Welcome to a very special trench chats.

I'm really pleased this week to be joined by Matt Dixon of the footsteps of the fallen podcast.

Somebody on Twitter a little while ago suggested that me and Mac got together and kind of

interviewed each other and Matt very kindly did that first and I was on his podcast a few weeks ago

and if you've not listened to that yet, make sure you go and check that out and we'll put

some links on our podcast website

for that. And now Matt's come to join us and we're going to have a good old chat about the Great War this evening. So welcome, Matt. Thank you very much indeed. How are you today? Good, good, good, and yourself. Yes, I'm very well. Thank you. And thank you very much for having me to come on and join you. No, it's a pleasure. It's a pleasure. I always start, I think as you do, when you talk to

people about the Great War, you know, how did you get to this point? Tell us a little bit about

yourself and your path, as it were, to the Great War. Well, I was very fortunate in one sense

that I grew up in a house that was full of books.

Both my parents were very, very well-read people. And my father has a lifelong interest in

World War I. He served in the military himself. He was at Royal Marines Commando in 4-5 Commando,

and he'd always been interested in World War I.

In fact, I think actually, if my memory serves me right,

he took my mum to the Somme when they were on honeymoon,

I think, on their way down to the Alps.

So, I mean, who says that romance is dead um and and i remember

very very clearly when i was growing up he had this enormous collection of uh books on

world war one and i used to spend hours sitting on the floor in the in in the living room

where the bookcases were, sort of looking through these

kind of books. And I remember this sort of, I think it was kind of like an appalled sort of

fascination with some of the pictures that I saw in there. It's obviously the very famous photograph

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