This is the third and final bonus episode of season eight of the Old Frontline podcast and I've come up onto the ramparts in the city of Ypres.

We often start a podcast series on the Somme and this time it's kind of fitting perhaps to end here in Flanders in this city of Ypres that means so much to the sacrifice of the First World War, the remembrance of the First World War and that wider culture of the old front line.

And I've come to sit this evening on the rampart walls overlooking the Menin Gates.

As many of you who listen to the podcast will know or keep an eye on the news related to the battlefields and the landscape of the First World War, this memorial has been under renovation for the last few years.

And for me, this is the first time I've come and been able to gain full access to it again in the way that we used to get access to it before.

So it's quite nice to do that.

And I'm here this week because I'm walking the battle I'm here with my old friend and colleague Dr Victoria Humphreys and we're taking a ledger group around the battlefields of Ypres and doing a double act with me doing the history and some of the anecdotes and her providing readings from some of the literature and poetry of the First World War.

And it's an interesting group and an interested group who have a lot of connections to the fighting here in the First World War.

This is one of the things that you discover when you bring parties of people to these battlefields.

You uncover all their family information and see their family photographs, and we've seen a lot of that this week, which has been really great.

It's absolutely what makes these trips in many, many ways and it's great to get out on the grounds.

Today we were walking the battlefields around Passchendaele from Tyne Cot down to Waterfields and Marsh Bottoms and up to Crest Farm and into the village itself, that sacrificial ground from 1917 that is so important in our wider understanding of the First World War, ground that I've walked many, many times over the years and I've written about in books but never, never ceases to impress me and move me when we're there.

And even in Tyne Cot, someone asked me today, how many times have you been to Tyne Cot?

And I honestly don't know, but it is hundreds and hundreds of times with groups over the years and in individual visits as well.

But again, I never tire of that.

How could you tire of it?

Coming to these places, connecting with these places, seeing the landscape.

And I've seen that landscape change and evolve, change and evolve many, many times.

And it will no doubt continue to for the rest of my life and for generations to come.

And there always feels as if there's something different to see, something new to connect to.

and long may that be really, long may that be.

So I'm sat here and it's relatively quiet.

There's people just in Meninstraat over to my right that are drinking in the corner pub there, which is frequented by a lot of battlefield visitors.

There's people, it's a holiday period, people walking along the moat over towards the camping ground and some of the places where there's accommodation here.

and many of these people perhaps also have come to see some of these battlefields but perhaps are just holidaying here having no real idea of what these places are or what even the Menin Gate is but it's been very busy for the last post over the course of this week it was absolutely jam-packed with people yesterday which is astonishing really 10 years on from the centenary people are still coming here wanting to understand it perhaps see it and I'm sure there is a kind of tourist element to it to a certain degree But perhaps people who come here from that perspective become moved by what they see and go away and want to find out more.

And sitting here as the sun sets over the city of Ypres, the last rays of ancient sunlight fading over the spires and the rooftops of Ypres now.

There were some swallows in the sky above me earlier.

The swifts have almost gone.

I thought today when I was in the valley before Passchendaele that I heard a skylark, which is something that is rare for me to hear a skylark in Flanders.

Perhaps I dreamt it.

there is a lot more kind of rough ground in that area of the battlefield now pasture land that's just left to go wild which is what birds like skylarks really love because they're ground nesting birds and all of that layer which I discuss so often here on the old front line is all part of the connection that we have when we come to these places and tonight I've come up and I've had a walk round the Menin Gate to see what the renovations that have been ongoing for the last couple of years what they have been principally about and I've noticed that on the kind of side panels as you walk through the two archway entrances and go up to the next level those panels have been extensively repaired in some cases by the look of it replaced or re-engraved and they're looking pretty new some of the other panels look less so for the fact that this has not been accessible and under works for the last couple of years and this isn't a criticism of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission but they don't look very different to what they looked like two years ago.

Maybe this is part of a long-term project to look at all the panels and all the names and do something with them, but perhaps as yet it's unfinished.

I believe up on the roof they've done a lot of work there, a lot of remedial work to the structure, some of the damage that was done in the Second World War.

This is one of those places where The First World War meets the Second World War, those crisscross paths, and there was fighting here in May 1940.

