When The Lights Went Out
Remembering the Great War

Winston Churchill observed: ‘history will be kind to me for I intend to write it’. I doubt he would have said this in the digital age, where anyone can blog their view of the world. The sheer volume of books published to coincide with the First World War makes it hard to say anything new or original on the subject and the hotly contested issue of why the war began is especially wearisome, unless we take a severely reductionist approach and claim the first cause was simply a few gunshots in Sarajevo.
Harry Patch, the last serving British soldier, died in 2009, meaning there is no longer any living testimony to this gruesome war. It is easy to be buried by the weight of words written on the subject, many of which contradict one another, and to lack the willpower to dig ourselves free. The bewildering array of views on the war may be gleefully taken by post-modernists as evidence that there are few, if any, objective truths to lay claim to in history, but I believe we should resist this. History may have many different and competing narratives, but it contains plenty of objective facts and truths and we should not despair of finding them.