What was it really like to live and fight in WW1 trench? Why was throwing your empty food tins into No Man’s Land a death sentence? And what was the worst care package a Tommy could receive from home? Speaking with Emily Briffett, Peter Hart answers listener questions on life in the trenches – from favourite foods and morale-boosting parades to a soldier’s chances of survival in the face of deadly diseases, gas and explosions.

When the Royal Flying Corps first flew to France in August 1914, at the start of the First World War, it is said they took London Gin to remind themselves of home. They expected the French to have tonic which they could use as a mixer; unfortunately, they did not.

“This proved to be a big problem,” describes Paul Beaver, “as they still needed something to mix with their gin”. Instead, the men decided to add champagne to their drinks.

“In doing so, they created what was probably the first cocktail to be made in war,” Beaver adds. “It was called the French 75, named after the French 75-millimeter light field guns that fired throughout the day and night, and made it impossible for the Corps to sleep.” It was said that the drink had such a kick, that it felt like being shelled by one of these powerful artillery pieces.

“It’s certainly a fun and unexpected bit of trivia about the Royal Flying Corps,” says Beaver. “After all, what do you expect from army officers?”

Want to try your hand at making the famous cocktail? Try this French 75 recipe from BBC Good Food. 

On the podcast | Paul Beaver answers listener questions and top internet search queries surrounding military aviation, including origins, allegiances, and popular myths.

Browse our archive of podcasts on the First World War, from plastic surgery to football. Scroll down for interviews with Alexander Jackson, Catriona Pennell, Gary Sheffield, and Peter Jackson…

Mehmed VI, the last sultan of the Ottoman empire, died suddenly on the night of 16 May 1926. His passing occurred as he entered his fourth year of exile, in the Italian resort town of San Remo. Mehmed departed life virtually penniless; his debts were so substantial that Italian authorities confiscated his coffin until local accounts were settled. The sultan’s surviving relatives eventually bore his body to Syria where he was interred on the grounds of an Ottoman mosque in central Damascus.

Accompanying Mehmed on his final voyage was his son-in-law Ömer Faruk, who reflected at length as they sailed across the Mediterranean. Their ship, he noted, was slowly passing many of the lands their family had reigned over for centuries. Not only was their empire now gone, the Ottoman name inspired little loyalty or affection. “Our unfortunate sovereigns were blind,” Ömer wrote to his wife. “They did not try to understand their people, nor the spirit of the people. What our rulers did, they did to themselves as well as to the people of their country!”

Mehmed’s final journey was barely noticed in the great capitals. But it marked a mournful postscript to one of world history’s mightiest and most durable empires. For centuries following its establishment in 1299, the Ottomans had controlled territory across the Balkans, north Africa and the Middle East. From their capital in what is now Istanbul, they presided over a truly massive imperium that, at its height in the 16th century, would stretch from Egypt in the south, modern-day Iraq in the east through north Africa to Algeria and on to modern-day Romania and Hungary in the north.

• Read more | 6 lesser-known facts about the Ottoman empire

By the early 1500s, Mehmed’s predecessors ruled not only as emperors, but as caliphs of the world’s Muslims. For hundreds of years, clerics throughout the Islamic world offered prayers for the Ottoman caliph during each and every Friday sermon.

In the autumn of 1922, however, the final sultan/caliph, Mehmed VI, was unseated. Of the 140 parliamentarians who assembled to vote the Ottoman monarchy out of existence on 1 November that year, only two rejected the motion to declare the sultan’s empire dissolved and dead. After years of insurrection and nationalist dissent, few appeared to lament its departing. In its decision to eject Mehmed, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey condemned the Ottoman royal family for presiding over a “system of autocracy”, one rooted in “ignorance and debauchery”.

What had gone wrong? How had an empire that exerted so much power – and for so long – been brought to its knees? When chronicling the causes of its collapse, many historians have focused on the empire’s long decline, its metamorphosis into the “sick man of Europe”, a period of decay that culminated in the catastrophe of defeat in the First World War. The calamity of 1918, some have argued, was the event that delivered the final blow.

Yet there’s more to the story than that. It’s undeniable that the empire’s final decades set the conditions for its collapse, but they didn’t render its demise inevitable. It was what happened between 1918 and 1922 – interventions by Greek, British and French forces, and, above all, soaring tensions between the region’s Muslim and non-Muslim population – that truly condemned the empire to its fate.

Perpetual conflict

When Mehmed VI was born in 1861, there was little denying the difficulties confronting the Ottoman empire. Most of its citizens would have hardly known a decade of peace. In the late 1870s, the Ottomans were defeated in war by their great imperial rival, Russia. Worse still, in 1912 the states of Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece attacked the Ottoman empire, sparking the First Balkan War. Defeat in this conflict led to the loss of most of its remaining Balkan territory.

The damage inflicted by these crises was staggering. Modern studies suggest war and insurrection left up to 5 million refugees displaced in the Ottoman lands between the end of the 18th century and the First World War. For those who lived at a safer distance from the empire’s borders, high taxes, conscription, economic upheaval and crime exacted no less a terrible cost.

By the time Mehmed became sultan in the summer of 1918, the empire had abandoned all of north Africa. The years leading up to his accession had witnessed immense political turbulence and after decades of autocratic rule by his brother, Abdülhamid II, officers in the imperial army rose up in the summer of 1908 demanding the restoration of the constitution and its elected assembly. This Young Turk Revolution saw rule shift into the hands of a political party known as the Committee of Union and Progress (or CUP). The “Young Turks” of the CUP advanced the belief that Muslims alone embodied the true spirit at the heart of the Ottoman nation.

• Read more | Tales of the Turk

The new emphasis on the distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims would play a critical role in the empire’s downfall. In the months leading up to the First World War, the CUP imposed dictatorial rule over the state and expelled hundreds of thousands from the native Greek population of Anatolia (the land peninsula that is today the Asian portion of Turkey) from their homes. Forcibly removing these “internal tumors”, as one Young Turk official put it, became a hallmark of the CUP’s rule, rendering deep divisions in Ottoman society.

Despite this, Ottoman citizens went to war in 1914 enthusiastically. Seeing an opportunity to align themselves with Europe’s most powerful army, Ottoman leaders sided with Germany and the Central Powers. The fighting, however, proved brutal and disappointing from the start. Ottoman armies went on the offensive against Russia and Britain in the winter of 1915, only to be driven back with heavy losses.

