With the help of Santurce best friends, Christmas is saved, listen to a magical audiobook Sanctus Cat brought to you by Lutwyche Iowans to discover who Santa is preparing for a Christmas like never before. Hi, everybody, welcome to Dance Knows history hit, we're here. We've arrived, this is it, part one of our Christmas truce. You've been listening to me banging on about this for so long, you must be thinking, thank God he's actually going to play it.

Now, this is part one of our Christmas truce special. The most ambitious audio and video project we've ever launched here at history. Hit a long time ago. I asked people on this podcast. I asked people via TV, radio and social media to back me as I attempted to start a History Channel that could compete with any History Channel in the world, putting proper historians on screen, telling big stories from our past, a channel that did not feature aliens or LIFESTAR programs for some reason badged as history.

And all those years ago, lots and lots of you back me. As I've said many times, I'm incredibly grateful. We've had tens of thousands people subscribe to history hit TV, and thanks to all that support, we have been able to spend that money on creating bigger and better TV shows and podcasts. This week represents a big milestone on that journey. We've produced our first big drama documentary. It's been the most viewed program on our channel ever.

It's the story of the Christmas truce in 1914 and the forgotten story of the brutal offensive that led up to it. Even by the standards of the First World War. The fighting after stalemated set in after the famous first battle of EPA when the British just held onto it, stabilized the front line. So after trenches stretch from the channel coast to the Alps, there was an attempt to drive the Germans back, if you like, almost the sort of first big set piece of the era when there was no hope of outflanking the enemy, when the trenches stretched from sea to mountain.

And those attacks were unbelievably futile. As you will hear on this podcast, we've got Peter Hart. He is one of the greats, really. He is one of the most remarkable military historians of the First World War. He's written many, many books. He's been on this podcast before. His enthusiasm and knowledge is without parallel. He was the oral historian at the Sound Archive, the Imperial War Museum in the 80s and made a huge number of recorded interviews with veterans of the First World War before that generation died.

And so he has talked to the people involved in this truce. He has read the sources and he's a brilliant communicator you can love. And we've also got to have Gillingham, a legend as well. He is a historian in his own right, but he's also the man who advises historical films, plays, TV documentaries about soldiers, kit, equipment, drills, how they lived in trenches. He's also been on this podcast before. You're going to love him.

It's not just those two gentlemen. We also got the brilliant Rob Schaefer. He's a German historian, a fantastic friend of this podcast, one of the brains behind the Hill project. I don't know if you remember a couple of years ago, I was out there interviewing him, one of the a threatened piece of battlefield just outside. They managed to secure that and a great crowdfunder and they wrote excavate it and do some really remarkable archaeology there. Rob is also one of the key brains behind the new and very successful Iron Cross magazine for all his military history fans out there.

And check out the Iron Cross magazine.

So huge, thanks to him. And Rob has been able to bring to our attention some German sources about the truth. I've never been translated before. And you're going to hear on this podcast from a range of sources, sources written at the time, sources written down shortly after, a few sources recorded long after the event. But they are the voices of the Brits and the Germans who took part in the fighting leading up to the Christmas truce. And then an extraordinary cessation of violence, which started on round about the 24th of December, 1914.

So here it is, everybody. If you want to watch the drama documentary, please had a bit of history at TV.

You can use the code Truthy are you see, you get a month for free and then your first three months for just eight percent off. It's a mad offer. Go and take it up before we withdraw it. It's too good. And I get people asking me all over the world, does this work on my territory? Answers. Yeah, you can watch this wherever the Internet exists. That's the beauty of it. So please head over to history at TV and subscribe and watch.

In the meantime, everyone here is part one of the Christmas truce.

In the summer of 1914, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, Hungary caused a crisis between his empire, Austria, Hungary and Serbia, and the Austrians blamed for this act of terrorism. Both sides are able to call on support of neighboring powers, which triggered a series of alliances which drew all the great powers of Europe into the First World War. Now, obviously, this process is dealt with in slightly more detail in other history podcast, but essentially it's all kicked off.

