I rode Thatch four-and-a- half years ago from Mons to Fontainebleu following the British army of 1914 and I just felt so close to the landscape. Is he as far to the right as most media-friendly historians? "Oh goodness," he says "I really haven't got a view on that. I'm very much a pragmatist and I'd want to make my mind up closet to the time."In fact Holmes is not only Francophile but even partly French "I'm Huguenot on my mother's side. I did my PhD in Paris on the French army of the Second Empire I am extraordinarily fond of France and the French. We are the worst of friends or best of enemies at times - remarkably close and yet at times very distant.

Call it his own brand of military camp."The problem with Hastings is I was in the grip of an extraordinarily powerful emotion," he explains. "You're sitting on a bit of ground where this wonderful Saxon host must have known that even with the best will in the world they wouldn't live to see another sunset."Stripped down to its essentials, War Walks is basically about England's confrontation of the unknown quantity from across the channel - he has renamed our Norman conqueror "William the lucky bastard" - so we may as well know where he stands on the ERM. As he drinks mead from a horn-shaped goblet on the field of Hastings, or munches the whiffy cheeses once scoffed by Henry V's lot on course for Agincourt, there is something thespian about him bordering on the luvvie. But curiously that's just what they wanted."Holmes's theory is that "you could easily say that in some respects I'm a regular officer manque" In fact you could say nothing of the sort. While he would appear to belong to a sporadic line of military broadcasters - Sir Brian Horrocks and Field Marshal Montgomery both had fleeting careers on the small screen - there is little of the ramrod spine and clipped vowels in Holmes's persona. He had also just published Fatal Auenue, about the defenceless corridor of France's eastern border of which De Gaulle once said: "It is in this fatal avenue that we have just-buried a third of our youth.""I was phoned up by the BBC who said `Any chance of putting together the Fatal Avenue idea and some of the presentational skills that you used for the Burma programme?' I thought, to start with, that they'd be put off by the fact that I was quite interested in doing really a very personal series. "I felt that command was such a privilege and such a rarity and there were lots of ways in which I could cock it up but I didn't want one of those ways to be lack of time."It was only a matter of time until someone lobbed television into this juggling act.

The communication skills that are the common denominator of all Holmes's jobs were first deployed in Tales From The Map Room, and the VJ Day film Burma: The Forgotten War. I wanted to get the wind in my hair and the frost on my moustache." He was soon teaching at Sandhurst in the week and sleeping under a hedge at the weekend.There was one period of over two years when he gave up academe to command a battalion. He stuck with the TA instead - "the dear old Essex yeomanry" - whom he had joined while still at school. "I have spent almost all my territorial career in the infantry quite deliberately because I didn't want to grow into a frowsty old academic, lungs full of dust from archives. Holmes nursed an ambition to join the regular army, but after studying history at Cambridge, an offer of a year's study in Illinois took him inexorably down the academic route. And you want to give the viewer a feel for what it's like, then do it."I met Holmes in the first week of his new job at the Ministry of Defence.