My side of the family including my Dad served in the Allied forces. We were lucky - they all came back. My partner's side of the family - and a lot of our friends' parents - served in the Italian and German forces. My partner's family were lucky, too. I know very many people whose families have similar roots, and similar mixed feelings about the Great War to End War and its sequel.
Yes, it was wonderful that Hitler and Mussolini were overthrown, and yes, I'm moved by the veterans on their last visit to the Normandy beaches. But millions died. I have loved ones who remember doodlebugs and V2s hitting London, and loved ones who remember the great cities of northern Italy in flames, and loved ones who remember starving in the ruins in Year Zero, and loved ones who (if they can bear to talk about it at all) told me that the great battles they fought in were full of shit and blood and the stench of fear and terrified young boys blindly shooting. Talk of liberation, and flags, and patriotism, and courage, and duty, and sacrifice do not move me; they sadden me. The boys who fought in the second war were overwhelmingly conscripted. They had in some cases no choice, in others, very little.
Harry Patch the last surviving fighting Tommy, who died in 2009, said, "When the war ended, I don't know if I was more relieved that we'd won or that I didn't have to go back. Passchendaele was a disastrous battle – thousands and thousands of young lives were lost. It makes me angry. Earlier this year, I went back to Ypres to shake the hand of Charles Kuentz, Germany's only surviving veteran from the war. It was emotional. He is 107. We've had 87 years to think what war is. To me, it's a licence to go out and murder. Why should the British government call me up and take me out to a battlefield to shoot a man I never knew, whose language I couldn't speak? All those lives lost for a war finished over a table. Now what is the sense in that?"