I'm looking down the Menin Strat up towards the point where it curves to the right and heads to Hellfire Corner, and that's the direction the Germans were coming from in May 1940.

British troops had occupied the Menin Gate, and the Moat Bridge was blown by a Royal Engineers officer.

It's mentioned in his military cross citation.

He was awarded the MC for his work here, and the destruction of that Moat Bridge is something that's mentioned in his MC citation and with blowing of that moat bridge it damaged the front of the memorial the Germans opened fire with various weapon systems including a 20mm anti-aircraft gun supposedly which chewed up the line on top of the men in gates so a lot of damage was done and I picked up recently some German photographs of the gate from 1941 which shows that damage quite clearly and the commission I believe have been doing a lot of that remedial work again because although it was patched up after the second world war I don't think that was done perfectly in the 1950s, so they've had to go back and revisit that work.

As with all these memorials, I mean, they are mighty structures in all kinds of ways, on all kinds of levels, and the maintenance of them is a very difficult prospect and a costly prospect, no doubt.

But it's good to have access to the gate again.

It's felt strange not to be able to go up those little side corridors and touch the names of so many soldiers that I've researched over the years, whose photographs that I have, whose documents that I have, whose medals that I have or memorial plaques that I've found tucked away in junk shops, you know, in those old days in Sussex, picking those kind of things up.

It's great to be able to come out and touch those names.

I went to the name of Len West on the Royal Sussex panels tonight, and he was a military medal winner.

He got his MM as a stretcher bearer at the Boar's Head at Richborg with the South Downs Battalions, and then he was killed near St Julian on the 31st of July 1917 when his battalion A-post moved forward into a German bunker, and it subsequently took a wrecked hit and a lot of the casualties and the stretcher bearers were killed there amongst them him, his brother had been killed the previous year at Richbourne where he'd been awarded the MM they were from Eastbourne in Sussex and I've walked in their old world, have been to the street where they lived in Eastbourne, been to the front door of their house and followed them around the battlefields and it's always something special really, part of that special connection that we have to be able to come and touch the name of a casualty like that on a memorial.

like the Menin Gate that is in front of me now.

As the sun fades, the Menin Gate is gradually lit and the names appear more strongly on the panels in front of me.

You can possibly hear the birds in the background in the moat.

I'm sitting in a bit of the ramparts where the walls curve slightly and I think there's a sally port behind me, one of these ancient doors that came out from the main ramparts so that defenders could go out to attack anyone that was trying to assault the walls.

That was kind of part of the original plan.

defence mechanisms that were here when this was constructed by the military architect Valba.

And in the Great War these ramparts were used for all kinds of purposes.

I'm looking down a section of it now where troops were slept and billeted on top of these ramparts in the early phase of the war where observers could use this high ground to look out onto the battlefield where eventually the chambers and the casemates within these ramparts were used for military purposes, for headquarters, for dugouts.

Just around the corner from the Menin Gate, some of the tunnellers who worked up on the high ground of the Bellewaerde Ridge and around Hooge carrying out that war underground were billeted there and going to and from the line from these positions.

So the ramparts, one of the original features of Ypres that still survives, is an important, essential part of the Great War story here in Flanders.

So I've come into one of the kind of walkways of the Menin Gate on this side facing the ramparts and possibly the sound will be a bit more echoey in here because I'm surrounded by the panels of names I'm looking at one of the addenda panels with so many names of so many different regiments behind me is the Wiltshire regiment panels which is quite apt because in this series of the podcast in one of the Q&As we had a question about the Wiltshire regiment and as I look back over this season eight we've covered quite a lot of ground and walked quite a lot of different bits of battlefields and we've had interviews with It was good to speak to the MOD war detectives and understand a lot more about the work that they do, for example.

And we've continued with the question and answer episodes, and they are proving incredibly popular.

When I first started those, I wasn't really sure whether they would last, looking at three or four different aspects of the First World War in each episode based on your questions, and do keep those questions coming.

But the questions have certainly kept coming and the diverse nature of the questions and some really absolutely fantastic questions that we've had has enabled us to talk about lots of different aspects of the First World War and that seems very popular to have episodes where we don't just focus on one thing but we focus on several things seems to be incredibly incredibly popular and will certainly continue and of course as we come to the end of this season I decided to redress a balance really because we haven't really spoken about the war in the air very much and it's such an essential part of the history of the Great War so I thought we'd do it properly and have a kind of mini series and we had an introductory episode looking at the work of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force in the Great War and the history behind it.

