It’s good to talk

‘It was so unreal,’ said one of the first world war veterans about the long-awaited Armistice. It was the most striking thought I heard all week, and the most shocking. The sense that when the guns finally fell silent at 11 o’clock on 11 November 1918 (and both sides had continued to barrage each other until the very last minute), signalling the end of war, the arrival of peace, the opportunity to return home, to go back to ‘normal’ life — that all this was somehow ‘unreal’. But for the young men who had spent four years in the trenches, that life of fear and dirt and rats and mud had become their normal; it was the only way to survive. When it was over, many of them were left with ‘a terribly empty feeling’.

Dan Snow’s Radio 4 series Voices of the First World War (produced by Megan Jones) has followed the course of the war over four years from Ypres and the first Christmas truce to Passchendaele and the battle of Cambrai, using recordings of conversations with those who took part, often made just in time as the generation who fought on the Western Front and in the Middle East neared the end of their lives. They were looking back after several decades and were themselves struck by their odd reactions. ‘We were too far gone, too exhausted, to enjoy it.’ They would also be leaving so many ‘chaps’ behind. ‘That was the sad part.’

Hearing the voices of those who fought in the war creates such a powerful connection with actual events, making them vividly real to us now even 100 years later. Their stories told directly to us through these recordings is like handing on history from one generation to the next, not telling us to remember but making sure that we do.