As we approach our four-year anniversary of the old Frontline podcast, I look back over the episodes that we've made.

What inspired me to start to begin this podcast?

How has it changed my view of that landscape of the Great War and the language by which we discuss it?

And what have we done over these four years on that old front line?

Incredibly, it's almost four years since the very first episode of this podcast was broadcast

on the 29th of March 2020. None of us really needs to be reminded of the circumstances of that

year, the year when all our lives one way or another stopped. It was a hard year,

a difficult year and we all found different ways to cope with it and found different paths

to take ourselves away from the realities of the world we were living in, and paths that would perhaps

take us down new avenues of our lives, and that was certainly the case for me. But there I was,

I found myself as a battlefield guide with no access to the battlefields and no groups to guide, what to do with myself. It was a time to stop and pause

and think and initially I read quite a lot of Great War books to take my mind across to those

battlefields that I suddenly realised I could no longer get to.

And I'm sure for many it was a welcome pause where you could not work, you could stop,

you could be with family, do whatever you wanted to a degree, being contained as we were.

But I felt personally that I just couldn't kind of do nothing.

And I began to think about a way of connecting to the battlefields, but then linking that connection

to a wider audience. In the way that we do with our battlefield tours with groups that we take year after year

across that old front line and i'd often thought about doing a first world war a great war

podcast because i'd worked with quite a few different people recording podcasts over the previous decade.

I remember going right back to when Dan Snow first started doing podcasts,

and he very kindly invited me on a number of times to talk to him about different aspects of the battle of the Somme and tactics in the last 100 days of the First World War.

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