We had two chats with experts in the field, Andy Saunders about McManach and Joshua Levine having a talk about the whole experience of aerial combat in the First World War.

Both of those were fantastic to record with old friends who are at the top of their game and incredibly knowledgeable about those subjects.

And then following on with a special Q&A about The War in the Air and an episode looking at what we find on the landscape of the First World War today relating to that subject.

So I think that series has been well received and lots of positive comments about the different episodes and the whole idea of having a month's worth of podcasts where we focus on one theme is something that will certainly go into season nine, our next season that begins in September.

So that's something to keep an eye open out or an ear open for as we move forward.

Quite what the next special subject will be, I don't know whether we'll focus on a particular battle or perhaps a particular nation, or perhaps we'll look at some of the forgotten fronts of the First World War.

I mean, send in your emails and your comments and your fan mail to the podcast.

Tell me what you think.

What should we look at in a special series over the course of the next season?

But essentially at the heart of this podcast, from the very beginning, is walking the ground.

And in terms of walking the ground, it's obviously not a concept that I invented.

Far from it.

It's something that many people have done over many generations of visiting battlefields.

It's a fantastic way to connect and I remember in those early years of being a member of the Western Front Association meeting so many people who encouraged me to get out and walk the battlefields and that's what I did from the very beginning when I visited the Somme with my dad and did follow-up visits.

Getting out onto that ground and walking it really helped me connect in such a massive way on so many levels that probably at the time I didn't fully appreciate.

what we do when we do those virtual walks across that ground is very much part of this podcast and always will be and we're far from exhausting the subjects and the locations and the battlefields that we can do that so for example i'm aiming to start the next season of the podcast, with a walk on the Somme.

As we've said, we often begin there with a podcast season, and it's going to be on the northern part of the battlefield, so one to again watch out for.

The thing that fascinates me eternally about the First World War how all the stories kind of weave through it i've been mindful of that this week walking with a group talking to them about my own experiences of visiting this ground over many years telling them the stories of some of the veterans that i knew in the 80s and 90s brings back into focus that part of my life when i was so privileged to speak to those veterans spend time with those veterans of the Great War, those incredible men who I will be forever really in their shadow.

All of us will be really the things that they achieved, the things that they experienced, and the things that they went through.

And with a new group who've coming to these places for the first time, when you tell them those stories of the veterans, it's just interesting to see how they react to it.

it kind of pushes me forward even more and be determined to continue to tell those stories because I'm mindful of the fact we all have a finite time on this planet but that generation has gone and they left me a legacy and I have a legacy which I kind of want to pass on to a wider audience.

And that's really important.

I wish more who had done similar things would do the same.

Not everyone can or wants to.

I kind of get that.

And some, of course, like great friends of this podcast, like Richard Van Emden and Josh Levine, who we spoke to recently, have done a lot in terms of oral history and putting that out there.

And when we look back at Richard Van Emden's work with Harry Patch and so many other veterans, it's just incredible to see that those stories are out there for us to connect to and understand.

And I guess that I kind of often wonder whether the ghosts of that past of mine of speaking to these men, I mean, I came here to the Menin Gate on many occasions and met veterans here.

I remember in the summer of 1986 coming down to the last post one evening, And there was a veteran, so obviously a veteran, wearing his medals.

I went up to him and spoke to him.

He'd served with the Royal Field Artillery in the Ypres Salient and he'd come to see graves of some of his mates and look up some of their names on the many gate and wanted to hear the last post.

It was only something that he'd read about.

It was his first trip to the battlefields, his first return since the end of the war in 1918.

I'm mindful of those ghosts when I walk this ground.

They are ever-present, and I think they're important, really, because it is all too easy for a subject like the First World War to kind of fade away.

That's what those veterans that I met always worried about, and some were convinced that it would happen.

They used to say to me, I don't know why you're interested in this old war of ours, go out and live your life.

When we're dead, no one will remember it.

And I was always countering that.

Well, no, you know, come on, Harry, come on, Malcolm, come on, George, come on, Albert, whoever it was, that isn't going to happen.

You will always be remembered.

What you achieved, what you went through, that war will never be, must never be forgotten.

