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Remembered Today:

IWM Oral Histories Palestine


Skipman

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Am always grateful to the Imperial War Museum for firstly, interviewing the veterans and secondly, for making many of them available to us. I always find there is so much to learn from these recordings. Material this is not alway available in print.

 

Couple of questions

 

1) What percentage of these is actually available online?

 

2) Is there an index of all recordings

 

3) Is there an easier way to find a specific recording  rather than trawling through each entry on a page. For example, I would be really interested in any recording od 1/5th Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders who served in Palestine, particularly at the Second Battle of Gaza.

 

Here is the link to the excellent Palestine audio files. Click

 

Mike

 

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I find IWM Collections search results to be bl**dy awful, and full of so much chaff. A search on Zeebrugge that I made brought back over 800 results, of which 30-40 were pertinent.

If no answer is forthcoming, perhaps a FoI request could be made to the IWM? I do believe that the IWM Collections database has its own API, but this is private, and cannot be accessed by the public. An FoI request would be one means of sourcing the data, by an IWM employee doing the analysis via the API, then passing on the results.

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Mate,

 

Like the Australian WM recordings, it depends on the interviewer asking the questions.

 

Most are after the quick answer and the sound bite from what we think we know of the war.

 

Few get down to the real questions I am after, like who were the men you served with, what was your day to day work, and what did you really do during the battles?

 

I wrote letters to a number of Camel Corps vets during there later years (1980's) and got some great answers by that means with so interesting answers.

 

Sadly that has now gone and we have these poor but vial records on what they thought we wanted to know?

 

S.B

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8 hours ago, stevebecker said:

Mate,

 

Like the Australian WM recordings, it depends on the interviewer asking the questions.

 

Most are after the quick answer and the sound bite from what we think we know of the war.

 

Few get down to the real questions I am after, like who were the men you served with, what was your day to day work, and what did you really do during the battles?

 

I wrote letters to a number of Camel Corps vets during there later years (1980's) and got some great answers by that means with so interesting answers.

 

Sadly that has now gone and we have these poor but vial records on what they thought we wanted to know?

 

S.B

 

HI matey,

 

 Fascinating. Really interested in your take on this.

 

Could you give me some examples of IWM interviewers only interested in quick answers and soundbites? Are you aware that some elderly veterans were incapable of detailed answers? Which IWM oral history interviews, as opposed to the BBC Great War interviews and authors' recordings also preserved at the IWM, have you listened to? Of course, to have confused the two would be a farcical mistake! One which you would never have made before launching your attack.

 

Could you give examples of the more detailed/better answers you got in letters to Camel Corps veterans in their nineties? How many veterans? I am ever so surprised that there was so many alive and ready to scribe down real detail - as veterans were mostly too old to write long letters by then. 

 

Of course, I personally would never have thought of asking such brilliant questions as: 'Who were the men you served with? What was your day to day work?  What did you really do during the battles?' if only I was starting again with such insights - rather than just approaching retirement - the IWM collection could have been so much better! I apologise unreservedly for my sins. 

 

Still never mind. Your massive Camel Corps archive will doubtless soon be available to the public - properly catalogued and indexed as well! Thank you for all your work on our behalf!

 

Pete 

 

Edited by PMHart
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Dear Peter

 

We have missed you. Welcome back.

 

Love

 

G

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Here is a typical shallow 5 hours 30 minutes IWM interview: 

Eric Wolton on Gallipoli and Palestine service. Done in 3 x 2 hour sessions when he was 90 odd! If only he had written it down!

