Europe was prepared for war in 1914, but just not the kind of war that the Great War would rapidly turn into.

A static war, a trench war where trench warfare dominated.

In this episode we ask, why was there trench warfare in the First World War?

As we move into season 7 of the old front line podcast, I wanted to bring in another new aspect of what we do here on the old front line.

Last season we had dispatches, the shorter podcasts, and also the question and answer bonus episodes,

and both of those will of course continue.

But one element that I wanted to bring in, which is kind of inspired by the sort of questions that are

coming into the podcast, is a kind of how and why podcast, a series of those looking at different

aspects of First World War history and asking how and why those things happened. And we'll begin with this episode

by asking a principal question and then go on hope to answer it. And that question is,

why was there trench warfare in the First World War?

Now, trench warfare is something that dominates the collective memory of that conflict.

If you asked anybody in the street who knows almost nothing about the Great War,

tell me something that you know, they would respond with something about trenches the images

that we have taken by official photographers showing conditions in the trenches the mud and the

muck and the slime the close nature that kind of troglodyte world of the trenches and i often talk

about here on the podcast.

This is what really dominates, I think, the collective memory of it.

So in a war so dominated by that memory of trenches, were trenches an integral part of what the war was meant to be from the beginning. Was there a plan to have this kind

of trench warfare? Or if that wasn't the case, what led to it and how did those armies adapt? Did they

already know how to do it? And we'll ask a whole host of kind of questions around that subject,

hopefully shining some light on this key aspect of not just the war on the Western Front because there was static warfare in Salonica where trenches were dug there, static warfare in Mesopotamia, where we were fighting the Ottoman Turks, and there were a kind of trench warfare in Palestine, and also almost a replica of the Western Front, happened at Gallipoli in 1915, where

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