It was not the battle to end all battles and it was certainly not the war to end war. But 100 years ago today began the slaughter or maiming of more than one million men in the Battle of the Somme and it is right we should remember their sacrifice.
The photograph is by an esteemed former colleague, Geoff Pugh, reproduced with his consent, and the context takes us back 10 years. As I have said before, forgive me if you have read this here previously. It bears repetition.
Just three months before the abrupt end of my Daily Telegraph career, I travelled by train from Paris to the Somme to write about the 90th anniversary of the start of one of the grimmest and bloodiest of battles in military history.
As Geoff, my photographic companion, and I walked up a lane towards the giant Lochnagar crater, just outside the village of La Boiselle, we spotted children linking hands around its rim.
We quickened our pace.
It turned out that the hands belonged to children from Dunblane, which I - as I reminded DT readers in this article - was "the Scottish town that has only to be mentioned by name to stir different memories of violent and random death".
The children had no direct connection with the tragic events of 1996 but it was impossible, as an outsider, not to contemplate the awful fates of two groups of people, small children slaughtered at school by a lunatic and soldiers butchered in the First World War. The crater is a relic of the massive mine detonated two minutes before the Battle of the Somme is generally regarded as having commenced.
The teachers accompanying the pupils readily agreed to get the children to repeat the gesture for Geoff's benefit. His photograph, used shallow across much of the page, lingers in my memory as one of the most striking images, taken in my presence, of my long journalistic career. See more of Geoff's work at geoffpugh.photoshelter.com.
I thought of it again when preparing articles for The National, Abu Dhabi about the mighty commemorations of 2014: the 100th anniversary of the start of that war and the 70th anniversary of D-day, the beginning of the end of World War II. In the midst of this work, coincidence struck again: the man I chose among winners in a competition at Salut! Sunderland works in the Middle East but asked for the prize to be sent to his UK address. In Dunblane.
There will be many centenaries to mark in the period to 1918 as we reach the 100th anniversary of each major development of the war.
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And now, please, reflect on some more powerful words, those of the Scottish-Australian singer-songwriter Eric Bogle, whose songs of the Great War are rightly considered among the finest to be written.
This is one verse from his wonderfully crafted song, No Man's Land.
The sun's shining down on these green fields of France;The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished long under the plow;
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard that's still No Man's Land
The countless white crosses in mute witness stand
To man's blind indifference to his fellow man.
And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.
Bogle is, understandably, less than keen on unauthorised reproduction of his work and I am hardly going to write to the address provided, in Oz, to seek permission to quote any more. If the short extract makes you wish to see more, please see the lyrics in full at
http://ericbogle.net/lyrics/lyricspdf/nomansland.pdf.
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I am also reminded of the noble words of Kim Willsher, a good friend and a fine journalist in Paris, , written for the 96th anniversary of the Armistice, a day - as she put it - on which to pause and remember.
They were not "the Fallen" or "the Glorious", and they did not choose to perish and make the "Ultimate Sacrifice". It was not the "Great War" or the "War to end all Wars". These euphemisms are intended to convince us it was a necessary evil, instead of an avoidable bloodbath. Those who fought in Europe between 1914 and 1918 were mostly young men who believed they were on an adventure and had a duty to defend their country. They were plunged into the most unimaginable horror; a horror that even today we are hard pressed to describe.********
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