The Lou's anniversary featured in the news at the end of September with the reburial of several soldiers from the nineteen fifteen fighting at Lewes British Cemetery in the new extension there, and these were men who'd been found on the Lend Hospital site close to the slopes of Hill 70.

Two of the soldiers had been identified, and their stories were featured in a BBC News documentary that featured the MOD war detectives and the work that they'd done to help identify these soldiers, and it also featured quite extensive interviews with the families of those soldiers too.

It was a really well made programme and it's available on iPlayer, and I'll put a link to it in the show notes for this episode.

And the whole incident crosses over nicely really with the podcast episode on the MOD team.

But also once more it shows how the pages of Great War History never stop turning, and that in itself never ceases to amaze me.

But let's get on to this week's questions.

Question one comes from Paul Burns on Patreon.

Patreon is a means by which you can support the podcast, and we've built quite a nice little Great War old frontline community there, and quite a few unique things are offered to those who support us via that method.

And you'll find details of that on the podcast website.

Paul asks, I am a newly intrigued person into the history of the Great War, and your podcast has opened up so much to me.

Thanks for that, Paul.

He says, My question will probably reflect that, but how did Hills get their numbers along the front line?

And was that number only used once in the whole of the line, i.e.

hill eighty near Epe means there could not be another Hill eighty anywhere else?

Well, first of all, let's go back to maps in nineteen fourteen when the British Expeditionary Force, the BF, came across to France at the very beginning of the Great War.

It had maps, maps that had been prepared by the War Office and using data provided by the Ordnance Survey, which is the big mapping organisation in Great Britain.

They in themselves had bought map data from other countries because they couldn't go and survey so many places right across the world, not just within Europe.

So they bought that map data and used it to create their own maps.

And these maps were fairly basic things, often in quite a large scale, so they covered quite a big area, and they didn't always include every detail that was actually on that landscape because those kind of maps it was thought were not really useful.

That's what you have sketch maps for.

And if you look at a lot of the early war diaries for the First World War for that 1914 campaign, you'll see tons of sketch maps in them because officers were trained to make those kind of maps, and those are the maps that they used in the field.

And once the front went static, it was found that the map data that was on a lot of the maps that the British Army was using was simply incorrect.

So when it showed the contours of the ground, and because it was based on European mapping data, those contours were in metres, not feet.

It showed contours that were 60 meters above sea level, for example, and the guns would be calibrated if you were an artillery unit, you had to fire over that hill that was 60 meters high and fire at an enemy position beyond.

So you calibrated your guns, you fired them over the hill, and in fact the hill was 65 or 68 meters high, and the shells whack into the side of it, and the whole thing doesn't work properly.

So it was realized fairly early on that while these maps were useful, they were not useful once the war focused on a particular area because a lot of the information, the data on the maps, was just simply wrong.

Things were spelt wrong, roads were laid out wrong, woods were not quite the definition that they were marked as on the map, and all kinds of things like this.

So the Royal Engineers were brought in, and survey units then began to survey the battlefield, producing some of the very first trench maps.

And we have discussed trench maps on and off on the podcast, and there's been a couple of episodes relating to them, but it's about time I think that we had a proper podcast episode looking at the history of this mapping.

So that's something that will come.

But coming back to this story, that is when these trench maps in that period of 1914 on into 1915, and once the front stabilized and the British sector of the Western Front began to expand, the need, the necessity for maps grew and grew.

The Royal Engineers produced them and features were marked on them.

And it was important to mark features so that those features could be mentioned in messages and war diaries and combat reports and all kinds of things like that.

And when it came to hills, that's how these hills suddenly became numbered because, particularly in places like Flanders, which was a big chunk of the British front in that early phase of the war, on a flat landscape, any rise of ground will afford you an advantage.

So the hills took on a much greater symbolism and importance when it came to fighting over that kind of ground, and the hills got their names.

