Sir, There are few of us young or old who are not at least vaguely familiar with the famous recruitment poster from 1914 in which a glaring Lord Kitchener points at us and proclaims that he and our country ‘needs you’.
It is one of the most iconic and enduring images of the First World War and serves as a reminder that military service back then – and during the second global conflict that followed 21 years later – was all-encompassing, rather than the situation today where each and every one of us has a choice as to whether we wish to serve our country in this most important of ways.
It is the unspoken hope that our world will never suffer war on this scale again, but it is a stark fact of modern life that, as I write, there are countless conflicts taking place across the globe, many of which involve our brave servicemen and servicewomen.