Dr David Mervin, Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick, presently living in Arnside, is uneasy about some recent remembrance events

My father served on the Western Front, as did several of my relations, including a cousin whose bravery on the Somme led to an MC, to which was added a bar after he was killed in action in 1918. I have great respect for what these men did.

However, there is another side to all the remembrance events of recent months.

The ceremonies held annually in the Albert Hall always make me somewhat uneasy. All those uniforms, the battle flags, the marching and the music seem to be primarily about celebrating our military victories and only secondly about honouring the fallen.

Wars, far from being a cause for celebration, represent tragedy on a monumental scale and nowhere is this more true than in the case of World War One. And while I am awestruck by the bravery displayed by those who fought, I am no less in awe of the courage shown by those who stood against the tide of lunatic patriotic fervour and hatred that infected British public opinion at the time.

Those who resisted the war were not only extraordinarily brave, they were also right. Far from being embarked on a crusade, or a holy war as so many contemporary commentators claimed, Britain was engaged in a futile, ruinous struggle that killed many and marred the lives of so many more.

Moreover, those who resisted were overwhelmingly vindicated by what came to pass later and by our generation’s better understanding of how WWI came about.

I have sometimes looked at that conflict in personal terms. How would I have dealt with the challenges that confronted all those young men?

No doubt, initially at least, I would have been taken in by all that propaganda about German atrocities, about fighting for freedom and democracy, and defending the rights of small nations.

But then if disillusionment had set in I doubt whether I would have had the courage to take a public stand against the war and been ready to go to prison for my beliefs, as so many did.

In reflecting on the events of a hundred years ago, I also wonder how I would have dealt with the horrors that the men who joined up endured.

The fearsome mud, the monstrous, relentless barrages of shell fire, the infernal lice, the agonies of trench foot, the stench of putrefying corpses. the terrifying danger to life and limb, the need to kill or be killed.

Could I bring myself to bayonet a cowering young German soldier begging for mercy? Could I have been a sniper or a machine gunner mowing down young men like fields of wheat being harvested?

How would I have responded to an order to go over the top and to walk deliberately towards the enemies guns?

What would have been my reaction to having friends and comrades killed and maimed as they stood beside me in a trench? And how would I have borne the anguished cries from no man's land of wounded and dying men?

In the same terrible circumstances I fear I might have been among those who cracked under the intolerable strain.

While I have the greatest respect for those who fought on our behalf in WWI, we should not forget the courage of those who resisted the rush to war and suffered dire consequences as a result, men whose actions in any case were arguably justified by later events.

We also need to show compassion and understanding to those lost souls who faced with the horrendous conditions of that terrible war, would not or could not continue to fight, and, in a shameful number of cases, were shot at dawn.