We MUST ask: What was their heroism for?

SINCE I first blundered on to the edge of war, and saw what bullets do to human flesh and bone, I have given daily thanks that my generation never had to fight. These days, when I watch old films of D-Day, I imagine myself, trembling and gibbering with fear and cold, turning tail and running rather than face the German guns. I still don’t know how they did it, soft human flesh running head on into hard, cruel metal. And I also wonder, more and more, how it came about that young men found themselves having to do this horrible thing. And so, while I honour them for it, and understand why they had to do it, I do not honour those politicians whose vanity and stupidity made it necessary.

If we are serious about revering these men, and I am very serious about it, hasn’t the time come to look once again at the 1939 war, and how it came about, and whether it was as good a war as it is cracked up to be?

For if we don’t, how will we avoid the same thing happening again? In my experience, most of my generation still have a glamorised, idealised view of the Second World War that has little to do with what really took place.

Those who actually fought in it generally shut up about the horrid details. The only D-Day veteran I ever knew, asked to describe what it was like to step ashore at Arromanches that morning, would only say: ‘There seemed to be rather a lot of sand flies about.’

An equally eloquent silence is to be found in the war cemetery at Bayeux, where the terse and hopelessly sad inscriptions on the graves of all those 18-year-olds will reduce anyone to helpless tears in less than a minute.