These early defeats on the battlefield stoked the paranoia of senior leaders who suspected that the empire’s non-Muslims could no longer be trusted as loyal citizens. Central to their suspicions were Armenians, the bulk of whom lived in regions bordering the empire’s historic adversary, Russia. Beginning in the spring of 1915, government officials banished hundreds of thousands of Armenians from their native villages and towns, sending the majority of them south into the deserts of northern Syria and Mesopotamia.

An untold number, primarily men, were executed amid their removal, while many more, particularly women and children, died from hunger and exposure. “Military considerations alone,” as one Ottoman minister put it, did not prompt the deliberate mass killing of Armenians. The war instead provided the Young Turk government an opportunity “to thoroughly sweep up internal enemies, the native Christians, without being disturbed by foreign diplomatic intervention”.

But that war would end in defeat. Following the surrender of Bulgaria (which had fought on the side of the Central Powers), and the loss of much of what is today Syria, leaders in Constantinople agreed to an armistice with the Allies on 31 October 1918. By now, both soldiers and civilians of the empire had experienced immense levels of suffering. Deaths at the front, coupled with the mass expulsion of Armenians and others, emptied vast swathes of the Ottoman countryside.

Fractured Ottoman society

In laying out his conditions for peace, US president Woodrow Wilson promised the “Turkish portion” of the Ottoman empire its “assured sovereignty” while “other nationalities” would be granted “undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development”. Wilson’s peace plan heartened Arab nationalists and Armenian survivors. For others in the empire, confusion and fear reigned.

These tensions erupted when Greek troops seized the port city of Smyrna (or Izmir), on the west coast of Anatolia in May 1919. The Greek offensive came hard upon indications that Athens, along with Britain, France and Italy, planned to carve up the sultan’s lands once peace talks in Versailles had concluded.

The arrival of Allied troops to the capital, Constantinople, in November 1918, coupled with the fall of Smyrna in May 1919, fractured Ottoman society along sectarian lines. Opinions among non-Muslims varied between caution and outright support for the Allies. Many Muslims, however, denounced Greece’s attack while thousands rallied to army units aiming to end any hope of an Allied occupation. Leading this armed struggle was a figure who would go on to dominate Turkish politics until his death two decades later.

That man was Mustafa Kemal. He ended the First World War as a senior commander in the imperial army, and in opposing the Allies (now dominated by Greek, British and French forces) once again, he declared that his principal goal was restoring the sovereignty of the empire. However, his National Forces, as he called them, limited their aims to the liberation of only those Ottoman territories where a “Turkish and Muslim” majority prevailed.

For Kemal and other Nationalist leaders, re-establishing imperial rule over Arab territories like Syria proved neither practical nor preferable. Recent events, Kemal believed, proved that Turkish-speaking Muslims alone composed the historic and political core of the Ottoman nation. Relinquishing the Levant and Mesopotamia appeared to assure the survival of a coherent and viable state grounded in Anatolia.

As he waged his war against the Allied powers, Kemal declared that it was his intention to save the sultanate. However, this aim was undermined by Mehmed VI’s positioning towards the enemy. While Kemal strained every sinew to eject French and British troops from Anatolia, the sultan feared the National Forces would bring about the return of the violence and ruination associated with the CUP. The National Force’s early successes did little to dissuade Mehmed from negotiating directly with the Allies.

In August 1920, the sultan consented to sign the Treaty of Sèvres, which allowed the Allies significant territorial concessions in Anatolia. Mehmed’s surrender, coupled with his efforts to suppress the National Forces, was received as an act of treason by large numbers of loyal citizens – and set in train a series of events that would bring his reign to an end. Soon after the signing of the Treaty of Sèvres, a new parliament calling itself the Grand National Assembly passed a revised constitution. In addition to declaring Turkey the country’s new name, the constitution stripped the sultan of all his sovereign powers.

Politics prevented Kemal and the National Assembly from challenging Mehmed outright. But his stay of execution would be but a brief one.

Violent reprisals

The Nationalist war against the Allies reached a climax in the autumn of 1922 with a bloody, chaotic victory for Kemal’s forces. During their retreat from Anatolia, Greek troops left much of the countryside in ruin. Nationalist troops retaliated in kind, leading to the near-total destruction of Smyrna. The demographic consequences of the fighting proved far more irreversible. From 1919–22, most Armenians who had managed to return home were forced to leave Asia Minor for good. Fear of violent reprisals forced equally large numbers of Anatolian Greeks to flee Nationalist troops before the fighting ended.

For Kemal and other Nationalists, the mass flight of Anatolian Christians was a necessary evil. In the hopes of solidifying a fully “Turkish and Muslim” majority within its territory, Nationalist negotiators agreed to a post-war “exchange of population” with Greece, resulting in the expulsion of 1.2 million Greek Christians from Anatolia.

In receiving 400,000 Muslims from Greece in return, Kemal’s government made it clear that all citizens were to accept the predominance of a Turkish-speaking Muslim majority. Even officials who had long served the empire were potentially forbidden from retaining their citizenship if they maintained that they were of Albanian or Arab extraction. Those officials who felt such connections with their ethnic kind, one parliamentarian avowed, could leave for Albania or the new state of Syria. “From now on, our country and our army must survive [as] Turkish.”

Reputation in ruins

The social decomposition of the Ottoman empire reflected the culmination of elite and popular dissatisfaction with the monarchy. Many commentators came to assert that the sultan had always defied the “national will” in submitting to the demands of foreign powers over nationalist rebels. Mehmed VI’s capitulation at Sèvres appeared to demonstrate that a sultan’s loyalty would never be to the nation, but to a monarchy and an empire that was now more than 600 years old.

Rule under the Ottoman royal family, one Nationalist ideologue declared, was akin to “the oppression of the pharaohs who built the pyramids”. This was the context in which, on 1 November 1922, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey voted overwhelmingly to dissolve the empire. Soon, the Republic of Turkey would be established, with Mustafa Kemal at its head.

The condemnation of the Ottoman sultanate continued to echo among former imperial citizens. After driving Mehmed from power, Kemal cleansed his new republic of many of the lingering institutions derived from the empire. In doing away with the office of the caliph and imposing a new regime of laws and “national” customs, he declared the empire to be the antithesis of the progressive ideals of the Republic of Turkey.

Post-war nationalists in Iraq and Syria came to decry Ottoman rule as a dark era of misrule and backwardness that had negated Arab rights. As the state responsible for the suffering of hundreds of thousands of Christians during the early 20th century, the Ottoman empire is often reviled by Armenians and Greeks living in the wider world today.