A general war had begun. Germany invaded the West. France, Britain and Belgium fought to blunt and then reverse the German advance. Peter Hart is a legend, he says, during the Great War and while he was at Imperial War Museum, he interviewed dozens of veterans for their oral history project. The first few months of the Great War were an incredible period. It's a clash of two mighty empires, the French and the Germans, and they both have their own plans.

One, the Germans are going to sweep, ran through Belgium and crash into northern France, aiming at either side of Paris whilst the French are going to drive into their lost provinces of Alsace. Lorraine, so you get the circular motion and those are the two great visions of what will happen.

What does happen is it all goes wrong. They start to dig in and from their race to the sea, it's unbelievable.

They're not race to the sea. They're trying to outflank each other. And thus you get trenches going from Switzerland to the North Sea. All that happens in three or four months.

Taffe Gillingham is also a star in the war and the expert who sources, equipment and extras for big TV and film productions. He's helped us so many times over the years and he's just helped us produce our big Christmas truce in 1914 show. At that point, both sides settle down. Can't get the advantage, can't get the better of one another and dig in. So really then by the end of 1914, there's a fairly loose line of trenches stretching from the Belgian coast all the way down through Belgium and France for the British.

And it's important to notice that because the French had been digging in before for the British, the first trenches come in mid-September with the battle of the Aisne. This is where they go to ground. And from then on, they're digging trenches all the time as they raced to the sea trying to outflank each other with the French, the Germans and smaller part there. The British tried to outflank each other. Then as they do that, as they crash into each other there, there's an exchange of fire, one side of the other trying to gain domination.

And what happens is that when they fail, then they dig in as best they can and then they look to outflank.

The British soldier of 1914 is well equipped for what they were expecting to do, fire and movement. So they had an absolutely excellent rifle, the Lynnfield.

It was brilliant. It was everything you could want from a rifle.

When the British army go to war in 1914, very specifically, anybody under 19 years old is left behind.

So all of those underage lads who had been serving as drummers or who were just 18 or 18 and a half years old, all of them in theory, although some battalions did take them, were left behind and sent to their depot units literally to wait until they're old enough to go at the other end of the scale. You've got some some of these old timers who who'd been in the Army maybe 12 years or more. And there was a lot of much older men still serving in the army than you'd expect.

So whilst I couldn't tell you the exact average age of the soldier of 1914, it's probably much older than you'd expect it to be. At least half the British Expeditionary Force were regular serving soldiers who who obviously were up to fitness. But the fact that so many of them had been called back from reserve literally only a couple of weeks beforehand before they find themselves fighting it, months means that certainly a good proportion of them really hadn't had time to build up their strength and certainly to break in their boots for the amount of marching that was going to be required.

As the British army pulled back the retreat from mom's best part of 200 miles all the way down to the moon.

But there is one thing they haven't got. They've got no equipment for trench warfare because that's not what they were expecting to do. So they have no hand grenades. They have no trench mortars there. They haven't got the right artillery. Yes, they've got good artillery, but they haven't got any heavy artillery, which you need to smash up trenches there. Haven't got the right sort of shells. They've got shrapnel. Well, shrapnel doesn't harm a trench.

It's just pellets, led pellets. It doesn't do anything. They need high explosive shells. They haven't got it. And in this respect, the Germans are far, far better off. They are equipped for trench warfare. They are equipped to blast people from the face of the earth.

After the baking hot temperatures of August 1914, the thermometer has dropped as winter approached, the British soldier was not equipped for winter, for winter weather, perhaps for a cold snap.

Yes, perhaps even for a bit of snow. Not equipped for living in a flooded trench. They didn't have trench waders. Their boats would fall apart their good boots, but they fall apart. They're constantly in water and mud, that they're potted universe and constantly in water don't work. They don't have balaclavas. They're just not enough clothing to keep them warm. They are not well equipped for the sort of winter they got in December 1914. And sod's law, what do they get?

One of the worst winters of the century. The British soldier was not equipped for winter weather.

Lieutenant Arthur Palam Byrne of the Gordon Highlanders described the mud in a letter home.

I used to think I knew what mud was before I came out here. I was quite mistaken. The mud here varies from six inches, reinforced even five feet. And it's so sticky that my men used to arrive in the trenches with bare feet.

