Repeat

There's still quite a bit of interest in the First World War - and so there should be. It's no longer the centenary of the outbreak of war, but a hundred years ago those poor young chaps were dying in the trenches.

Recently we watched a very good subtitled series called 1864, about a war between Denmark and Prussia that we'd never heard of before. It was excellent. The battle scenes were unsettling, but battle scenes should be. I had a bad dream after the last one.

And last Friday, my friend Claire and I met for a sunny day in beautiful York, had lunch in a secluded convent garden, wandered through the medieval streets, drank Pimms, and walked around the city walls. In one of the towers on York city walls is an exhibition about King Richard III (remember him? Wars of the Roses, curvature of the spine, car park in Leicester?). York has always been loyal to KR3. Claire is definitely a Ricardian, I give him the benefit of the doubt, and we both love history, so we were up for a KR3 exhibition. Part of it was about the Battle of Towton.

Towton was one of the bloodiest, bitterest battles ever fought in Britain, and the one that brought Richard's older brother Edward to the throne. A rout turned to a massacre.

ssentially, all of these - WW1, 1864, The Wars of the Roses - were the same. One or two people got a big idea. They were people of power and influence, so they were able to promote this idea and raise armies.

A lot of young men were killed. Farm boys, many of them. Children lost fathers, money was squandered, land was wasted, people got poorer, maimed soldiers lived out their days. There was a mess.

Most wars are the same. it's a repeating pattern and societies should have learned to recognise it by now, and do something different. Aren't we clever enough? We can invent ever-new ways of killing each other, can't we find a way of not wanting to?

AND YET -

AND YET - last Friday, Claire and I met for a sunny day in York... lunch... garden... Pimms...

so despite all the conflicts of the twentieth century and before, and despite that fact that, come to think of it, our ancestors might have tried to kill each other at the Battle of Culloden, Claire and I have grown up in a free world and so have our children, and there is joy. Lots of it, popping up like daisies. War bellows and screams, but at the end it does not have the last word.