This collective repudiation of the empire after 1922 holds significant consequences for the descendants of the empire’s last citizens. In textbooks throughout the Middle East, Ottoman history often received scant attention. Although subsequent governments came to rehabilitate aspects of imperial history, Turks remain divided as to how to best remember their collective Ottoman past. What remains unquestioned is the profound effect the empire’s dissolution would have upon the geography, politics and culture of the old Ottoman world.

Ryan Gingeras is a professor in the department of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, California, and an expert on Turkish, Balkan and Middle Eastern history. He is the author of The Last Days of the Ottoman Empire (Allen Lane, 2022)

Why wasn’t football banned on the home front when men were fighting and dying in France and Belgium? Did war halt the march of commercialisation in the sport? And why did the number of red cards surge between 1914 and 1918? From goal gluts to illegal player payments, Alexander Jackson tells Spencer Mizen how the First World War changed the face of English football.

Alexander Jackson is the author of Football’s Great War: Association Football on the English Home Front (Pen & Sword, 2022)

• Buy now on Bookshop.org
• Buy now on Amazon
• Buy now on Waterstones

On 18 November 1918, one week after the armistice had finally brought an end to the First World War, George Macdonogh, the Adjutant-General of the British Army, chaired a conference to examine how best to locate and bury the hundreds of thousands of war dead. One measure agreed at the meeting was to divide the Western Front into sectors: the Canadians would be responsible for searching the Albert/Courcelette area and Vimy Ridge; the Australians for Pozières and Villers-Bretonneux; the French for the Aisne/Marne battleground of 1914; and the British would take charge of the rest.

It would be grisly work, stated Macdonogh, so volunteers would paid an extra two shillings and six pence a day. The exhumation companies, who with the customary dark humour of the British Tommy dubbed themselves ‘Travelling Garden Parties’, were composed of squads of 32 men each. Their tools were “two pairs of rubber gloves, two shovels, stakes to mark the location of graves found, canvas and rope to tie up remains, stretchers, cresol [a poisonous and colourless compound] and wire cutters.”

• Read more | Remembering the First World War: blood, poppies and poetry

The men who volunteered for the exhumation companies had all fought in the trenches, so they knew the tell-tale signs of where bodies may be found. They looked for grass that had turned slightly blue indicating a body underneath, holes in the ground made by rats digging out a bone, or the butt of a rifle just visible in the mud. When they located a corpse, the men retrieved the identity discs and personnel effects, then placed the remains on a canvas sheet soaked in cresol.

“Working in the fields digging up the bodies, a very unpleasant job,” wrote Australian Private William McBeath in his diary on 15 April 1919. Two days later, he described how his work was interrupted by an unwelcome visitor: “Working in cemetery. An English lady came over to see her son’s grave, found him lying in a bag and fainted.”

The English poet and writer John Masefield, who had worked as an orderly in a field hospital in France, believed the work of the exhumation companies would prove futile. “The places where they lie will be forgotten or changed,” he wrote in his book The Battle of the Somme. “Green things will grow, or have already grown, over their graves. It may be that all these dead will some day be removed to a national graveyard.”

But Masefield’s scepticism was misplaced, for he had not reckoned on the efforts of one of the unsung heroes of the war, Fabian Ware. More than any other person, he ensured that a century after “the war to end all wars”, the graves of the fallen would remain immaculate and honoured.

One man’s war

The Bristol-born Ware was 45 when the war began. His professional life hitherto had been varied, including a stint as an educational administrator in South Africa, a spell editing The Morning Post newspaper and, in 1914, a post as the special commissioner to the Rio Tinto mining company.

He was desperate to do his bit for the war effort, but he was too old to fight. Undeterred, he used his contacts to travel to France as the head of a mobile unit of the British Red Cross. Along with a band of volunteers, men in possession of automobiles, he drove around the northern French countryside collecting the wounded at a time when the war had yet to develop into static trench warfare.

As Ware went about his work, he grew increasingly concerned at the way the army was dealing with its dead. Soldiers would be buried where they fell in shallow graves and with a rudimentary wooden cross, if even that. There was no attempt to log the burials and Ware believed the graves would be destroyed in future fighting.

• Read more | All Quiet on the Western Front historian’s review: An ambitious, visceral exploration of life and loss in WW1

So in October 1914, he persuaded, with the support of the Red Cross, the army to allow his unit to expand its remit. They would not only collect the wounded, but keep an official register of the location of every grave, placing a permanent marker on the spot. It hadn’t been difficult to win over the military. The war was evidently not going to be the short all-over-by-Christmas affair everyone had initially believed and hoped, but would last months, even years, and public opinion was becoming more critical as the casualties mounted.

Before the 20th century, the British had attached little importance to honouring their fallen soldiers, with most being buried in mass graves and only the social elite and wealthiest accorded individual recognition. This had caused anger and distress in the Second Boer War (1899-1902) and the army acknowledged that it would be beneficial for morale if more humane methods were introduced.

In March 1915, Ware’s unit – now comprising 121 vehicles – was rechristened the Graves Registration Commission. The Times ran a piece on their work the following month, which was no doubt intended as a fillip for worried families. “The first of these mobile units was formed in September, and has since been attached to the French Cavalry Division,” commented the article. “Members of this unit have rendered excellent services in searching for the graves of British soldiers. In many cases the graves are marked by wooden crosses, upon which, however, such evidence of identity as could be traced had been often only pencilled. To these crosses metal plates are now being fixed, and records are being kept, so that the graves may be easily identified after the war.”

By now, the nature of the fighting on the Western Front had changed. It was no longer the fast, fluid conflict of the early autumn of 1914. The protagonists had dug in, constructing a complex trench system that stretched from Switzerland to the Channel. Heavy artillery attempted to blast the enemy out of their fortifications and when, in 1915, the infantry tried to seize trenches with the aid of poison gas – at the Second Battle of Ypres and Loos – the numbers of casualties were reaching appalling heights.

• Read more | Revolution on the western front

Ware and his unit registered some 27,000 graves that year, which prompted General Douglas Haig, then a corps commander and later the commander of the British and Commonwealth Armies, to remark that their work has “an extraordinary moral value to the troops as well as to the relatives and friends of the dead at home”.

In recognition of their role, the Graves Registration Commission was transferred from the Red Cross to the army and, on Ware’s insistence, a principle of ‘equality of treatment’ was agreed. For the first time, the dead would not be treated differently according to their rank, social status or wealth, meaning that every fallen soldier was to be honoured in the same way. What’s more, there would be no repatriation of bodies.

France facilitated the new policy in December by “ceding in perpetuity land for Allied graves in France”, as reported in The Times. The paper also noted that Ware had been part of an official British Army delegation that called upon General Joseph Gallieni, Minister of War, at Christmas to express the “sincere thanks” of the nation.

