Before we get to this week's episode, I wanted to mention some sad news,

the passing Canadian military historian Tim Cook.

I never met Tim, and we only spoke spoke on email and I had hoped to speak with

him on the podcast but I knew that he was unwell but didn't realize how unwell and he tragically

passed away this week aged only 53. Tim's contribution to military history and especially the subject of the Great War was immense.

And his book on Vimy, for example, is arguably one of the best, perhaps the best, ever written

on that subject. We've lost an important and significant voice in Tim and his death will have left a void in his family's life.

So this week's episode, which has a lot of Canadian content, is dedicated to the memory of Tim Cook.

Do try and seek out one of his books and read it in his memory.

So where are we this week?

The landscape of the Great War is not just restricted to those

fields of death where the fighting was at its peak. To truly understand that landscape where past and

present sit side by side, we have to look beyond just the battlefields, to the sky, as we've discussed here before, below,

to the troglodyte war underground, and also to the areas behind the front, and not just behind

the British front, but the German one too. The area behind the lines is different to the battlefields because much more of its original

features from over a century ago survive. So when we travel that landscape in the villages and the

towns and across the fields where that infrastructure behind the lines was once located,

we see a landscape of the present that isn't that different behind the lines was once located. We see a landscape of the present that

isn't that different to the landscape of the past and we find perhaps far more reminders of

that past as I hope we'll see in this podcast. In many cases there are villages and towns in these areas

where if you could take a veteran back, he would see little changed in them.

They're like time capsules.

...