, what was the kind of support network that they got to deal with these experiences?

Well, almost nothing.

There was no psychological counselling after the war, there was no counselling full stop for these men, while some who might have had money could have gone to see a psychiatrist to try and talk through this, and there are some examples of this in print, and if you go to Paul Fasell's The Great War and Modern Memory, you'll see quite a lot in that.

It's a curious book in many ways, but it does tackle this subject about men seeking help after the war.

But most men were not in that position to do so.

They buried themselves in their lives, in their civilian occupation, in their family, in their children, and pushed the war further and further away.

And that was a commonality in almost all of the men that I interviewed in the eighties and nineties, that they'd push that war into the background to a point where they thought they'd silenced it, but when they stopped work and their children grew up and they were living quiet, retired lives, the war slowly crept back, and the noise of the haunting of that war grew stronger and stronger to a point where somehow they had to do something with it.

And some had sat down and written their memoirs as a way of dealing with that, and then others met people like me who gave them the opportunity to talk to verbalise their war, perhaps in a way that they had never done.

I mean, I wasn't the only one doing this.

Way before me was Lynn MacDonald and Martin Middlebrook and a few others, and at the same time as I was interviewing veterans, Richard Van Emden was out there doing it on a similar kind of big scale, leading to all those fantastic books that he's written.

And it was good and important that we recorded those memories at that time from Middlebrook through to Richard, and like we've said, many other historians doing this kind of oral history work.

Alf Peacock up in York, who used to be the chairman of the York WFA, the Western Front Association, and the editor of the Gunfire magazine, which is available now on the Western Front Association website.

He was doing a similar kind of thing.

All of this is really important, but I think probably unknowingly, unwittingly, even, we were acting as kind of counsellors to some of these men to give them that opportunity to verbalise their experiences.

And I'm sure and I know not all of it came out.

So when I look back on it, I realised what an extraordinary time it was, and what it taught me was the ways in which men could be affected by being in conflict, and then I saw the whole thing all over again on an even bigger scale when it came to that period in which I was travelling with and interviewing and talking to Second World War veterans as I took them back to Normandy, to Monte Cassino, to Arnhem, wherever it was, and I saw commonalities in the way that they phrased their experiences, how I could approach them to get them to talk about their war.

I saw a commonality with the men that had served in the Great War.

And the documentary that you're referring to, I think ends up with this phrase, they don't make men like that these days, where a veteran is asked if the First World War could happen again, he says they don't make men like that these days.

And I'm sure on one level that is true, but the experience of the Second World War for many service men and women was just as terrible, just as horrific, just as difficult to square off when that war was over, and they struggled with it in the same kind of way.

And does that make them lesser than the veterans in the Great War?

I mean I don't think this is a kind of competition.

And men and women who have served in recent conflict, because we've had decades of that in the early part of this century, have come back with life-changing injuries, but also the problem of dealing with the experience of conflict in the same way that veterans had done a century before them.

So that wheel I think kind of still keeps turning.

I think it's a really important part of our understanding of the First World War, of all conflict.

It's not to turn these men and women into victims, but it is to understand how that experience of war, that experience of conflict, the experience of comradeship and the loss of comrades, and all of the other jigsaw pieces that the Great War is made of, how that changed men and women forever, and not just service personnel, because the loss of people on the battlefields affected families back home, wives, sisters, daughters, sons, the list goes on.

And I think it's really important to remember that.

So it's probably a kind of subjective answer, Angus, but I hope that's highlighted I think some of what you were trying to get at in your question, and I'm sure yet again this is a subject we will return to.

So our fourth and final question comes from Neil Coleman.

Neil says, Regarding the Battle of Manchester Hill in 1918, when I was a student at Manchester University, I used to talk to a First World War veteran way back in 1973.

He told me that in one battle, which I think was the Manchester's at Manchester Hill, he told me that the remaining soldiers were being overrun by many Germans.

The few remaining men were getting the wind up, and the commanding officer shouted out that he would shoot the first man to run back to avoid a dire situation.

The veteran told me that one of his fellow soldiers shot the officer, and they ran back to save themselves from the Germans.

The more I've read about this, I wonder if this could have been Lieutenant Colonel Elstorb, who famously told his superiors that they would fight to the last round and the last man.

I wondered if you'd come across this occurrence in your research.

Well, it's a really interesting question, Neil, and one actually that has come up a few times recently, and hopefully this will answer a collection of questions based around this incident.

So, first of all, what is Manchester Hill?

It's a position overlooking the city of Saint-Cantas and Quentin, which was captured in the spring of nineteen seventeen by the 2nd Battalion of the Manchester Regiment, serving in which was the war poet Wilfred Owen.

That was a regular battalion.

They took that ground and the hill was named Manchester Hill after them.

It was then turned into a strong point, and when that line was stabilised and reinforced, it was one of a number of redoubts, defensive positions, that was built as part of the in-depth British defences in that area.

There was a whole load of redoubts in that area, of which the Manchester Hill redoubt was one.