 

Pete

 

REEL 1: Recollections of background at Ickworth and Lavenham, 1896-1914: family's Suffolk links; father's farming career; education at Woodbridge School; awareness of approach of war; OTC activities; work as farmer, 1913-1914. Recruitment as officer with 5th Bn Suffolk Regt, 15/12/1913: reasons; training; pride in unit. Recollections of mobilisation in Lavenham, 5/8/1914: procedure; local reactions; brothers' territorial service; reporting to Bury St Edmunds Barracks; personal morale. Recollections of periods in training at Folkestone, Colchester, Thetford and Watford, 8/1914-7/1915: coastal defence duties; marching in Essex and songs sung illustrating relationship with other ranks. REEL 2 Continues: songs sung illustrating relationship with other ranks; billets at Mile End Asylum, Colchester; volunteering for overseas service; route marches; tactical exercises on Thetford Heath; revolver and sword; officers' mess; role of regular adjutant in defining officers' responsibilities to other ranks; pride in territorial status; removal of local Bde and Div titles; Watford billets. Recollections of voyage on Aquitania to Mudros, Lemnos, Greece, 7/1915-8/1915: send off at Watford; reactions to posting. REEL 3 Continues: conditions and routine; brother Owen's transfer to unit, 1914; reaction to being left behind to clean and unload ship at Mudros on unit's departure to land at Suvla, Gallipoli, Turkey; premonition of brother Owen's death; second hand reports of failure of Suvla offensive and unit's attack, 12/8/1915; fly problem at Mudros. State of morale on joining unit in reserve at Suvla, 15/8/1915. Recollections of period on Karakol Dagh, 8/1915: terrain; reserve role; sangar front line; naval support; water shortage; sea bathing. REEL 4 Continues: reactions under fire; church service near lines illustrating inexperience; working party duties and consequences of lack of transport. Rest period at Lala Baba, 9/1915. Recollections of period in Hill 60 sector, 9/1915-10/1915: situation; initial trenches; corpse problem; improvements to trenches; distance from Turkish lines; repelling Turkish patrol and subsequent problem with smell of corpses; Turkish enfilading field gun; shellfire, small arms fire, sniping and bombing. REEL 5 Continues: use of jam tin bombs; other bomb types; opinion of policy of trying to get closer to Turks in contrast to Second World War practice; question of adequacy of training and competence of high command; inefficiency of catapult bomb throwers; personal morale; water and food rations; latrines; fly problem; state of health; fatigue; state of unit morale. REEL 6 Continues: daily routine and duties as platoon commander; story of leniency shown sentry asleep on duty in Palestine, 1917; relationship with NCOs; rest period working parties; letter and parcel contact with GB; role of religion; Gurkha, Sikh and ANZAC troops; attitude to Turkish troops. Recollections of being wounded and evacuation, 30/10/1915: receiving leg wound during British bombardment which landed in support trenches, 30/10/1915; vulnerability whilst in beach hospital. REEL 7 Continues: vulnerability whilst in beach hospital; hospital ship voyage to Alexandria. Story of collapse of latrine in Dixon's Gully, Suvla, 10/1915. Reactions to leaving Gallipoli. Convalescence in Alexandria, 12/1915-2/1916. Opinion of successful evacuation of Gallipoli, 12/1915-1/1916. Recollections of period on rejoining unit in Egypt, 2/1916-2/1917: state of unit; initial camps prior to taking up defensive positions to defend Suez Canal; water supply; patrolling activities. REEL 8 Continues: patrolling activities; brushing sand and checking for intruder tracks; acceptance of role on quiet front; local leave; daily routine. Recollections of move into Palestine, 2/1917-3/1917: march on wire roadway; period at El Arish depot; view of tanks. Recollections of First Battle of Gaza, 26/3/1917-27/3/1917: initial lack of opposition; consolidating position on Sheikh Abbass Ridge; confused situation and withdrawal; acting as sentry to allow other ranks rest. REEL 9 Continues: taking up positions on Mansura Ridge; view of battle from Sheikh Abbass Ridge; withdrawal to starting positions. Recollections of Second Battle of Gaza, 17/4/1917-19/4/1917: interval between battles; recapture of Sheikh Abbass Ridge; breakdown of attacks passing through position; personal morale; further advance and digging in; withdrawal to Sheikh Abbass Ridge; slight leg wound. Recollections of period in Gaza area, 4/1917-11/1917: improving trenches; state of morale; stories of patrols in Samson Ridge sector. REEL 10 Continues: stories of patrols in Samson Ridge sector; conditions of service; evacuation with dysentery to Alexandria, 10/1917; rejoining unit, 11/1917. Recollections of advance through Palestine, 11/1917-10/1918: marching conditions; selection as representative officer to join triumphal entry into Jerusalem and its cancellation on continued Turkish resistance; surprise attack to capture Bornet Hill, 15/12/1917; close escape from shrapnel; story of avoiding duty in command of firing squad for suspected Palestinian spies and effect of experience on replacement. REEL 11 Continues: sentries method of staying awake; comparison of conditions with other fronts; GB leave and Armistice, 10/1918-11/1918. Rejoining unit and period in Cairo, Egypt, 11/1918-7/1919: role controlling civilian unrest; court of inquiry duties. Demobilisation, 7/1919: question of staying in army; effect of experience on religious beliefs. Sings 'We Are the Suffolk Boys'.
 

