In Delville Wood
31st October 2013
All the British survivors have gone now (the men, that is. Just possibly there are bereaved women still alive, but nobody seems to ask about them.) In a hundred years, most things fall silent or shrivel into peculiar objects in display cases. The Crimean War began in 1854; in 1954, it was to me no more than a distant pageant of men with uncommon facial hair, pillbox hats and frogged tunics. By the time British troops went back into Afghanistan after 9/11, nobody in this country felt that the Second Boer War (1899-1902) was ‘relevant’ to what was happening. But the Great War, which ought to be in every sense history, keeps on speaking to us.