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Back in episode 37 of Questions and Answers, we had a question about men re-enlisting that due to a slight misinterpretation on my part, and I think the runner dropped the message on the way up the communication trench and I didn't quite read it properly.

A question was unfortunately wrongly attributed to somebody, and thanks to them for pointing that out to me.

And that was in fact a question from Sam Daly.

So thanks for that question, Sam.

For now, let's get down to this week's questions.

Our first question comes from Angus Cole on email.

He asks what is the current size of the zone rouge in France, and if applicable, Belgium, and what impact do these areas continue to have on modern day lives in those areas affected by them?

Also, are there plans to as far as you are aware, to try and clear some of these areas for agricultural residential use again, or are they considered to be forbidden areas in perpetuity?

Well, we've looked at the subjects of the Zone Rouge on a previous podcast.

In fact, the myth of the Zone Rouge.

So let's say what it is first.

Well, after the First World War, that vast area of France that had been affected by those four years of combat which had been devastated with villages and towns and even parts of cities smashed to oblivion by bombardments, roads and railways and canals and bridges destroyed, torn up, and this massive, massive acreage, hectarage of destruction had cast this dark shadow over that area.

And to rebuild it, reclaim it, well that required government assistance, a government programme, if you like, and to classify the areas that were affected by all this, they were designated by colours, and the worst affected, the ones that had seen almost total destruction, were in the red zone, the zone rouge, as the French called it.

And that classification then helped, I guess, planners to look at this and see what could be done, see what assistance could be given, and I think some people believe that the Zone Rouge was something that was classified in perpetuity.

It wasn't.

Essentially, and we've got quite good accounts of this, the Zone Rouge technically ceased to exist in the 1930s because the areas had all been declassified, some had not been rebuilt, so there were areas in the Marne and in the Champagne and around Verdun and other areas besides, even some on the Somme where villages had not been rebuilt in the same place or not been rebuilt at all, and those areas were cordoned off.

Now there are some reasons behind this, not just because the land could not be reclaimed, although in several cases that was obvious or it would be difficult to do that.

But for example, at Verdun, there was there a desire to commemorate, to memorialise, and one way to do that was to take that sacred French battlefield of the First World War, where so many had died and so many had fought, it became a kind of symbol of French sacrifice and steadfastness in the Great War, then there was the desire to permanently preserve it.

So that landscape was forested and the villages within it were essentially abandoned, in some cases rebuilt elsewhere, but not always.

So if we looked at what the Zone Rouge was just after the war and what it had become by the eve of the next war in the late 1930s, the vast majority of it had been reclaimed.

Villages had been rebuilt, farmland had returned to farming, there were crops growing there, there was cattle in fields, lives had returned to normal two decades after the Great War.

That didn't mean that there wasn't a legacy of the war with munitions and gas and all kinds of equipment still coming to light as farming became far more industrialized, and tractors were able to plough the fields in a way that horse-drawn ploughs hadn't, and this brought up even more munitions and caused casualties as a result of this.

So the legacy side of it was still there, but technically the Zone Rouge had ceased to exist, and for a long time there was really no talk of the Zone Rouge because it was no longer there as such.

There were these areas that you couldn't go into at Verdun and in the Champagne and the Marne, but these were areas that were also military camps where modern military training took place small arms fire, mortars, artillery, but latterly in some places they had tank firing ranges there, and modern tank armaments can also include depleted uranium rounds, and there were some areas where these had been fired and their exact whereabouts were not known, or they had been discovered and they hadn't been moved, they were left in situ.

So it was considered too dangerous for the public just to wander into these areas that have been training grounds to stumble across munitions that have been used in live fire exercises.

So quite a few of these areas that were also crisscrossed with trenches and mine craters and the ruins of some of these disappeared villages that had been left, they had signs, they had fences around them and signs with skull and crossbones on there saying danger of death, do not enter.

