Are We Forgetting The First World War?

Is the First World War slowly fading from public memory, or has our relationship with the Great War simply changed? In this episode, Are We Forgetting The First World War?, we explore how interest in WW1 has grown, shifted, and adapted over the last forty years, and what the future may hold.

We begin in the 1980s, with the formation and growth of the Western Front Association, a turning point that helped revive serious public interest in the First World War. From there, we chart the expansion of family history research, as available records and personal archives encouraged millions to reconnect with relatives who served. We also reflect on the passing of the last surviving First World War veterans, a deeply symbolic moment that changed how the war is remembered and commemorated.

The episode then examines the rise of battlefield tourism, local history projects, and public engagement that laid the foundations for the First World War Centenary (2014–2018), a period of unprecedented books, documentaries, exhibitions, podcasts, and community remembrance.

But what happened after the centenary ended? We explore the unexpected “Covid bonus”, when lockdowns sparked a surge in WW1 podcasts, YouTube channels, online talks, and digital history projects, bringing the Great War to new audiences in new ways.

Finally, we ask where we are today. Is interest in the First World War declining, fragmenting, or evolving? And crucially, what can historians, educators, content creators, and enthusiasts do to ensure the First World War is not forgotten?

Sign up for the free podcast newsletter here: Old Front Line Bulletin.

You can order Old Front Line Merch via The Old Front Line Shop.

Got a question about this episode or any others? Drop your question into the Old Front Line Discord Server or email the podcast.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:10

Are we forgetting the first world war? It might seem an odd question to pose on a podcast about the Great War, but I think sometimes we do have to ask these kind of questions and in this first episode of twenty twenty six, a major anniversary year connected to Verdun and the Somme, perhaps it's a good thing to do as we turn a fresh page. What's for certain is that the First World War shaped the century that followed it and shaped our modern world too. But with living memory of the conflict long gone with the death of the final veterans and the centenary over for nearly a decade, is public interest in the period slipping back? Are we beginning to get too far from the Great War? So in this episode we will ask Is the First World War in danger of being forgotten? And if it is, what can we do about it? Along the way we'll look at post centenary public engagement, schools, the book and podcast and YouTube worlds and practical ideas to renew some interest in this subject. First of all, let's remind ourselves of why the Great War is important still after more than a century. For Britain it was truly a world war, the first people's war in many ways. It affected every aspect of society, and the dead, the fallen, the glorious dead dominated the post war obsession with the conflict from war memorials to the construction of the cemeteries across the old battlefields. The war became part of the landscape figuratively in terms of a national mindset, but also quite literally too. So this was true on the landscape of the past across the old battlefields where the pathways of that conflict met, and also on the landscape at home in Britain, how war memorials of all kinds dominated British society in the nineteen twenties and thirties, and with that through the collective memory families had of those who had served and perhaps never returned. That concept of the lost generation, a generation of young men disappeared, even though exaggerated as we now know, most men survived, of course. Despite that it held strong and fast as a belief in that interwar period in Britain. So the Great War didn't simply just change Great Britain and the wider empire, it changed everything for everyone. It was a pivotal moment in twentieth century history. Every nation, including those defeated in the conflict and those changed by the war, like Russia, for example, experienced the same emotions and same sense of that change. But let's pause with the history for a moment and its effect on the wider world and move on to twenty fourteen, the beginning of the Great War centenary, and remember what happened as that year began. Between twenty fourteen and twenty eighteen, the First World War certainly seemed to be everywhere. Public events, television, publishing, schools, new memorials, and then the growth of a new medium, podcasts and YouTube. During that time, for example, it's when I first appeared on some podcasts, including Dan Snow's history hit, talking to him about the development of warfare on the Western Front, the causes of the First World War, what happened on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. And I remember him saying to me at the time, You should get a podcast, you should do a podcast, but at that point I was just too busy with all the things that were unfolding during that centenary period. But it was the start of this new media that would play an important role then and potentially still does today. On the battlefields themselves, locations like Tynecott had nearly a million visitors