Welcome to a special summer edition of the Old Frontline podcast with me, military historian Paul Reed.

In this episode, we'll take a walk on the battlefields near Passandale.

We'll talk about some of my recent visits to the landscape of the Great War and will have an extended question

and answer episode to answer some of the many questions that have come into the podcast lately.

So let's begin in Flanders.

It's high summer on the old front line and I've been lucky to spend a lot of time there in the last month or so.

My work as a battlefield guide has taken me across that landscape of the Western Front, from Flanders to Piccadie and Artois. I wanted to have a bit of a summer break this year as well,

as work has been pretty busy leading those tours. But I also wanted to put out this summer

special, summer special edition of the podcast, a bit like the special editions of our favourite comics we had

during our school holidays when we were younger. Well, perhaps not exactly like those.

But I've been out on that old front line, on that landscape of the Great War with groups

and working for the last few weeks with my good friend Dr. Victoria Humphreys

and that's taken us from some of the dark chapters of the Second World War

but which of course criss-cross with the. We went to Fort Brindonk,

for example, to look at that as a concentration camp as a Holocaust site from the Second World War,

and it was a 19th century fort that took part in the defence of the National Redoubt around Antwerp in 1914

with Rupert Brooke and the men of the Royal Naval Division,

not being that far away.

As we've said, another one of those places where the First World War meets the second.

But I've also been out taking groups to First World War sites as well. We did a great tour where we looked at

the poetry and the writing of the First World War, something that we frequently discuss on

this podcast. And I'm hoping from that trip alone, we might have had a few converts to this podcast

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