Cllr Peter Thornton, leader of South Lakeland District Council, reflects on the horrors of war

I've heard it said that we can't comprehend any number larger than seven. Above this, we count, but don't understand the actual number.

How can we understand a number as large as 576,207?

On Armistice Day this year I walked around a new memorial near Arras in Northern France. It is constructed in the form of a circle with a list of 579,606 names on 500 panels, each with over 1,000 names.

It's the longest list I've ever seen and it is a list of those killed in the Great War, just in the Pas de Calais region of Northern France.

241,214 names are British - almost half the total. 173,876 are German and over 106,012 French. The scale is staggering and it takes some time just to walk past all of the names.

And that was just one area of this war. Total British casualties were about four times this amount and behind each name there was a grieving family whose lives would never be the same again.

We may feel that Arras is a long way from Kendal, but it took me just five hours to travel there by train and on the way there I wondered how those young men felt as they travelled on this same route 100 years ago.

I was especially thinking of a young soldier named George Cragg, who was born at Ubarrow Hall, where Hazel and I now live.

George had probably never travelled further than Kendal. He attended the village school and would have learned about France in his geography lessons.

Did he see it as a place of great glamour? Paris, the Eiffel Tower, music, fine clothes and Can Can girls?

What did George learn in his history lessons at Longsleddale village school? Did he expect war to be filled with colourful standards, gallantry and cavalry charges?

This was to be the greatest adventure of his life and he probably travelled with friends both new and old. None of them would be expecting machine guns, mud, poison gas and aerial combat.

They would be taking part in the war that would change the way we live our lives and their world would never be the same again.

George is still there, buried in Northern France. His life ended at the Somme, just five days before the battle of July 1, at which so many of his colleagues perished.

This war literally decimated the young men of our country. One in ten soldiers, sailors and airmen perished in this conflict - almost one million died from our small Island.

One hundred years is a long time. The last -surviving soldier died some time ago, although there are still civilians with childhood memories of that time.

Perhaps because of the passing of time, there is a surge in battlefield tours of the region, although I was surprised to discover that Thomas Cook were running tours while the war was still taking place.

Everyone takes something different from the experience of seeing the list of names and the endless fields of crosses. I kept returning to the inescapable fact that this war was caused by the failure of politics.

The great nations of Europe reached a point at which killing each other seemed the only way forward.

What a dreadful conclusion to come to, and one that is still being reached throughout the world.

Thankfully, peace has reigned here for over 69 years and we've found other ways to settle our differences.

The names on the memorial are not segregated by either rank or nationality. Divided in war, they now appear on this longest list, united at rest.