Sometimes we inherited those names from the French, and when the number was used, it was again relating to metres above sea level, so hill 60, 60 metres above sea level, hill 80, 80 metres above sea level, and so on.

But those numbered names I would add a proviso to that, in that remember, many of them were given in the early period when the early maps were used, so the number might not be entirely accurate to the actual meterage above sea level of those promontories.

So Hill 60 is a good example.

It's not 60 meters above sea level, it's something like 46 metres, something along those kind of lines.

So this is something we have to remember when it comes to these names.

But your question goes a little bit further in this, Paul, in that you ask, were these numbers repeated?

And I think when the British sector was relatively small, so it 1914-15 it ran from Saint-Loire down to the La Basse Canal, they could kind of get away with it because there were probably several rises in ground that were around 60 metres above sea level, and what you see them begin to use are names that are slightly different numbers.

So there's a hill 62 and there's a hill 63, and like you say, there's a hill 80 near Wicharter.

But what's interesting is that the numbered hills on the British front tend to be restricted to that area in Flanders.

So all kinds of numbered hills eventually became part of that landscape which the British Army fought over during four years of war in Flanders in the Great War.

But when you come down to places like Arras and the Somme, hills tend to be given names rather than numbers.

You see less of that.

Orange Hill and Infantry Hill at Montchy-lepre near Arras being a very good example of that.

But some names were repeated, so there were two Hill 60s, for example, but not both on the Western Front.

One, the famous one just outside Yape in Flanders, but a Hill 60 in Gallipoli as well.

And it's interesting to go there and see that the fighting at that Hill 60 was taking place pretty much at the same time as some of the fighting at the Hill 60 in Flanders, and both were reported in the news with those names, so I'm sure it caused quite a lot of confusion.

And when you move on to the French part of the Western Front, you see this manner of naming hills with numbers far more commonplace.

So I wonder whether in the early phase we adopted a lot of numbered hill names simply because we took over those positions from the French, and that was what they'd marked on their maps that we then used when we first took over those sectors.

So there's an incredibly interesting history behind the development of these sectors and with it the naming of parts of these sectors as the front gradually expands.

Again, all part of that fascinating element of the Great War, layer of the Great War, which is the landscape and the study of that landscape.

So thank you, Paul, for that excellent question.

Question number two comes from Surid Sonsma on email and he asks my question is about logistics.

The amount of soldiers from both sides meant that there must have been an absolute astonishing amount of supply of food, munitions, water, petrol and everything else.

The Germans had exactly the same problem and they even occupied much of the French countryside where coal was mined.

How was this possible and what effects on the economy were there to make this possible?

Well, as we've said in quite a few episodes of the Old Frontline podcast, logistics supply is a really important element of our understanding the First World War.

It's not as sexy as the bombs, bullets and baynets and the fighting on the battlefield, but it's absolutely essential in our understanding of how the front, no matter what front it is, whether it's the Western Front, Salonica, Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, Palestine, it's absolutely essential in our understanding of how those fronts were maintained, because soldiers couldn't fight those battles without all of the kinds of supplies that you've mentioned in your question there.

And in terms of the British approach to this, the British Army invested in infrastructure, as I've said many times, from the very beginning of the war.

The first units that went across as part of the British Expeditionary Force were not infantry, not cavalry, not gunners, they were support units like the Royal Engineers and the Army Service Corps being sent across to set up the base depots, the logistics trail, and the beginning of that supply route that would take supplies being brought over from ship, from port to port, from Britain to France, and then being moved up to wherever the British Army would go and fight its battles.

And as the war progressed and the suddenly the war of movement became a static war, and there was a front that the British Army was holding, and to keep the men on that front, fighting on that front, everything had to be sent to them, and more and more infrastructure was put in place, more and more support units and personnel within those support units were brought over and helped that happen, made it happen.

And as the war grew and grew, and the size of the British Expeditionary Force grew and grew, more and more of those people working in the logistics and supply were needed, and manpower was needed to move everything around.

