Wadhurst

Not the Somme this time, but Sussex.

We start this Season 10 of The Old Front Line, yes, Season 10, it's amazing to consider that, in a small East Sussex village called Wadhurst.

As many of you know, Sussex is the county of my birth, and like the Somme, it runs like a vein through my own interest in the Great War, and is very much part of my Great War journey.

From finding Royal Sussex Regiment graves in my local cemetery as a kid, to discovering the history of the regiment and where it fought, and researching it in the archives, through to interviewing the surviving, the last surviving Sussex veterans back in the '80s and '90s.

But it's not just that, though.

Knowing the history of a regiment and its men has helped inform me on many layers of Great War history, and has given me a, a kind of lodestar as I've traveled that old front line, finding so many shadows of it in every place I've been.

So why Wadhurst? Why here? Why this village in East Sussex? Well, I thought in this episode, we'd return to a subject we've discussed before on the podcast, how the Great War is all around us.

It's something I've said a few times here, and I think it's really, really important to remember.