More than three decades ago, I interviewed several hundred veterans of the Great War.

What does their personal testimony of the conflict tell us?

How did they deal with their memories?

And what is the value of oral history? I've just returned from Normandy from the annual commemorations of the

D-Day landings. A different battlefield and a different war to the ones we discuss here in the old

frontline podcast. But as I often say, the criss-cross paths of the

Great War don't just extend across that section of Northern France and Flanders and the places

where the fighting was between those years of 1914, 18. They echo across later decades, echo right to today, of course. But in Normandy we find traces of it as well in Ranville War Cemetery. Where I was is the grave of Roy Fazan, a commando officer killed in the fighting on the Breville Ridge. He was named after his uncle, who was killed

with the 5th Battalion, the Royal Sussex Regiment, in the Battle of Alba's Ridge in 1915. He was from

a little village called Wadhurst in Sussex. He was commissioned in the Royal Sussex Regiment originally

then attached to the commandos. So are two roy fazans one killed in the great war and the one killed in normandy

and it's not a unique occurrence that you find survivors of the great war who named their children after much-loved brothers or even friends

killed on the battlefields of the First World War, who would then themselves, sadly, go on to

be killed in another World War just a few decades later. But that's not the point, really,

of what I want to talk about in this podcast. I was in Normandy

with the York branch of the Normandy Veterans Association. I've been travelling with M2 Normandy for 14 years now.

We started off with a big group of veterans and now, more than a dozen years later only ken cook remains of the original band he landed on d-day with the

yorkshire regiment was wounded about six weeks later and then returned for the fighting in germany in the final phase of the war

it's always a privilege to travel with veterans. Having done it twice

over in many respects with the veterans of the Great War in the 80s and 90s and in the last

two or three decades as well with the veterans of the Second World War and in particular as my job

as a battlefield guide with ledger holidays, it's given me this unique

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