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The Old Front Line

Back To The Front: Ypres

The Old Front Line

Paul Reed

Education, History, Tv & Film, Film History

4.8637 Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2021

⏱️ 45 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this episode after so many months away from The Old Front Line we return to Flanders with a Leger Battlefield Tour group on a trip along the Western Front. We visit Tyne Cot, walk the trenches at Sanctuary Wood and attend the Last Post at the Menin Gate. Send us a text Support the show

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

As the modern world begins to return to some degree of normality,

0:06.0

we travelled back to the front.

0:09.0

We return to that old front line

0:13.0

in the company of a group of passengers from a ledger holidays battlefield tour

0:19.0

as they walk the ground in Flanders close to the city of Eap.

0:28.6

After all those long months, I finally made it back, back to the old front line. This 18 months has been difficult for us all in so many different ways

0:40.2

and I have been over during that period I managed to get to heap in between lockdowns last summer

0:47.0

but that in itself was 15 months ago a long time to be separated from these battlefields that have been

0:54.1

part of my life for most of my life.

0:57.5

So what was it like to return? Many of you have no doubt thought about this. There was a degree of

1:04.1

complexity with forms and tests and requirements, and most of France and Belgium have strict regulations with the wearing of masks

1:13.7

and the way you check yourself into locations but all of this just seems acceptable for the

1:20.8

chance to be back there a minor inconvenience really to be on that ground to be in the cemeteries, to be on the

1:29.2

Western Front. And I would encourage any of you listening to this to begin to return. The areas

1:35.5

themselves need the battlefield pilgrims who visit every year. So much good work is done by so many

1:43.2

people involved in the commercial side of battlefield tourism.

1:48.2

And while there are many that perhaps feel a degree of reluctance in connecting commercialism

1:53.7

to the subject of remembrance and the Great War,

1:56.8

what it has helped with over the years, particularly in recent years,

2:00.4

when the Great War has been very much on people's radar and the visitor numbers have increased, it stops locations from slipping into obscurity.

2:10.5

It's aided in the preservation of locations and places on the battlefields and our support for that by visiting and eating in places and going to museums and sleeping in hotels and all of that really does help and will help in the rebuilding of these places of these locations along the western front as we emerge from these recent dark times.

2:36.6

But it's much more than that for me to be back there again, to be walking in the cemeteries,

...

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