A better way to honour these poor men would be to stick the hundreds of thousands spent on commemorations into relief work for those hit by war today.

Having just returned from The Somme I have a lot of sympathy for this viewpoint. The centenary there was a nightmare of bureaucracy and ridiculous levels of ‘security’

However, I can’t help but imagine the social media backlash if the French authorities had simply ignored the centenary, even if they had given a hundred thousand (or whatever) to an armed forces charity.

Dammed if you do … etc.

Moggy