Mark Urban

Well, I mean, interesting you made the glancing reference to Ukraine.

And of course, in due course, we'll talk about why it is the way it is there on the front line.

But this idea that the means of defense had become much more powerful than the means of offense, there's various ways of seeing it.

But

I think pretty quickly after the war broke out in 1914, people realised that the combination of shells, high explosive shells, machine guns and barbed wire, it was going to create huge problems as soon as the armies arrived.

went firm anywhere and dug in and trench lines emerged.

And of course, then over time, those kind of sanitized, sterile landscapes that we see in Nash's paintings of the Western Front of trees that are just stumps and men under ponchos trudging through the mud, all of that develops.

And of course, we remember from studying the Western Front that

you know, really quite small distances were involved.

Sometimes the people in the frontline trenches could shout over to one another and hear one another.

And it could have been a couple of hundred metres, it could be more than that, but really very short distances.

And the flower of English youth was cut down trying to get across that ground or, you know, one can think about all sorts of other places, Gallipoli, all sorts of other places in that war where things went horribly wrong when people tried to advance.

Now,

From fairly early on, even late 1915, so just over a year after the war had started, there were already people in the British Army and indeed the French Army thinking, look, there must be another way of doing this.

And they were studying all kinds of things, technologies and all kinds of ways of trying to close that gap, protect the soldiers.

cover the ground and if we think about the start of the first world war a lot of the elements of what becomes the tank are there they have been invented the internal combustion engine machine guns armor plate there are armored cars racing around from the outset so how does that then become a tank and what happens really the key thing is the invention of the caterpillar track

because that allows you to put a lot more weight over soft ground without sinking.

And they pretty soon discover that if they try and take their armored cars off-road, they just sink up to the axles.

They're not going anywhere in that mud.

And so it's the development of the track