Remembrance 2017

In one year's time it will be a century since the armistice was signed to begin the end of what came to be called the Great War. There will be a host of events to mark the anniversary.
This year, in the comparative quiet, I take time to reflect.
I have spent the last four years immersed in war, as I have been writing successively War on Wheels and then Ordnance. I have read of terrible loss of life, examples of bravery but mainly the dogged work of ordinary people in trying to make sure that our soldiers would have all they needed to defeat the enemy. It was inspiring and has made me think long and hard.
The one enduring image is of waste.
My own father, who led the RAOC in WW2, gave a number of speeches with the title The Waste of War. He had witnessed massive waste of human life in both world wars, but a colossal expenditure of materiel in WWII. As he put it, the side prepared to waste the most would emerge victorious. I might now add, after researching WW1, that alongside the waste of life, the waste of material resources was on a scale so great that made a shortage of raw material a real issue.
I encapsulate this waste in the image of the War Memorial at Chilwell.

Chilwell was a major shell filling factory in WWI and the Army Centre for Mechanisation in WWII. The Memorial remembers the 134 munition workers who lost their lives in an explosion that nearly destroyed the factory on 1 July 1918; it also remembers those who have lost their lives in WWI and later conflicts.