Fascination with the past ......

I have always had an interest in the past.

Castles, Homes, Buildings, Fields, Henges the "whole 9 yards" as the saying goes.

But I have, for a long long time had a overwhelming fascination with the first World War.

A little background. As some will know, I'm a fairly meek and mild sort of person. Many of the more modern conflicts in the world have had some dubious (and continue too) basis for wasting human life. But, it is a known trait of many people to have a fatal fascination with war.

I remember watching on TV (mainly because all the air time seemed to have been turned over to the task) the coverage of the 1st and 2nd Gulf Wars. As a teenager I watched as the British task Force set sail for the Falklands.Followed, with horror, the loss to the Sheffield, the Atlantic Conveyor, the General Belgrano. The shock at watching burnt and wounded soldiers being evacuated from the landing ships bombed by the Argentine Air force. Then they made war personal by attaching the names of the dead and wounded. Col H Jones, Simon Weston.

But, for some reason I have always had this horrified fascination for the First World War.

All war is horror, intermingled with hero's and extreme evil.But it seems, to me least ways, that the WWI seemed to concentrate all those elements into a few "controlled"areas of the World. A more concentrated version of all that is bad with the human psyche.

As I type this, there is , in the background, the TV on, showing the series The First World War on the Discovery Channel. A further reinforcement of my interest?

As a School Child I was taught the given wisdom of the time, sanitized, of course, for the younger mind. But even then there was enough information to know that WWI was something different.

As I grew up I read, not only of the First, but the Second World War. Vietnam, Korea and The Falklands. But it always came back to the obvious waste of the First World War.

Then I read one of Lynn McDonald's books - 1915

This wasn't one of the more Traditional books on the subject. It wasn't a remote telling of the facts and actions. Clinical. Accurate.

No, these were the retelling of actual people's recollections of the time.What they had done, what they had had to do to survive, not only the battles and actions, but the dangerous tedium of everyday life. From their own minds, their own words. And that seemed, to me, to bring everything to life.

Of course it is important to read, and take in, the overview tombs on any situation, but to read the reality of life at war, from the horses mouthyou then can appreciate what the squallier meant to a real person.

I have read Tommy. And I am reading, at the moment , The last Fighting Tommy, the recollections of Harry Patch (the last British Tommy, who died recently).

It would seem, for all the loss of life in the past century or so, we have learn't nothing.

Within the next week is the parade, and funeral of local soldier, Anthony (Tinny) Lombardi , one of 200 odd British hero's (and numerous other American and Allied Troops) who have died in Afghanistan since the war against terror turned it sights on that mountainous border country. It is also that period when, 70 years ago, the Second World War began.

As a father, I had hoped, like many parents before me throughout history, that their children will never have to become involved in any war, any conflict. And again, it seems, I (we) will be another generation of parents who will, sadly, not achieve this hope.

All that said, and I'm still human, and I'm still fascinated.