I often wonder what my father thought as he watched me play at soldiers on the window ledge, pointing my small howitzer at the serried ranks with deadly aim and skill, then leaned forward, brushing others off with my careless sleeve like some pestilential disease. Years earlier, not much more than a lad himself, he'd marched blithely from just such a toy cupboard to the Great War, where he soon became entrenched, with thousands of others, in a morass of pointless death.

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