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All the oral histories by Lyn MacDonald -- the only one I don't have is They Called It Passchendaele. My principal references are Martin Gilbert's The First World War and The Imperial War Museum Book of the First World War by Malcolm Brown.

I've been to Belgium, and I'm headed to France next month. I've stood (approximately) where John McCrae wrote "Flanders Fields." The fields really are flat and you can see a long distance in every direction. It's farmland, mostly. Clutches of white buildings with red tile roofs. And in every direction you can see a Cross of Sacrifice that marks a cemetery. There might be a dozen graves. Might be a hundred. Tyne Cot cemetery has something like 12,000 graves.

It's terrible to contemplate. But it would be much worse if no one remembered.

I've started to read Victory at Vimy : Canada comes of age, April 9-12, 1917 a book just published this March by Ted Barris.

I've not read that book, but it sounds like something I would enjoy. I recommend Welcome to Flanders Field: The First Canadian Battle of the Great War Ypres, 1915. It has a lot of details about Canada on the homefront at the start of the war, as well as on the battlefield.

I'd like to go to Vimy Ridge someday.

I read Goodbye to all that when I was 16 and it made a huge impression on me. The first world war was horrifying - not just because all war is horrifying which it is but the thought of all those young men who went off so cheerfully thinking it would all be over by Christmas and the horrors that they had to face. I sometimes try to imagine what the trenches must have been like and can't even begin to get close - soldiers drowning in the mud. Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy is well worth reading as is William - an englishman by Cecily Hamilton which has been republished by Persephone Books. It was published in 1919 when the author was still in France where she had been since the outbreak of war in 1914. Both my grandfathers and several great uncles (one of whom died when he was hit by a shell) were in the war. We must never forget them.

Please let me know what you thought of the book. My great uncle died after the war of wounds suffered at Vimy Ridge. He and his brother, my grandfather, were the sons of English immigrants in Chicago. When the war broke out without U.S. participation, he went to Canada to enlist while his brother returned to England and enlisted in the RFC. If you thought worthwhile I'd be interested in trying it.

Goodbye to all that and Old Solidiers Never Die by Frank Richards, a private in Graves' own regiment, tell me more than the overview histories could - although these of course also have their place.

Definitely worth reading is For Your Freedom and Ours about Polish airmen of the Kosciuszko squadron, both for their achievement and for a sober reminder of their shameful treatment after the war.

I've just finished Lyn MacDonald's 1914-1918 Voices and Images of the Great War. I skipped the Gallipoli chapter; I can't stand even to think about Gallipoli.

My great-uncle fought in the Meuse-Argonne with the 35th Division, which was nearly destroyed there. He was gassed and shot in the throat. I'm kind of surprised he survived. I'm surprised the Germans didn't manage to kill them all.

Gallipoli is so resonant in peoples' minds - even now.

In New Zealand and Australia it is the main battle site people remember when thinking of either of the two world wars of the twentieth century.