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

Trench maps, the military maps that were used by those men on the battlefields of the Great War to understand that landscape.

What do they tell us about the history of that conflict?

And how can we use them to connect to the landscape that we know more than a century later today?

When we started dispatchpatches the shorter podcasts from the old front line,

I mentioned that we would use it to talk about books and photographs and documents and even battlefield maps.

And I'm sure many of you who listen to this podcast wondered how that would be

possible so in this episode we're going to take an original trench map that I have on the table

in front of me and talk about the history behind it on quite a few kind of different levels really.

We'll look at the history of trench maps,

we'll look at what the map can tell us about the landscape of that part of the Western Front,

both then and now and hopefully see how we can use objects like this

to tell a story of the Great War

because every object does have a story, a backstory often behind it. And I think more and more

how important these objects that do connect us to the Great War, well, how important they are in our understanding of it.

We can glean a lot from books and from research in the archives,

but the objects are all part of that story as well.

The objects are part of that archive, part of that culture of the Great War. And this is something I've thought about

quite a lot in recent times. There was a power behind objects. I see that every time I do public

history, take artifacts like this to groups who perhaps only have a kind of family history connection to the First World War.

And when they see an original map or a photograph or a diary or a memorial plaque or some medals and some cat badges,

I think that it sometimes triggers things in people.

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