And what we saw in the centenary were a lot of journalists joining up some of these dots and thinking that those signs referred to the fact that the zone rouge, the red zone, still exists, and they were warning people away from that.

Now, this again does not mean that the dangers and the problems which confronted those who tried to reclaim that zone rouge after the war doesn't mean that they've gone away far from it, and there are many, many recorded examples of this, but it doesn't really exist because if we look at a place like Verdun, it was forested after the war.

The landscape was protected really by the plantation of those trees because the roots held the ground together and preserved vast, vast areas of trenches, for example.

There had been a degree of some surface level clearance, but beneath of course there would be shells.

But really that is no different than the open farmland of the Somme or Loose or Combray or any other battlefield of the First World War.

So living as I did at Corcelet and walking the tracks and the fields around that village was no more or no less dangerous than going into the forests at Verdun.

There was the same permanent danger in the ground from munitions from that period, and the pollution of that ground by all of the metals and the gas and the chemicals that had been used in weaponry in the First World War was ever present in the Somme in the same way that it was ever present at Verdun as well.

The levels might have been higher in consequence of the way the landscape at Verdun was preserved by a forest, but then when you walk in that forest, as I did for the very first time in the late 1980s, nature had taken control, had returned that landscape to a natural environment which was full of plant life, of animal life, of birds and everything else.

So it's not that these places are barren, quite the opposite, in fact, a bit like No Man's Land during the Great War.

This was wilding on a massive scale.

So the wildlife in No Man's Land in fact prospered under those conditions, not at the mud of Passchenda, not at the moonscapes of Thirty and all those kind of things, but generally on the static part of the front, it could be perhaps the very opposite of what we think of when we think of a landscape of the First World War.

Now, in terms of the work today, people living on that landscape, they have to face the realities of living there.

And while in some countries like Belgium, they have archaeologists and there's EOD clearance, munitions clearance of ground to make it safe for new developments to be built, that isn't always the case in the vast, vast areas of France that had once been affected by the First World War.

I remember in Corsolette watching a house being built there that I knew was about to be built on top of a vast German dugout where there would be a huge amount of munitions in the ground, and the people doing the building had come from an area outside the Somme, had no knowledge of the First World War, didn't believe it until they started bringing up their first buckets of grenades and mortars and shells and everything else.

So it is an ever-present element of life on these battlefields, but the idea that there are these forbidden zones where nothing grows and life has finished and that they can never be reclaimed is part of the mythology of what that Zone Rouge is today.

But I think it is again all part of that legacy more than a century later, that still directly connects us to the First World War.

Just this year, at the end of the ploughing season up on the Red Ann Ridge, was a massive pile of unexploded ordnance, British shells, German shells, grenades from several different nationalities.

Quite staggering to see that.

It never stops, and every year that I'm there on those battlefields, no matter what part of the front it is, it will always, always be there.

Certainly in my lifetime and probably many lifetimes still to come.

So check out that episode, Angus, and I'll put a link to it in the show notes about the myth of the Zone Rouge, which will hopefully tell you a little bit more about that infamous red zone.

So on to question number two, which comes from Carl Austin, also on email.

Carl asks, I understand that morphine was issued as a pain relief for serious wounds.

Was it carried by individual soldiers for the purpose of self-administration?

And bearing in mind that rum was so likely to go astray, was there ever a problem with morphine being misused?

I've never heard of any issues regarding this, but can't believe that it wasn't abused as a coping mechanism.

Well morphine was certainly used as a pain relief and it wasn't given to individual soldiers.

Soldiers carried a filled dressing in their uniform with some iodine in it, but not morphine.

Morphine was initially the preserve of medical officers of the Royal Army Medical Corps who would use it as and when required treating the wounded that were coming in off whatever battlefield it was in that early phase of the First World War.

And of course, that early phase was mobile from Mons to Lookato to the Marne and the Ain, and then the movement north to EAP, which while there were trenches dug by units at Eap, and we've got photographs of them doing that, it was still much more of a mobile operation.

