Omnibus 1916 Series 2 - a podcast by BBC Radio 4

Dan Snow tracks the development of the First World War through the recollections of those who were there.

Drawing on the sound archives of the IWM and the BBC, in this omnibus edition of five programmes looking at the course of the war in 1916, interviewees recall the impact of the Battle of the Somme on Sheffield, through the recollections of a soldier who fought with the Sheffield City Battalion and two people who were schoolchildren at the time. They recall the lists of dead in the newspapers, the frequent announcements in school assemblies of older brothers who had been killed, and the sight of the many returning wounded on the streets. Gertrude Farr's husband Harry, injured at the Battle of the Somme, refused to carry on fighting. In the second programme Gertrude and her daughter reveal the effect the execution of her husband for cowardice in 1916 had on her life. In the third programme, men recall the first appearance of tanks during the war, at Flers as the Battle of the Somme carried on. Dan also looks at what troops got up to off the battlefield, when they were out of the front line in France. British soldiers spent the majority of the war behind the lines with brief, often appalling, spells in the trenches. Football matches, construction projects, training, drinking, theatres, religious observation and sex took up more time than the fighting. Finally, in 'Prisoners of War of Kut-al-Amara', men recall the 'death march' from Kut to Baghdad and northwards, and their experience of years of captivity after the end of the siege of Kut in April 1916, and we hear how differently officers were treated in contrast to lower ranks.

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