The most important change, the battlefield in late 1914 was the development of those trenches. How'd you end up in a trench?

People often wonder, well, the thing is, you're not intending to be in a trench. What happened during a fire fight with the Germans? They're shooting at you. You scrape with your little entrenching tool, you try and get anything. Men will hide behind a blade of grass. They'll always tell you, but you just try and get that five or six inches down, put the earth in front of you and then make it a bit deeper.

Even better. There's a ditch. Let's use that ditch. It's got water. Let's use that. Did you cares about getting wet so that the trenches are often built up from existing ditches and little scrape holes? And as time goes on, what happens is they join them together.

And so gradually from these little personal scrape, hold your your phone call. The thing that's keeping you alive gradually develops into firstly a sort of a longer bit of trench and then a post, if you like, an outpost. And then they're joined together and gradually a front line develops and, you know, early on then are all completely joined together. There are gaps in the line where you're covering it basically by rifle fire. But gradually a complete trench system builds up.

But it's still very crude. I mean, our image of trenches, predominantly 1916 trenches of the sort of trenches we see in our minds, deep trenches, heavily revetted, lots of timber, lots of woodwork, duck boards in the bottom. But in 1914, it was it was all very, very crude. It was just pretty much ditches shored up just to stop them collapsing, very often just with planks laid in the bottom and in certain places, certainly in the wet conditions around the upsilon, those wooden boards would literally just keep sinking in the mud.

So every few days you'd be putting more and more boards in just so that you could keep some sort of solid bottom to the trench.

What does a trench look like in December 1914? It looks like a complete mess put out of your mind. Anything you ever think from a manual, how to build a trench? It's nothing like that. It is fundamentally a ditch, often less than four foot deep. So three, four, four foot deep.

So anybody has to crouch down. If you get any deeper, you might have a fire step, a step to stand on fire. But when it's four foot deep, you don't need water at the bottom. You might have a little cubbyhole to get out of the rain to get out. We just dug into that. You always into the front because the force of a shell clings shrapnel forward. So little cubbyholes, as they call them in the front.

That's what a trench looked like. It just looks like a ditch for the most part, a horrible, nasty water and mud filled ditch.

But I think it's also fair to say that those first trenches come about when both sides literally can't get the better of one another so that both sides on the opposite side of a field find themselves not being able to get any further forward and literally dig in where they are. And the problem with that is that those trenches might not be in a very suitable position. And what I mean by that is that the Germans might well have observation over the land, so you might not be able to resupply them in daylight.

You might not be able to bring any more ammunition up or food.

So eventually there becomes a bit more of a pragmatic approach where trenches, some of the worst trenches are abandoned.

They pull back, they build them elsewhere. But by the end of 1914, a lot of them are still in pretty unsuitable conditions. So by November 1914, the trench network, if you like, has already started to evolve. It's still very crude in most places.

It certainly doesn't have the whole frontline support line reserve line organisation that we'll see later. And its main purpose, the main purpose of all trenches is simply to make it safer for soldiers to live. The minute that you get below the surface, you're out of rifle fire. You can still be got by artillery, but it's certainly much, much safer to move around in daytime if you can stay below the ground. So the trenches evolve. They connect with other.

But it's still a long way from what we would think of as a very well organized, very, you know, almost geometric proper trench with proper fire bays and saps and all sorts of stuff which come later, the Germans often had the better ground for the simple reason that as the war progressed in the first few months, the Germans had managed to push the British, the French and the Belgians pretty much right up into the top corner of Europe, held them there with one hand looked over the shoulder and said, well, what's the best ground to defend?

Built their defenses on the best ground and then fallen back to sit in those defenses. Well, the British, the French and the Belgians follow them up. And if you like, said at the bottom of the hill, with the Germans in the best positions until the British and the French and the Belgians can get enough momentum to then push the Germans off again, the high ground meant that the Germans could make deeper trenches. Certainly in Flanders, where they were, the ground was very wet.

You can go down very far before you struck water. That meant in practice that you had to build the trenches up using sandbags artificially. So a lot of trenches might only be three feet deep and then built up with three feet of sandbags.

