UKH

I already have WW1 books but I’m looking for recommendations on what happened next.

in particular, how did landowners deal with the mess on their land? What was done to clear up? How was the war machine dismantled and returned to Britain?

How were the masses demobbed?

That kind of thing...?

A good question - I'd also be interested to learn more about all this

There is very little on the post war clearance of the battlefields. The standard work seems to be 'After the ruins' by Hugh Clout, it is out of print and pretty sought after, if you find a copy (not cheap) could I read it after you?!  'The Soldiers Peace' by Michael Senior looks at demobilisation but I haven't got round to reading that yet either.

Its an area I'm particularly interested in but good books on it are far and few between. There seems to be suprisingly little on the restoration and resttlement of the Zone Rouge.

Thanks - it’s a start!

https://books.google.com/books/about/After_the_Ruins.html?id=nSprHxTuXdAC

On google books!

Maybe not quite what you want, but an interesting documentary about the re-discovery of a British underground trench system - it basically reveals what lies underneath an ordinary French field.

youtube.com/watch?v=S88vie0eCnA&
youtube.com/watch?v=z08fLU5a6sc&

An excellent book on tunneling is 'War Underground' by Alexander Barry, I expected a dry account with a lot of technical detail on pumps or wooden shoring, I got a read as exciting as any thriller. A real page turner, if Birdsong ignited any interest in this part of WW1 then time spent tracking this down won't be wasted.

I read <a lot> of WW1 books, here are some picks from my shelves, some well known others a little more obscure. They do however represent my interest in the Land War on the Western Front. I have left out some obvious choices such as "All Quiet.." and "Goodbye to all that"as they are pretty well known.

*** essential

** very good

First person memoirs/diaries,

Somme Mud, EPF Lynch. ***  Modest Australian memoir from the thick of it. 

A Very Unimportant Officer,  Capt. A Stewart, Edited by Cameron Stewart.

Storm of Steel, E. Junger.  Well known title, War can be fun! ***

Copse 125, E Junger. More exposition of Jungers 'philosophy' and some insights into a man who defies lazy categorisation. **

Harrys' War, H Drinkwater.

A Gunner on the Western Front, Aubery Wade **  An artillerymans memoirs, captures an essence of inescapable horror.

Field Guns in France, N Fraser-Tytler*** War as fun from the British perspective, takes delight in shelling Germans and shooting partridge equally.

Some Desperate Glory, Edwin Campion Vaughan. **

Undertones of War, Edmund Blunden ***

A Nurse at the Front, Edith Appleton, Edited by Ruth Cowan *** Essential diary of nursing

With a Machine Gun to Cambrai, G Coppard.

Drawing Fire, Len Smith, An artist at war sent out into No mans land to sketch the German lines, just like in Blackadder but for real.

Sniping in France, Major H Hesketh Pritchard ** Very readable technical account of the development of sniping and use of big game hunting techniques, illuminates a 'free lance' side of the war.

The War the Infantry Knew, Capt JC Dunn *** If you picked one book from this list....

Historical/technical but very readable;

The Hell They Called High Wood, Terry Norman. Possibly the most contested few acres of the Somme battle? 8000 men still lie there unburied.

Somme, Heroism & Horror, Martin Gilbert

Raiding on the Western Front, Anthony Saunders, 

The Blood Tub, Jonathan Walker. Account of the desperate fighting around Bullecourt

Fromelles, Patrick Lindsay, 

The Marne, Georges Blond

Verdun, Georges Blond 

The White War, Mark Thompson, The war on the Italian front

Zeebrugge, Barrie Pitt

The Price of Glory, Alistair Horne. Account of Verdun,  A masterpiece still acknowledged as authoritarive after 50 years

Fiction,

Under Fire, Henri Barbusse, slow to start but inexorably leads you into hell.