So by 1917, with it being a truly global war, and from a British perspective, with the empire now the Commonwealth, a huge amount of labour was brought in from all of those empire nations to work behind the front, men from the British West Indies, from Egypt to work at the ports, from South Africa, the South African Native Labour Corps, and so many others, but even that was not enough.

More labour was required.

So over a hundred thousand men from China were recruited to come and work for the British Army behind the Western Front.

Now that's one example from a British perspective.

But if you look at other nations, they're doing very similar.

The French do something very similar to maintain their vast army because, again, if we look at the early period of the war, only a very small part of the front was manned by British troops.

The bulk of the front was the French army, millions of men in uniform, which required a huge amount of infrastructure of supply to keep those men there, to keep them fed and supplied and everything else.

And the French too eventually adopted the idea of using a native labour source of men to come over and work, and they recruited those from Indochina, but they also recruited additional personnel from China just like the British.

So all of this was going on, and it was the only way to keep this vast engine of war moving.

And as you suggest, the Germans on the other side of No Man's Land, holding all of that 450 miles of the Western Front, they had exactly the same kind of problems of supply, bringing their logistics, their supply, their war material a much greater distance in many ways from Germany into Belgium and France, and then up to the fronts.

They used, of course, railways to do that on a massive scale, that whole idea of war by timetable and railways being so important to the movement of men and supplies and everything else.

But what Germany didn't have to back up this logistics trail was an empire to fall back on.

No resources from empire and no men or material from empire that they could bring over, in particular manpower.

So while they had a very small colonial footprint, it wasn't big enough to really bring over vast numbers of men to work behind the front in the same way that the British and the French had done that through their empires, and I think the Germans were reluctant to do that anyway because they did not like the use of black soldiers on a European battlefield.

But more than that, it was industrial mites, this huge industry behind Britain, industry within France.

Germany had a massive armaments industry, but was it geared up for a long conflict?

That's the thing.

And I I've read quite a few historians of both the first and the second world war who believe that Germany was doomed to lose both those conflicts because they were unable to end the war quickly.

Their economy, their industry was geared up for a short fight, a rapid war, and if that war went on more than a year or so into a mired conflict, which the First World War was, and a protracted conflict like the Second World War, then in many respects it was doomed to failure because the economy could not keep up with the demand that was needed to fight a war on that scale.

So coming back to your question about economy, it affected, of course, the war affected the economies of all nations.

In the end, Britain had to borrow huge amounts of money to keep the war effort going.

You see public subscription being called upon to give money to governments through war bonds, for example, to help fund this whole industrial process of feeding the war, because industrial output was one thing that you could not cut back on.

If you cut back on output, whether that's armaments or the food required to feed your army in the field or whatever it was, then you were going to end up losing this conflict.

And that was something, as I say, the British from the very beginning putting in this whole investment in infrastructure, you see that much more clearly in the British approach to fighting than you do with the Germans, who perhaps, like so many people in 1914, thought the war would be over quickly.

In Britain the phrase was home by Christmas, the war would be over by Christmas.

In Germany it was home before the leaves fall, and none of that, of course, was going to be true.

That this war, the peculiar circumstances that led to this war, the changes in technology and everything else would pretty much guarantee exactly what happened in 1914, that a mobile war would go static and commit huge volumes of men to a massive area of terrain and require this massive industrial might to feed that engine of war and keep it turning.

Now I'm not an economic historian, but it is important to I think understand these elements, these layers of the first world war.

So thank you, Seud, for your question on this subject.

Question number three comes from an unknown listener from Toronto on FanMail.

Now fan mail is a way that you can contact the podcast through the podcast provider, BuzzSprout, and you kind of send a text message to the podcast.

I don't see your phone number, and unless you add your name, I don't know who you are, and I can't respond to those messages either.

But it is a way that you can send questions in, but do remember to put your name on.

So if you are that unknown listener from Toronto whose question this is, do get in touch via the other methods and let me know who you are.