Rob Schaefer is a German historian who's worked with me in history here over the years to bring new perspectives and previously untranslated German accounts to the English speaking world.

The system of trenches on the Western Front is not the enormous multiline field fortification that people envisaged. When they think about trenches, the lines have only just frozen in autumn. So at this particular time, all sides are busy extending, consolidating their positions as well as to make trying to make them habitable for for winter. Both sides fight the court, the steadily rising groundwater levels in Flanders, in northern France and one another. So trenches during the period are mostly very simple affair.

So that's the main fighting trench, sometimes with the second trench, 50 to 100 meters behind that. That's on the German side. And to fortify those German soldiers would use materials that could source locally, then very much defined the look of the trench as well.

So they would take material from ruined and uninhabited housing, wooden roof beams, doors, windows, shutters, even bricks or ovens for the dugouts. So how a trench looked is very much defined by then of where it is situated. It's not that important. It isn't defined by who built it. In December 1914, the German army was only just starting to set up what they called pioneer parks in which they would store building materials they bring in from Germany and the occupied territories.

We've all seen the pictures, haven't we, at full shell holes. And it's just a devastated area, barbed wire everywhere. While not in December 1914. It wasn't then, it was just countryside. You might be able to see a German trench. You might just decide whether the parapet was.

But mostly it's a field, its grass, its crops dying in the field. By November, it's the old dead cow. Sadly, lots of dead soldiers. Sometimes it's hedges and fences and and trees.

Now, TV are ready to entertain you this Christmas stream, the latest and best blockbusters and festive favorites with a new TV Sky Cinema pass, Get the Family Together for Troll's World Tour and Little Women starring Sharon, enjoy seasonal classics like ours and rediscover the magic with the Harry Potter collection stream. All this and more this Christmas.

With a seven day free trial only on TV, 18 plus new customers only passes on. A new terms apply. With the help of Santurce, best friend, Christmas is saved, listen to a magical audiobook, Santurce Cat brought to you by Littlewoods Iowans to discover who Santa is preparing for a Christmas like never before. Life in the trenches took on a terrible rhythm. What is it like for a soldier in the trenches in December 1940? Well, it's a miserable, boring existence.

What marks it out? A boring routine and freezing cold. It's terrible. So your day starts with stand to Wystan, to everybody stands to because that's when they think the Germans might attack at dawn. So you stand to for an hour, your officer or your NCO goes round, checks everybody's airchecks, everybody's away. And then you move into the day. You have to settle centuries and centuries watching over, no matter how carefully we get a bullet through the head.

What do they do? I got one per section looking out, looking at over Nomad's and carefully peering out over no man's land, possibly listening and peering pins are cautious. You are, doesn't it? So you've got them the rest of the men. Well, during the daytime, often sitting there writing letters home or attending to trench maintenance, digging out things that don't make you appear above the sightline, that the Germans could see it cos you'll get sniped.

That's the underlying fear. You'll get snow and this is the day is spent.

It's just boring for the daily life of a German soldier in the trenches at that period of time is very similar to that of a British soldier opposite the British regiments in Flanders and northern France in December 1914. A lot of the duty of the German soldier is devoted to somehow try those trenches or some are trying to avoid those trenches to flood. What a cave in is is busy extending and fortifying on what he has and all that. In addition of keeping an eye on the fall patrolling, keeping everyone supplied at this early stage in this area of the front, the deep and nicely furnished dugouts that many people associate with German first war trenches do not exist.

They're not even on the high ground. So life in the furthermost trenches in winter's freezing cold, it's very wet. Hygiene is poor and many soldiers suffer from from bowel problems, for example, that is bone breaking, physically exhausting it, mentally draining routine.

So taking the, you know, taking the boots and socks and putties off at least once a day, drawing them off, getting them rubbed in whale oil, putting a driver pair of socks back on, that was a crucial thing because again, very, very quickly, fellows would get trench foot if they didn't keep their feet dry. But it certainly doesn't have anything like the sort of organization and structure that trench warfare will have the trench routine of the later part of the war.

It really is just boring, freezing cold in working up to your ankles, up to you, up to your knees in water and mud and slush, sometimes freezing mud and slush. It's just an awful, awful routine.