Covenant with Death, John Harris. All but true account of the Sheffield Pals. 'Two years in the making, a moment in the destroying'

Reference/etc - just a small few

The Somme/Passchendaele/Arras/Battlefiields of the First World War, Peter Barton  lavish comparisons of Battlefield panoramic photos

Beneath Flanders Fields, Peter Barton, Excavations and history of the underground war.

Before Endeavours Fade, Rose Coombs, Battlefield touring itineries. Often updated and ideal for exploring. Not too Ypres/Somme centric which I like.

Digging up Plugstreet, Martin Brown & Richard Osgood. Archaeology of a WW1 battlefield.

The War Walk, Nigel H Jones, Account of the Western Front on foot.

Anything by Richard Holmes, Lyn MacDonald and Richard Van Emden are usually worth reading.

Also worth hunting down, if you are into the recovery of the land  are the titles from the 1930's ; "Twenty Years After", also "The Great War - I was there" and "The Western Front then and now" (not to be confused with the later book of the same title by John Giles, which is also very good).  If you are going back to the 1930's look out for the photo- books printed by the Daily Express as warning about another world war, these are "The First World War - a photographic history" -prophetic title as it was published in 1933, and the quite rare "Covenants with Death" with its notorious sealed section of graphic images of the dead and atrocities. These are mostly from the Balkans and highlight the long standing animosities here. 

There are loads, loads more, but all the above should be accessible to those with a casual or passing interest. Some accounts get a bit bogged down with a lot of detail.

Conversely I'm always after recommendations myself, I especially like reading the long forgotten diaries and memoirs of those who were actually there.

In my research to trace the wherabouts of a relative, I found these articles interesting.

https://www.longlongtrail.co.uk/burial-clearance-and-burial/

http://www.greatwar.co.uk/battle-remains/battle-remains-western-front.htm

https://www.arrse.co.uk/community/threads/book-on-clearing-ww1-battlefields...

That's a heck of a list - thanks!

That first article is really good, I have seen it before but a while ago. Interestingly it quotes Fraser Tytler and Dunn, who I metioned above.

The best online resource in the UK (imho) is a sister site to Long Long Trail. 

https://www.greatwarforum.org/

The body density maps bring home the scale of the exhumations for me. 

https://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2015/05/an-extraordinary...

They were produced by the exhumation parties and show the number of bodies recovered from each map square. The one in the link above is of the Somme and gives an idea of the intensity of fighting in each location. On the map 4 squares are blank with no number given, these cover High Wood. It is the only place (to my knowledge) on the Somme where it was left, largely uncleared other than superficially. An estimated 8,000 still lie here, British and German. Its hard to imagine 8,000 living people there without them spilling out into the adjacent fields. It was cleared again in the 1960's but only rèally of scrap metal, of which there must have been tons and tons. In nearby Delville wood at the height of the battle an estimated 400 shells fell every minute. Today High Wood is a small pleasant wood high on a 'ridge'. It is private and access is banned, but you can walk round it in a few minutes and enter it in a few places. It is not 'untouched' as there is a private house there and it is used for hunting and forestry, but it has an atmosphere of its own. Well worth a small detour on the drive to Font or the Alps. A haunted place, if only by your own thoughts.

"Tommy"

My great uncle was gassed in 1916. (By British gas blowing back when the wind changed).

He was buried just behind the front line along with 20 or so other guys who met the same fate.

In 1918, in the German counter-offensive, they shelled and then occupied the area including the site of the burials.

In 1921, recovery parties were exhuming the bodies and parts, but all that was found was a cross with my great uncle's name on. This was buried in a nearby war cemetery, but no grave or mark shows the spot, they put his name on the Menin Gate.

The original site, marked on the recovery party's maps, is in a farmer's field.

That happened often, and is to my mind one of the saddest things. It's clear from contemporary accounts that often casualties would be buried with great care by their pals, only for their graves to be destroyed by subsequent shelling and all trace lost. It is always heartbreaking to see in a cemetary the inscription "believed to be buried in this cemetary" and seeing a single stone commemorating multiple persons. It reminds you that what was buried was rarely an intact person, but often a few fragments or a bony soup.