And in those battles, medical officers would be largely, I think, using morphine that was in liquid form that was then available at dressing stations.

Regimental medical officers would also possibly have had morphine ampules which could then be used on the battlefield.

Now for a mobile war where casualties were perhaps not on the scale that the First World War rapidly turned into, that administration of morphine probably was okay.

But quickly people realised the reality of First World War, Great War combat, the new combat that was being fought on these battlefields in 1914, and once the war became static in 1915 and the great offensives began that year, then carrying morphine as a liquid in a glass file was not a very safe or practical way of its use being implemented on a battlefield.

So while morphine would have been found in other forms at base hospitals and casualty stations and indeed beyond on the battlefield, what you start to hear about and read in the accounts in the official history of medical units is the implementation of morphine tablets which were placed under the tongue and dissolved and gave a dose of morphine.

And these were issued to medical officers on the front line, regimental or battalion medical officers, who had a stretcher bearer section who went out to pick up the wounded, and they were also given the power to administer morphine via this tablet form as well.

So they would be given probably a little box of these tablets and they'd take them out as part of their first aid kit and use them when required on the battlefield.

And they also carry this something we've spoken about in a previous podcast, an indelible pencil which made this kind of blue writing, and they would write on the forehead and the casualty card of the soldier because when a soldier was treated, they would have a casualty with their details on what the wound was, what had been administered at that point in terms of treatment, and that was put into a rubberised pouch that was then tied round one of the general service buttons on the soldier's uniform so that when they got to the next treatment level, they knew what had been done and what the wound appeared to be.

They would obviously reassess that, but more importantly, they knew in this case how much morphine or that a dose of morphine had been given, because if that wasn't noted, then you could overdose somebody on morphine and potentially kill them.

And it wasn't just pull on the casualty, they would often write that on the forehead of a soldier with an M on there to indicate one or more doses of morphine.

And I think these tablet forms were quite strong, so I'm not sure they gave too many doses of them in one go.

Now, morphine on a battlefield where there were so many casualties would quickly become a precious resource.

And what stretcher bearers and in particular medical officers had to do was prioritise its use because it would run out very quickly if you just gave it to everybody who had a wound that had caused them pain.

So they looked at the seriousness of wounds, the survivability of wounds, and they used the morphine in that way to control pain relief.

But there are also recorded examples where medical officers were confronted by soldiers with multiple fatal wounds, wounds that the soldier was never going to recover for, and no amount of treatment would save him, and the soldier was in terrible, terrible pain.

And at that point the medical officer has to make a terrible, godlike decision about whether this man lives or dies, or if it's possible for him to survive.

Can he let him suffer in this way?

And morphine gives him the ability for that end for that soldier to be more comfortable in terms of the patient's welfare.

He can't save his life, but he can make that end, that ending, free of pain.

And so young men who were medical officers had to make these kind of decisions, which are incredible to us in the kind of modern lives that we lead now.

And it's something that clearly had an effect on them because I remember reading some years ago that in the interwar period, former medical officers who'd served on the front line doing exactly this kind of thing, the suicide rate amongst those men was artificially higher compared to the rest of the typical population of the same kind of age and background.

Now, that is not necessarily a kind of scientific indication of the results of having to do this kind of work and what effect that might have on an individual who was forced to do this using morphine in this way, but I think it gives us a bit of a blink towards it and a bit of an understanding.

So this kind of begins to address the other aspect of your question about the misuse of morphine.

Given its wide availability to medical staff, could it be misused?

Well, of course.

I mean, people traded all kinds of stuff in the Great War, and while 1914 it seems that morphine was largely administered by officers or senior non-commissioned officers with stretcher bearers, they had access to morphine tablets and they were ordinary private soldiers.

So it meant that those men did have access to morphine.

Whether there was some kind of illicit trade, I've not read anything about that.

