At the going down of the sun

Vernon Scannell, a poet who fought in North Africa in the Second World War, observed in his poem ‘The Great War’:

‘Whenever the November sky Quivers with a bugle’s hoarse, sweet cry The reason darkens; in its evening gleam Crosses and flares, tormented wire, grey earth Spattered with crimson flowers, And I remember, Not the war I fought in But the one called Great Which ended in a sepia November Four years before my birth’.

Everyone in Britain, to an extent barely believable across the rest of Europe, has grown up in the shadow of the Great War — and particularly the trench lines that cut across the fields of Flanders and France for four hundred miles and four long years. The war whose centenary falls in 2014 ended a century in which Britain had, ever since Waterloo, managed to avoid entanglement in Europe’s wars — steering clear, for example, of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 which both gave dramatic notice of  the rising power of Germany, and presented the French with a weeping grievance and an itch for ‘revanche’.