Welcome to another trench chat and I'm really pleased to be joined by Roger Stewart, who works as a

battlefield guide in Flanders, and he is the author of two superb books on the Great War, one about

the German cemetery at Langermark,

and a new one that's just come out, reclaiming the salience, resurrecting the Great War

Battlegrounds of Flanders Fields, published just recently by Helion. So welcome to the podcast, Roger.

Hi, Paul. Thank you very much for inviting me on such a podcast with such a great

reputation. So thank you very much. Thank you. So, I mean, you work as a battlefield guys in Flanders.

How has your journey brought you there? Oh, it's quite a long story, really. Originally my wife,

and my wife is from this area. So we moved

to the area around about 2010 and we opened a bed and breakfast in Iqa. And then I've

always had a passion for the first World War going right back to the was about 10 years old.

And I can trace that right back as well. I don't know if you remember, Paul, but growing up,

I mean, I'm 55, so growing up in the UK in the 1970s, all the kids' comics were kind of

World War II-based stuff, you know, like warlord and whatever. But there was one in particular

called Battle Action, and it bought out a comic strip called Charlie's War and it was for me

for the first time I'd heard anything about the First World War and the artwork in effect

was very graphic in terms of you know the mud and the horror of the trenches and the rats

and everything else so that really got me hooked on the First World War from an early age

then I read all quite on the Western Front at from an early age. Then I read all quite

on the Western Front at quite an early age as well. And from then on, really had been,

it's been kind of a passion for me for the rest of my life. And it was fate really. I suppose

I met my wife. She was from this area. We opened a B&B, which we sold in in 2015 because my

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