A National Committee for the Care of Soldiers’ Graves was established in early 1916, with the Prince of Wales as its president and Ware a committee member. By this point, the Graves Registration Commission had grown to an organisation employing 700 staff, a sombre testament to the scale of the task they had faced in the first 18 months of the war. Little did Ware know, however, as he moved his office to London in May, that the slaughter had only just begun. The battles of the Somme, Verdun and Passchendaele cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers – many blown to bits, drowned in mud or left to rot in no man’s land.

Honouring the dead

There was only so much that could be accomplished while the fighting continued. When the guns finally fell silent on 11 November 1918, Ware’s work began in earnest. He was now a Major General and vice-chairman of the Imperial War Graves Commission (rechristened the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in 1960). It had been granted a Royal Charter in May 1917 and the Prince of Wales appointed the inaugural president.

Ware was faced with a staggering list of 500,000 missing soldiers, nearly the same figure as those men with a grave. His first task was to start the search for remains, while at the same time beginning the long, complex and sensitive task of how best to honour the fallen. The War Graves Commission had discussed the issue in its first meeting in November 1917, at which Sir Frederic Kenyon, then Director of the British Museum, accepted an invitation to act as architectural advisor. Answering to him were four principal architects: Sir Edwin Lutyens, Reginald Blomfield, Herbert Baker and Charles Holden.

• Read more | 11 November 1918: The day the world turned upside down

Kenyon spent that winter visiting the Western Front and in January 1918 he wrote a report in which he stated: “The general appearance of a British cemetery will be that of an enclosure with plots of grass or flowers (or both) separated by paths of varying size, and set with orderly rows of headstones, uniform in height and width.”

There would be no distinction in death between officers and their men. An aristocrat might lie next to a miner, a Muslim next to a Catholic, an Englishman next to an Indian, and their headstones would be identical save for the inscription on each giving the soldier’s name, rank, regiment and date of death.

It was agreed that families could choose a personal inscription at the foot of the headstone, although it was not to exceed 66 letters, and each grave would bear a Christian cross unless requested otherwise. The Star of David was engraved on headstones of Jewish soldiers and in each cemetery there would be a Cross of Sacrifice and a Stone of Remembrance, made from Portland limestone wherever possible. Inscriptions were initially charged at three and a half pence per letter, but the fee was later made voluntary after an outcry.

This policy didn’t meet with universal approval. In 1919, a petition was handed to the government, having been backed by sections of the press, demanding that “relatives of those who fell in the war should be allowed to erect monuments of their own choosing over the graves”.

On the eve of the House of Commons discussing the motion in April 1920, Sir George Perley, High Commissioner for Canada, wrote to the Chairman of the Imperial War Graves Commission, Winston Churchill, warning that “this motion seems to me to strike directly at the root of the principle of equality of treatment of war graves”. Churchill agreed, as did the majority of the House, and in throwing out the motion, he said: “There is no reason why, in periods as remote from our own as we ourselves are from the Tudors, the graveyards in France… shall not remain an abiding and supreme memorial.”

While the architects, accountants and administrators worked – managing to keep to the original estimate of £10 per grave – it was left to the exhumation companies to locate the dead. None would ever forget the horror of their task. “For the first week or two I could scarcely endure the experiences we met with,” recalled Private McCauley. “Often have I picked up the remains of a fine brave man on a shovel. Just a little heap of bones and maggots to be carried to the common burial place… I shuddered as my hands, covered in soft flesh and slime, moved about in search of the [identity] disc.”

The bulk of the work would not be completed until 1937. By then, there were nearly 1,000 cemeteries across France and Belgium, containing some 600,000 headstones and 18 larger memorials to the missing. That same year, the Duke of Gloucester succeeded the Prince of Wales as president of the Commission. In his inaugural speech, he described the “great privilege” of his appointment and added: “I have heard, on many occasions, of the comfort which the work of the Commission has brought to relatives overseas as well as at home.”

One of those headstones marked the grave of 21-year-old Second Lieutenant Walter John Warrell-Bowring, who was killed on 29 July 1916 and buried in the Aveluy Communal Cemetery Extension on the Somme. His parents chose an inscription that was also a plea: “Let those that come after see to it that his name is not forgotten.”

Through the ongoing efforts of the Commission, a century after the end of World War I that plea is still being answered.

Gavin Mortimer is a writer and historian. His latest book is David Stirling: The Phoney Major: The Life, Times and Truth about the Founder of the SAS (Constable, 2022)

This article was first published in the November 2018 issue of BBC History Revealed

All Quiet on the Western Front (in German, Im Westen nichts Neues, literally translated ‘In the West Nothing New’) is a 1928 novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of the First World War. The fictional story of a group of German soldiers on the western front has been adapted a number of times for film and television since – notably in 1930 and 1979 – and is the subject of a 2022 adaptation by Netflix.

Bethany Wyatt spoke with actor and executive producer Daniel Brühl (who plays Matthias Erzberger, a real figure from history); director Edward Berger (the director); composer Volker Bertelmann; and actor Albrecht Schuch (who plays Stanislaus ‘Kat’ Katczinsky).

• Read more | “An ambitious, visceral exploration of life and loss in WW1”

What were your first impressions of Remarque’s novel?

Daniel Brühl: Like so many others in Germany I read this book in school, and it had a huge impact. It’s one of the books that got to us, impressed us all, and made us want to read it again. My father was a documentary filmmaker and made a documentary about Remarque, so he’s always been someone that fascinated me, and in particular this – his most famous and first novel – for its universal truth and timelessness.

It was a real epiphany when Malte [Grunert], the producer on the film and the driving force behind it, found a new adaptation of it written in English. He told me [the story] had never been done in its original language, which I hadn’t thought about. Knowing that it’s the most famous book in German literature, it was a chance to do something new with it.

Edward Berger: I read the novel when I was maybe 15, and then again in my twenties. I said yes [to Malte Grunert] immediately without having re-read it because I knew that it had left an indelible mark within me. I carried it with me, like every reader of this book, probably.

How far did the novel influence the direction of the film?

EB: In terms of how the novel relates to the music, or a theme that we took out of the film, it’s in a way about the industrialisation of war and the dehumanisation of these kids. It was the first industrialised war, with a lot of shelling from artilleries and tanks. For example, there’s a sequence in the movie where tanks appear out of the fog, and the kids open their eyes and it’s almost sci-fi – like spaceships. They’ve never seen anything like this before, it’s like a machine that just keeps rolling and rolling over these kids, and they actually become part of this machine.

