At Rest

Available for over a year

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.