So the question is, what a wonderful show, Paul.

Thank you.

Well, thank you for those comments.

He goes on to say, I have a question regarding the number of a battalion affiliated with British regiments.

Often I would read about the 5th Battalion of a regiment that fought on the Somme or other battles.

Were there regiments with multiple battalions serving at the same time in the Western Front or maybe in other theatres of war?

Well, there is a podcast, one of our earlier ones, called What is a Battalion, where we outline what a battalion is and how that fits into the wider structure of the army, and I'll put a link to that in the show notes and also on the podcast website.

But when Britain went to war in 1914, its army was comprised of regiments, largely county regiments, most of which recruited in a kind of localized area, not quite in the same way as POWs, but there was a regional area that those regiments generally recruited from.

So I've always been interested in the Royal Sussex Regiment, and that generally recruited people from the Sussex area.

I mean, it had when you look at the men who died in the retreat from Mons or on the Marne and the Ain with the Second Royal Sussex, they come from quite a widespread area, but generally most of them are born or lived in Sussex, and that was true for a lot of different regiments.

Now I knew veterans who deliberately joined a regiment that had no connection to where they came from because they wanted to get away from where they came from for all kinds of reasons.

So it's not a kind of set process that if you are from Sussex, you will definitely be in the Sussex Regiment because there were regulars who were killed in 1914 in the Munster Fusiliers, in the Duke of Cornwall's on Infantry, and loads of other regiments, men who were born in Sussex towns and had no connection with those counties or places like Ireland, but yet served with those regiments.

But the army was essentially made up of these different regiments, and they did not fight as regiments per se.

So they were split into individual battalions, and normally for a regiment before the war it would have a 1st and a 2nd battalion.

One of those would be on duty within the British Empire, the other one would be in Britain, and then at some point they would swap over.

There would be a 3rd battalion as well, which was a reserve battalion and training battalion, and it would often supply reinforcements for whichever battalion was overseas at that time.

That was a common thing, and that was normally based at the regimental depot.

So for the Royal Sussex Regiment, the 3rd Battalion was at Chichester when the war broke out in 1914, because that's where the Regimental Depot of the Royal Sussex was located.

On top of that, most county regiments had territorial battalions.

Territorial Army after the war, these were part-time soldiers in units that again recruited locally.

These were made up of eight individual companies before the war, of about 120 men, and they had their own drill hall located in a specific location, and then it recruited in that area.

So the 1st 5th, the 5th Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment, which is a territorial battalion, recruited in the eastern part of the county of Sussex, and it had drill halls in some small little villages like Wadhurst and in towns like Rye on the coast or Hastings, and it recruited men from those areas, and they would have an annual camp where all of those companies came together and then regular drill hall sessions.

The men carried out their normal civilian jobs and were part-time soldiers, only being brought into the army as a whole, as it were, if there was a conflict like the Great War or for one of these annual camps.

Now, when the war broke out, all of these units, particularly with the formation of the new army, Kitchener's Army as it became known, Lord Kitchener, called for those hundred thousand volunteers, and again across Britain all of these regiments began to form service battalions, which were the new army, Kitchener's Army battalions that would be needed to continue the war by bringing in a huge amount of manpower because Britain had no history of conscription, and everyone at this stage of the conflict was a volunteer.

And in some places these service battalions became POWs battalions or chums battalions, like the Accrington POWs or the Grimsby Chums.

In Sussex there was the South Downs battalions, there was a Wandsworth Battalion.

I mean, you know, we've discussed these on so many occasions.

And having formed these individual battalions, what did the army do with them next?

Well they then put them into the bigger formation, which was the brigade and the division, and in each brigade there were four battalions, and in each division there were three brigades, so essentially every division of the British Army would have twelve infantry fighting battalions, one pioneer battalion, and then the division was the basic formation by which the British Army fought its battles.

So in terms of regiments having multiple battalions serving on the Western Front or in specific battles, yes, indeed that happened.