in a year at one point during the centenary. Churches and parishes across Britain researched the names on local war memorials, often produced booklets that were placed in that church or in the local village hall, and there was a desire I think that no one during that time would be forgotten. And indeed that twenty fourteen eighteen period produced a huge burst of public history activity, museum exhibitions, community projects, major national ceremonies, smaller local ones, and arts commissions of all kinds, from artwork reinterpreting the Great War through to poetry, through to projects connecting young people with war memorials. There was the famous one of the war memorial on Paddington Station, where there's a bronze tommy with a letter in his hand, and children were encouraged to write a letter to the unknown soldier, kind of putting down on paper what for them might have potentially been in that letter that he's holding in his hand, and this created huge, huge engagement on all kinds of different levels. Scholars who studied the period and examined the centenary emphasised high levels of public participation during the centenary, and many academics made sure that they were involved too, driving projects, assisting with projects, going to give talks to groups that were working on projects, and bringing good history to a much wider audience. And that in my mind was a great success as the academic world of history often feels distant to a general public, but it wasn't that way during the centenary. In the media there were major TV documentaries and specially commissioned series, such as Jeremy Paxman's Six Parter, launched in 2014, project that I worked on, where based on the book that he was writing at the time, we went out to the battlefield and interpreted his view of the First World War through the landscape as it is today, and that kind of kicked off the whole series of television production that was made in that approach and for the opening stage of the centenary. It kind of peaked in 2014 and dropped off a bit a little bit afterwards, but on other channels, documentaries were produced there. It filtered into a lot of popular media culture, so there were special editions of Who Do You Think You Are, where celebrities went to visit the sites connected with their First World War ancestors, and it even filtered into The Archers on BBC Radio. There were one-off documentaries on multiple different channels, like the Channel 4 programme I worked on about the Battle of the Onk. When it came to doing something on the Somme in 2016, we kind of felt that we couldn't go back to just the first day of the Somme again, it had to be different, so we looked at the end of the Battle of the Somme instead, and that created a huge kind of public interest. And in that programme, rather than use celebrities, we spoke to ordinary people, and that had a great kind of impact on the audience that watched it. Books saturated the mass market from bestsellers to all sorts of obscure titles, with one major publisher putting out hundreds of titles each year during the centenary. And battlefield tours during that time were especially active. There had been a growth period of these before the centenary, but during 2014-18, some companies were taking as much as 15,000 people a year to the battlefields. And one event which involved ledger battlefield tours who I work for, we took two and a half thousand Royal British Legion members across for five days to follow the story of the Great Pilgrimage that had taken place ten years after the Great War in 1928, and that led to thousands of these standard bearers parading at the Mening Gate and visiting the wider Western Front, and there were many other such visits besides. It was clear that all of this reached a very wide public indeed that perhaps in normal years would not have engaged with the First World War. People realised they had a connection and wanted to understand and know more. They wanted to uncover the war hero essentially in their family, and that meant something, I think. It meant something to the people who were inspired to do that. But as the centenary came to a close, there was an inevitable drop off. Had everyone done in inverted commas the First World War during those years? Was that chapter now closed? Media attention moved on as it inevitably would. Anniversaries of the Great War reshifted somehow and became smaller, quieter affairs, and exhibitions and displays that had been very much part of that centenary period closed, came to an end, and contact with that wider public through those kind of events diminished. So was this period of twenty fourteen, twenty eighteen a temporary spike or the last great moment of mass engagement? Was it the end, as it were? Studies at the time and much speculation on social media seemed to conclude that what happened suggested a post centenary plateau rather than steady growth leading to a wider legacy, and also indicated that it didn't suddenly drop off a cliff as such. So not a decline, but not four years that led to an even bigger growth after the centenary and something that would go from strength to strength beyond those years. That perhaps was the failure of the Great War centenary. There could be reasons for this, lack of legacy projects. In Flanders, they marked the site, literally marked the site on the landscape of the First World War front lines by planting trees all the