Heroic long-suffering

English patriotism was still a force in 1914. On the first day of the war, my mother’s three brothers, and my father and his two brothers, all joined up together, in the Artists’ Rifles. On the first day of the second world war, which I remember well, there were some similarities, but they were superficial. Again, my elder brother joined immediately. But the mood was resignation, not enthusiasm. There was no rejoicing, no talk of a new and better world: just a despairing attempt to preserve what was left of an unsatisfactory old one.

The truth is, the Great War knocked the stuffing out of the British. They have never been the same since, collectively. Of the 722,000 killed, the vast majority were volunteers, overwhelmingly young: the eager elite. Adam Hochschild writes: ‘Of every 20 British men between 18 and 32 when the war broke out, three were dead and six wounded when it ended.’