The trenches of France and Flanders drew men like a machine to and from the front.

What remains of that crimson coast in northern France, where thousands arrived on their journey to the battlefields,

and men returned shattered from their experience along the old front line we tend to

think of the battlefields of the great war in isolation particularly along the western front as if

the events of the conflict only happened in places like Aras and the Somme and Ipe.

But the world of the Western Front was much wider than those battlefields themselves,

and behind the British Front was this vast infrastructure,

infrastructure that the British Army increasingly invested in as the war went

along. And in many respects, when you look at the path to victory in 1918, there's a clear

connection between the development of that infrastructure and success and victory, because

without the ability to resupply your men, whether that be with ammunition, equipment,

weapons, food and water, or reinforce your armies with men themselves by resupplying troops

to the front line, then your chance of success, your chance of victory is greatly

diminished. And this was something that essentially grew, particularly within the British

Expeditionary Force, including all of the British and Commonwealth Nations fighting there, and

was perhaps less apparent on the German side, particularly in that last phase of the war,

when submarine blockades strangled Germany and men were almost starving at the front.

And you see the attacks of that final year of the war, often breaking down because German soldiers

stopped to pick up rations from British supply dumps that they have overrun in their advance,

be that in the Kaiser Schlecht on the Somme in March or in Flanders in April and the Schmende Arm in May of 1918.

So in terms of these battlefields, when we look away from them, we look behind the lines.

And this week we're going to look at the so-called Crimson Coast.

...