Edited by PMHart
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More slipshod efforts by Mr Hart. Why didn't you do a proper interview? :D

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19 minutes ago, PMHart said:

 I was only young!

Pete

 

That's no excuse. :D

 

As said, am always extremely grateful for these wonderful recordings. Mine was more a criticism of the IWM search engine.

 

We are all much the better for your efforts Pete and grateful.

 

Mike

 

 

Edited by Skipman
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To be fair I was a paid employee - so it wasn't really me it was the IWM! I would probably have stayed in the pub!

Pete

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Mate,

 

Sorry No I have not heard the British IWM recordings, only some of the AWM recordings and found them full of problems.

 

I remember the Beersheba recording by old men and most follow the line as we know the battle but no details of there work was recorded.

 

I find this a problem as men didn't know the bigger details and only the area they were in, but after 60 to 70 years they have read about there battle and give you what you want to hear?

 

I got the writer to write about a time period and they gave me good answers, telling me about some patrols they took part in and some names of the men with them, I found the interesting.

 

Me, I like the small er details, but your right most can't remember much of that, hell even I tried to remember back to my war 50 years ago and had the same problem remembering all the men in my Troop and my officers, while other details are more clear, the smaller details are not?

 

I surpose it all depends of which recording you listern to, some give you great details, while others do not.

 

S.B

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Hi,

 

Fair enough chum! I wrote an introduction to Voices from the Front (a dreadful sales failure) that tried to sum up the uses and flaws in Oral History. I attach it below. You may find in interesting - or not. Please excuse the usual book style blather. 

 

Pete

 

THIS IS AN ORAL HISTORY of the British military involvement in the Great War based on the 183 interviews with veterans I carried out for the Imperial War Museum Sound Archive in the 1980s and early 1990s. These interviews varied in length from some 30 minutes to a stupendous 21 hours - they were always fascinating, but since the passing of the last few veterans they are now a unique source of authentic voices from the front line. The recordings have never been 'forgotten'; they were deliberately created by the IWM as part of their ongoing mission to expand our historical record. But few previous authors have been unable to do more than skim lightly over the surface of these treasures. This book attempts to use these interviews within a proper historical context to tell the story of ordinary serviceman at war: their recruitment, their training and the fighting they endured on all fronts – on the ground, at sea and up in the air. 


During the Great War men lost all effective control as events overwhelmed them. Illustrious statesmen and politicians, industrialists and trades unionists, generals and admirals were all rendered impotent by forces which seemed to dwarf the efforts of mere individuals. Armies marched in millions and mankind seemed to be reduced to the level of a ‘resource’ to be enumerated in the same manner as ships, guns, munitions, grain, horses, oil and steel. It was a war of 'big battalions'. The war exerted a catalytic effect on the history of the Twentieth Century. Empires fell, others were crippled and new contenders arose to entirely redefine the balance of power in the post-war years. Strong economies were dragged down by the debts incurred in the fighting. The established political orthodoxies were challenged by communism and the spectre of fascism lurked menacingly in the wings. Even now, an understanding of the war is crucial to a grasp of the internecine conflicts that rage across the Middle East and the Balkans. It changed the map of the world, but it also radically affected the lives of all those caught up in the maelstrom. In this book I have tried to restore individuals back to centre-stage; to restore the voice of men asserting their humanity loud and clear for all those who care to listen.


