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.

When this edition of the podcast goes out, we'll have actually had two Q&A in a row. And I've done this just so I can kind of position the order of the next few podcasts so I can set up a sequence. And we're going to have a whole month devoted to the war in the air, the war above the trenches of the Western Front, involving the men of the Royal Flying Corps,

and latterly, the Royal Air Force. So the next episode from this will be the beginning of that

mini series. And as part of it, I'm going to have a special RFC, RAF Q&A. So if you've got a question relating to the war in

the air, send it in, and I'll pick the best for questions, and I'll answer those in a special

edition of the Q&As for that air war month that we're going to have as a kind of trial really for something new on the podcast.

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

Question number one comes from John Anderson of the Grove Academy in Broughton Ferry.

John asks, as a teacher, I'm always intrigued when you speak of your own

experiences of visiting the battlefields with your school for the first time in the early 1980s.

August will be my 15th battlefields trip with young people from the east coast of Scotland.

So what actually was it about that first trip to the old front line with your school that got you hooked?

Well, a brilliant question, John. And in some respects, it wasn't that trip that got me hooked as such, because the Great War was already there in my life.

Having a father who'd been in the Second World War and two grandfathers who'd been

in the first and my grandmother who spent a lot of time with me and me with her during my

formative years she'd been a young girl in Colchester during the Great War she could remember

the wounded coming back to the stations in Colchester, covered in some mud.

She could remember all of her cousins marching off to war and her brother too, my Uncle Dan,

and only Uncle Dan coming back, all the others were killed.

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