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Essex Farm: poetry, poison and poverty - a journey through a cemetery

31 min • 5 oktober 2020

In our 5th episode, we have come back to Belgium and walk through Essex Farm cemetery near Ypres. It's a cemetery full of stories, including the division that withstood the first use of a terrifying new weapon of war; a Black Country man who joined the Army to escape poverty and single-handedly saved the lives of his entire company, winning a VC in the process. We hear about a disastrous excursion into No Mans Land; one of, if not the youngest soldier to die in combat, and how the death of a friend prompted a Canadian doctor to write the most famous poem of the entire Great War.