EVERY year I wear a poppy and keep the two-minute silence while I think about the sacrifices our servicemen make, in Afghanistan, Iraq.

It’s part of the yearly cycle that I missed, along with Guy Fawkes Night, when I lived abroad.

I took for granted that every British town and village has a war memorial, without wondering why the same isn’t true in other countries.

The First World War was long before I or my parents were born and when the last British veterans died this summer, it seemed even more remote and irrelevant.

Then my son went on a school trip to some First World War battlefields.

From the moment his coach arrived back in York a week ago, he has talked about what he had seen, as he tries to comprehend the enormity and senselessness of it.

He told me of the cemeteries of massed white crosses that you see on television every November, but he also told me of travelling for hours through a landscape dotted with smaller cemeteries with a few hundred graves each.

My son told me of going to the Menin Gate at Ypres where every evening local buglers play the Last Post and recite one of the 58,000 names of dead soldiers with no graves that are carved into the gate. The buglers are about half-way through and they’ve been doing continuously it for almost a century.

He told me of how few German cemeteries there are and how the German dead were piled into mass graves under black crosses because, burdened with reparation payments, the Germans didn’t have their own war graves commission and were treated as the enemy, even after death.

But the iconic book of trench warfare, All Quiet On The Western Front, was written in German, by a German soldier, about German soldiers. More people died on the Western Front than in the Holocaust and there were so many bodies, many of them unknown, that the Allies made the decision: no repatriation. So every village and town built a war memorial; to give bereaved parents, children, wives, girlfriends, grandparents a focus for their grief.

My son told me of a photo taken showing most of Ypres that you can’t take now because a cathedral blocks your view.

It blocked your view before the war, but, like the rest of Ypres, it was literally flattened by artillery. That was before nuclear weapons or carpet bombing.

After the war, the town and cathedral was rebuilt exactly as it was, but the people couldn’t be rebuilt. They died in the rubble, or from gas, or fled if they were lucky.

They were just a few of the civilians who lost homes, life, everything. Any farmhouse, any village within range of the guns was flattened because it could be used by the other side. If only the men who ordered the bombing of Dresden, Coventry, Sarajevo, Baghdad and the Gaza strip, among others, had seen this.

If I had my way, I would make every politician and diplomat in the world visit the battlefields and tell them: “This is what war means. Utter devastation and death. If this happens again on any scale, because of something you do or don’t do, then you have failed in your job.” On Remembrance Day, I will be thinking of the dead, military and civilian, of the First World War as well as those more recent.

We must remember man’s inhumanity to man and learn from it.

And one day I will follow in my son’s footsteps and visit the battlefields because, as he said, I can only fully appreciate what they mean when I do.