Welcome to the Old Frontline with me, military historian Paul Reed.

This is a regular podcast where we can travel together across the haunting battlefields of the Great War,

from Flanders to the Somme and beyond.

So what's in this week's episode?

In this very first episode, I want to start as I mean to go on, really.

The whole purpose of this podcast is to share with you some of the stories and the tales that I've picked up as I've wandered around the battlefields of the First World War over nearly 40 years.

In each episode, we'll have a virtual walk across one of these battlefields and we'll also dip in to some of the history of the Great War and objects connected to that history.

So let's get started.

So where to begin our journey along the old front line? Well inevitably for me I suppose it has to be the Somme Battlefields.

And we're going to start today on the old Albert Bapom Road, the old Roman road,

that cuts through the middle of the Somme battlefields, delineates it from north to south,

and cuts through the area where the fighting was at its fiercest in those months from July to November of 1916.

It is a Roman road reminding us that the Somme was not always just the scene of conflict in the First World War.

It was part of northern france which had seen

fighting over many many centuries and the remnants of the roman world there are among the places

that we are most familiar with gomacour durnancourt morland core these villages that end with core, court, C-O-U-R-T,

it's a derivation of an old pickety word meaning Roman encampment,

so these were the places where the Romans had their camps and their garrisons.

And that echoes through the Somme battlefields but let's bring ourselves back to

1916 and we're on that albert babholm road just on the outskirts of the village of posier

where between july and september of 1916 there was very heavy heavy fighting initially with British units from the 12th Eastern Division, Kitchinner's men who'd fought at Luz in 1915,

and in the Battle of the Hoins-Ollon craters, and had taken part in the attack further away at Mash Valley at the beginning of the Somme

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