Welcome to Despatches, a new short-form podcast from The Old Front Line. These new shorter Pods will look at some specific aspects of the Great War and the landscape of the battlefields of the First World War. They will be published in addition to the regular episodes.

In this first Despatches episode we travel to the Somme and look at the Butte de Warlencourt, the old burial mound where the fighting came to an end in November 1916. It was in the news this week having had a change of ownership, and we look at its history and consider how and why sites like these can be preserved.

The official Butte de Warlencourt website is here: https://www.buttedewarlencourt.com/

The Butte de Warlencourt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ButteDeWar

The Hawthorn Crater Association is here: https://hawthornridgeca.com/

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In this episode we look at the War at Sea in the Great War for the first time and are joined by historian Rebecca Clarke to discuss her book on the fate of HMS India and her crew, following the loss of the ship to a German U-Boat in August 1915. The men spent the rest of the war interned in neutral Norway and we discover the fascinating stories behind their experience there.

Rebecca Clarke's website: HMS India website.

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In this episode we return to the Arras battlefields in Northern France and walk to the village of Gavrelle where the men of the Royal Naval Division fought in 1917, and discover the fields where the Royal Marines lost more men in a single days fighting than on any other in their entire history. 

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In this episode for Armistice Day we look at those who survived the Great War and came home to write about in a series of memoirs which were published from the 1920s until more recent times as that generation faded away. We look at Officer's Memoirs and ask why there are fewer memoirs by ordinary soldiers? 

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In this latest Trench Chat we are joined by author and historian Richard Van Emden to discuss his new book 'Volunteers' about the men who enlisted as volunteers in the British Army during the early years of the Great War in 1914/15.

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After moving house, and nearly three hundred miles with the Old Front Line archives and library, we return from a new location, new ideas for the podcast and shifting hundreds of Great War books has prompted some thoughts from the past, from authors to Great War veterans.

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In this special Trench Chat we bring together four Great War Podcasters: I was so very happy and honoured to be joined by Mike Cunha, Matt Dixon and Terry Whenham. We discuss what podcasting is all about and what we think the subject brings to this medium, and go off on plenty of tangents too! 

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In this latest Trench Chat we speak to Professor Peter Doyle about his current research on the mine craters of the Somme battlefields. We learn how were these craters formed, what their wartime story was, and what do they mean in relation to the landscape of the Western Front today?

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On a hill above the village of Hénin, close to Arras, stood a wooden cross remembering soldiers of the 64th Brigade who fell there in 1917. Preserved at Beverley Minster in Yorkshire, what happened to this memorial, and what can we find of the men who fought here at Hénin Hill in 1917? 

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Charley's War was a comic strip published in the late 1970s and early 1980s telling the story of Charley Bourne, a 16 year old Tommy on the front line of the Great War. What does it tell us about the conflict, and what impact does it have on our understanding of the subject? 

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