The Great War & A Return to the Western Front
World War I lasted for four desperate years from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. Contemporaneously described as "the war to end all wars", it led to the mobilisation of more than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, making it one of the largest wars in history. It is also one of the deadliest conflicts in history, with an estimated nine million combatant and seven million civilian deaths as a direct result of the war, while resulting genocides and the resulting 1918 influenza pandemic caused another 50 to 100 million deaths worldwide.
The assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand on 28th June 1914 created a spark that ignited the world into war. Great Britain had not fought on European soil since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815; but her treaty to guarantee Belgium's neutrality caused her to declare war against Germany on 4th August 1914. The BEF under command of General Sir John French was dispatched to the Western Front in time for the Battles of Mons, 1st Ypres, 2nd Ypres and Loos. General French was replaced by General Haig whose first battle would be The Somme of July 1916; with Great Britain and Her Empire taking the major role for the first time as France struggled at Verdun.
In 1917 the Allies at last saw some successes with the Battles of Vimy Ridge and Messines. However the Allies attempt to capture Passchendaele Ridge involved huge loss of life and August of that year saw the highest level of rainfall on record - but the German Army no longer believed it could win.
In 1918 the Germans advanced over all the ground, the Allies had gained at such cost in the three previous years and nearly reached Amiens. The Allies amassed hundreds of tanks, employed new tactics of cooperation and halted the German advance. The Last Hundred Days saw a series of highly successful battles conducted by General Haig and his staff which have never received full recognition. It led to the Armistice signed on 11th November 1918.
The Western Front is today littered with memorials of different kinds; pillboxes, trenches, craters, barbed wire, war graves, memorials, statues and museums. Piers Storie-Pugh's highly educational and original presentation explores the Battles of The Western Front 1914-18; and what there is to see today and what they represent based on his experience in guiding groups there since 1982.
Piers is uniquely qualified to speak about The Great War and Remembrance and this riveting talk, supported by over 100 slides, is not only educational but a fitting tribute to those who fought and died on the Western Front: a memorial of a different kind to their memory. Piers set up Remembrance Travel for the MOD and The Royal British Legion and ran it for 25 years; an operation that specialised in group visits to war cemeteries and memorials worldwide. His talk includes the background to the Unknown Warrior and the Cenotaph.
The Great War talk includes:
* Memorials, Cemeteries, trenches, blockhouses, plinths, preserved battlefields, barbed wire; Piers explains the relevance of all these.
* Stunning photographs from 1914 -18 period as well as from the battlefields today.
* Remembrance and the origin of the Menin Gate Ceremony.
* Battles of The Western Front.
* Acts of extreme bravery.
* The Kipling Story.
* Moving testimonies of those who made their personal cemetery visits with Piers Storie-Pugh.
* The work and principles of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and how to trace your relatives.
* The story of the Unknown Warrior; the Cenotaph in Whitehall.
Henry John Patch (17 June 1898 – 25 July 2009)
Dubbed in his later years "the Last Fighting Tommy", Henry ‘Harry’ Patch was an English supercentenarian, briefly the oldest man in Europe and the last surviving combat soldier of the First World War from any country. He is known to have fought in the trenches of the Western Front. Patch was the longest-surviving soldier of World War I.
The Somme, 1916
Foreword by Piers Storie-Pugh to ‘Somme 90’
No battle is seems evokes such outrage and feeling as does the Somme of 1916 for it sucked thousands of young men into her bottomless pits. Coupled with the word Somme are such charges as incompetence, disloyalty, self-deception, poor leadership, to the extent that any outside reader could draw the conclusion that nothing whatsoever was gained by this battle which raged through 1916 and finally petered out in the bitter temperatures of November.
The Army of 1916 was a hotchpotch made up of the remnants of the Regular Army, soldiers of the Territorial Force, some conscripts, members of Kitchener’s New Army and soldiers from the Empire. There is no doubt that the army that was put to the field in 1917 was far more professional in its field-discipline and staff work than the one that entered the Battle of the Somme in 1916. If one believes this, or even only part of this, then the young men who fell in Picardy did not die in vain.
Piers standing at Sheffield Park on The Somme battlefield.
As early as 1915 the War Office was besieged by relatives for news of those who had fallen. There was no good news to be had, for not only had they died, seemingly in vain, but no trace could be found and no record kept; until Fabian Ware established his remarkable work now embodied internationally in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission based at Maidenhead, England. Its work is carried out in over 150 countries but its origins are deeply entrenched on the Western Front.
In 1927 the first ever Legion Pilgrimage got under way with 150 Pilgrims, en route to France to pay respects to those who had fallen and to gain some idea of the appalling conditions in which the men had fought. This First Pilgrimage so fired the imagination of the Nation that the following year a staggering 10,000 Pilgrims set out for Belgium and France, their aim being ‘to show the World that their loved ones are not forgotten and above all that the purpose for which they died is still remembered. Prince and Ploughman, General and Private Soldier, Mother and Widow, found unity in something greater even than the discipline of War and on the very scenes of their kinsman’s sacrifice.’
Field Marshal Haig was to be on this pilgrimage but died en route, but not before this ‘remote and uncaring’ man had established the foundations of The Royal British Legion as a non-political and non-sectarian body whose role was to safeguard the interest and welfare of the ex-Service community and their dependents.
The ideals and principles established by our forefathers that there should be in place a Pilgrimage Scheme for relatives indeed remains in force, and even 100 years after that great watershed of a battle, The Somme, Pilgrims still make their way to his sacred place. They are continuing to do what the architects of the 1928 Pilgrimage had in mind ‘that the purpose for which they died is still remembered!’