But in the early period, some of these trenches, certainly in November of December of 1914, were in a terrible state. Some of the trenches near Plug Street, which were literally almost full to the top with water. So they would have men in there with rifles perched just on heaps of mud and the rifles would just keep sinking in the mud.

And every day those men would be pulled out and replaced simply because it wasn't possible to to keep men in those conditions any more than a day at a time and expect them to be in any sort of condition to fight in. And what happens at night?

Well, then the work starts because they can't see you. So you've got a working party digging out the trenches, perhaps digging a communication, but you've got to ration parties going back. You've got patrols going out in front, possibly even a raid, because it's crucial to know if the Germans are changing the units in front. You change units means the Germans might be going to attack you. So there's all this going on at night. Of course, you've got to try and sleep.

You've got more sentries on. One man in three is on to our sentry stint. It's a busy time tonight. And is there any warmer at night? No, it's not. It's just miserable. And then it'll rain and then it might snow. What? Life in the trenches.

What food do you get? Well, you can forget hot food. You're not going to get hot food. What you get is standard British army rations and that is aimed to feed the body. It's not to feed the soul, that's for sure. So what you get, you get the staples bully beef. Now we call that corned beef now tend to bully beef. You get that they're sick to death of a Maconochie. That's a sort of lamb and vegetable stew to.

Right. Heated up. If you can heat it up on a Tommy cook, a little tiny Tommy Cook, it's a bit greasy and horrible. Otherwise, pork and beans. That's not very nice. Lump of pork fat more than pork. Bacon rolled up in tins and biscuit.

Oh, biscuit asante's. Nice digest. If you forget now these are more like dog biscuits, three inches, pretty well square, about a quarter of an inch thick and they break your teeth. Remember troops in those days? Soldiers nowadays didn't have great teeth, so a lot of them broke teeth on these biscuits. Are the biscuits good for you? So they say apparently very nutritious. What did. The soldiers think of I didn't like them, they build walls with a racket.

So that's the sort of food you got. If you're lucky you got a loaf of bread. Sometimes you get cheese and you get jam. Always plum an apple on the western front. And this is all you got. Repetitive, repetitive, but not enough to keep body and soul together. Does the Army care about your soul? No. All they want is you fit to be able to find you've got enough calories. You've got the right sort of food to enable you to continue to fight for your country.

And that's all they care about.

How do you keep clean in the trenches?

Well, there's a bit of a problem. How would you keep clean in a trench full of 18 inch of water and mud? No hot water, no nothing you might you might have in your personal kit. You might have your toothbrush, you might have a flannel. But what? Everything's muddy.

Everything's muddy. Your uniform is cluttered with mud from head to foot. What are you going to do? You look down and you think, wow, what should I clean first? Mud everywhere.

Cleanliness and hygiene was really, really important for the British army. They learned a massive lesson in South Africa during the Boer War when more men have died of disease and they had of gunshot wounds. And in the years in between the South African war and the outbreak of the First World War, they had gone out of their way to make sure that men were trained and manuals of military hygiene were pushed on soldiers at every opportunity. So by the time the fellows arrived in the front line in those trenches, they know that every day they wash, they shave.

And of course, water is a problem. It's such an issue to try and find clean water. I mean, if they couldn't possibly find any, then obviously then at that point you just have to shave when you came out of the front line.

But what they would do, they would they would get probably three inches of water in the bottom of the mountain, which was what they called the day type nesting, because it was a sort of a dish tin with a shallow lid. Half an inch of the water would be poured into the lid and they would use that half inch to shave width. So you'd rather up your soap, shave your face, make sure that you rinsed off the razor in the top half of the Mastin so you didn't get any of the bristles mixed up in the water.

You're going to wash the rest of you with and then the two and a half inches left. You would use that to wash your face. You'd wash your hands, you'd unbutton your shirt so you'd wash under your armpits. You just button it back up and dry yourself off. You'd unbutton your trousers, you'd have a rummage around and you do the same there. But yourself back up.

