Before The Storm: Drumbeat Of War (Part 2)

**James Holland** (0:12)
At Shadow Teary, the military policeman in the middle of the road looked at our press cards, shrugged his shoulders and said it wasn't his responsibility to stop us, but that we would probably not get fruit of reams. At reams, they shrugged their shoulders and said they'd probably stop us at Verdun. At Verdun, they said we would surely be stopped at Metz, and at Metz, nobody paid us any attention. All the photographs and books of boyhood came to life around me. I was living in the exact world of 1914
Camouflage buses, the buses of Paris, were loaded with infantry and arrived in long lines over the rolling hills, past the overgrown bunkers which had been the old trenches, past a rusted tank which had been left by the road as a souvenir these twenty years.
In the barrels of their old rifles some of the French conscripts had stuck long stem purple flowers. They had done that too before. Decrepit trucks bumped along pulling 75s and plotting horses were still drawing the old fashioned soup kitchens, the steam rising from the stew inside. It was all the same. The projector had stopped in 1918 and now was turning again. And that was the American War reporter Eric Severide writing about his experience of visiting the front line in the autumn of 1939 And yes, if the French Army looks a little bit old fashioned, well, that's because it was. It's the long and short of it.

**Al Murray** (1:47)
That's what we're going to discuss in this episode. Welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk with Al Murray and James Holland for the second episode in our series called Before The Storm, about the phony war, the Sitzkrieg, the war with no war. In the last episode, we looked at the Germans, a German state of preparation, German resilience, to use a modern buzzword. And then we had a look at the British Army, the most modern mechanized army in the world for sure, but also with its own sets of problems. And now it is the turn of La France. The thing is, Severed there has visited the French Army, and he's saying it's just like the exact world of 1914 Interestingly, in our last episode, James, we talked about the Germans being horse drawn. And in years gone by in this podcast, you've done that thing of getting a picture of German horses at a watering hole and saying, well, what year was this taken?
Is this from, which wars is this from? Is it from, is it for the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, is it the First World War or is it the Second World War? And inevitably, it's always the Second World War, because otherwise, what's the point of showing us the picture? But very often, very often, we've looked at footage though, of the British Army in 1939, and they're still in their tunics from the First World War. And I've watched that footage with you and you've gone, oh, I don't like it, I don't like it, it makes it look old fashioned.
I can't stand it, they should be in their battle dress.

**James Holland** (3:13)
There's only one uniform for a million, that's the battle dress.

**Al Murray** (3:15)
But here we do have genuinely an army that is living in the not too distant past. And this is the thing, this is the army that held the line at Verdun, that in the end was part of the defeat of the Germans in the First World War, and that fought valiantly and gallantly against terrible odds and in terrible, epic, meat grinder battles, the like of which, Verdun is probably a complete one-off in military history, isn't it, in terms of blood-spilt gestale mate, makes everything else look like a little half-hearted, I think. Yet the French Army for Severed is very much the same objet, the same thing it was in the previous war. So who is he, this guy Severed? What are the circumstances?

**James Holland** (4:03)
Well, he's a fascinating man. He's a terrific writer. He's a great war reporter. I think he works at CBS. He's in the kind of Ed Murrow kind of bold, and these are, they're worldly, they're international, they're cosmopolitan, they're East Coast.
He's over here right from the start of the war, making almost daily broadcasts of the war news from Europe over to the United States.
He's watched the arrival of British troops in Sherbrooke, and then he reaches the Maginot line with a number of other journalists including the New Zealander Jeffrey Cox, who's a mate of his. No journalists are technically allowed there, but as he wrote in that opening quote, they managed to get through two checkpoints to reach Metz and then drive straight onto the front line and no one's stopping them. He sees these long lines of camouflaged Parisian buses and horses putting soup kitchens and men wearing the same oval helmets of the First World War, and the rest of the uniform is now khaki, but it's still got those great coats with the kind of folded back bits that you see of the Poylew in the First World War. They were then red, you know, start of the war, they were red trousers with blue trench coats and by the end of the war, they were kind of like blue trench coats all the way through and trousers, but they're the same pattern. Nothing's changed at all. And they still have putties, you know, these strips of wool that you tie around your shins and all the way up to your knee. And the uniform retains a very, very strong 19th century feel. They still got long tunics underneath. And you can't help but think this must be detrimental to the soldier's mindset, because, you know, a modern uniform is needed to instill confidence that you're in a modern army, right? I mean, that's part of the point of the battle dress. It says, that was then, this is now, we're new, we've upgraded. The point about the battle dress is, it's the first time ever that short jackets are employed on mat. I mean, okay, so cavalry tunics were short in the cavalry era of the 19th century, but uniforms are psychological as much as they're practical. I think that's the thing to bear in mind. Afterwards, he and Geoffrey Cox drive into the low countries, which are Belgium and the Netherlands are technically neutral. Belgium won't allow Britain or France to build defensive lines along the German-Belgian border due to their neutrality, which is exactly the same condition as it was in 1914 And King Leopold, who is the king of the Belgians and the Belgian government, assume that the Germans will honour their neutrality, just as they assumed they would honour their neutrality in 1914