The way to survive is in a way to become a machine, to sort of dehumanise everything, shut all emotions off. It becomes about your survival. You need to survive, you need to eat voraciously when there is food, and you need to kill voraciously to get through it, with disregard for anything else. Nothing else counts, and so that loss of innocence, that hardening, is the arc of the story.

Basically, the north star for what we did is the book, and we tried to get images from the book and from research and combine this. Whatever happens in the frame is to give the audience an impression of what Paul [Bäumer, the main character and central figure of the story] is feeling at any given moment. I think that was the guiding light – be it music, be it camera, be it the fog in the frame, be it other characters around – a lot of it takes place on Paul’s face, and so really the biggest attempt was to get the audience to feel what he’s feeling at any given moment, to make it as immersive an experience as possible.

What attracted you to playing the roles of Erzberger and Kat respectively?

DB: I found it interesting that this new layer, which is not in the book, had an added storyline of a crucial moment in world history, which is so important for what happened after.

In Germany, I did not learn that much about Matthias Erzberger, who is a very interesting figure in German politics and history [Erzberger, 1875–1921, was a writer and politician, and a signatory of the Armistice in 1918]. He was a man who was very determined with a strong moral conviction and compass. Very early on, he started to argue with the Reich, complaining about the colonial politics, for example, and never got intimidated by the threatening voices of the far right and pushed for that signing of the peace treaty.

To play the human voice within that madness, who was surrounded by these men who you know feverishly want to continue that war, was something that attracted me.

Albrecht Schuch: This novel shook me in so many different layers and I thought being a part of it would be just more than a wonderful journey, especially with Edward [Berger], who I felt connected to right away.

Kat – this is the short version of Katczinsky, but the short version sort of defines his character already – doesn’t need too many words to express his situation, and that’s what I liked so much, because that’s cinema for me. The audience has a chance to project themselves into the silence of the character somehow, that’s a universal language without any words, so I liked the silence of that character and to fill that with thoughts, and to do so I was looking for an emotional core as well.

There was, for example, another scene from the novel, that’s not in the movie, when Paul Bäumer takes this holiday trip when he’s off duty, and he’s coming home. Just hearing the words of his sister – “Oh mother, oh mother, Paul is coming” – he literally broke hearing that warm familiar sound. It became the core of Kat for me to hide that [feeling] but to still give it a little corner somewhere hidden in his inner self. Kat tries to teach [his fellow soldiers] this – he is like a father in the movie. He’s trying to teach them not to approach that core too often because it will make you weak; it would put too many layers on your ‘animalish’ instincts which you need to kill out there on the battlefield.

The film chooses to take us away from the battlefields at moments, and to the signing of the Armistice. The figure of Matthias Erzberger has an emotional importance in the film. What can you tell me about that choice?

DB: What I found an interesting and intelligent choice is to have that parallel structure towards the end, that back and forth, because that creates tension dramatically. On the one hand it is sort of a relief to leave the horrors and death at the trenches and then go to the train; on the other side it’s as horrific because [audiences see] how polished they are, eating their croissants and having their tea, whilst the young men are dying on the battlefields, and still discussing and arguing, not getting to an agreement. That tension was interesting.

I read the biography of Erzberger, who is fascinating because he makes his way up from the German south, the provinces, a very devoted Catholic, conservative but liberal within his conservatism, and that’s why I wanted to keep his accent – which is hard for me because my wife and her whole family are from that area so I’m pretty sure they are going to complain about my Swabian accent. I had a small part, but I know it was pivotal for the film, so I wanted to fill it with something that brings me closer to that man and that accent.

There are a few historical changes, but always to help the essence, to tell this story. In fact, Erzberger’s son died of the Spanish Flu – he was not a victim in the trenches – but it was a change that I totally understood, so that he in his conviction in front of these hardcore, cold Prussians is more emotionally anchored in saying “My son died, what kind of honour should he feel?”

It was important to also fill these little parts with as much truth as we possibly could.

Two of the most powerful elements of the film are the use of personal objects as motifs and the use of landscape visuals. What were you hoping to achieve with this?

EB: The personal objects really came from trying to give every character something very personal, and very distinguishable from the other.

We are in the trenches so unfortunately there’s hardly any female presence in this film – basically none – and there’s a scarf that almost makes the absence of the women more palpable. The scarf is the female presence in a way, it’s something soft and it smells good and it’s something where the boys want to get to their mother or to their lover, to something that is beautiful and warm, and not just destruction and dirt and war and cold, and all these things that contrast that.

One of the characters, Kat, has a little beetle that he takes care of. Another [soldier] has an image of female presence, a poster of a theatre play that was put on. This is to give everyone something like a longing, a yearning – there’s this German word called sehnsucht, it’s the addiction to longing in a way.

The landscapes are very much about contrasts. It’s about behind the lines in the war and in front of the lines, and what the generals think and how they act and what they do, or the armistice negotiators and the soldiers in the trenches. To make that even starker, we created something behind the lines to really make those trenches even smell more. The battle scenes are loud, but then there are peaceful sequences in between, to make that contrast even harsher – darkness and light and dirt and clean. We have those contrasts a lot, and the landscapes contrast to the destruction. But they are also something where we yearn to get again, and what we are about to lose, and the beauty of what we are destroying, just to remind us of that and almost give a sense of this could be so beautiful and so easy and yet we don’t let it. That was the purpose behind those serene shots.

Returning to the score, there is a bass motif which runs throughout the film, and often returns at moments of jeopardy. What was the thinking behind this?

Volker Bertelmann: I wanted to find an instrumentation that came from that time, so I found an instrument in my studio that was given to me by the mother of my grandmother, an old harmonium.

At the same time, I was thinking about war films where you would hear a lot of war horns – these big, shouting horns – so I wanted to find a sound that in a way captured this kind of tension, and the massiveness and the boldness of a war horn. But at the same time, I didn’t want to use a horn that would be used in a Roman empire movie or something like that, because it’s a completely different movie.

It maybe also connected with the idea of these little things that were giving warmth in a way. I found the harmonium of my grandmother which was given to me, and I restored it and recorded this motif in the first two days when Edward and I started working. I sent it to him and he loved it, and this one very intuitive motif became very strong. I actually used the harmonium with a distortion, an amplifier that you use for heavy metal guitars, and I think it describes the machinery of war.