And it is quite extraordinary because should you ever do this, which I have on numerous occasions, it's just like having a bath. You really do feel clean because what you've done, you've washed all the sweaty bits. So despite not having much water every day, the fellows managed to keep themselves as clean as possible.

And again, once they've been to the latrines, again, obsessive about cleaning their hands wherever possible just to make sure that disease didn't spread through the trenches, through the entire war, the soldiers in the front line, literally at the sharp end, sleep exactly in that front line, in that frontline trench on the fire step, because they are literally the point of contact with the German army. There's no point in them being in dugouts or somewhere tucked out of the way, because if the Germans attack, there'll be no time to get themselves organized to get back into the front line to stop the German attack.

So they literally sleep on the fire step. In some instances, they'll have built themselves crude shelters, very often with doors this stage in the war doors taken off houses nearby, which won't stop shellfire but might well keep the rain off. But most of the time they are just sitting on the fire step in the mud. And in the winter, certainly the winter months, the British army had a formal summertime in the wintertime. So in the winter time they were allowed to wear their great coats, which again, they made of wool.

So they get soaking wet quite quickly. Some men had got their goatskin Girkins, which at least were waterproof, although again, they get very heavily waterlogged and they would have a rubberized ground sheet, which they could use.

To be honest, you could either put it over the top of yourself to keep the rain off from the top of you, or you can put it underneath to to stop the damp rising. But it wasn't big enough to do both. Sometimes you might share with your mates, you might sit on his grandchildren. The two of you might try and huddle underneath yours. But, yeah, it was a fairly miserable existence in the cold winter months. But that really didn't alter much throughout the entire war because, as I say, the need is to have soldiers in the front line ready to fight whenever the Germans show up or not struggling to get out of the dug out somewhere.

How do you get to sleep in the freezing cold? It's so cold, you're frozen to the bone. Now, that's an expression we use when we're waiting for a bus. This is frozen to the bone. Your legs are covered in freezing cold water. You can't take them and put them somewhere dry. You've just got to stand there. How do you go to sleep? Well, sometimes if you're lucky, you've got a fire step, you could line the fire step.

You could sometimes said that cubbyholes I could get in. Sometimes there is a proper Douga, but sleeping is difficult in the front line. Very, very difficult. It's a horrible existence because you're so cold all the time. The men were exhausted. They were stressed out their mind and exhausted. It's not to be forgotten how terrible an existence this was for the men at the front, because that explains a lot of what happens at Christmas 1914.

The German army may have been slightly better prepared, but it was still overwhelmed.

According to Rob Schaefer, trench warfare, the fighting from fortified field positions had formed part of the German regulations long before the war. Yet when the war broke out, no one was prepared for the huge scale of what would be needed. When the lines actually froze and were fortified from the autumn of 1914 that German troops were prepped for trench warfare that came only later in the war of 1914. The enormity of the required work at the bone crushing extortions of building and maintaining, living and fighting in a trench and making preparations for reconstruction from which all that could be done.

What was new for all warring sides, not only for the Germans allied?

The war will be over by Christmas, really? Where does that come from? It comes from the usual places, from politicians and the media. It's not real. It's just something that people said. It's not what the generals thought.

The phrase it will all be over by Christmas. He's actually quite hard to pin down. It crops up in some letters. It might have cropped up in a couple of newspapers, but it wasn't really that common. Certainly amongst the generals that were in charge of running the war, they were perfectly well aware of what it was going to take to defeat the Germans. I mean, I think that even just from a simple point of view, 12 years earlier, it had taken four years to defeat a bunch of Dutch farmers on horseback in South Africa.

So what might kill you in December 1914 if you're in the trenches? Well, there are three main risks. The first is shell fire there. Word blasting the front lines, but shells could come across any time. And that was an obvious danger. The most persistent danger, though, was sniping. The Germans had a lot of good shots. They've got a lot of woodland areas. They've got a lot of gamekeepers, that kind of person. There were a lot of good snipers in the German army and they tended to dominate no man's land at this stage of the war before we had our sniper skills.

And so therefore, if you showed anything above the line of the parapet or off the top of the deck, you were likely to get a bullet through it. Now, this means if you were average height of about five, 10, then possibly, well, unless you're very vulnerable to get a bullet through the head, a tall man walking even in a six foot trench with a natural sort of bounce, the top of their head would just occasionally bob up above the line.