And even within individual brigades and divisions, the same regiment could have multiple battalions.

So if we look at the 34th Division that went over the top on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in the attack on La Boiselle, Lochnagar, Minecrater, came over the high ground of the Tyre, Usner Hills, something we've spoken about previously on this podcast.

It had two brigades of its three in that division, made up of battalions of the Northumberland Fusiliers, who were known as the Tyne Side Irish and the Tyne Side Scottish.

And you see this quite a lot in many other formations, territorial divisions and also new army ones as well.

So it meant that if you took a typical regiment, and the Royal Sussex is a very good example of that, having studied that regiment has given me a very good insight into how the British Army was structured, maintained, run, and how the whole kind of sequence of units from battalion to brigade to division actually functioned.

When you look at something like the Royal Sussex, by 1915, they've got battalions on the Western Front, they've got a battalion at Gallipoli, and as the war progresses, they have battalions in Egypt and Palestine and eventually Russia as well.

And other regiments would have had multiple battalions on the Western Front and then perhaps at Salonica or in Mesopotamia.

So it meant that the British Army and these individual regiments could serve in a number of theatres of war simultaneously, and that functioned because the regiment didn't process and maintain those individual battalions as such.

It was the formations in which they served, the brigades and the divisions.

The regiment's function during the war was to maintain these individual battalions on paper, maintain them actually, some of them the ones that were on home service only, and then use those to facilitate the recruitment and training and processing of men that would then be sent on as reinforcements to battalions on active service.

So whereas before the war, with just two battalions potentially on overseas service and one reserve battalion, you could keep that going easily as the war grew.

Then these regiments would need more battalions to train men up to replace the losses on the battlefield.

And what it meant by wars ending is that your typical regiment, even a small county regiment like the Sussex or the Dorsetshire Regiment or whatever it was, could actually have an incredible number of battle honours that were granted because of where its individual battalions had served, and not just the big ones on the Western Front like the Somme and Epe and New Chapelle and all those kind of things, but these other places where the war had become truly global, from Gallipoli to Salonica, Palestine, Mesopotamia, and all of the other places that we've mentioned.

So it's complex and unique in many ways.

The way the British Army operated, was formed, and was structured, was unique compared to other nations.

The French army had numbered regiments which were broken up into smaller subunits.

The American army does a very similar kind of thing.

The Germans recruited more regionally because of the way Germany had come into existence by the unification of German-speaking states.

The army was still reflected those states with Bavarian troops and Prussian Wurttembergs and Hanovarians.

But the British army kept this identity, this regional identity with these kind of county regiments.

But as the war moved on, men from a particular county, even from a particular regiment, could find themselves being forcibly transferred by the army into other regiments that needed them.

So for example, if you joined the Royal Sussex Regiment in 1917 as a conscript, you did your training, you were sent to the infantry base depot at the Tarplar, and often you get there to an infantry base depot, and they would require replacements for a particular regiment up the front, and they would say, and one veteran that I interviewed told me this story.

The sergeant major stepped forward and said, Every other man, one pace forward, and they suddenly found themselves in the Manchester Regiment, for example.

So that's kind of how it operated, and I hope that makes sense to you.

But do go back and have a listen to that What is a Battalion podcast?

Because that is a kind of longer explanation of what I've just described, and I'm sure this is something that we will come back to again and again because just like logistics, it's an essential part of our understanding of the Great War.

So let's move on to question number four, and this one comes from James also on Patreon.

James asks, I'm just reading Frank Lindley's account of the attack on Sayer on the first of July 1916.

He mentions whippers in with pistols, who I'm assuming were men appointed to stop men retreating.

I haven't heard of the expression before.

Were these men present for every attack?

How were they chosen?

Do you know of any accounts of men being shot, retreating from an attack, or were men generally reprimanded and then faced a general court martial?

Would you be listed as killed in action if you were killed in such circumstances?

