Dominic Sandbrook

I mean, you know, if you get really into the weeds of this, you'll find they've actually captured a village or something.

A village, a hill here, a hill there.

But in the grand scheme of things, they've made no progress whatsoever.

The sun has come out.

It's now the height of summer.

There are these amazing accounts from officers in Mark Thompson's book.

There's no escaping the heat.

Tongues swell, coated with thick saliva.

Fingers swell and dangle clumsily from sticky hands.

Eyes inflamed, skin like parchment.

And he also quotes an Italian officer called Virgilio Bonamore, who kept a diary in the first month of the war.

Bonamore says, you know, he describes being in one of these limestone trenches.

We talked about the trenches on the Western Front last time.

The Italian trenches are awful.

They are far worse than anything on the Western Front.

You can't bury the bodies?

Yeah, of course.

So the bodies are just hanging around.

The stench was unbearable, says Bonamore.

We're squatting among our own and enemy corpses.