Welcome to Dispatches, a short-form podcast from the Old Frontline, and me, military historian Paul Reed.

In these shorter podcasts, we'll tell some of the quieter, smaller stories of the Great War,

will share books, look at original documents, and take dispatches

on the road and visit locations across that landscape of the Great War.

Pilgrimages have long been part of the human experience long before the Great War.

Pilgrimages were often prompted by religious belief, but not always.

If you travel across Britain and mainland Europe, you'll discover many pilgrimage routes, some dating back millennia.

And when it came to the end of the Great War in 1918 and the parents and the men and the women

would live through that conflict, look back on what had happened over those momentous four years, there was a feeling that the

loss, the sacrifice within Britain and its empire had to stand for something, had to mean

something. And the dead of Britain and that empire took on a kind of semi-religious tone and feeling to it.

Luchens on what was the temporary cenotaph and eventually the permanent one in Whitehall in London

called them the glorious dead and there was desire for them to be remembered, which we saw in many acts in that period in the

1920, some of which we've covered on this podcast before, the burial of the unknown warrior,

is a good example of that in Westminster Abbey. And while some of those early pilgrimages in the immediate years following the end of hostilities

on the battlefields of the Great War related to visiting war graves, to visiting the dead,

there were also pilgrimages about those who had survived and led by those who had survived

the trenches of the Western Front.

So where did those pilgrimages begin?

In some respects they began even before the army that had fought that war was demobilized.

There were units based across northern France

and parts of Belgium when the war ended. When the fighting ceased at Mons, that last great

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