Well this is a really great question, James, and something that I often heard from veterans, these kind of stories of men being killed in the heat of battle, whether that was under circumstances like you describe, so there are men in a trench, and their job is to make sure everyone's gone over the top, and this particular soldier wouldn't do it, refused all orders, so to stop panic amongst the other men who were also about to go over the top, he is then shot dead.

There's also stories of unpopular NCOs or officers being shot as well.

Now many of these are what I would describe as stamina stories, where soldiers sit there, have a few drinks, start talking about the war, and there might be a tiny inkling of truth in some of this, but it gets blown out of all proportion.

And in terms of verifying it, I mean you ask, would they be listed as killed in action?

If men were shot under these circumstances, then that would probably almost certainly not be recorded.

So we will never really know.

Now there are some published accounts where men say that they did things like this.

Frank Percy Crozier, Brigadier General Crozier, claims that he did it in No Man's.

Land on the Somme on the 1st of July 1916.

Then there's Hutchie, Graham Seaton Hutchison, who says he did it during the Battle of the Lease in April 1918.

There are less examples of what you described, the whippers in with pistols, and that is a phrase I haven't seen myself, where there are men hanging back.

But it is true that there were men in the trenches to ensure that everybody did go over because a momentum had to be maintained, so you couldn't have men hanging back because the whole momentum would break down.

And what they would use for this is the regimental police.

So in an infantry battalion, there is a group of men who are not part of the core of military police, the military foot police or the military mounted police as it was in the Great War.

They are part of that battalion, but they are part of the battalion or regimental police as it's called, and they wear a coloured armband around their tunic sleeve with RP on it indicating they're part of the regimental police.

Very often those men would be required to do this kind of work.

Now they were armed, they might be carrying their own rifles.

You see photographs of them, and they often have side arms, so they have pistols.

Whether they actually shot anyone, I mean is difficult to say, but let's think about these units that were at Sair on the first day of the Somme.

These were POWs battalions, northern Powers Battalions, recruited in places like Accrington and Barnsley and Leeds and Bradford and Sheffield, they had a very, very high Espirit de Corps comradeship.

They were bound by where they'd come from and what they'd been through.

And although some men did let the side down during that early phase of the Battle of the Somme, and we've got some well documented examples of that that ended up in field general court martials, I think those kinds of men, those type of men would have pushed back, would have been unhappy about the idea of having whippers in in the trenches to make sure they went over, because this is what they'd all trained for.

This is what they'd all come to this point to do, to face an enemy, to go into battle and take that enemy on.

So in many respects the discussion of a subject like this is speculation because we don't have very many, if any, truly verified accounts of a named soldier being shot under these circumstances.

We have the estaminae stories, we have the whispers that kind of drift down the century, but more than that, it's very hard to pin it down to a name on a grave or a soldier in a casualty list or whatever it is.

But the reality of war of course tells us that not everyone could give a good account of themselves when that hour came for them to go into battle, and that men broke down, couldn't do it, couldn't face the reality of that is well documented in the cases of those who were shot by firing squad who was shot at dawn following a field general court martial.

And remember that only a small percentage of them that were sentenced to death for those crimes were actually executed.

There were thousands more who had done very similar things, but we've only got their names in ledgers, in books, rather than having their case files to see how widespread this kind of thing was, because sadly all of those case files of the men who were not executed were destroyed some years ago.

But this whole subject of military discipline and the way it was dealt with is a fascinating subject, and one that I will be returning to at some point because there is some absolutely fascinating material on it in the National Archives at Q.

So that's something to come down the line, yet another podcast promised.

But a great question, James, and thank you for that, and thank you to all of those who submitted questions for this episode.

As usual, you can send them in through the easy routes of email and on the Discord server, or via fan mail, and indeed one or two other sources besides.

But keep those questions coming in, they're always fascinating to read, fascinating for me to answer, and I hope you find this of interest, and until we meet again to discuss some more QA's on the old frontline.

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

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