Welcome to Dispatches, a shorter podcast from the Old Front Line and me, military historian Paul Reed.

We've just had our first podcast supporters meeting on the battlefields at Epe in Flanders.

And I wanted to tell you about that weekend

and share with you some of the stories

from a weekend at Epe.

I've just returned from the first ever podcast supporters weekend at EAP.

The first time I've purposely met up on the battlefields of the Great War

with some of you who listen to the old front line.

It was a great weekend in Flanders with people who felt like friends I'd never met and almost exactly

four years on from when the first podcast was broadcast. It felt to me that weekend that

the podcast has now come a very long way since those early moments, which I switched it on to record about posseers.

But at the same time, I kind of felt that also this weekend, it kind of proved that in many ways, we're only just starting.

And we've kind of talked about that in the recent episode, about four years on the old front line.

On one level, the old front line.

On one level, the podcast is just there for you to listen to,

for you to enjoy in your own individual ways, in your own places.

And we've often spoken about all the different places that many of you listen to this podcast

but on another level i do feel we have forged a kind of first world war great war community

here of like-minded people people passionate about the subject and impassioned too with the landscape of the

Great War and how important that is and will always be. And as I've said before, I think that

that is really important because going back to those early years when I visited the kind of battlefields that we've seen this weekend,

the battlefields were not a subject which the general public was impassioned with.

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