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Soldiers talk about how they filled their time behind the lines, from cleaning to drinking and football, and while none visited brothels, they had friends that did.
Dan Snow looks at what troops got up to off the battlefield, when they were out of the front line in France. British soldiers spent the majority of the war behind the lines with brief, often appalling, spells in the trenches. Football matches, construction projects, training, drinking, theatres, religious observation and sex took up more time than the fighting, and crucially kept morale up. Drawing on interviews in the sound archives of the BBC and the IWM.
Last on
Thu 17 Nov 201613:45
BBC Radio 4
Broadcast
- Thu 17 Nov 201613:45BBC Radio 4
Podcast
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Voices of the First World War
Dan Snow tells the story of World War I through the voices of those who were there.