EB: What I connected to is that [the score] attacks you, and I immediately thought: “What a great transcription of the images and what a great counter-position too.” It felt like it was attacking the images, destroying the images, not just scoring it but adding a whole new level to it, and that’s why I loved it so much. But there’s a cracking and a creaking underneath it, and that’s really the inner workings of this old instrument, you hear Volker’s feet and knees pumping the air in it and underneath it’s dirty; it’s not a clean instrument and I love hearing all these creaks and it’s a part of that machine I think, it’s wonderful.

• Read more | Operation Alberich: the story of Germany’s retreat in 1917

VB: Normally you would cut those sounds out. You know, normally when you record something you would clean it, like take the breath out, take the air out.

What would you like viewers to take away from the film?

DB: I want young people to watch it. That would be my hope, because we all wish that this film was not as relevant as it is, with a war in the middle of Europe. We all should be reminded, and the youth should be reminded, that war is not an adventure, as Remarque said. It’s not cool, there’s nothing glorious about it; even if you are the supposed winner, your life is damaged and ruined for the rest of your days. This is the essential message of Remarque, and it comes across in the film and I would love especially young people to watch it.

EB: I wanted the audience to feel a certain weight, an inescapability, and for maybe just one minute, or an hour or if I’m lucky, the evening; they’ll take an impression of it home and just think about it. Then, probably, everyone moves on with their lives. I don’t want to impart a message or anything, everyone sort of needs to interpret that for themselves, but I think that’s the best word for it: there’s a weight that this story, and war in general, brings with it.

Bethany Wyatt is a cultural historian and heritage professional. You can find her on Twitter at @WyattBeth

More than a century ago, in 1921, paper poppies were first sold to raise money for returned soldiers of the First World War. In postwar society, many veterans struggled to find homes, employment and financial security, so associations were formed to campaign for their rights. Sometimes, these efforts turned violent, causing great anxiety in a British political establishment still reeling from the Russian Revolution and postwar political radicalism across Europe.

• Read more | Remembering the First World War: blood, poppies and poetry

Yet when a number of ex-servicemen’s groups combined to form the British Legion, with Field Marshal Earl Haig as its president, veterans’ associations started to become more widely popular and part of the establishment rather than a force for opposition. As part of this process, the British Legion introduced the idea of selling paper poppies as a fundraising campaign to alleviate the material distress that lay at the root of veteran discontent and political agitation.

In its first year, the Legion sold 9 million poppies, entrenching the deeply felt symbolism attached to the poppy since the 1915 publication of the poem In Flanders Fields by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae.

• On the podcast | First World War poets: everything you wanted to know

Throughout the 1920s, most British people chose to wear poppies every 11 November, but attempts to unify the nation in a shared memory were never completely successful. In 1933, the Co-operative Women’s Guild introduced the pacifist white poppy to counter the supposed militarism inherent in the so-called Flanders poppy, inspired by the poppies that grew on the battlefields. Many veterans reacted angrily and sometimes destroyed the white poppy wreaths left at war memorials.

Commemorative events were scaled back during the Second World War, and poppy-wearing remained limited until the 1990s when the British Legion campaigned successfully to reintroduce the two-minute silence. Since then, poppy-wearing has become widespread not just on Armistice Day but in the weeks leading up to 11 November. It is now unimaginable for a public figure or a BBC journalist to appear without wearing a poppy in early November.

Wearing the poppy is no neutral act. It has always been political and highly symbolic; it has always been contested and has served to highlight national divisions as well as shared myths and memories. Does wearing the poppy glorify war, or does it remind us of its tragedies? There are many responses to that question, but after 100 years, wearing the poppy reminds us that the after-effects of war endure and that we still have no answer to the question posed by the Scottish poet Tom Scott: “Why are men always making war rather than the things they need?”

Dr Fiona Reid is the associate dean at Newman University in Birmingham, and author of Broken Men: Shell Shock, Treatment and Recovery in Britain 1914-30 (Continuum, 2010)

This article was first published in the November 2021 issue of BBC History Magazine

Generations of historians, literature scholars, and schoolchildren are intimately familiar with Im Westen Nicht Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front), which is perhaps the seminal fictionalisation of (young) men’s experiences fighting in the Great War.

Initially serialised in 1928, the novel by German writer and ex-serviceman Erich Maria Remarque was a firm rebuff to the established genre of adventure war fiction, with its intention to portray the cruelty of conflict and its impact on the human body and spirit. Now, more than nine decades since its publication, and the release of the (Oscar-winning) first adaptation in 1930, the story has been adapted in German for the first time. It’s a decision which immediately cultivates a quiet authority.

The film centres on 17-year-old Paul Baümer (played by Felix Kammerer), and his friends Albert Kropp (Aaron Hilmer), Franz Müller (Moritz Klaus), and Ludwig Behm (Adrian Grünewald), who all decide to enlist in 1917. It charts their journey from idealistic youths, expectant of an adventure and the opportunity to cement their masculinity, to men horrified by the realities of industrialised conflict.

For those familiar with First World War cinema, there are commonly seen characterisations in All Quiet on the Western Front: the terrified boy desperate to go home; the more experienced soldier who is (mostly) adept at managing his emotions; the disabled serviceman anxious about his prospects; the men of authority who manipulate the recruits and espouse the honour of warfare (the viewer cannot fail to spot the irony in the phrase: “The Kaiser needs soldiers, not children.”) But it is important to note that this is faithful to the spirit of Remarque’s novel, which was among the contemporary literature that provided the initial inspiration for such tropes in British and Hollywood cinema.

An additional layer to Remarque’s story

Where the film most notably diverges from the source material is in its presentation of an additional layer to the story (achieved by omitting Paul’s training for service and his visit home on leave). This consists of regular scenes of what is happening behind the lines, featuring (real) politician Matthias Erzberger (played by Daniel Brühl) as he leads negotiations for an armistice, and General Friedrich (Devid Striesow), who is determined for his troops to fight to the last rather than submit to a capitulation. Erzberger carries a personal motivation which accelerates his moral conviction that the war must end, and these scenes give rise to a race-against-time atmosphere as the viewer anticipates whether Paul and his friends can endure.

In the group’s everyday experiences, there are resonances to the emotions felt by First World War soldiers across nationalities. These include excitement at the arrival of post, joy in food (and misery when supplies are meagre), and humour in surreal and bleak circumstances. The film also explores the anxiety that servicemen could experience during periods of prolonged shelling.

As the narrative progresses, Paul’s circle extends to the more experienced soldiers Stanislaus ‘Kat’ Katczinsky (Albrecht Schuch) and Tjaden Stackfleet (Edin Hasanovic). Paul and Kat’s friendship is the core of the film, with the latter serving as an (unconventional) father figure. In the novel, the power of the pair’s friendship is often unspoken, but the adaptation includes new scenes which delve into their dynamic. Two of these additions underline the physical – but not emotional – separation from loved ones.