. What a breadth of experience our veterans amassed between them in the Great War. For this was a global conflict that raged across most of Western and Central Europe, enfolded most of the Middle East, spread deep into Africa, while probing deep into the extremities of the Far East and Americas. And what destruction they witnessed: the Great War posed the most intractable set of military problems hitherto encountered in modern warfare. Artillery ruled the battlefield alongside an unholy trinity of layered trench lines, tangled masses of barbed wire and spluttering machine guns. The much abused generals were no ‘donkeys’, but they made mistakes that cost the lives of thousands of men. Every positive step forward seemed to be countered by new defensive tactics as trench warfare constantly mutated to create hitherto unforeseen problems, traps and pitfalls to be overcome. The conditions in the trenches have become bywords for suffering: mud and blood; death and destruction, courage and sacrifice; hopelessness and despair. Archaic terms, techniques and weapons from the half-forgotten era of siege warfare made a return to prominence as mining expanded from small beginnings to huge underground operations that had the power to blow up whole ridges in the flash of an eye. The first tanks rumbled their way across battlefields, slow-moving and unreliable perhaps, but a potent sign of the future for all that. Poison gas made its terrifying entrance into modern war; even the very air that they breathed was turned against the troops.


 At sea the huge fleets faced each other across the North Sea and in the Mediterranean. The hopes and fears of entire nations were bound up in the technological marvels of the dreadnoughts that defined the arms race of the day. When they clashed in battle thousands of men lost their lives in minutes, but somehow nothing ever seemed to change. Smaller cruisers roamed across the globe from the Atlantic to the Pacific, spreading across the Indian Ocean the Black Sea, the Baltic, the China Seas, even right up to the Arctic and the Antarctic Oceans. Under the waves submarines stalked the sea lanes, sinking troopships, merchantmen, liners and even hospital ships. Disguised armed vessels – known as ‘Q’ ships - sought to take murderous advantage of any submarine commander gentlemanly enough to allow a ship’s crew and passengers the opportunity to escape. Controversy raged, but in truth both sides stretched the long-standing rules of war until they snapped. 


 Above them the air war raged for the very first time. The first aircraft had only flown in 1903, but after just over a decade it was evident that warfare had gained a deadly new dimension. The development of army cooperation aircraft carrying a wireless meant that the war reached deep behind the front line trenches as targets could be first pin-pointed and then destroyed by shell fire directed by observers perched high up in the sky. The bombing of cities far behind the front lines soon blurred the traditional acceptance that civilians were non-combatants. This was the beginning of total war – everyone would be caught up in the new Armageddon.


Oral history is a strange business. It can be a cold and unemotional process: sitting in a museum environment listening to disembodied voices recorded long ago by complete strangers. Or it can be like stepping into your own past. Throughout my aim was to make this book deeply personal, to reflect the stories told personally to me, not gleaned remotely at second-hand.  For me this book is real life. As I sit down to listen to the recordings I made in my late twenties and thirties (I am now sadly in my late fifties!) my mind is soon transported back to the myriad front doors, halls, kitchens and living rooms of the elderly veterans I interviewed. These were men who had actually experienced the horrors and witnessed the cataclysmic events of the Great War that I had only ever read about. Some rich, some poor, some hale and hearty, some sadly on their last legs. Many were warm and welcoming, but others were nervous or withdrawn - at least at first. A number were chronically lonely, an indictment of a society that no longer places much value on experience. A kaleidoscope of tea and coffee made in every imaginable manner, fancy napkins and best china, broken cups and filthy mugs, plain biscuits and fancy cakes - all part of the process of getting to know each other. Sitting opposite each other on chairs that chronicled the passing fads of a century of furniture design, many showing their antiquity, some you can clearly hear creaking on the tapes! Rooms heated to a furnace-like intensity; others bitterly - worryingly - cold. Once we started recording, then I sat opposite them, watched their faces, their body language as they told their story. Most would soon lose track of time and place, immersing themselves in their past and carrying you along with them on their journey through a lifetime. Now with this book I can present the distilled essence of those interviews. What a pleasure it was to listen to them again after more than twenty years; what a fantastic insight into life in the Great War. 