way on that Flanders front, and that is a legacy that a decade later still helps visitors to those battlefields understand the landscape that they are looking at. Linked to online resources and videos and imagery, it has in my mind become a kind of model really of the kind of legacy that should have been put in place to ensure that future generations benefited from that spike in interest during the Great War centenary, and sadly no similar projects were done in places like Arras or the Somme or at Verdun. Funding for exhibitions and projects was limited to those centenary years and locations hosting these kind of things wanted to move on to once that came to an end. But did it signal a decline long term? Before we get to that, let me just go back for a moment right back to when my own interest in the First World War grew. In the nineteen seventies, I'd always somehow had an interest in the First World War, through books borrowed from the library, through listening to my grandmother who grew up as a young girl in Colchester during the First World War, and witnessed her brother and all her cousins march off the war and only her brother come back, having seen wounded soldiers come back from the Somme to the military hospitals in Colchester, covered in the chalky mud of the Somme battlefields. I mean those kind of stories that she told me really absolutely fascinated and drew me in to the subject of the First World War. And comics in those days were dominated by war stories, and then Charlie's War, which was spoken about on this podcast before, became a big part of my early interest in the Great War, following that story of a teenage Tommy through the Battle of the Somme and beyond. Again, kind of enhanced that next level of my interest. And there are also the picture books by Dennis Knight, where he did a whole series of these things on all kinds of other things, from ballet to the moon, but loads on first and second world war history, including a really great one on the first world war, and they included lettraset transfers that you then made your own little battle scene using those transfers. And it was quite an interactive childhood for those of us in the 70s because Airfix Kitts played a massive part in it, and I remember buying the packs of First World War British and German and French soldiers and building battlefields with trenches on them with my mum. And I think that kind of interactive play based on real history is certainly some way for me and I'm sure many other young people to inspire them to be interested in a particular period of history. And then when I finally myself got a chance to visit those battlefields that I'd read about, some of the magazines in the 70s, like military modelling and battle for war gamers, they carried articles about visiting the battlefields, and suddenly I realised that this was possible. So when the opportunity to go there with my school in the summer of 1982 came along, it kind of all came together. And I remember after having visited the first cemetery that I ever went to on the Western Front, which was Hopstor near Vlamatinger in Flanders, driving along the road to Eape, I started to look out into the fields, expecting to see trenches still there. I mean we did see trenches on that trip at Sanctuary Wood and also in some of the wooded areas around the bluff and places like that. But I realised fairly quickly that interpreting the modern landscape of the First World War that reflected the past would take some skill and take some work to truly understand it. And forty odd years later, I'm still doing that. But when I came back from that trip massively enthusiastic about Great War history, it still felt like something that was quite obscure. I didn't know anyone else who was interested in it, a couple of my schoolmates, but it was a subject really that few knew anything about and most cared even less. I remember taking my photographs from that Eap trip to Dixon's, who used to print up the pictures in those days when we had film cameras, and I got them printed, and when I went back to pick them up, the guy behind the counter asked me why I had so many photographs of war graves, what was that all about? The kind of conversation that I hope I probably wouldn't have today. It would be more like, wow, that's really fascinating. Tell me more. But then during the summer holidays that followed that first trip, I went to the Somme with my dad, picked up Rose Coombs before Endeavour's Fade. We took the ferry over from New Haven to Dieppe and the train down to Amiens up to Albert, and we stayed in the centre of Albert at the hotel Basilique opposite the Basilica in the main square there, and we walked the battlefields. I walked the Somme for the very first time. And when I was staying in that hotel Basilic, there was a poster on the window for something called the Western Front Association, a First World War Remembrance Organisation, and the address of the founder and chairman, John Giles, which was an address near Canterbury in Kent. So I wrote to John Giles when I got back, saying I'd just made these two trips, one to Eape and one to the Somme, and I was very enthusiastic. I pointed out how young I was and I wanted to learn more, and was there a way for me to join the Western Front Association? And he wrote me a fantastic letter back encouraging me, telling me to give him a call, telling me to come to the next meeting of the