Would we read anything about that?

Because it's something that I guess would exist on a level beneath the official account of the Great War.

But in some of the crime-related papers to do with the conduct of the British Army behind the lines on the Western Front, there are some hints of this, some hints of some kind of drug abuse, and morphine is the most likely candidate for that, considering that it could be widely available.

If you were that way inclined to misuse drugs and you were on a battlefield as a conscript soldier later on in the war, and you come across the body of a stretcher bearer and know that in his haversack there's a load of morphine.

Are you just going to walk past and leave it there?

So there were circumstances in which morphine, I guess, could be acquired and then misused, traded, sold.

I mean, who knows what?

I mean, this is a darker side to the Great War that we don't know enough about.

And I was thinking recently about the papers of the military police who operated behind the lines dealing with crime like this, not just drug related but alcohol related, damage to property, all kinds of nephriotous activities going on.

Because once you had a conscript army conscripting men from 18 to 55, it conscripted a huge cross-section of the male population, really good guys, but also some bad guys as well, who, as unwilling soldiers, as conscripts, carried on their nephriotous activity in Kharki just as they had done in civil life as well.

And I must go back to the archives at some point and see if I can pull out some good examples of this, and we can do a podcast about crime in the First World War because it is all part of that story.

So I can't give you a definitive answer to your question, Carl, but I hope that shed a little bit of light on this subject and a subject of the misuse of material and the crime related to that that hopefully we will return to in a future podcast episode.

So thanks for that, Carl.

So on to question number three, and this one comes from Joe in Canada.

I was wondering when helmets were first issued to British and Canadian troops.

When did these troops start to add divisional insignia to their helmets?

And was that done during late 1918 for troops going home or was it done earlier than that?

Well, when the British Army and the Empire forces, the Commonwealth as it is today, went to war in 1914, no one had helmets.

Everyone was wearing service dress caps, soft caps, because that was the standard headgear of the day.

And there was no thought about injuries to the head from bullets or from shrapnel or from shell fragments, because this was going to be a war of movement, not a static war.

But very quickly, of course, as we know from the history of the Great War, that's exactly what it turned into.

So 1915, with trenches dug across this vast landscape of Flanders to northern France from a British and Empire perspective, with men from British regiments, Canadian, Indian, and then increasingly other nations as the war moved on, with the arrival of Australian and New Zealand forces and also South Africans, and by the latter two years of the war, men from all over that British Empire serving on the Western Front.

With that static war and men in trenches in holes dug in the ground with shells going off above them, the increase in head wounds led to the development of the first steel helmets.

Not by the British, but actually by the French, who developed a very basic steel skull cap basically that went underneath the Kepi and gave some very, very limited protection against shrapnel and bullets and shell fragments.

But this was something that was done provisionally.

The French then developed the Adrienne helmet that was the first proper steel helmet used on the battlefield of the Great War, which was issued to French soldiers in 1915.

Quite a lot of British officers acquired them.

There's photographs of Churchill wearing them.

I used to own one to a British medical officer that had a Royal Army Medical Corps badge welded onto the front of it.

But at the same time there was the development of a proper steel helmet, a shrapnel helmet, as it was called at the time, to be issued to British and Empire soldiers.

And they were ready in time for the Battle of Luz in September 1915, but only small numbers were issued, and I don't believe there are any photographs of any ordinary British soldiers wearing the steel helmet at Luz in 1915.

An added complexity to this with officers is that they bought their own kit so they could order a steel helmet from a catalogue and have it sent to them in the trenches of northern France, and many did do this.

So some of the first helmets to arrive were private purchase helmets that were bought by officers and worn in the front line.

Now some of those were decorated with insignia, sometimes painted onto the helmet, the badge of the regiment or the unit that they were serving in.

Sometimes badges were welded onto these helmets.

You may have seen this in the film 1917, where some of the characters in that are wearing helmets with a cat badge welded on it.