 Yet while oral historians usually develop warm personal feelings and a deep admiration for their informants, once an interview are recorded it becomes evidence to be assessed on its merits just as with any other historical source. Unfortunately, oral history in recent years has been attacked by people who disparage it as a knee-jerk reaction. Perhaps many of them have never had the time, the opportunity, or the inclination to sit down and listen to hundreds of detailed interviews. Many ally this sceptical approach to oral history to a near-worship of contemporary sources: letters, diaries and official documents. In essence their outlook seems to be that if it was said, thought, or best of all authoritatively stated at the time - then it must be true. 


A robust defence of oral history must start with a recognition that it is invaluable in correcting mistaken beliefs and misconceptions garnered  through the uncritical study of more traditional forms of historical evidence. Ironically this is most evident when reading unit war diaries and their subsequent enshrinement in the pages of regimental or official histories. The reverence displayed by some historians for such sources can cause amusement to those more aware of their provenance within the command structure of a battalion - where their prime function was to help absolve senior officers from any possible criticism of their performance in battle! Hence the unbelievable number of times that a 'retirement’ is ordered to ‘conform’ with the ‘retreat’ of the unit next in line to the right! Secondly, ordinary personal diaries are ludicrously partial, often placing the peripheral writer at the very centre of events. They are often inaccurate and above all reflect the transient contradictory emotions of the writer; as such the view expressed can be entirely dependent on which date you chose to select. Finally, the tone and content of letters depend to a large degree on the person destined to read them. Soldiers frequently under-exaggerate the risks and their fears for the future in letters to their mothers; while exaggerating the same to male contemporaries and making frankly nonsensical boasts to their girlfriends. Very rarely do men refer to the mundane horrors of war in any great detail – the lice, the stench and above all the deep personal humiliations inflicted upon them by diseases like dysentery. Such things, if mentioned at all, are concealed, rather than revealed, by coy euphemisms.


So what is oral history good for? Well if you want to know what life was really like for the men fighting the Great War then reading this book is surely the closest you can get a hundred years later. Oral history is excellent providing a level of detail that is unequalled by any other source! It brings the past into sharp focus – revealing and explaining all the nitty-gritty fundamentals that define the spirit of the age, the little wrinkles that allow you to feel what people were going through. Some elements are strangely familiar; other once commonplace habits or attitudes now seem alien. Oral history can also simplify a convoluted situation. An amusing anecdote can cut through the complexities to reveal what was really happening in a way that a dry narrative often cannot. But above all it is the emotions heightened by war that are revealed in interviews. Men and women open up as to what they were really thinking, as opposed to the conventional viewpoints as expressed in regimental histories and the hundreds of 'gung ho' post-war memoirs. It is very apparent from oral history interviews that once men became aware of the horrors of war, then few of them had much enthusiasm for fighting and many were just plain terrified. This makes their courage in carrying on and ‘going over the top’ all the more remarkable, but it rather undercuts the official sanctioned view that the lads were ‘dying to have another bash at the Hun’. Terrible tragedies are often exposed in heart-rending memories of much loved relatives or comrades that were killed, mangled or mentally shattered by war.


Oral history gives us much needed variety. All of human nature is here and indeed I encountered 'all sorts' as I carried out the interviews. Quiet bespectacled types, rough diamonds, stolid bible reading types, intellectuals, eccentrics, even a few who still 'liked a drink'. Brave men who could take all their enemies could throw at them and ask for more; nervous types who found it all really much too much. Many got through without a scratch, but some were dreadfully wounded, their bodies ripped apart and their lives ruined or changed forever. Few had ever written anything down or preserved their contemporary letters, so without these oral history interviews their experience would have been lost.


