Concerning the post I made to your blog, thank you for your kind words. I have always been passionate about the heritage of Great Britain – not always a particularly pretty or happy subject for Britons themselves with the First World War of course; which certainly contrasts with that song (‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’). For me, it shows the truly pathetic nature of war itself: counting down as so many young people lose their lives in a war of such conquest and inhumanity. The way in which lives were forgotten, only to be recorded in statistical analyses both disappoints and infuriates me. Whilst today, with a maximum of, say, nine or 10 soldiers dying in a very bad week, one can see the sheer uproar publicly and through the media. Yet back then, on – for the sake of example – the 1st July 1916 (Battle of the Somme), 60,000 young men die in disgusting, bloody battle and nobody bats an eyelid. Where is the hatred? The anger? The remorse? Nothing.

I’ve never been an overtly philosophical person myself, but one quote has always stood out for me regarding the Great War: “When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die” (Sartre). Again, Plato also concluded that “it is only the dead that have seen the end of war”. Hence the fickle nature of war and man combined.