This came under criticism from people who watched the film, but actually it's quite correct.

This was done, and there's lots of photographic evidence to show this.

But more commonly, they began to paint them on there because they found, I believe, that when you welded a badge to a helmet, it created a weak spot, and there was this widespread belief that German snipers knew about this, and if they saw you standing in a trench wearing a helmet with a cat badge on it, they would aim their sights on that cat badge and the bullet would go straight through and kill you instantly.

Now, whether that was true or not, the adaptation of helmets adding insignia was something that then continued throughout the rest of the war, and it depended really on what unit you were in.

Now I suspect Joe that you're looking at this from a Canadian perspective, and there are wartime photographs, particularly in 1918, of soldiers with divisional flashes or their unit flash painted on their helmet, sometimes on the back of the helmet rather than necessarily the front.

This was also done in British divisions and probably Australian, New Zealand formations, South African formations as well.

And this wasn't just about pride in your unit, your battalion, your brigade, your division.

There was a practical reason for this as well, because increasingly as the war moved on, soldiers would remove identification from about their uniforms, so take off shoulder titles, remove sometimes cloth titles that gave away what regiment or corps they were part of, and that this idea of using symbols to indicate what unit they were a part of that would, in theory, only be known to men within that formation was something that was increasingly done.

And there's quite a few books on battle insignia showing how this developed.

There was no standardisation in some divisions of the British Army, no insignia was used at all, and in others there were very complex systems by which they painted helmets, put colour flashes on the collars, the back collars of uniforms and upper sleeves, and all this kind of stuff.

It's a fascinating subject, and again, there's a lot of photographic evidence of all that in contemporary images.

So you can find a lot of information about this.

Now I know today these helmets, which are often erroneously called brody helmets, that's not a phrase that you see being used for them during the Great War, during the First World War itself.

I think that's more of a collector's description of these helmets.

They were a steel helmet or a shrapnel helmet, and one proudly made in the city of Sheffield, which I used to once live close to when I lived in South Yorkshire, which was proud of its steel industry, and they made the vast majority of steel helmets that were issued to British and Commonwealth troops in the Great War.

But from a collector's point of view, I know that the ones that have got insignia painted on them are highly prized, go for huge amounts of money.

Over the years of collecting this kind of material myself, I've had a couple of examples of this with very nondescript kind of rectangles or squares with some colours on, and I wasn't ever really entirely sure what unit that some of these related to because the paint had often changed colour and it was difficult to match them up to any known documentation.

But what I have seen increasingly since the time of the centenary are helmets that are quite clearly faked, in my view, with some very strange-looking insignia, or insignia that's kind of too good to be true, really, and doesn't match up with what we know that that division or regiment or battalion or whatever actually used, and there's always this kind of so-called provenance with it that it's an exception to a rule, and that tempts collectors to go after these kind of things.

But coming back to the history of steel helmets, first uses we've said, the Battle of Luz, September 1915, and then on the Western Front, by the time of the Battle of the Centre Loire Craters, which included Canadian soldiers that were serving in that part of Flanders at that time, this was the first battle on the Western Front in which every British and Commonwealth soldier had a steel helmet, and from then onwards, from March 1916 onwards, that was the standard headgear of soldiers on the front line.

Many men wore them behind the lines.

I've got plenty of photographs of guys that were out on rest and went to studios to have their photographs taken, and they're still wearing their steel helmet.

Some men didn't wear them.

I've spoken a lot about George Butler, who was in the machine gun corps.

He thought they were scruffy, he was a regular soldier, so he wore the service dress cap with its stiffener in it for the entire war, which cost him in April 1918 because a shell went off above his machine gun position, killed the rest of his crew, and badly wounded him in the head, and he wouldn't have been as badly wounded if he'd have been wearing a steel helmet.

So what you see as the war goes on is the widespread adoption of these helmets, and by the time of photographs of the Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1916, everyone is clearly wearing them, and they see that as another way to protect themselves on the battlefield.

