Books & Battlefields: The Somme

The Old Front Line

Paul Reed

Education, History, Tv & Film, Film History

4.8 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 8 May 2021

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Something slightly different this week: we look at the village of Bazentin-le-Petit on the Somme battlefields through the lens of three classic memoirs of the Great War. These include Robert Graves Goodbye To All That and Frank Richards Old Soldiers Never Die. How important are these WW1 memoirs and what do they tell us? Send us a text Support the show

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's impossible to understand the Great War without reference to the memoirs of those who were there.
0:07.0	Books and battlefields are inextricably linked.
0:12.0	To view those dusty lanes of Flanders or the vast open fields of the Somme through the eyes of the men who were there
0:19.0	gives us different insight,
0:21.2	new understanding of the old front line.
0:26.3	Something a little bit different this week,
0:28.7	books and battlefields,
0:30.7	the first in what I hope will become a regular spot on the podcast
0:34.7	where we look at books and we connect them to places on the battlefields that
0:40.6	we know today. Now I know many of you listen to this podcast and probably curse me for the
0:45.9	amount of books that I recommend or mention and I know many of you go on to seek them out. So this
0:53.0	will take that one step further where we'll look at some
0:56.5	particular books and we'll see how they connect to parts of the Western Front and how they
1:02.4	connect to battlefield locations. Now what sort of books are we talking about here? Well we're not
1:08.7	talking about Le MacDonald or the Holtz Guide or
1:12.4	Battleground Europe books. What I'm really talking about here are the memoirs of the Great
1:18.5	War and these are really, really important in our understanding of this period. I'm often asked
1:25.9	by people in particular aspiring battlefield guides,
1:30.2	what books should I read? Now, there's a whole plethora of titles on the First World War.
1:36.3	You don't have to go very far on the internet to find these. And as I mentioned, there are the books
1:41.2	by Lynn MacDonald, Martin Middlebrook, Richard Van Emden, Peter
1:45.1	Hart's, the list goes on and on and on. And those are all really superb books and really
	...

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