I CANNOT let pass David Quarrie’s statement that King George V was complicit with the Tsar and the Kaiser in starting the Great War.

He was a constitutional monarch and his cousins were absolute.

Although Britain was engaged in a naval building race with Germany, our principal economic competitor, we went to war for one reason.

In 1839, the Treaty of London, which guaranteed Belgian neutrality, was signed by all of the European great powers.

In 1914, when Germany invaded France it did so via Belgium. We regarded the old treaty as more than a scrap of paper and went to war.

In early 1914, my father, a 15-year-old schoolboy, joined the TA to get money to help his widowed mother. He fought with Gordon Highlanders until the day before Passchendaele when he got shrapnel inn his jaw.

The vast medical operation set up ready for the big push had him in London in a few hours to be operated on by the New Zealand inventor of plastic surgery, Sir Harold Gillies.

No-one could ever tell that he had an artificial jaw.

According to my mother, dad always considered himself lucky both in the timing and treatment of his injury and his escaping the battle itself.

A V Martin, Westfield Close, Wigginton, York