The officially sanctioned brothels on the front line laid bare for the first time.

 Sex and the Somme: The officially sanctioned brothels on the front line laid bare for the first time.

The brothels provided men with an escape from the slaughter and filth of the trenches.

When Corporal Jack Wood was given a few hours of leave from waging war on the Western Front, he probably never imagined that he was about to shed yet more of his innocence.

He had only recently arrived in France, but already had witnessed the travesty of friendly fire and been exposed to enemy shelling. He had waded through the mud of the trenches, felt lice crawl across his body and rats scuttle over him as he slept, exhausted, on the Front.

Yet, as he strolled through the streets of a nearby town, there was another shock awaiting him: a brothel. Wood wrote in his diary of how ‘we had heard of the renowned Red Lamp with a big No 3 on it, but never thought of the reality of the thing. My first view, I shall never forget.

‘There was a great crowd of fellows, four or five deep and about 30 yards in length, waiting just like a crowd waiting for a football cup tie in Blighty.

'It was half an hour before opening time, so we had to see the opening ceremony.

'At about five minutes to six,  the lamp was lit. To the minute, at six the door was opened. Then commenced the crush to get in.’

This establishment — marked by its red lamp — was one of the legendary maisons tolérées, or legalised brothels that dotted the towns of northern France.

They housed professional prostitutes who worked under the discipline of a madame and were subject to regular medical inspections. By 1917, there were at least 137 such establishments spread across 35 towns.

Outside these settings, vast numbers of amateur prostitutes also plied their trade in streets, hotels, cafes and bars. It’s not known precisely how many British soldiers indulged.

One snap-shot study, carried out by British medical officers in Le Havre, suggests it was a vast number. They counted 171,000 visitors to the brothels in just one street in this port town in 1915 alone.

We also have the personal accounts of the men themselves. Over the past four years, I have scoured archives and libraries for any mention of British soldiers consorting with prostitutes  as part of an academic dissertation.

Unsurprisingly, this subject tends to be shrouded in secrecy. But the unique circumstances of the Great War encouraged a few men to discuss their indulgences in their letters, diaries, memoirs and interviews. Their language suggests that consorting with ladies of the night was commonplace.

 Extraordinarily, visits to French brothels by British soldiers were officially sanctioned. It was traditional for the British army to accept the local customs wherever they were stationed.

The French thought nothing of allowing their soldiers to use brothels and, not wanting to offend their allies, the British High Command insisted that they should be kept ‘in bounds’ for most of the war.

Not everyone in authority agreed with such liberal measures. The Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, provided each man with a leaflet offering him some intimate advice.

It warned soldiers to ‘keep constantly on your guard against any excesses. In this new experience you may find temptations both in wine and women. You must entirely resist both.’

But according to one of the recipients, Private Frank Richards, a reservist soldier who had been called up the day after the war broke out, this guidance ‘may as well have not been issued for all the notice we took’.