They'd get a bullet. The sniper would work out where the bombs were and then be waiting.

If you have a loophole, you look through, a really good sniper could put a bullet through that loophole. There's constant danger. They'd have fixed rifles on places where, for instance, the trench there was just a, let's say, a sandbag mitting or a just a bit of a hole in the trench line and they'd have a fixed rifle.

And as the German war passed during the night, they'd fire it. And if you happen to be going past it at that time, you're in trouble. And the third threat is machine guns. Now, the biggest threat for them is when you're in, no matter. But of course, they also fire on fixed lines so they could alter splatter an area of trench or a communication trench during the night. So these are the three risks, the one that most on people's nerves was probably the sniper at the slightest mistake and you could be dead.

And remember, the most commonly hit place was the head. And you've got to remember, there is no head protection, no helmet.

The Pecola was useless for the Germans at Arkless Gap was even more useless. So if you got hit, you were dead. German soldier Friedrich Nicklaus' of the 50 3rd Reserve Pioneer Battalion gives us an account of the twin terrors of the conditions and the enemy.

Things have got very much worse, Flanders is just one great morass, and all military operations have been brought to a standstill by the day and night. We stand up to our knees and what and what we have to wrap our legs up to our thighs and sandbags just to survive the rain incessantly from above were beneath us. The water table has risen to just below ground level. On top of this, all this mad gun battle goes on across this forsaken plain, stretching out in front of us as flat as a tabletop where it is dangerous even to raise your head above ground during the day.

One German soldier, Villy Byrne, started a letter home.

We are simply nothing but lawyers for we are burrowing trenches so that England can break through here. We have constructed dugouts which we can lay our weary heads at night and slip into to be out of the way of the shrapnel.

He never finished it. He was struck by a sniper's bullet and it was completed and then posted home by his comrades. At the very end of 1940, there came a series of offensives on the Western Front, though I'd never really studied before, and even after years of visiting battlefields, making programs, podcasts and writing books, I was stunned by the pointlessness of these particular attacks.

Traditionally, campaigning stops for the winter because the days are too short, the weather's too bad, and everybody needs the opportunity to to regroup, to to rebuild their armies, to resupply. Ready for the campaign the following spring.

However, as so often in the story of the British army in the First World War, the French, who are the dominant partners in our coalition, say that what they really need is an attack by the British in conjunction with the fact that they're going to put in to keep the pressure on the Germans, because there's also a very real feeling that the Germans are now relaxing after the first battle of EHP in December.

What's often forgotten is that the French are still really intent on driving into the German lines. They launch a series of absolutely massive attacks, one on the 17th of December in the RTR, which is the very rich area, and then a few days later they smash home again and the champagne. Now, just to give you the scale of this, that's quarter of a million men attacking, supported by 600 guns in the champagne. Just think about that for the moment.

That's more than the whole British army. That's just one of two major attacks. These attacks last four weeks. They are smashing into the Germans. They are intent on trying to win the war, break the lines and really get back to open warfare. What's the British part in it? Well, the commander of the French joff, he doesn't order Sir John French, but he intimates to him that it is expected that the British will do their bit.

They also will attack. What he wants is the whole BBF to attack. What he gets is we water it down, then we water it down some more, then we water it down just a bit more. And what eventually happens is the most famous one takes place, I think in mid-December we end up with just two battalions of 2nd Corps attacking the poor Hal Gordon Highlander's and the Royal Scots, just two battalions. So an infantry attack in late 1914 is pretty much as you'd expect later, but without the sort of the organized start in trenches with trench ladders, it's pretty much hauling yourself up out of a much more shallow, almost like a ditch or a trench at the time, and starting across no man's land, trying to shape yourselves out into some sort of line to, you know, to advance.

Because if they just go across in a big rush in a big heap, there's there's no means of controlling it. The officers in the CEOs are going to be in no position to actually control them when they get to the German front line. So there was always much more control over these things than you'd expect. It wasn't just a mad dash and hope for the best.

