As the guns fell silent, the soldiers who had survived the Great War placed down their rifles

and picked up their pens, and in that 20s and 30s period so many war books were published,

the memoirs of the Great War. What do they tell us about the experience of conflict

and how do we use them to find the old front line?

Armistice Day is approaching the time when we pause

to remember the fallen from two world wars and for many

veterans of recent conflicts a time for them to remember their service and their friends,

their comrades who fell alongside them. But it's also a time to remember those who returned. I often describe them as the forgotten

survivors of the Great War. The vast majority of those who went to war in 1914 came back.

Even in the infantry, one in five were killed and three in five were wounded. That means most men

returned. They might not have returned without a wound and even if it wasn't a physical wound,

they would have returned with memories that haunted them for the rest of their lives.

I'm sitting here now in my new dining room, which has become a library, really,

which will be hopefully my space where I'll record this podcast,

and I'm surrounded by books about the Great War and the other Great War, the Second World War.

But one of the many types of books that I have here are memoirs of the Great War,

men who survive that conflict and went on to write about it.

And that's what this episode will be about. So I'm going to be talking about

books surrounded by books as well. And I'm looking up from the microphone and I can see two

period Great War postcards that I've got up on the shelf there looking down on me. One of them

is Eric Rupert Heaton. Eric probably needs no introduction

on this podcast. I've spoken about him in several episodes and one of the video blogs,

...