Remarque’s idea of a disconnect between soldiers and civilians is nevertheless nodded to by Kat: “All they’ll want to know is if we fought in close combat. We’ll walk around like travellers in a landscape from the past.” As with other First World War films, portrayals of comradeship are frequent, and here its employment occasionally includes a tactile attention, from the smoothing down of a uniform to an embrace.

Invoking the longing for home

Director Edward Berger’s thoughtful use of material culture crafts additional emotional threads. A uniform name badge, a scarf, a theatre poster, photographs – they all tell a story (some connected to the novel). The wider visuals are impressive. Beautiful landscapes add moments of tranquillity, with the juxtaposition of forests, hills, and sunrises with the chaos of No Man’s Land suggestive of both the desecration of war landscapes, and a longing for home landscapes.

Indeed, a passage in the novel sees Paul suddenly struck by visions of his town: “[English translation] The parachute-lights soar upwards – and I see a picture, a summer evening, I am in the cathedral cloister and look at the tall rose trees that bloom in the middle of the little cloister garden […] Between the meadows behind our town there stands a line of old poplars by a stream […] We loved them dearly, and the image of those days still makes my heart pause in its beating.”

The film’s use of idyllic landscapes bears similarities with another recent First World War film – Sam Mendes’s 1917 – which featured cherry blossom as a motif.

Environmental visuals are a potent force in All Quiet on the Western Front’s visceral battle scenes. Representing the sensory experience of trench warfare, Paul exists in close proximity to the earth, sheltering in shell holes, crawling along No Man’s Land. With a close-up of mud encrusted on half his face, it is as if Paul himself is being subsumed into the war’s landscapes.

In keeping with the unflinching descriptions of warfare in the novel, the film contains harrowing scenes of acts of violence and their aftermath, presenting the use of weapons such as bayonets, sharpened spades, tanks, and flamethrowers, and the graphic injuries which result.

The camera compels the viewer to follow Paul, vicariously experiencing the tumult of battle and desperate frenzy of close combat. In the later stages of the film, Paul remarks fatalistically to Kat: “I can’t discard two years of hand grenades like a pair of socks. We’ll never get rid of the stench.” One of the most affecting scenes, taken from the novel, sees Paul confronted with the reality of death in the most intimate way as he is compelled to remain in close quarters with a Frenchman he has fatally wounded.

Speaking of endings, it is difficult to match the power of the 1930 All Quiet on the Western Front’s conclusion, which has endured as one of First World War cinema’s most memorable moments, striking in its simplicity and symbolism. However, the 2022 adaptation succeeds in crafting its own elegy for the men who did not return home.

With a terrific cast and arresting score by Volker Bertelmann, All Quiet on the Western Front is by far the most powerful example of its genre in recent years. Indeed, it makes a strong case for being the finest First World War film to date.

All Quiet on the Western Front is available to stream on Netflix from Friday 28 October

Bethany Wyatt is a cultural historian of the First World War. You can find her on Twitter @wyattBeth

Stanley Unwin held a not unreasonable belief about children’s book publishing: the best way to know if the book was good was to have a child read it first. With that in mind, and being a publisher himself, he often took manuscripts home for his son, Rayner, to read. One day, the manuscript was a fantasy story, filled with wizards, dragons, Elvish languages, mountainous treasures, magic rings and a strange race of creatures much like humans, but smaller.

“Bilbo Baggins was a hobbit who lived in his hobbit-hole and never went on adventures,” began Rayner’s report, complete with spelling errors. “At last, Gandalf the wizard and his dwarves persuaded him to go. He had a very exiting time fighting goblins and wargs.

At last they got to the lonley mountain; Smaug the dragon who gawreds it is killed and after a terrific battle with the goblins he returned home – rich! … It is good and should appeal to all children between the ages of 5 and 9.”

Rayner received a shilling for his report and his father, founder of George Allen & Unwin, was convinced to publish. The Hobbit, it quickly turned out, appealed to far more than the predicted age group.

Published on 21 September 1937, it sold its initial print run by the end of the year. Its success heralded a new name in fantasy literature, JRR Tolkien, and a new world called Middle Earth. Readers of all ages couldn’t get enough.

Later in life, Tolkien reflected that “One writes such a story not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed … but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind”. He wrote The Hobbit and his masterpiece followup The Lord of the Rings while leading a decidedly ordinary life as an Oxford don.

Life was comfortable and every day pretty much the same. So the ‘leaf-mould’ that gave life to his bestselling epics had gathered in his youth, and been added to by loss, friendship, passion for languages, war and love.

Who was JRR Tolkien?

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien – Ronald, to family and friends – met his wife of more than 50 years in 1908, when he was 16. Edith Mary Bratt was three years his senior, a gifted pianist and a fellow lodger in the house of Mrs Faulkner in Birmingham. Their friendship, formed through secret whistles and midnight feasts, soon blossomed into romance.

Tolkien’s Catholic guardian, Father Francis Xavier Morgan, disapproved of the match. Edith was both a Protestant and a distraction as he studied for a scholarship to Oxford, so Morgan told him not to pursue the relationship until he turned 21. All communication was then prohibited after the love-struck pair were spotted several times on secret bicycle rides or chance meetings. Tolkien grew so despondent that it actually came as a relief when she moved to Cheltenham. “Thank God!” he wrote in his diary, such was his deep respect for Morgan.

The kindly priest had taken Tolkien as his ward, along with his younger brother Hilary, when they were orphaned. They had lost their father, Arthur, at ages too young to remember him properly. Arthur had been an English bank manager in Bloemfontein, South Africa – where Tolkien was born on 3 January 1892 – and died in early 1896 due to complications from rheumatic fever. At the time, his wife Mabel and the two boys were away in England.

With no wish to return to South Africa, Mabel moved to Sarehole on the outskirts of Birmingham. The effect this had on Tolkien was profound. Despite his mother struggling with a meagre income, Sarehole came to represent an idyllic childhood. He was in the countryside, living a simple rural existence, able to watch the mill in action or pick mushrooms from the field of a local farmer, whom he called the ‘black ogre’. When he later wrote about the Shire, he was thinking of Sarehole.

His bliss lasted only a short time. In 1900, Mabel converted to Roman Catholicism, to the outrage of her family, who stopped financial support, and then she moved the family so the boys could be nearer King Edward’s School. Tolkien felt the loss of the countryside keenly. Then in 1904, his mother succumbed to diabetes. From then on, Tolkien, a cheerful and sociable person at heart, could sink into deep despair at the fear of everything beautiful in the world being lost.

