On a day associated with a battlefield truce between the soldiers of both sides,

how is it possible that more than a hundred men died on the battlefields of France and Flanders

and others much further afield at sea?

What's the story of those men who died on Christmas Day, 1914?

With the Christmas holidays approaching, it's that time of year when we think of family and friends.

And it was good this week to have another podcast supporters evening where we got together

and we heard a great talk by Rick Smith from the Hawthorne Ridge Crater Association to tell us about the work that they do with also import from Terry Berry and also Dane Wrights, one of the archaeologists who looked at the site.

We have one of these evenings about once a month and it's for those of you who are so kind to support

the website via Buy Me a Coffee or Patreon and if you've ever donated through either of those

platforms then you'll receive information about these evenings via those websites and often via

email as well and it's good that we're building this kind of great war

community through the podcast because we all have that mutual interest in the First World War

in common and a desire to see the battlefields accessible, understandable, and we have

interests in the preservation of battlefield

sites like the Hawthorne Crater on the Somme, and the association there has done some

incredible work in making that an accessible site, a site that is much more easy to understand

with less trees in it, and also preserving it,

actively preserving it for future generations. And sometime next year when we can travel again,

we seem to say that quite a lot recently, but I'm aiming to go to the crater and talk to the team

there on site to discover more about the kind of work that they do and why it's such

an important location. But the community aspect of this podcast is one that initially

I hadn't really planned or even thought about, but it's a nice development of what we've done

...