And on the 21st of March 1918, the Germans attacked in this area in that final great German push of the Great War, when at 4.40 a.m.

that morning, a massive bombardment, huge amount of artillery, massive use of gas, saturated the positions here around Saint Contown, a wider front, not just Manchester Hill itself, and the lines around the hill, around the redoubt, began to collapse as the Germans pushed through.

They had the advantage of artillery firepower, but also the advantage of fog that screened a lot of their movement that day.

And Lieutenant Colonel Wilfrith Elstob was in charge of approximately 170 men of the 16th Battalion of the Manchester Regiment, which was the Manchester Powers Battalion, and they were the ones who defended it that day.

Elstob was a vicar's son from Sussex.

He was educated at Christ Hospital School near Horsham, and then later at Manchester University, and after his education he became a teacher in Manchester.

He joined up at the very beginning of the war, and he was one of those that went from private to lieutenant colonel, so he served in the ranks, was then commissioned, and latterly he became the commanding officer of this Manchester Powers battalion.

Now it was clear as the fighting progressed around them that they were being cut off.

They had a fixed link back to brigade and divisional headquarters, an armoured cable with telephone lines in it that they hoped would not be broken by the bombardment.

That kept the lines open, and Elstorb gave out information to the situation they were in.

Within the redoubt, they had quite a lot of ammunition, bombs, machine gun ammunition.

They had backup personnel from the trench mortars and also from the machine gun corps assisting them in the defence of the position.

But the amount of ammunition that they had wasn't going to last forever, and gradually the situation got more and more critical.

So messages came through the wire from Elstorb to headquarters.

The enemy are on top of us, we are surrounded.

I hold my battalion, my left flank is gone, my right flank is going, situation critical, and one of his last messages was I will not surrender.

And in the final battle, as the Germans began to swarm over the position as the firepower of the redoubt gradually diminished, the defensive perimeter was shrinking, ammunition was almost non existent, the machine guns pretty much all gone.

Elstorb is seen to move amongst the men, encouraging them, directing the fire of the men who still had weapons that could operate, and in the final German push they overrun Elstorb's positions and trenches, and he is killed.

Accounts vary between being shot while rallying his men or making a last bayonet charge at the enemy as the ammunition had completely run out.

And the redoubt the Manchester Hill falls around about midday on the twenty first of march nineteen eighteen.

Now Elstob is dead, he's killed in action, and he's subsequently awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross, and for that there has to be a number of witnesses, and witness statements were given to put forward the recommendation for the VC, which was accepted, and that was subsequently gazetted in the London Gazette.

So that means quite a large number of men who were in the action were spoken to to corroborate the story of Elstob's bravery leading to his award of the Victoria Cross.

So was he then killed by his own men based on your discussion with this veteran?

I've heard this quite a few times in different accounts.

Well, I mean that is a question that probably I and no one else can answer.

We don't have any definitive written accounts that state this.

It is a matter of kind of whispers and discussion, and some later writers have speculated about the exact circumstances of Ilstaub's death, but there is no contemporary evidence to support the claim that he was killed by his own men.

All reliable sources indicate that he died fighting as the position was overrun.

Now I think what your question hints at is the kind of wider idea if an officer was going to get a load of men killed under all kinds of different circumstances, would the men react?

I mean in the Vietnam War this was called fragging, where they'd throw a grenade at a useless officer and kill him before the actions of that officer got them killed.

Did that happen in the Great War?

It must have done.

Was this the situation at Manchester Hill?

I don't think so, because Elstorb was highly regarded by his men, he had commanded them for so long, and he never asked men to do something that he wasn't prepared to do himself.

And putting himself in the vanguard of the fight there meant that this is going to be almost certain death for him, and he knew that.

So it didn't require his own men to kill him, the Germans were having a pretty good go at it themselves.

We will never get to the bottom of this, I don't think.

But it's right to ask these questions and it's right to question the accepted narrative of something, but always, always it has to be based on good evidence.

Because there were, as I've mentioned in the podcast before, when talking to veterans, there were those kind of stamina stories where little teeny fragments of fact got blown out of all proportion by men with a lot of drink in their belly, and suddenly all kinds of stories would come out of that.

And possibly that is the genesis of this tale of Elstob being killed by his own men.

But for me, Elstorb will always be the hero, fighting against impossible odds, but onwards, ever onwards for him to the very last.

His body was never recovered, and you'll find him commemorated by name on the panels of the Poziers Memorial to the Missing.

So that ends our questions for this week.

There have been some really superb questions this week, and I love the kind of questions where we do challenge accepted fact that's really, really important.

And keep the questions coming, send them in via the usual routes of email and the Discord server, and we'll be back soon for some more questions and answers here on the old front line.

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

You can follow me on Twitter at Somcor.

You can follow the podcast at OldFrontline Pod.

Check out the website at oldfrontline.co.uk where you'll find lots of podcast extras and photographs and links to books that are mentioned in the podcast.

And if you feel like supporting us, you can go to our Patreon page, patreon.comslash oldfrontline, or support us on buymea coffee at buymeacoffee.comslash oldfrontline.

Links to all of these are on our website.

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you again soon.