Apologies for what is turning into a total thread Hijack, but I'd also recommend this film if you aren't aware of it;

youtube.com/watch?v=NDC1Z8Pj0e8&

Made in 1928 it was filmed on the actual Verdun battlefields with a cast of veterans. (A similar concept was 'Theirs is the Glory', a film reenacting the battle of Arnhem, shot in about 1946).  The film is very raw, a lot of footage is familiar as it is passed off as original. But the battle scenes are about as authentic as you will find, though other bits less so.

Hijack away, it’s an interesting thread if I say so myself!

i have started reading After the Ruins on google books. I think a few little bits are omitted but not much. There will be plenty to get a real sense of the post war clearance. It’s very academic, but hopefully manageable!

Can't keep away, I just found this, a day by day visualisation of number and location of French deaths.

https://www.lefigaro.fr/fig-data/tombes-champ-honneur/

Sobering stuff.

I know this isn't what you were looking for (I'd be as interested as you to read on such) but I found John Keegan's 'The Face Of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme' excellent. Basically, why didn't the soldiers at the sharp end run away?

DD mentions Alastair Horne's 'Price of Glory' on Verdun. I haven't read that, but can vouch for his aptly named account of the Algerian war of independence: 'The Savage War of Peace'.

i have The Face of Battle - a great read

I recently read A Rifleman Went to War by Herbert W McBride

He was a American who wanted to experience war so he volunteered for the Canadian Army.

I found it a very interesting first hand account of sniping in WW1

youtube.com/watch?v=ugwNn0wtwaQ&

That's a new one to me, lookd good and I'll hunt it down. Have a like for linking to Gun Jesus!

This is an excellent book. It shows how unprepared we were. The kit we had, the training, the rifles and scopes were pretty poor when compared that of the enemy. We initially thought that random deaths were from stray shots, rather than from aimed shots.

Its written in a very plumy British style. Rather than just being an account of the training he set up, he was regularly crawling around in no mans land, taking out enemy snipers.

Its available online for free, if one looks about a bit.

There is a passage in Regeneration by Pat Barker that talks about this.....  'Dear Mrs. Bloggs. We gave your son a good Christian burial but unfortunately that area came under heavy bombardment. George has been back to see us several times since then'

The book is a fictional account of, among other things, Siegfried Sasoon and Wilfed Owen meeting in an Edinburgh psychiatric hospital. Horror and grim humour in approximately equal measure.

Another Hesketh-Pritchard fan! I think it is worth reading for much more than the history of sniping. It captures a rather Heath-Robinsonesque side of the war, where a few enterprising (maverick?) individuals were given almost free reign to experiment. Other great characters like this must include John Norton Griffiths driving around in his Rolls Royce developing tunneling techniques, and I'd mention William Livens too for his ambitious, barely official, but pretty effective, weapons developments. 

It also sets the scene for one of the shadiest chapters of the war. The all but straight exchange with Germany of Rubber for Zeiss lenses for telescopic sights. Done via Switzerland it was not the most honorable chapter in history.... lest we remember that episode.

What about George Dyson, who had the job of training infantry in the use of grenades before they went to France and wrote the first manual on their use? 

He devised his own reusable practice grenades and mock-up training grounds and, his father being a blacksmith, knew how to get local suppliers make what he wanted with the minimum of formalities getting in the way.

He later became Director of the Royal College of Music and was the father of the physicist Freeman Dyson.

He is a new name to me, this thread is great, I just found his pamphlet online and ordered the MacBride book. Happy days.

The google books version of After the Ruins ended at page 54.

im on a library mission now as the first 54 pages were fascinating.

Ian Kershaw To Hell and Back

 'Chemical Soldiers - British Gas Warfare in WW1' - might be of interest.