Welcome to some more questions and answers here on the old front line.

These are questions submitted by you, the podcast, listeners,

and each month we select some of the best questions that have been submitted via email and the Discord server to answer here and hopefully give us all fresh perspectives

and new knowledge of this vast subject of the Great War.

So let's begin.

I've just returned from Italy and a nearly two-week tour there, taking a group across the battlefields of

Anzio, Montecino, Salerno, and along the Adriatic coast. It is, of course, a World War II tour,

but as so often, with those two great conflicts, they sit side by side, and there were so many occasions for us for me in which

World War I met World War II in terms of commanders on the ground. Bernard Freiberg who

command is at Casino had been awarded the Victoria Cross on the Somme and there were many other

great war veterans who were in those battles.

But coming back up through northern Italy and on into Austria, I crossed over some of the

areas where there was fighting in the Great War in that northern part of Italy and saw

memorials to Italians killed in the conflict. And then when we were staying overnight

in Austria, some incredibly beautiful and moving memorials to men from Austria, so with the

Austro-Hungarian forces in those battles of the First World War. And then finally, coming back

through Belgium on the return to UK,

I crossed over the old front line at Newport on that very northern part of the old Western Front.

And I guess things had gone full circle. And it was back to Blighty and back to the podcast. So in this episode of questions and

answers, the 30th one that we've done, it's a special one in some ways because all of the

questions are from some of our American listeners. The number of American listeners has grown

substantially over the last year or so. I'm

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