“Have you forgotten yet?” (Aftermath, Siegfried Sassoon) Even before the guns fell silent across the Western Front a century ago, staff at the Michelin Touring Office in London were busy preparing guidebooks for motorists intending to go see the trenches for themselves (see images above and below). By the early 1920s battlefield tourism had become big […]
Backchat in the Trenches
When the Great War began for Britain, August 4th, 1914, the British Army was recognisably the one described so affectionately in the works of Rudyard Kipling. It was ridiculously small – scarcely 450,000 men, including reservists – by comparison with the millions-strong levies being mobilised by France, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. But Kipling’s army was […]