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.

It's a winter morning in Flanders and I mention that dispatches will come on the road and you can hear that I'm literally on the road now with the noise of cars with the modern world interacting with the old world because I'm standing at the entrance to a military cemetery from the Great War.

Coxida Military Cemetery, a cemetery in the sand dunes.

And we're going to go through the gate and enter the cemetery.

Now this is a cemetery that's set back from the road amongst the sand dunes, and I'm on a little path.

It's a frosty path this morning running alongside some modern houses, and it's foggy.

And at this time of year when you visit the old front line, you kind of think about conditions on the battlefield more than a century ago

that men might not have been fighting necessarily at this time of year, but they were still existing in those trenches of the Western Front.

And it was pretty cold as it is today. I mean, I've got modern Gortex and decent boots, and they had none of that,

but yet they were still living in these positions here on the Western Front.

And where we are, where this cemetery is located,

Coxida is a little seaside town just inside Belgium,

just down from Dunkirk and up towards the town of Newport,

where we're going to go to later

and that's where the Western Front either began or ended depending on how you look at it

where the trenches ran out on the beach and the North Sea and Channel Coast.

So this cemetery, quite a big one, there's over 1,600 burials in here, is a cemetery

that is from this part of the front. And we often kind of use that phrase forgotten front.

And if there was ever a forgotten front of the Great War involving British and Commonwealth

...