But when the war becomes mobile again, you see perhaps a relaxation of this.

And if you look at photographs of the last hundred days, particularly in that summer of 1918, there are perhaps fewer helmets being worn by some men, and there was also a return to the adaptation of uniforms that have been discarded.

So the officers' tunics that had their rank on the cuff that had been discarded for the so-called wind-up tunics, where you had the rank up on the epaulets of the uniform, so it couldn't clearly be seen that you were necessarily an officer.

But in 1918, a lot of officers on the front line went back to wearing those cuff rank uniforms that had been discarded perhaps two years before, except in photographs taken in England when you were training.

I've gone slightly off the Kind of subject there as we often do, but there is a symbolism as well, I think, with helmets that goes beyond the battlefield itself, not perhaps exactly in the same way as the German steel helmet, the Stahlhelm, which was very much a symbol of being a veteran and used on war memorials right across Germany.

But I think in Britain that the steel helmet did represent you as a soldier.

So there was an organisation called the Memorable Order of Tin Hats, the Moths, and they used the steel helmet as their symbol.

They had a little lapel badge that you wore with a steel helmet on it that said moth, and you see helmets being used widely in statuary and war memorials, not just on figures on those war memorials, but often the helmets are arranged in stone around the base of a memorial, including on cemeteries as well.

So if you go to the original entrance to Tynecott Cemetery, where you would have walked in through that front gateway to be confronted by this vast hillside of the dead in that post-war period, when that was all complete, the architect there actually placed as kind of almost like curbstones, steel helmets on the outside of the cemetery.

So the symbolism of the helmet, the shrapnel helmet, the steel helmet, some erroneously call it the Brody.

During the war, it was referred to by officers often as a battle bowler.

It is very much part of the identity of the British Tommy in the Great War, whether that Tommy is from Britain or from Canada or from one of the other Empire Commonwealth nations.

And I would refer you to one of the great friends of this podcast, Peter Doyle, who's written extensively about uniforms and equipment of the First World War.

And if you pick up one of his books like Remembering Tommy or What Tommy Took to War, that'll give you quite a lot of good insights into the use and development of steel helmets and their adaptation by British and Commonwealth forces during the Great War.

So thanks for that, Joe, and I hope that's answered some elements of your question and shed a bit more light on steel helmets and the decoration that was made to them during the Great War.

On to our fourth and final question, which comes from Kevin Tobin on Discord, which is another way for you to submit a question to the podcast.

Kevin asks, Are there any First World War slang words still in use by people today?

Well, I'm going to refer you to Peter Doyle again because Peter Doyle and Julian Walker wrote a really good book on this called Trench Talk, which was first published in 2012 and is still widely available.

And there's a whole host of material about the language used in the First World War, words that became unique to the war, words that were plucked out of the past to have a new meaning, and how words and language developed as the soldier went through his experiences in the First World War.

And first of all, slang is part of the verbal currency of military service.

Slang is used in the military today, it's been used probably in every military that's ever existed in any time frame.

But in terms of the First World War, where this vast army in Britain is recruited from pre-war regular soldiers, volunteers, and territorials through to the creation of a new army, Kitchener's army with volunteers in 1914, through to eventually a conscript army with this vast cross-section of British society going into the military, including by 1917-18, a lot of women as well serving not just in nursing roles, but in military roles behind the lines on the Western Front and other fronts besides.

So a lot of language is developed and used through this service, which then, of course, for those who survived the war and go back home, becomes part of their verbal currency, their day-to-day language that often would help identify them to others as someone who had served in the war.

Because not necessarily by the 1930s, not necessarily everybody in your street is going to be a veteran of the Great War.

Even some who are the same age as you might not have served, might been medically unfit to serve, or had protected jobs, whatever it was.

