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In this episode, we visit the famously preserved trenches at Sanctuary Wood near Ypres.  This remarkable landscape of trenches and dugouts is a must-see for any battlefield visitor.  The museum attached to the cafe contains a remarkable and often chilling set of stereo-scope images that show the Great War in a level of violent detail very rarely seen.

We examine the work of a Royal Engineers officer by the name of William Livens, whose hatred of the Germans drove his life's work, to design and develop weapons to kill as many Germans as he could.  Dangerous to know, he turned his barracks bedroom into a bomb factory and made flame throwers in the officer's mess. He is best known for his invention of the Livens Projector, the standard British trench mortar, and he was twice decorated for bravery. 

We meet once again, Bernard, a stalwart of The Roundabout Appreciation Society, a man who never let the vagaries of Belgian weather get him down, and whose visit to Sanctuary Wood nearly ended in disaster thanks to a dropped umbrella and being strangled by his own anorak.

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In this special episode of Trench Talk, I have the pleasure of sitting down with Belgian archaeologist Simon Verdegem and talking about his career specializing in the excavation of WW1 sites. 

We talk about his introduction to archaeology and the poignant discovery of the remains of a New Zealand soldier in excavations in Messines.  We look at the hugely successful Dig Hill 80 project at Wytschaete, and some of the incredible archaeological finds that came out of the project., including a rare signallers lamp and a harmonica.

Simon talks about the problems of identifying the dead, and why, despite the small percentage of soldiers whose mortal remains are finally identified, he remains as enthusiastic today about recovering the dead as he was when he began his career. We reminisce on the top finds of his archaeology career and consider what next for the battlefields of Flanders.  

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In January 1917, a  German encrypted message was intercepted by a small relay station in Cornwall and passed to the secretive world of the code breakers inhabiting the dingy Room 40 in the Admiralty building in London's Whitehall.

In the room were some of the finest minds in England, led by the enigmatic and charismatic Oxbridge scholar Albert "Dilly" Knox.  The team, including a man known as "The Dormouse" and a cake-loving Vicar called Monty, decrypted the message, and its 166-word content was political and diplomatic dynamite, that changed the entire course of the Great War.

Known to this day as The Zimmerman Telegramme, the explosive contents caused the previously neutral United States to join the war on the side of the Allies.   What did the telegramme say? How did the British intercept it, and why did the contents change the course of World War One?  Find out in this latest podcast, where we look at the single greatest intelligence triumph of the First World War. 


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In this episode, we begin our journey through the footsteps of the fallen in Brighton, where one Autumn afternoon in 1915 the Constabulary were called to a disturbance on the seafront, following the appearance of a large collection of saber-wielding men.

On arrival, however, they found calm, with the genteel folk of Brighton swapping cigarettes for chapatis with the Indian soldiers who were happily cooking their dinner in the seafront gardens.  Who were these men, and how did they find themselves in Brighton?

We look at the history of the Indian Army, their baptism of fire on the Western Front in Belgium, and hear the story of Khudadar Khan, the first Indian soldier to win a Victoria Cross during the Great War.  We hear about how the theft of a German officer's sword, turned one Punjabi soldier into the scourge of the Germans, and discover all about the mysterious medicinal qualities of Indian treacle. 

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In our latest episode, we walk the battlefield in one of the lesser-known killing fields of the Somme, Trones Wood.

While diminutive in size, the wood was a fearsome obstacle, whose capture was essential for the wider assualts planned on the Somme front, starting on the 14th July.

For a period of five days, the British and Germans fought brutally for control of the wood, and it was a remarkable attack by the men of the Northamptonshire Regiment, that finally wrested control of the wood from the Germans.  Described by many veterans as the worst place they ever saw during the Great War, Trones Wood cost the British over 4000 casualties, and won the Northants their first Victoria Cross of World War One.

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On the 31st October 1914, men of the 2nd Battalion the Worcestershire Regiment fought one of the greatest counter attack actions in British military history, in an afternoon of brutal close quarters, hand to hand combat against the Germans, in the small Belgian village of Gheluvelt.

If the Germans had taken Gheluvelt, nothing stood between them and the city of Ypres, and then the Channel ports that lay beyond. 

Outnumbered, exhausted and subjected to German artillery fire on a scale never seen before, men of the Worcesters and South Wales Borderers, inspired by the command of "The Demon" routed the Germans and stopped Ypres falling into German hands.  To this day, the city of Worcester recognises October 31st as Gheluvelt day. 

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In our latest episode, it's a real pleasure to sit down with the CEO and Trustee of the Western Front Way project, Rory Forsyth.

The project is a charitable foundation dedicated to installing a walking and cycling path that follows the line of the Western Front, from Nieuport on the Belgian coast to Pfetterhouse on the Swiss border; the 1000km path is a joint collaboration between the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, and Germany.

We talk about the remarkable discovery of a letter written by a Scottish officer over 100 years ago, who envisaged a "path of peace" running the length of the Western Front.  We hear about some of the challenges faced by the team in setting the project up, why the mayor of a small commune was late for a meeting (but still managed to open the champagne) and how the remarkable flower logo of the project came to be.

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On the 6th July 1915, hundreds of British soldiers left their trenches near the small Belgian village of Boesinghe in an attack against the German lines. Men from the Hampshire Regiment were tasked with the unenviable task of attacking a German strongpoint called Fortin 17.

Over 600 men were killed that day, and thousands wounded.  Almost 100 years later a team of amateur Belgian archaeologists unearthed a teaspoon that belonged to a man who was killed that afternoon.

In this episode of the podcast, we walk the canal from Ypres to Boesinghe, before we look at the events of the 6th July 1915.  A series of coincidences culminated during a shopping trip to a grim leisure centre in Leamington Spa, where a chance purchase brought a remarkable connection to a man who lost his life in this small corner of Flanders. 

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Shortly after the first German gas attack at Ypres in April 1915, rumours began circulating among the troops that the body of a Canadian soldier had been found crucified on the door of a barn, his body pierced by eight German bayonets.

The crucified soldier remains one of the great legends of the Great War. Did it really happen, who was he, did his family know?

In this episode we analyse the story of the crucified soldier, study German atrocities in Belgium in 1914, hear the story of how a remarkable piece of artwork sparked a diplomatic incident between Canada and Germany, and how the undiscovered notes of a British nurse led to the probable identity of the soldier being revealed once and for all. 

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On the 31st July 1917, the third battle of Ypres, or the Battle of Passchendaele as it is more commonly known began.  Near the small village of Boesinghe, men of the Welsh division went into action at 3.50 am with the objective of capturing the hamlet ofPilckem.  As they ran the gauntlet of machine guns from Wood 15 and Artillery Wood, they fought up the ridge and by 9.30 am had captured Pilckem and were close to the Steenbeke stream beyond the village.

While largely a successful operation, casualties were heavy, amongst them a shepherd's son from Snowdonia called Ellis Humphrey Evans, more commonly known by his Bardic name, Hedd Wyn.  A prolific poet and possibly the greatest Welsh language poet ever, he was a committed pacifist, only joining the Army through conscription.  By the time his poem "The Hero" published under the pseudonym Fleur de Lys won the 1917 National Eisteddfod of Wales, Evans was already dead, having been hit in the stomach by an artillery shell. 

We walk the battlefield of Pilckem, visit the magnificent Welsh memorial garden, and discover why Evans came to be known as "The Black Bard".