And that's all that goes over the top. Now, why is that bad? Well, if you attack on a narrow front, that means all the enemy to your right and all the enemy to your left can shoot into that area. Whereas if you attack on a broad front, it's obviously reduced. This is terrible. And those two battalions are slaughtered. And you can picture the scene when they go over the top.

The whistles blow the bombardment if you can hear it, because there's not that many guns and they haven't got that many shells. The bombardment stops and they go across no man's land whatsoever. And they're like, well, it's just fields, but it is incredibly muddy. The Germans see you come in and they open fire that tat tat attack of the machine guns. And then after a period, the shell fire starts and the poor old Gordon harlot's a role Scots are slaughtered in numbers.

Their men fall in all ran them. They're only two weak battalions. That's all that's going forward. And they are slaughtered. And then gradually it becomes apparent the attacks failing. They can't go any further and they fall back. People still being killed, of course, as they fall back to, you know, some of the men that were wounded in those attacks were still crawling back or being rescued from no man's land two or three days later. Imagine being wounded, lying there, bleeding, unable to walk in water and mud.

How are you going to get back? Imagine freezing cold beyond belief. Imagine what it must have been like for those men. It is. It's difficult to imagine. It really is. Mostly, they'd walk across no man's land.

It's not some instructor's job. It's just the kit they're carrying. It's heavy. And what are you going to leave behind? You've got to have your rifle. That's the heaviest bit, really. So they walk across moments and the ground conditions are not good. It's muddy and they walk into the machine gunfire. And I wonder what those men thought. It must have been terrible. There are a series of British attacks during December, the Indians made an attack, the Scots attack.

But what's wrong with these attacks? Well, what's wrong with them is they're on a narrow front. They don't have a proper bombardment. There's no proper briefing. They haven't done a proper recce, that troops are already exhausted before they start the units chosen.

They've had a lot of casualties. It goes hopelessly wrong. One anonymous Scottish soldier wrote, I've just come from the trenches where I had my first baptism of fire. I will never forget when I saw my mates knocked over, I felt a bit giddy. The ground was in an awful state. We were up to our knees in mud and water, shivering with cold, a soldier in the border regiment wrote in his diary.

Soon as we went up, the Germans let us have it and we were going down like raindrops as our trenches was only seven yards apart. We were tired and then made the second charge, but received the same slip in a blacksmith's shop, watching him swing a hammer on red hot shoe and sparks flying around you. But instead of being sparks, they were bullets. It was a pitiful sight to see their comrades dying and couldn't get out to help them as it meant certain death.

If we'd move, we had to lay there from six thirty until eight fifteen in the morning. And as an angel sent down from heaven, it came over very misty and it's been our only chance. We made good of it. So we crawl halfway and then make a run for it. I could not see what we were going so fell over our comrades who were dead. None of these attacks resulted in the lasting capture of a single section of German trench.

What is the mood as they're coming in that last week towards Christmas? The mood is depressed. There's no two ways about it. It's freezing cold. It actually starts to snow in the mud and water in the trenches starts to turn into slush and ice. What a man feeling. They're feeling depressed. They're feeling this war is not going to be over any time soon. They can't see an end to the war. That means that they can't see an end to their personal torment.

Well, that's the end of part one of this Christmas truce special episode podcast, tomorrow, our experts will describe the truce itself, one of the more remarkable episodes in modern military history. Don't forget, you can log on to history hit TV to watch our Christmas extravaganza of drama documentary about the Christmas truce in which we attempt to bring it to life with actors and actors on the battlefield set and historians and primary sources. Of course, if you had over there, if you use the code Truthy are you see, you get a month for free and then your first three months for just 80 percent off.

So please do go and check it out.

Throughout the history of. He is part of the history of our country. Oh, my God. And I hope you enjoyed the podcast just before you go, a bit of a favor to ask.

Totally understand. If you want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash, money makes sense. But if you could just do me a favor, it's for free. Go to iTunes or have you get your podcast. If you give it a five star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, perjure yourself, give it a glowing review. Really appreciate that stuff. Well, the law of the jungle out there and I need all the support I can get, so that will boost it up the charts.

It's so tiresome. But if you could, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.

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