The Bastion of Ipe marked a defiant line in the defence of Belgium, but behind the lines was the route to the front, the place where the soldiers who were wounded were treated and where the supplies came up to feed the war, to feed the front.

We travel behind the lines at Ipe.

I've just returned from a few weeks up and down parts of the old front line.

In my work as a battlefield guide I've been fortunate to walk the battlefields with a group

and take several groups on introductory tours to the Western Front.

While I was out there, we had a fantastic live stream from the Mening Gate for our Patreon and Buy Me a Coffee supporters.

And broadcasting live via Zoom for those supporters from the Menning Gate was a new venture for the podcast

and one I certainly hoped to repeat. You can support the podcast at any time by listening to it

and I'm forever grateful for the thousands of you now that listen to it on every episode. The

listening figures seem to rise and

rise. But if you want to support it more directly, you can go to our Patreon page and our Buy

Me a Coffee page. Links to those are on the podcast website, oldfrontline.com.uk. I also bumped into quite a few podcast listeners when I was out on the battlefields and again that's a really, really nice thing to do. To meet some of you, to hear what you think, to hear what episodes have particularly affected you in different ways. And I certainly hope over the coming months as I'm back out there again

I'll see some more of you as we travel around those battlefields.

But while I was in Epe over the last few weeks, I thought about not the front line so much

because on every tour that I do I always try to set the scene for a group

and give them an introduction to what

they're going to be looking at over the course of their tour. And while we're going to be visiting

the front lines on these tours, it's important to understand the process of getting to those

front lines and what kept those front lines supplied. And it made me think about the behind the lines in Flanders really, behind the lines at EAP.

And that's what this podcast is going to be about.

So we're going to pack our virtual boots, head out onto the ground with our virtual pack,

and look at behind the lines at EPR.

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