Welcome to a question and answer episode of the old front line podcast. In these bonus episodes, we'll answer the questions that you pose out of the episodes that we release each week. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast via your favourite platform and do think about leaving us a review or a star rating. So let's get down to the podcast via your favourite platform and do think about leaving us a review or a star rating.

So let's get down to this week's questions.

Welcome to our first question and answer bonus episode for season 7.

We're kind of catching up on some of the questions that were sent in during season 6.

It's proving a very popular aspect of what we're doing with the podcast now

and something that I will definitely be continuing with throughout this season and hopefully beyond.

Hopefully it's become part of what the podcast does.

It's clear that you've got a lot of questions that you want to ask, that you want answers to,

and it's a real pleasure for me to sit down and answer them for you.

And I think it helps us discuss some of the kind of smaller aspects of the

Great War, but it also helps us to kind of go off topic in a way that we might not do with

the main episode and shine light on a lot of different angles or layers, as we often call them, on this podcast.

So we're going to get down to our questions for this week. And as usual, we'll kind of

stick to four questions, which I think works pretty well in the context of a 20 to 30 minute

episode.

So, our first question is from Andrew Caesar Gordon, received on email.

The first question you answered this week mentioned the old contemptibles.

My question is, does anyone know how many of the original 90,000 strong BF actually survived the

whole war? You talked of the original BF of regulars being almost wiped out by the end of

1914, where you're just referring to the original 90,000 troops at the first wave in August.

I understand that 145,000 men applied for and received the 1914 Star Medal after the war,

and there must have been many others who didn't bother applying for a medal.

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