Estride the old Roman road between Arras and Combrai,

set back amongst the trees a cavalry remembers a missing officer of the Great War.

On the open fields to the north, small comrade cemeteries act as beacons to the fighting what happened here at furshi it seems strange

that as i record this week's podcast war rages in europe once more the conflict in the ukraine gripped us all. The past is the lens by which

we see the presence. It doesn't always give us understanding, but it can give us hope, it can give

us insight. Historians aren't necessarily military analysts, but I suppose what the current crisis, what the current

war proves, is that the past, the echoes of the past, are still relevant. The Ukraine had a complex

history in the Great War, Ukrainians fought on both sides of no man's land for the imperial Russian forces and also for the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Some years ago I researched the role of British troops in that area of what was then the eastern front of the Great War.

The men of the Royal Naval Air Service and the Armoured Car Squadron that served there fought in the Western Ukraine.

This was for a television programme that sadly was never made.

But it shows us how rich the history of the Great War is and how far reaching it is in so many ways.

More than a century ago, news took some time to filter back from the battlefield,

but today we get it almost instantaneously through social media.

But what modern reporting does is show us that war is real, war is cruel.

And those of us who visit the battlefields of the great war and i know many of the

podcast listeners are out there now visiting the western front you can't help but walk around

those cemeteries of the great war and reflect not only on the past and the losses of the past

but on your own life and the modern world as it is now,

and how all that we see as we walk the old front line, it still has relevance. It's not locked in a past.

It echoes down the century, and perhaps gives us greater compassion if that was needed for the situation in the world as it is now.

But we'll leave modern times to one side and we'll return to those battlefields of more than a century ago

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