OVER the next few days there will be a number of events and commemorative services across the area – and, indeed, the nation – marking the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War.

There seems no escaping the centenary ceremonies and services, but nor should there be.

Anyone who has been reading our archivist Mike Dewey’s Nostalgia pages this year cannot fail to have been moved at some of the stories he has recounted of people from the local area and their experiences in the war.

Some died in battle, others survived with terrible scars – physical and mental – to return to everyday life as best they could (a number of these can be viewed on our website, at www.bucksfreepress.co.uk/ nostalgia if you have missed any).

They are striking stories for many reasons – the way these men were torn from their everyday lives to find themselves on the fronts of Europe, then, if lucky enough to survive, plunged back into the world they left behind again.

And we are lucky to be able to have these accounts, to be able to connect in some small way to the dreadful times these soldiers faced (and, of course, all those others whose lives the conflict ran roughshod over).

‘In some small way’ being the operative term, of course – there is no way of ever truly imagining what it was like for them, just of being given perhaps the slightest inkling here and there.

I have had the privilege of speaking to a number of war veterans as a reporter, largely from the Second World War, who have shared memories – some terrible, some moving - of their experiences and they are always humbling and rewarding interviews to conduct.

You have to wonder if such large-scale acts of remembrance have a meaningful impact on the world stage.

There is no shortage, after all, of particularly vicious conflict at various points of the globe as our horrifying news headlines attest on a daily basis – the situations in the likes of Syria, Gaza and the Ukraine, being the most obvious examples of recent months. Parallels have even been drawn this very week by Prime Minister David Cameron, between Russia’s behaviour and that of Germany’s before the outbreaks of both the First and Second World Wars.

Much, too, has been made of commemorating these in the correct way, with even the Prime Minister coming under fire from Jeremy Paxman last year for comparing the planned centenary events with the sort of scale of the Diamond Jubilee Celebrations of 2012.

There have even been criticisms recently that too much attention is paid to the military machine, what with Armed Forces Day and the recent D Day anniversary, and that we are in danger of celebrating war itself.

The Quakers made this point, suggesting such events were a cynical way of manipulating public support in the face of otherwise unpopular conflicts.

That seems to miss the whole point, though.

What such events and memorials should always come down to, is trying to put a human face and cost to these conflicts – the individual stories and experiences of soldiers waging a war a century ago are vital for giving context to the barely comprehendible numerical statistics of how many lives were actually lost there.