He found solace in his Catholicism and through fellowship. At school, he had a close group of friends – Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Smith and Christopher Wiseman – who made up the Tea Club, Barrovian Society (or TCBS), which met to discuss literature or share artistic endeavours. Then, when he went to Oxford in 1911 to study Classics at Exeter College, Tolkien joined the rugby, debating and essay clubs, and founded a literary club of his own, the Apolausticks.

JRR Tolkien, Inklings and Middle Earth

Years later, as an Oxford professor, he was an instrumental figure in the Inklings literary group. The loose collection of academics, writers and literary enthusiasts met for conversation, readings of works-in-progress and drinking in The Eagle and Child pub.

There, Tolkien would have tested out chapters from The Lord of the Rings to an encouraging audience, not least his friend CS Lewis.

It was in such groups that a younger Tolkien demonstrated his exemplary talents for language and philology. He had a natural skill for picking up languages, and a passion for inventing his own. Tolkien loved the sounds of words, whether in Greek or Gothic, Welsh or Finnish, Old Norse or Anglo-Saxon. He read greedily, but nothing struck him as much as a couplet in the Old English poem the Crist of Cynewulf: “Hail Earendel brightest of angels, above the Middle Earth sent unto men.” These words formed the cornerstone for much of his early writing as he conceived his own Middle Earth.

Despite hours spent writing or inventing languages, socialising or studying (he did too little of the latter in his first years at Oxford), Tolkien eagerly counted the days until his 21st birthday. After nearly three years apart, he intended to write to Edith to renew their relationship.

As midnight struck on 3 January 1913, he put pen to paper: “How long will it be before we can be joined together before God and the world?”

But when he got her reply, it seemed Edith had moved on. She was engaged to someone else. “I began to doubt you Ronald and to think you would cease to care for me,” she wrote, but added that had changed now she received Tolkien’s letter. With the hope of winning her heart again, he travelled to Cheltenham on 8 January. The two walked and talked for hours, and by the end Edith had pledged to break off her engagement and marry Tolkien.

The woman he loved was back in his life. She converted to Catholicism and moved to Warwick for him, while he switched from studying classics to English language and literature so as to better suit his interest in philology.

Tolkien had cause to be optimistic – until the First World War broke out. While friends and contemporaries rushed to sign up to fight, Tolkien hoped to finish his degree first. It was not a popular move, but he realised he could undertake military training in Oxford at the same time. He also worked on his own language, Quenya. By 1915, Tolkien had achieved a first and enlisted as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers. After months of further training, and only when it became clear he was about to be deployed to France, did he marry Edith, on 22 March 1916.

His battalion was bound for the Western Front in time to relieve depleted forces at the Somme. Tolkien spent some four months in and out of the trenches, enduring what he called the “animal horror” of war, before contracting a fever and being sent back to England.

Most of his men were wiped out, and more distressing news came when he heard that two of his closest friends from his school club, the TCBS, had been killed. Just before Geoffrey Smith was hit by a shell, he wrote to Tolkien the poignant words: “May God bless you, my dear John Ronald, and may you say the things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them, if such be my lot.”

Tolkien took this to heart and decided it was time – that he had gathered enough ‘leaf-mould’ – to write a grand mythology on which to ground his invented languages. This marked the beginning of what has since been called his ‘legendarium’ (works relating to Middle Earth and the broader world) and the beginning of the book he would never complete, The Silmarillion.

Ongoing illnesses prevented Tolkien from returning to the Western Front, so time was spent writing or with Edith, by now pregnant with their first child, John. They would have two more sons, Michael and Christopher, and a daughter, Priscilla. When Tolkien was stationed in Hull in 1917, they went for a walk in the woods near Roos and, stopping in a grove filled with hemlock, Edith danced for him. He never forgot that moment as it inspired his beloved romance of Beren, a man, and Lúthien, an elf. Those names can now be seen on the headstone Tolkien and Edith share.

After the war, Tolkien worked on the New English Dictionary – concentrating on the letter W – and as professor in English Language at Leeds. He returned to Oxford in 1925 as professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, specialising in Old and Middle English. Until his retirement in 1959, he worked tirelessly: tutoring undergrads, preparing classes, and giving lectures, most notably his seminal talk on Beowulf. His academic publication record was far from impressive, but he was more focused on his teaching. He was required to give at least 36 lectures a year, but he did not feel that covered the subject adequately so, in one year, he gave 136.

JRR Tolkien and The Hobbit

Tolkien was sitting in his study at home on Northmoor Road, marking an examination paper, when he came across a blank page. Without thinking, he scribbled down the line, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”. He didn’t know what a hobbit was, or why it lived in a hole, but he wanted to know more.

He jotted down a story that he thought his children would enjoy, and that became an embryonic manuscript of The Hobbit. It got passed around his friends in the Inklings until a copy found its way to an employee of George Allen & Unwin publishers named Susan Dagnall, who immediately saw its potential and passed it to Stanley Unwin. From there, it went to Unwin’s savvy son, Rayner.

JRR Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings

The success of The Hobbit prompted George Unwin & Allen to ask Tolkien for a sequel. It couldn’t be The Silmarillion as he hoped – there weren’t any hobbits in that – so he began drafting a new story without any idea of what it would be about. By the time it was eventually finished, The Lord of the Rings had taken Tolkien a full 12 years to write and another five to get published. World War II had been declared and won (Tolkien called Hitler a “ruddy little ignoramus”), his children grew up and left home, and he changed professorships from Pembroke to Merton College.

All the while, he was changing details, such as the hero’s name to Frodo from Bingo Bolger-Baggins, or adding layers of mythology that had never been seen in a fantasy novel before. Tolkien took worldbuilding to new heights, as tall as the book’s two towers themselves. It was no longer a children’s book.

When he finally delivered The Lord of the Rings to the publishers, it was accompanied with a note, saying: “It is written in my life blood, such as that is, thick or thin;  and I can no other.”

Yet The Lord of the Rings had taken so much time and was so weighty that Stanley Unwin had grown unsure about whether to proceed with publishing it. The decisive opinion, as with The Hobbit almost two decades earlier, fell to Rayner, now, of course, an adult.

He described the novel as a “brilliant and gripping story”, and argued for its publication, despite the risk of it possibly losing money. It was a work of genius, said Rayner, and that was enough for his father. Again.

• Read next | JRR Tolkien and the dark side of the Anglo-Saxons

This article was first published in the May 2019 issue of BBC History Revealed