Ww1

The war memorial in my hometown, a place of no more than 6,000 people today, lists the names of no fewer than 292 men from Selkirk killed in the Great War. As we remember them, and the hundreds of thousands and millions of others today, it’s also worth noting that it is a mark of how much better the world is now that such sacrifice, such slaughter, is all but inconceivable. There are thousands of terrible stories with which one can mark Remembrance Sunday. Stuart Bathgate wrote a fine piece for the Scotsman yesterday, reminding us of one such story and the dreadful casualties suffered by the London Scottish rugby

I should probably be inured to articles arguing that even though europe endured “two twentieth-century apocalypses that left it depopulated and permanently traumatized” it is wrong for europeans to have drawn any conclusions, or learnt any lessons, from the First and Second World Wars. And yet, I’m afraid, I continue to be irritated by such pieces, not least because they invariably demand that europeans prove their moral seriousness by going to war more frequently, regardless of the cost or even the cause involved. Equally, it’s startling quite how many people never met a war they couldn’t embrace and champion. Michael Oren, historian and prospective Israeli ambassador to Washington, seems to

Back in the days when the Edinbugh Evening News printed a “Saturday Pink” edition, it used to be said that there were two headlines on hand for whenever Scotland played England for the Calcutta Cup. Occasionally the sub-editors could scream “It’s Bannockburn!”; more often they were left to lament “It’s Flodden”. The latter, as always when the game is played at Twickenham, seems the more probable result tomorrow. Still, talk of ancient battles is merely tabloid hyperbole. Other conflicts loom larger. Frank Keating had a characteristically lovely piece in the Guardian this week, recalling the terror of the First World War and the calamitous toll it took on rugby: The