Memorial

Coming home from work this evening, I noticed that our village Memorial Hall had been decorated with a copy of that famous Kitchener poster, doubtless to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. And it seemed incongruous, given that the hall was originally built in the early 1920s as a memorial to those from Patcham who had been killed in that war; and symbolic of the strange ambiguity at the heart of our attitude to remembrance - that mixture of affirmation of heroism and horror at the price of war.

Perhaps, as a friend of mine suggested on Twitter this morning, it is prefereable to commemorate the ends of wars rather than their outbreak.