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

More than four decades ago, a British military historian fascinated by the Great War,

went up in a plane over the battlefields of the Western Front

to record what he saw of that landscape.

What does aerial survey, what did that journey four decades ago,

what does it tell us about the old front line?

This week, the death of Martin Middlebrook, one of the most important Great War historians

of recent times, was sadly announced. For many of us interest in the subjects of the First World War,

Martin has been a familiar companion

as we've examined the fighting on the Somme

or in the March Offensive, the Kaiser Schlacht of 1918.

And those two periods covered in his two seminal books on the subject really have helped define people's understanding, I think, of the Great War.

And his books were not only superbly written, full of detail, they lifted the voices of ordinary soldiers from the dark shadows into the sunlight

and in a way that few others up to that point had done.

He was a true champion really of oral history and history from below

because his books are not full of details and accounts and stories of senior officers. It's just ordinary men in those

extraordinary circumstances of the Great War. In many ways, Martin Middlebrook invented a new way

of looking at the war, that way of looking at it through those ordinary soldiers

taken on by others like Lynn MacDonald, who did such important work in that same time period

of the 1970s and 80s. And it's an approach and a view of the war that has clearly appealed to a wide audience.

When we read those books, we see the stories of ordinary tommies, and we relate that to those

in our own family's story and how they might have experienced those great battles along the trenches of the

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