With the passing of the last World War One veteran, 110-year-old Claude Stanley Choules, on May 5th, the terrible battles of the Great War also pass out of living memory.

When we look at pensioners on the street, it’s difficult to imagine that they were once young and in many cases performed heroics in global conflicts that we, with our largely cosseted lives, can only guess at.

So, for once, I am going to break one of my cardinal rules and use Frost for an unashamed plug, because it’s a book that everyone should read – and remember.

Ebury Press’ ‘Forgotten Voices of The Great War’ by Max Arthur captures the first-hand accounts of the men and women involved in the bitterest of wars that cost the lives of some 37 million people.

Gunner Leonard Ounsworth: “In the evening, we went up to Trones Wood. There were no trees left intact, just stumps and treetops and barbed wire mixed together, and bodies all over the place. Jerries and ours.

Robbins pulled up some undergrowth and as we fished our way through there was this dead Jerry, his whole hip shot away and all his guts out and flies all over it. Robbins stepped back and then this leg that was up a tree became dislodged and fell on his head. He vomited on the spot.”

Private Charles Taylor: “I started crawling towards our lines and I had never seen so many dead men clumped together. That was all I could see and I thought to myself, ‘All the world’s dead.’”

Private Harry Patch: “ All over the battlefield the wounded were lying down, English and German asking for help. We weren’t like the Good Samaritan in the Bible, we were the robbers who passed by and left them. You couldn’t help them. I came across a Cornishmen, ripped from shoulder to waist with shrapnel, his stomach on the ground beside him in a pool of blood. As I got to him, he said. ‘Shoot me.’ He was beyond all human aid. Before we could even draw a revolver he had died. He just said, ‘Mother.’ I will never forget it.

Lest we forget too.