Objects are the tangible evidence of our history.

They're the things we can touch and connect us to the past.

What do they tell us about the Great War?

There's been some interesting discussions on Twitter in the last couple of weeks about the importance of objects in our understanding of military history.

Where do they sit in our research into the period of the Great War, for example?

And one of our followers there remembered how in the early days of the podcast, I used to talk about a particular object and describe it and discuss the wider history connected to it.

And I thought, well, perhaps it's time to bring that back, but in an entire episode, so in this episode of the podcast, we're going to look at four separate objects or little collections of objects

and look at what they tell us how we connect to them and how they fit into the wider history

of the first world war but why objects at the end of the day they're just an inanimate object

they can't speak or can they and i think that is the power of objects like this because a photograph,

a medal, an artifact picked up off the battlefields either during the war or afterwards,

or perhaps in even more recent times, all of these things, and there are so many different

examples of what we mean by objects of the Great War, then all of these things and there are so many different examples of what we mean by objects of the Great War

then all of these have a way of telling us something and having a way to speak to us directly or indirectly

about the history that we're studying and I certainly see in my own cases so many years of working as a battlefield

guide both with school groups and adults

how they connect to objects even just as simple as showing them a few relics at who crater at the

trenches there they can hold a steel helmet they can handle a safe deactivated grenade they can

pick up a baynet fill the weight of a rifle and things like this.

It adds another dimension, I think, to our understanding of these subjects.

But of course, at the end of the day, this is a podcast. It's not a video podcast.

So I'm not going to be showing you these objects, but what I've done is put photographs of all of them on the website.

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