WFA at the National Army Museum in London and come up and introduce myself and say hello, and that's exactly what I did. And he couldn't have been nicer, couldn't have been more helpful, and that was true of a lot of the members of the Western Front Association of that time who really went out of their way to help a youngster like me. And I think there's a great lesson in that, and it's a lesson that I've learned, and I've tried to pass on that help, the kind of help that they gave me in those early years. So suddenly I found a gang of people who were interested in the same subject as me, that there was regional branches. There was one in Sussex where I lived at the time, which I went to. The WFA published a regular magazine, and I think that together with many of the kind of very famous Great War authors of that time, like Martin Middlebrook and Rose Coombs and Lynn MacDonald, they really helped to drive interest in the First World War, and again that there is a lesson with that. What I realized though for nearly the next 15 years until I started work as a full-time battlefield guide for Ledger was that the Great War, in many ways, despite this driving forward of interest, continued to be quite obscure, continued to exist in the margins really, and despite how everyone was connected to it, that seemed to have been forgotten really at that time. So what changed it? What was the moment that changed it? Well, I I don't think it was just one thing, but certainly family history in the 1990s was a really big thing. There were multiple magazines, there was the new availability of records, particularly First World War records, when the service records and the medal records were released. Suddenly you could trace those ancestors in your family tree who had served, who had fought, and who had died in the Great War. And this paved the way really for a wider interest, I think, because people researched those ancestors, found that they fell at EEEP or the Somme or the Schemendedam or whatever it was, and that then prompted them to find out more, perhaps took them down the same path as me to organisations like the Western Front Association, and this was a period as well where the veterans were fading away, and I think people were realizing that they hadn't asked them enough. And it paved, I think, this interest, it paved a way specifically, I think, for mass battlefield tourism that really began in that period. There were small companies doing it in the 1990s the Holtz, Martin Middlebrook, Rose Coombs, the MacDonald, they all did their own tours, and there were a few other little companies in different parts of the world. Of the UK, and then Ledger came along, Shearings did it, Wallace Arnold, a number of these big companies suddenly were doing battlefield tours. So this was the time when the subject was pushed forward because this went hand in hand with the development of that interest, that wider interest in the Great War, as something new. The internet grew and paved the way for the centenary in some ways. In those early days of the internet, people searched on there for their favourite subjects, and I searched for the Great War, and I found Tom Morgan's Hellfire Corner website, the very first website about the First World War, and others followed suit. And this kind of built up momentum, I think, for the increased interest in the subject of the Great War. And some of those that I greatly admired from those early years of my own interest in the First World War often described the Great War as a wavelength that you kind of tuned into. And it's clear that those on the wavelength of this subject grew in the late nineties and on into the early 2000s, and again paving the way for wider engagement that came with 2014 and all that. But post 2018 had it all then come full circle, had we gone back to that time in the eighties when the Great War felt distant and interest in it was fading and it was a niche subject. To an extent, I think, because of the lack of legacy. But not long afterwards, of course, there was COVID, being confined to home, unable to travel to the battlefields or to archives or to do research or to visit war memorials. Perhaps all of that might suggest that interest in the First World War would fade even more and perhaps confine the Great War to those dusty pages of the past that the veterans always spoke about. But actually it was quite the opposite. That pause in our lives gave us time to think and to do things that we perhaps wouldn't always have the time to do. And in all of that darkness of 2020, there was a chink of light, and that was through podcasts and YouTube, and particularly podcasts and history. While podcasts had been around for a decade, and as I mentioned, I'd been on Dan Snow's History It and others besides, they weren't mainstream, they were looked at curiously by the wider public in many ways, but Covid changed that on all kinds of different levels because not everyone was tuning in to First World War podcasts, they were tuning into podcasts covering all kinds of subjects, but it led to a growth in history-based podcasts, factual podcasts, where people being knowledgeable in a particular subject would create a podcast, and people then during COVID had the time to listen to it. So it gave this peculiar circumstances for these ideas of new podcasts, which might have just kind of disappeared into those margins of a of a public interest