Amongst the trees of a dark woods on the battlefield near Combray,

battalions of men of short stature, but not short on courage,

experienced their baptism of fire in November 1917.

For the bantoms, all roads led to Borlon Wood.

Amidst the gunsmoke of a November morning, a group of soldiers emerged from a shattered wood

in northern France after five days of heavy fighting.

These men were almost at their end. It had been the hardest

battle of their experience on the Western Front. A casual observer would have noticed that amongst

the ranks of soldiers who filed away were men of a much shorter stature, men much shorter than the average soldier

to be found in the trenches of the Great War. Once the army had laughed at these shorter

men, but now in this battle at Ballon Wood they'd shown their true fighting spirit.

These were the bantoms, the bantam soldiers of the Great War.

Entire battalions recruited from men who would normally have been rejected from the army

on accounts of their height or lack of height.

So who were these bantam soldiers and what brought them to

Ball on Wood in 1917? A popular postcard of the period contains a verse celebrating the

enlistment of these bantam soldiers at the beginning of the war. It's called the British bantoms. There is a bonny brood of bantoms as yet unknown to fame who have joined the British roosters to earn a glorious name. They are sturdy and they're willing and sure to stand the test. What price the German eagle when the bantoms leave their nest?

When the Great War broke out in August 1914 and Britain declared war on Germany,

Lord Kitchener was Secretary of State for War. There was much talk of a war being over by Christmas, something that we've

spoken about on this podcast a few times, but Kitchener was one of those who did not subscribe

to that view. He feared it would be a long and protracted conflict, and Britain's regular army,

its reserves and its territorials would soon diminish on a battlefield

...