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When They Realised WW1 Wouldn't Be Over By Christmas

270K views · Sep 4, 2025 · Education

The Rest Is History

588K subscribers

Comments · 523

@GreylanderTV · 1 year ago
For what it's worth: your cold-open intros are such a classic hallmark of your style, I don't think you should mar the beginning of your videos with an ad, even if they pay you more. Surely after the intro is worth as much or more to an advertiser.
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@KonguZya · 1 year ago
Damn, one episode off from integrating the Uber ad into the story of the taxis at Marne.
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@trackside-with-carl · 1 year ago
I'm in a depression filled hole at the moment and this podcast series has been so good for me. Love how you bring the characters to life with animations.
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@JC-gf5vv · 1 year ago
As a Canadian school child,  at every Nov 11 ceremony, we would recite or sing the poem by Canadian  WW1 military doctor John McCrae, who did not survive the  war:  "In Flanders fields the poppies grow, between the crosses, row on row......We are the Dead.  Short days ago we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields....."
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@CardinalBiggles01 · 1 year ago
Another wonderful episode. You gents have great chemistry as narrators and a very British sense of humour. You clearly love history and have great knowledge. Keep it up chaps
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@greyforge27 · 1 year ago (edited)
"One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead."<br>- a J.R.R. Tolkien quote to balance out the Hitler one with which they began this episode (Tolkien and Hitler were at the Somme at the same time in 1916, on opposite sides of the trenches)<br><br>WWI was the devil's masterpiece, which seems almost to have been orchestrated to break out inevitably and cause the mass industrial killing of Christians by Christians (read Tom Holland's own chapter on it in Dominion). As the RIH chaps have pointed out in one of these episodes, all the particular horrors of the 20th century and up to the present pretty well spring from it. But the lives of Tolkien and Hitler prove that personal reactions to the war differed greatly and underscore the responsibility of individuals to learn the right lessons from events. No doubt Hitler and his generation of Germans were victims of the war, but Hitler chose to cause more destruction after living through it. Tolkien, later, after he had survived both World Wars and Hitler had died ignominiously in a bunker in the ruins of Berlin, told his publisher, "You can make the Ring into an allegory of our own time, if you like: an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power" (Letter 109).
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@donteatthemushroom · 1 year ago
As someone with 3 small children, the story of the soldier dying in agony in a muddy hole struggling to breathe with only the thought of his little ones on his mind and an enemy to comfort him hits really hard.
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@xSAINTPERKx · 1 year ago
This episode is makes me supremely melancholic. So many young men and boys, lost to a meaningless conflict. God rest their souls and never forget them.
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@MtbStoat · 11 months ago
Everyone imagines themselves in some sort of role in the trenches, I'm an engineer by background so I imagined myself as an artillery junior officer charged with preparing for a creeping barrage or to provide counter battery fire.  Sitting in a damp dugout with rats and the most evil smells not even a decent cup of tea, pouring over artillery fire tables by candle light for a dawn attack.  They had a terrifying job on their shoulders trying to estimate windage, air pressure and humidity and getting exact timing, likely with four 25 pounder field guns, (Ordnance QF-25pdr), you would be charged with delivering a certain rate of fire so if you lost a gun you would try to compensate, for counter battery fire (unlike the Germans) you had no line of sight on the German guns so would be going off aerial reconnaisance, plus as your guns heat up you have to compensate for the effect of the "hot" barrels.  Meanwhile men's lives hang on you advancing the fire as they walk to a schedule across no-mans' land.  Add to that the indifferent quality and uncertain quantity of your ammunition...
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@bradyoung1714 · 1 year ago
Learning about both world wars makes me realize how much of a waste of life all of it was and how easy it is for leaders to get an absolutely astronomical number of regular/innocent/ignorant people killed
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@largesatsuma · 1 year ago
Two of my great-grand-uncles joined in 1914.  They were both killed in 1917, one of them at Ypres.
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@vincentsavage1562 · 8 months ago
Wow guys. You make history so incredibly interesting. Thanks for bringing some family history to life. My grand uncle, Patrick Joseph Savage, 12th Lancers,died on 21st Oct 1914 in Ypres.
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