in a subject like this. It gave those podcasts an opportunity to grow, and that's exactly what has happened. And now, for me, half a decade on from that, I can only speak about my own experience with the old frontline, and that now has well over a thousand downloads a day. We're approaching two million downloads in total. We've built this brilliant, warm community of like-minded people fascinated with the Great War. I get a huge number of emails from people all over the world telling me about their connection to the First World War, what it means to them, about their ancestors, about their own travels across the landscape. I mean it really is quite incredible and for me quite humbling to read this stuff. And here in late 2025, there are now nearly a dozen First World War podcasts out there that publish regularly on the subject, with a new one just out in November I discovered, looking at the Canadian side of the Great War, and that's called Memory and Valor, and I would recommend it. YouTube now is even bigger. That kind of ticked along as a kind of niche thing for a long time, but that has become massive now with massive YouTube channels. There are millions of uploads to YouTube every day on just about every subject that you could think of, but surprisingly, Great War content on this channel isn't as big as you'd expect. The old frontline has a presence there which I'm building on all the time, but there are some really big channels like the History Underground, History in Your Hand, and Trails of History, and the Great War Channel is one of the long established ones that just has First World War content in it, and that one is highly recommended looking at all kinds of aspects of First World War history. But the level of World War One content, and some of the channels that I've mentioned there, the bigger ones, don't just do first world war, they cover quite a broad spectrum of different periods, and many channels now, particularly on YouTube, are dominated by the second world war. That's the one that it's kind of easy to tap into a bigger, wider interest. You can focus on specific things like kit, planes, tanks, machine guns, and you don't kind of see the same thing happening with first world war history. What drives interest in that, I'm discovering, is the personal stories of the Great War. And again, there's another kind of lesson in that. Elsewhere during the same period, organizations like the Western Front Association post-centenary have also grown and developed. They're doing a lot of different things. They too began doing online lectures, they put a lot of that onto YouTube on their channel. There's the Salonica Association, which is the reformed one that veterans started after the First World War. I'm a member of that. It's a great organization to belong to. There's the Gallipoli Association, and it's also seen the arrival of some new organisations as well, like the Great War Group, and this is all to be welcomed. Education in the UK was also playing a part. The First World War was very much part of the national curriculum and still is, and those involved in education continue to ensure students have an understanding of the conflict, often leading to battlefield trips to inspire these students, I hope, in the same way that I was in 1982 on that very first school trip. The focus in education in the classroom may be on causes, maybe on trench warfare, on war poets, but does that matter? If it's paving a way for a new generation of people fascinated by the Great War, enabling them to emerge and discover more, surely that's a good thing. Otherwise, how else would this continue? And in recent years I've seen with the old front line that something like twenty-five per cent of the podcast audience is under thirty-five. Now that really surprised me, and it's bucking the membership trends of some of these organizations like the WFA, and it's not putting a finger at them, but I think it's an interesting thing to note, and I think it bucks the idea of what is the popular perception of the kind of people that would be interested in a subject like the First World War. Many people would say that this would be a subject confined to those who were retired, for example. Major and specialist publishers continue to commission and publish First World War titles, both academic and popular, well after the centenary, but these now are few in number compared to other periods of history, particularly other periods of military history, and a quick glance in your local bookshop will demonstrate this easily. They clearly feel publishers that there is a dip in interest in the Great War, otherwise they would be publishing books on it. And I had a meeting with a major publisher this year who essentially told me they would publish almost anything I wrote about the Second World War, but it was very unlikely that they would do anything on the First World War despite the success of the old front line. So this is an area where clearly some work is needed, but it's hard as writing is very time consuming. I know this only too well. Research is expensive, and there's very little financial return for it, despite what many people believe, often putting people off from the very start from going down that route of writing a book, and that is a great shame. And where does that all leave us? Is the First World War truly forgotten? And what can we do about it? My view is that