Nearly three decades ago, I wrote the first of a trilogy of walking books about the battlefields

of the Great War. How did I come to write them? What did I intend to write about? Follow me on this

journey as I describe how I wrote those books on the old front line.

This weekend it's History Writers' Day on Twitter.

This is a new idea and a new venture by Simon at the History Book Chat.

And the idea is it's a friendly history book club, essentially, where this weekend on

Writers' Day, those who writes books connected to history, whether that's nonfiction or

fiction, come online and tell a wider audience about the work that they do.

I'm going to be putting out a number of tweets connected to it this weekend.

There'll be a Twitter Spaces with myself and Dr. Victoria Humphreys talking about the work that we do, my books, writing about the First and the Second World War, and she's going to discuss the work that she's done on her upcoming novels that will be published early next year.

I've put some links up to the books that I've discussed in this episode onto the podcast website

and with the tweets over the weekend I'll be linking to my writer's page, my author's page,

on the pen and sword website. They are the publishers of the 10

books that I've written on the First and Second World War. But in this episode, this special

episode of the podcast, I wanted to talk about how I'd come to write not all of my books on

the First World War, but the trilogy that I'd wanted to write from really

the very moment I began to visit the Great War battlefields. And it was a trilogy of books

looking at how you walk those battlefields on the Somme, at Eap in Flanders and Arras in northern France.

And I think that I realised the first time that I went to the Somme

in the summer of 1982 with my father,

we took the ferry across from New Haven to Dieppe

and then the train down to Amiens and then the local train

...