They Shall Not Pass! A six-day battlefield tour following the French Army from the opening campaigns of 1914 to final victory in 1918.
Spaces are limited.
See the places that define the podcast’s stories, with added context and new details you won’t get from audio alone.
Join the voices behind Not So Quiet on the Western Front for a tour shaped by years of research.
A welcoming group where curiosity is encouraged and no one is left behind — whether you know every battalion number or you’re brand new to it all.
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Dan is proud to have worked for over a decade as both a professional military historian and battlefield guide across Europe.
Dan holds a Masters degree in the History of Britain in the First World War and has worked as a consultant in the media and on a number of national and international military history projects. Outside of history he enjoys boxing and cycling, neither with particular skill.
James Taub is a military historian based in Washington D.C., specialising in the First World War and particularly the French Army.
He holds an MA from the University of Glasgow and previously worked for the United States World War One Centennial Commission. A long-standing guest on Not So Quiet on the Western Front, James is our go-to expert on the French experience of the Great War, with a particular interest in the ordinary soldiers who fought it.
By 1917 the French Army had been fighting for almost three years. Today explores its greatest crisis — and the remarkable transformation that followed.
We explore the Chemin des Dames, battlefield of the disastrous Nivelle Offensive of April 1917, and a special visit beneath it into the extensive tunnel and quarry systems of the extraordinary subterranean battlefield occupied by French and German soldiers. Using the ground itself, we examine the 1917 mutinies — what happened when sections of the exhausted French Army refused further futile offensives, and how Pétain restored discipline while changing the way the army fought and cared for its men.
At Berry-au-Bac, birthplace of French armour, we look at the Schneider and Saint-Chamond tanks that entered battle during the Nivelle Offensive, the problems they encountered, and the road to the far more successful Renault FT. We close at Fismes, introducing the growing American presence on the Western Front and the changing nature of coalition warfare in the war's final phase.
Accommodation: Reims
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Our final day examines how the battered army of 1917 became one of the principal instruments of Allied victory in 1918.
We explore the Second Battle of the Marne, Germany's final great offensive of July 1918, and the French defensive system that helped stop it — defence-in-depth, artillery, aircraft, tanks and intelligence working in concert. At Belleau, remembered principally as an iconic action of the US Marine Corps, we place that famous fight back into its wider French operational context.
At Soissons we visit the battlefield of the Franco-American counterstroke of 18 July 1918, launched with hundreds of tanks against the exposed flank of the German Marne salient — a decisive turning point in the war's momentum.
We finish at Compiègne, the clearing at Rethondes where the Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, closing with a discussion of how profoundly the French Army was transformed between 1914 and 1918 — and why France's contribution to Allied victory has become so surprisingly poorly understood outside France.
We then return to the UK to finish the tour.
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