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 was back out on the

old front line just last week on the SOM battlefields filming some content for the YouTube channel.

And if you've never had a chance to have a look at the old front line YouTube channel,

I'll put a link to it in the show notes for this episode.

It's never going to replace the podcast, far from it.

It really supplements the podcast, gives a kind of visual aspect to what we do,

and I think that's quite important. And while I was out there with my friend John, who's helping

me with a YouTube channel, we were talking about fiction in the Great War because John recommended

a book to me quite recently, which I've been working my way through, and which I'm going to

mention in one of the questions.

So let's get down to this week's questions and answers on this episode of the old front line.

And we're going to begin with our first question that comes from Alice Williams via email.

Alice asked, did Britain really need to get involved in the Great War?

And what do you think the outcome would have been if we had not taken the side of France and Belgium

against Germany and our allies in 1914?

There's a school of thought of which you are no doubt aware that Britain has never recovered

financially or in other ways from taking part in the First

World War. From the vast amount of money which spent to the hundreds of thousands of dead,

wounded and traumatised soldiers, the country was left diminished in so many ways despite the

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