Winter is a time when I find my mind drifts to the battlefields and that landscape of the Great War, both past and present.

Having experienced many a winter there myself, winters in that time in

France during peace, not war, with no jeopardy except the coldness of winter's cruel hand,

it nevertheless gave me even more of an appreciation for those men who went through it

during the Great War.

The winter is traditionally in the experience of warfare when armies go into winter quarters and are inactive.

But the peculiar conditions of trench warfare,

particularly on the Western Front,

meant that inactivity was impossible.

One side or the other would force a hand

or the elements themselves might create conditions

in which soldiers could no longer just shelter they had to act.

So in this podcast, a bit like the episode we did about Winter on the Somme,

we will look at the four wartime winters in Flanders,

starting with the famous one when the Christmas truce happened.

We'll see what the British and Empire Line consisted of during those periods

around Christmas in 1914, 1915, 16 and 17.

We'll have a look at who was in the line then, which units, and see what we can find of their experience.

We'll look for patterns and stories and we'll analyse the data in the Commonwealth Wargraves Commission archives online to look at those who died each Christmas day and what that tells us about the experience of that period of the winter

in those wartime years.

And to understand what we're looking at,

it's worth remembering that in this area of Flanders,

...