forgotten, no, vulnerable, yes. Education, archives, museums, publishers, and enthusiastic creators via podcasts and YouTube keep the subject alive, but interest has clearly dropped from the centenary highs and is uneven across age groups and backgrounds. It seems that interest has become more specialized and personal as a consequence. And I think without sustained institutional and creative work, it is clear that public attention will continue to drift and it definitely is drifting. And if it drifts, that's what makes the First World War vulnerable to not being relevant to a wider public as it should be. So what can we do? I think there are signs of some change. In the tours that I do with Ledger, without any prompting or effort on our part, First World War tours this year have suddenly recovered in terms of the booking levels compared to some of their First World War comparative tours, and I don't really know what is behind that, but there certainly is a growth in interest to travel again to the First World War battlefields. The Old Frontline podcast continues to grow, especially in this past year, and I know that for almost every other First World War podcast and YouTube channel it appears to be the same. There is an audience out there who wants to be informed and engaged, and a big area in that increase is with listeners and viewers in America, in the United States of America, and that's interesting because America seemed to me to have kind of forgotten its First World War past, but it's developing an interest in that and an interest in the wider subject of the First World War II, and that is great news, I think. So what are the next steps? Well, while I have criticized AI, artificial intelligence on this podcast before, I also mentioned that it has a role to play, and I think in terms of engagement with the growth of AI created content, historians need to be engaging and understanding that to make sure we just don't get bombarded by a load of rubbish. But AI has its place especially when it's used properly. So I asked ChatGPT for some ideas as how we might drive interest in the First World War forward, and this is a sample of what it suggested, which makes some interesting reading. For educators and schools, it suggested that we integrate First World War inquiry projects into cross-curriculum work. So not just focus on one area of the curriculum, make it work across all of those areas from literature to geography to science. And when we look at a subject like the landscape of the First World War, we can see how that works very well. We can look at subjects like shell shock and medical advances and logistics and make that all relevant to a number of different parts of what students are required to learn. And the online availability of records means that to use free digital primary source packs, which are often provided by museums and archives, and oral histories that are now online, Pure War Museum, digitize their records in that respect, for example. This gives an opportunity for pupils to reach out and connect to real people by listening to their accounts. And also with schools, promote local battlefield partnerships, so between the school and locations on the battlefields, so that they can feel connected even if travel is difficult or impossible, and perhaps even generate virtual tours through those contacts on the landscape, the battlefields of the First World War. For museums and cultural institutions, it recommended that they maintain small rotating First World War displays tied perhaps to local stories, keep the content fresh and locally relevant, and build long-term school outreach programs, not just one-off events. And a good example that I thought of when I read that recommendation was in East Sussex, for example, schools could be looking at the South Downs battalions of the Royal Sussex, and then encouraging their students to go out and discover what can be found of those battalions literally on their doorstep, the location of the camps where they trained, the training grounds where they learned how to be soldiers, the war graves of men who died in training or came home wounded from the front and died in hospitals in Britain, and of course the war memorials that list the dead from those units, giving students a lot to get their teeth into, I think, and that's to be encouraged. For publishers, podcasters and YouTubers, aim content at wider audiences, narrative audio dramas, graphic histories, short vertical videos for things like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts. They are very, very popular. And I've had some on my channel that have had tens of thousands of views. It's staggering, really, and that is a way to make the past relevant to a modern audience. And also, as a creator, as a human creator, beat artificial intelligence to doing it with a load of AI rubbish. Collaborate with schools and museums if you are a creator online, produce classroom ready tie-ins. So do episodes that link to specific subjects like medicine in the First World War or trench warfare on the Western Front. The most popular episode of the Old Front Line is the one about trench warfare, which I know has been shared on many school websites. So there is a place for creators to help drive that part of an increased interest in the First World War forward. And organisations like the Western Front Association and the Great War Group might also have a big role to play