Yet it is undeniable that there are problems with the unthinking usage of oral history, normally by people who think of it as 'testimony'. In particular, veterans mostly of junior rank are inherently unlikely to understand the military strategy and higher tactics of the day. They may have been there, but in truth they did not know what was happening at the time. As such they are not authorities on what the generals were thinking, or of what should have been done. It is also true that some men, lacking confidence in their own recall of events, begin to inhabit a past that actually reflects the views peddled in post-war books or popular television programmes. These false memories can become their reality. Then again a very few sad fantasists have been lying about their exploits for years and could no longer distinguish truth from fiction. Such cases can generally be exposed by a combination of competent interviewing and diligent historical analysis; to put it bluntly, it is usually evident when veterans are unreliable informants. Yet one very real problem with oral history does remain: people in battle are under severe stress and often in a state of physical shock, with all the mental confusion and dislocation from events that this entails. The result is their recollections of actual fighting are often vague, sometimes dreamlike, or they may even have had a black-out and be reliant on what they have been subsequently told of the incident. Police officers trying to determine the exact course of a contemporary violent criminal incident will be familiar with this phenomenon. Witness statements can often differ radically just minutes after the event - never mind after a gap of several decades. Thus oral history ‘action’ stories always need to be carefully checked for internal inconsistencies and alongside other sources of evidence. In many ways interviews are best used to give a ‘sense’ of ‘what it was like’ to be in an attack rather than the fine details of what actually happened – in particular how they felt before they went over the top, the overall pattern of the fighting and the impact of the experience once it was all over. This might be described as exploring the commonality of a traumatic experience. Another avenue is to interview as many people as possible from the same unit so that the accounts criss-cross to provide a reasonably convincing overall account of what really happened. Sadly we were too late for this approach with our Great War oral history interview programme, although it has been pursued very successfully in our projects covering subsequent conflicts. 


In the final analysis, oral history is not testimony - a word that provides a wholly unnecessary smokescreen of reverence combined with the sulphurous whiff of legal depositions. On the contrary as a source of evidence interviews are by no means perfect and the veterans are not plaster-saints. When using oral history you have to be sceptical. But this is surely one of the ground rules of any historical research: if something is frankly unbelievable, then don’t believe it without a great deal of solid confirmation - whatever the source. In the end historical evidence is made up of many constituent parts much in the fashion of the ‘All Arms Battle’ that eventually won the war on the Western Front in 1918. Oral history is just one part of the big picture, but it does have an important role in that it humanises the record and provides a ‘grounding’ with its strong roots in real life. Rely solely on ‘contemporary’ documents and you will eventually end up with a sanitised ‘romantic’ view of war that significantly underplays the horror and moral ambivalence that defined the experience for the majority. 


All the voices preserved in the IWM recordings have all now fallen silent in the flesh and the deaths in 2009 of Harry Patch and Henry Allingham - the last of the known Great War veterans living in Britain - marked the passing of a wonderful generation. The men I interviewed had survived the war and the economic hardships of the 1920-1930s, they had experienced for the most part all the mixed joys/challenges of marriage, parenthood and family life. Some served again in the Second World War; others endured the whistling bombs of the Blitz. Most grew old and infirm together, reliving their comradeship through the British Legion or their much-treasured regimental associations; then gradually, almost imperceptibly, they faded away. Most were grateful that they had had the chance to enjoy a full life; the chance that had been snatched away from many of their mates who died when they were all so very young. Many felt a residual guilt they had survived when so many of their friends had not. Sacrifice is a cliché, but the dead of the Great War truly did forfeit their tomorrows: not just a few hours, weeks or at most months as it may have seemed in the midst of that mass slaughter, but they lost sixty, seventy, or even eighty years of potential life and happiness. It is to reflect the veterans’ heartfelt awareness of their deep indebtedness to their friends that died that this book is dedicated to all those who did not survive that Armageddon: men a long time dead; men dead long before their time. 
 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I have been listening to one of these recordings today Private 750/200125 George Waugh, 1/4th KOSB. Wonderful to hear him speak and a fantastic amount of very interesting information on the Egypt/Palestine campaigns. He only mentions France briefly at the end of the recording. When asked which campaign he considered the worst, his voice alone tells the story of his ordeal.

 

Steve Becker, listen to these recordings for some excellent information re camels.

 

Mike

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