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Oh I was delighted

WAR NORMALISED WHAT ought to have remained exceptional. In war, normality meant living alongside death. As a nurse, Edith Appleton was accustomed to that  –…


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Gawping at amputees

WE WERE WINNING, on the Somme at least. But it was the wrong kind of winning. A limited advance  –  not a breakthrough. The outcome…


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Who Made The Law?

FUNNY OLD WORLD. Except — not funny at all. Why is it that we ‘remember’ only the first day of the Somme when in fact the campaign…


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The Claims Of Good Sportsmanship

MAYBE WE WERE winning. Not, of course, winning in the sense that the end of the war was nigh. That fantasy burned brightly in many…


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Never Prouder Of Anything

WERE THE GERMANS HURTING TOO? Of course they were. Allied troops — who saw the dead and dying — knew that bullets and barbed wire, gas and artillery shells…