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

In this episode, we'll look at war damage postcards of the First World War, pictures of those smashed landscapes of the Western Front, and we'll ask, what do they tell us about the history of that conflict and the battlefields they depict?

I gave a talk this week to members of the old front line podcast supporters community

about postcards of EAP, the anvil of sacrifice of the British and Empire forces during those four years of the Great War.

And I use those postcards to discuss the history of the city before, during and after the conflict.

This wasn't just a kind of random collection of images.

These images brought together did help tell a coherent story and shared light on some different aspects

of Great War history. And those kind of talks are one of the benefits of being part of our

old Frontline community. And for this particular talk, I recorded it for those who couldn't tune in

live. And I've put it up on

the old front line YouTube channel if you'd like to watch it. And it just gives you an idea of

the kind of things that we do. But more importantly for this episode of dispatches, getting the

talk together, it may be think of the types of photographs

and postcards that I was selecting from the old front line archives, if you like, the ones

I was using to illustrate the talk. You maybe think about those and it made me reminisce about

those early years of my interest and passion

for the Great War and how easy it was really to find those kind of postcards and across

Sussex where I was living then in the early 1980s there were junk shops everywhere there were car boot sales

there were flea markets and you could go to these places and find them and I also discovered

that there were postcard fares you could go to those and there were professional postcard

sellers and they would have boxes of all kinds of postcards of topographical

stuff of your local town and particular types of imagery and there be a military section and one of

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