World War I was catastrophic, cataclysmic and all destructive. It wiped out empires and aristocracies and tore through the middle class.

It was a conflict that was pursued foolishly and incestuously by the royal families of Europe and it fertilised the ground for an even greater war, two decades later.

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It produced an atmospheric solemnity of grief and loss and a lingering, collective neurosis.

When the guns fell silent in Europe on November 11, 1918, some 16 million had been left dead. A ceremonial ritual grew up around commemorating the fallen.

So horrific were those events that a convention known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact was born, an instrument that initially began as a bilateral agreement between the United States and France to abandon war as an instrument of foreign policy.

Eventually, virtually all the established states of the day signed it, heralding a most fabulous illusion, pursued even as countries began rearming.

The commemorators that make an appearance on Remembrance Day........

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