in this. And I think another aspect of being an online creator is to examine diverse perspectives. Colonial troops, the experience of women in the Great War, non-European fronts, to broaden really the relevance of the First World War and the wider understanding of the conflict. And for local groups and for families, tell local stories, create community memory projects, digitize letters and diaries that emerge through outreach events. When I lived in Barnsley, I worked with a local museum, Experienced Barnsley, for free and went rounds to visit libraries, talk to people who had connections to the Great War. They brought medals and photographs and diaries and all kinds of things. And this is a great way to create interest again. And use when you're doing this anniversaries as prompts, but place them in a wider educational program or perspective so they aren't just one-off events. Don't get hung up on just dates. But what about us as individuals? What can we do? Join a group like the Western Front Association or the Great War Group. Support them. Offer your knowledge to local groups in your area, local history groups, go and give a talk, help them with research. Probus, which is the Association of Retired Business People, they're always looking for speakers. Go and volunteer for them. Take your Great War collection along to show people. This is how we engage people. Share First World War content on your own social media. Links to podcasts, to YouTube and articles. Put them, share them with your friends who perhaps are curious about your interest, and this is a way of getting them more than curious, getting them involved. And ask people to discuss their connections, people that you know, ask them to discuss their connections to the Great War as well. Visit the battlefields, of course, take photographs, share them online, sign the visitors' books, not just in the cemeteries, but museums and other places besides, support local museums on those battlefields, which are locally run, and businesses that are battlefield related, that's really important to keep that infrastructure that helps the expansion of interest in battlefields to keep that going. Because these aren't just places where people make money, many of them, like Nick at Who Crater, does so much in the local area to promote interest in the First World War, and they're really important to help promote and support when you're out there. And if you have a specific or general interest or knowledge on aspects of the Great War, why not think about your own podcast or YouTube channel? These platforms are open to all, and it's really important to share what we know, and if that's something you're thinking about, do reach out if you need any help or advice with that. So perhaps the real danger isn't forgetting the First World War, but allowing it to become predictable, distant and safe, especially distant, I think. If it feels distant, people won't think it's relevant anymore. As long as we keep asking new questions of it, continue to prompt learning and shed light into the darkness, corners of this subject, the Great War still has something urgent to say. And I don't claim to have all of the answers here, far from it. This is a kind of prompt to action, if you like. And do let me know what you think. Drop ideas in the comments or via email or the Discord server about what could be done going forward, or just give your thoughts on the matter. We'll build a fantastic community through the old front line, and I think it's important to hear your voice. But when I think back to the nineteen eighties and nineties, the old veterans used to chide me about being interested in their war. What was a young bloke like me doing finding a connection to the fourteen eighteen war, as they often called it? They believed that when they died it would all be lost to history forever. Some wept at that when they thought of mates who had never come home. One said to me, staring into the distance, they were all that I lost, everything to me, and it's important to remember sentiments like that. But like then, I now say the same. We must strive for this never to happen. It's all too important. Those millions of men and women built the modern world we enjoy, even a century or more later, they aren't so very far from us really. We live in a world that once was theirs, populated by memorials that still speak their names. The Great War is all around us. Those names, those people, they are real and vivid, and they left us a huge legacy which we must honour. And if we take that passage to France and Flanders and the many battlefields beyond, there I am sure we will find their voices still on that unquiet landscape full of connections, forever giving us more, our journey through past and present, our inspiration, our Old Frontline. You've been listening to an episode of the Old Frontline with me, military historian Paul Reed. You can follow me on Twitter at Somcore. You can follow the podcast at Old Frontline Pod. Check out the website at oldfrontline.co.uk where you'll find lots of podcast extras and photographs and links to books that are mentioned in the podcast. And if you feel like supporting us, you can go to our Patreon page, patreon.com slash oldfrontline, or support us on buymea coffee at buymeacoffee.comslash oldfrontline. Links to all of these are on our websites. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you again soon.