And this language is all part of that closed, almost secret society of veterans that existed in that interwar period where they spoke amongst themselves, talked about the war to each other, and kept quiet pretty much to everyone else.

So if we kind of think of some key words, I mean we could literally fill probably multiple podcasts with this, but let's have a look at a few examples of this.

And what we'll do is we'll look at words which I think are still pretty much used today.

Blighty.

I mean, people still refer to dear old Blighty.

I'm heading back to dear old Blighty when we do tours on our coaches.

People say, Oh, it's great to be back in Blighty again.

And that is a phrase, of course, that existed before the First World War, but became popularised with troops using it.

There were magazines that had it in the title, there were books, there was the popular song, Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty.

And what it is is a bit of verbal currency from regulars in India before the war, a derivation of an Indian word meaning home.

So Blighty was home.

You were going back to Blighty, you were going home when you were taking your discharge from India to go back to your depot to be released into civilian life.

And that was a word that then was part of the language of the soldier before the Great War and very much during the Great War and pretty much probably ever since, but one that is still used by people today.

Another one is chatting.

We all like a chat.

We go to the pub to meet our mates and have a chat, or we go to a tea room and have a coffee or a pot of tea and we have a chat.

Chatting is something that was done by soldiers when they were out of the line and they were covered in body lice, and they'd take off their uniform and the lice would often lay eggs in the thick woolen seams, and they would take a candle and run that lit candle up the seams, popping all the lice eggs, and it would make this pop, pop, pop, pop, pop sign, and they would be sitting there while they were doing this, almost nonchalantly talking to each other, chatting away, having a chat, and that's where that comes from, and we still chat to this day.

There's a part of this podcast called Trench Chat, where we speak to people.

So chatting is still very much part of the modern language as it was to the soldier of the Great War.

No man's land.

Now this was a phrase that almost certainly existed before World War I, but it became symbolic of the Great War and that battlefield, that landscape of the First World War, and it's something that we use today in with all kinds of meanings.

I remember when I moved back to Kent after living in France, there was a bit of a housing estate on the edge of the housing estate where I was living.

They had a sign up because they didn't want people to go into this particular area of the estate, and they'd written no man's land on it, indicating this was a place that you should not enter.

So I think that's still part of the modern language, societal language today.

And we see it in a lot of news reports, particularly relating to things like Ukraine and other places where there's conflict now.

Over the top, which was the phrase for going literally over the top, going into action, climbing up the ladders, going over the parapet, going into no man's land, making your attack, that is a phrase that is still used in all kinds of ways, indicating that you're about to do something.

Come on, we're going to go over the top and we're going to get this task done.

And one that I'll end with, which I used to think about a lot when we'd be going to and fro in the coaches, backwards and forwards to the UK in in the days long before the changes to the border and Covid and everything else.

People would often pick up a few bottles of wine.

And I had friends when I lived in Kent before who would go over and they'd pick up wine, they'd go to one of the warehouses near Calais and things like that, and they would always talk about, oh, I'm just heading over to France to get some cheap Planck.

And Planck is a piece of First World War verbal currency because soldiers tried to speak French and they'd go into an Estamina and they'd order a bottle of white wine, Van Blanc, and they couldn't say Van Blanc, so they would say vin Planck or just Planck.

And Planck was really a word for cheap wine because soldiers were not drinking the best claret or white wine or anything else when they were behind the lines in those Estaminaes during the Great War, and Planck is a word that we still use when we go in search of cheap wine in French hypermarkets or whatever it is.

So I think Kevin there is a whole host of words out there.

There's stuff about this on YouTube, and I would thoroughly recommend Peter Doyle and Julian Walker's book, Trench Talk, and there are a few others besides.

There's some earlier ones from the interwar period where veterans have outlined some of the words that they commonly use.

And it's something you see in much of the literature memoirs, fiction written by those who were there.

So it's an important part of our understanding of the Great War.

So thanks for that question, Kevin.

Thanks for all of the questions this week.

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