In Europe

the garden and forget about the war.’
    I drink tea at the kitchen table, talk a little with a young Scotsman, look at all the empty chairs around us, muse over the boys from back then. In London I had met Lyn MacDonald, an expert on the First World War, a writer who traced and interviewed hundreds of veterans before it was too late, the mother confessor of the last survivors.
    She told me how she had become intrigued by all those little clubs of old men who got together regularly in the 1960s and 1970s to raise a glass and sing a song. ‘The mere fact that they were together, that was enough. No one who hadn't been through the war could really understand what that meant.’
    MacDonald always spoke of them as ‘the boys’. ‘When I interviewed them, I quickly found myself talking, not to extremely old men, but to very young men from 1914. To them, that war was often more real than the rest of their lives. As one of them put it: “I lived my entire life between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, the rest was only the credits.”’
    During our conversation, she warned me against judging too hastily: ‘That generation wasn't mad, they were fantastic people. But they had very different ideals: patriotism, a sense of duty, service, self-sacrifice. They were typical Victorians, and after the war they came back to a world where they felt less and less at home.’
    But still, what drove them? What drove all those men to take part in collective suicide? Lyn MacDonald told me about a man who was wounded, fell, and all he could think was:‘What a waste! All those months of expensive training, and I haven't even fired a shot!’ Everything in him wanted to fight, to prove himself.
    ‘Going over the top’, the leap from the trenches, was the definitive experience of the First World War, and at the same time the most terrifying: endless waiting, the passing round of rum, vomiting from nerves, the count, the whistles, out of the trenches, towards the enemy, through the barbed wire, running for your life in an unimaginable pandemonium of bullets, mines and mortars, and then shooting, burning, stabbing, killing. ‘Over the top, boys, come on, over the top.’ And they went.
    Friends, neighbours, fellow villagers all volunteered together, were trained together and went over the top together. ‘You went, right, it was your duty, you'd signed up for it,’ said Arthur Wagstaff (b.1898) in the BBC documentary mentioned earlier. Tommy Gay: ‘Me and my mate were always together, the first time we went over the top we went together, but I never saw him after that. There was nothing but bullets. But not one of them had my name on it!’ Robbie Burns (b.1897): ‘Before every major attack you had the feeling this could be the very last time. You didn't let it show, you didn't talk about it, you kept it to yourself.’
    At the start of the Battle of the Somme, even the most hardened soldiers fouled themselves when they realised that their commander had made a fatal mistake: ten minutes before the attack, he had stopped the shelling of the German positions. That gave the Germans, as they well knew, enough time to run from their bunkers, man their machine guns and slaughter the attackers. And that is exactly what happened. But they still went when the whistle blew.
    All manner of explanations can of course be given for this phenomenon, varying from the patriotism on the home front to the strong senseof camaraderie and the tight discipline within the British and German armies. Barthas describes the start of an absurd attack in Northern France, in the early hours of 17 December, 1914, straight into the German machine guns with no cover. A major had given the order. At first the captain refused to pass it along, the two men fought, then the captain climbed out of the trench and was shot down after taking a few steps. Barthas: ‘In the trenches the men were moaning and begging “But I have three children.” Or they screamed “Mama, Mama.” Another soldier begged for mercy. But the major, revolver in hand and beside himself with rage, threatened to shoot anyone who hesitated.’ Finally, they went, just a little more afraid of their major than they were of the enemy.
    There is also another side to the story. The soldiers had not, after all, gone to war to ‘die for their fatherland’, but to kill, to wound, to mutilate. In most of the letters and diaries from the front, however, this subject is carefully avoided. Emphasis is