One of the things I've come to learn by doing the old front-line podcast over more than five and a half years now is how popular the episodes are where I talk about veterans of the Great

War. If you've been listening to this podcast for quite a long time or perhaps you've only

joined us recently, you may have realised that back in the 1980s and 90s, I spent a lot of my spare time tracking down

and interviewing Great War veterans. I was kind of in one of those right place, right time

movements. There I was coming out of my teens into becoming a young man, being a student,

being in the southern part of Great Britain, close to quite a lot of retirement areas where there were retirement homes,

retirement bungalows, and in some cases, places, specialist places, for disabled ex-servicemen.

And so being at that time when the last vestiges of that Great War generation were still alive,

being in a place where a lot of older people had moved to to retire,

I literally had these guys on my doorstep. And while I never tracked them all down,

I missed so many, often just by a few days, I was privileged, honored, really, to interview hundreds

of Great War veterans during that period.

Now at the time I understood how it enhanced my wider knowledge of the Great War

and as I began to make more and more visits to the battlefields

how I could connect what those veterans told me with places on the ground

that I knew today and places that I was yet to discover and did discover through speaking to these veterans.

So when one mentioned a village like Fampu, off I went to track that village down to visit that bit of ground,

to walk that battlefield and

understand it and see it often through the lens, the prison, the experience of those

veterans that I just interviewed. And very often when I went away on trips, and this is one of the

things that I eternally miss really, is that I come back from a visit to the battlefields,

and that would prompt all kinds of questions about different aspects of First World War history.

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