Although not of a military frame of mind, World War I has always been a subject that I am drawn to and more precisely, the heroic and tragic lives of the soldiers of the western front. So the marking of the 90th anniversary of the Armistice this week has been particularly poignant especially with the appearance at the Cenotaph yesterday morning of the last three surviving veterans of the conflict.

In hunting out my birth certificate a week or so ago I found it in a cache of family documents. Among them was the marriage certificate of my paternal grandparents. I discovered that John Voisey married Nora Wright in 1916 while he was serving in the army. For some unknown reason I had never figured out this family connection to the War To End All Wars. On quizzing my ma about it she said that my Gran had told her that he had been gassed on the western front and his health was affected afterwards, dying in 1932. I never talked to her or my dad about this that I can recall and am sorry about that.
The anniversary has also inspired some fine tv programmes. Ian Hislop followed up his excellent Channel Four series NOT FORGOTTEN with an interesting insight into the lives of Concientious Objectors - men and women who risked public and private disgrace by refusing to fight; there were also sympathetic and idiosyncratic profiles of Wilfred Owen by Jeremy Paxman and Vera Brittain by Jo Brand - the last one was particularly good - and the BBC also had a series of four programmes where eight 'names' discovered their own connections to the War.

The two I saw were quite moving, Natalie Cassidy discovered her grandfather had voluntereed to clear bodies off the post-war battlefields and then to clear unexploded shells and she was shocked to see this job is still going on - and still claiming lives. Dan Snow was peturbed to find that his great-grandfather Major Thomas Snow was not only responsible for the catastrophic first few days of The Somme but at the enquiry tried to shift the blame onto his subordinates. Most poignant of all were the journeys of Kirsty Wark and Rolf Harris to trace the footsteps of great-uncle & uncle only to find that both died within an arm's reach of peace. Rolf's uncle died as a result of wounds in a battle two weeks before the war ended wheras Kirsty's great-uncle died of the devastating Spanish flu epidemic 12 days after the Armistice was signed.

The stories of these men and women tested to beyond endurance at times by the events around them never fail to move me.

I am just finishing Anthony Beevor's thorough history of the Spanish Civil War - another conflict that reflects no glory - and I am hard-pressed to think of any TV series which has covered this at all. Anyone know better?