And all of us, I'm sure many of you All of you who listen to this podcast play your part in that by researching family members coming out to the battlefields, going to museums, reading books, telling other people about your interests and about the subject.

All of that is part of it.

But has the Great War gone through one of its cycles?

Interest in the Great War, has it gone through one of its cycles?

As I was just walking down the ramparts to come here, I was thinking about the first time I came to Ypres in 1982.

and how there were so few British visitors and so few people at the last post ceremony at the Menin Gate and Not much public interest or connection to it.

Now, of course, none of that is really true today, but it has certainly lessened since the centenary.

But is there a chance that the Great War might drift into obscurity again?

The chances of us seeing documentaries on it on the television are pretty slim.

Most of that kind of material is being made on YouTube now, on First and Second World War channels, military history channels.

That's where people go to, really, YouTube to...

to find their factual history, the factual content that they don't see on mainstream channels.

Very few books being published on the First World War, a few academic titles.

I picked up some recently that have got some fantastic insights into the First World War, but popular books are few and far between.

And I understand publishers have almost no interest in publishing anything about the Great War.

Perhaps that will change.

What will change it, I don't know.

Back in the 80s, it wasn't clear how it would ever change.

But I think that, I guess for me, it makes me even more determined to carry on with the visits that I make, the material that I produce and create online via YouTube, via this podcast.

And I know many of you have worked on websites and produced material and are researching individuals that you've gone on to then write about, perhaps in the pages of Western Front Association journals or the Great War Group journal.

All of that is important.

Keep on your research, keep writing, keep discovering, keep wanting to know more because that's what drives us to understand but I think also drives us to never forget.

And as I've sat here and recorded this, gradually the sun has drifted and set and there's a small amount of light over the city The lights of the Menin Gate, I'm looking down one long corridor of it now, and there's a wooden cross and some wreaths scattered at different points, poppy crosses plopped up against some of the panels where people have visited.

It's different to the 80s.

Great War isn't going to disappear and an interest in it and a reason for people to come and connect with ancestors that they've never known and perhaps never even seen a photograph of that continues.

It's a powerful, powerful subject and I don't think anyone's going to suddenly stop doing that soon because as we've said on this podcast so many times, there are so many layers to the Great War.

those crisscross paths and how one subject suddenly connects to another and then here on a quiet evening with the noise of the modern world around me, people going about their lives, living, continuing, exactly what these men fought for, for Belgium to be free and the Belgian people to fulfill their potential.

but that modern world somehow criss-crosses as well with the Menin Gate and everything that is here.

And as I cast my eyes across the lists of names here, just rounding this visit to the Menin Gate at night, not quite at midnight, but coming here to see these long lists of names, my eyes cast their way across those lists.

So I soon called them nameless names, I don't subscribe to that view.

Each name was a life, each name was a man who had hopes and dreams and aspirations, wanted to love and be loved, left behind family, left behind children.

people that they never wanted to forget, people that they hoped to return to but the cruel hand of war robbed them of that and in the case of names on a memorial like this robbed them of a known grave as well.

These are the undying stories of the First World War and perhaps also the unending because with missing soldiers and the work of archaeologists and the way the landscape changes here.

Perhaps some of the names who've fallen before my eyes tonight, perhaps one day they will be discovered, recovered, identified and there will be a headstone in one of the silent cities of the dead around Ypres bearing their name.

And recently I was looking at a book called Northamptonshire and the Great War and I've just chanced across the Northamptonshire Regiment panel, and there's Lieutenant Colonel Mobs.

He commanded the battalion of the North Ants, killed in the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917, a rugby player, and the Mobs match is still played in his memory.

It's like seeing the names of old friends when you chance across these things, men whose stories you know, whose paths and lives you followed.

And that's it, really.

That's what the subject of the First World War on so many levels is all about.

Those ordinary men and women affected by this conflict, in this conflict, never returning from this conflict.

They haunt us, I think, in a good way.

And this is a good place as the light fades and the new light of the Menin Gate shines across these names.

I guess, as I say, they're our grounding, they're our conscience, that they're the reason that we return so frequently to see and connect and understand to that landscape of the First World War, to walk and never forget, but to walk those pathways, those, in some ways, never-ending pathways, of the old front line.

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.

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Thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon.