Plot II, row C, grave 1...and millions like it

Today, and the days that follow it, are poignant ones for many families in Nottinghamshire.
Some will be remembering young men who lost their lives only recently, fighting battles in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Others will be thinking of loved ones lost in conflicts in the Falklands and Northern Ireland.
Still more people will spare a thought for members of their families who are long gone – the men who went to war between 1939-1945 and 1914-1918.
It’s that most distant conflict that strikes a chord for me.
Yesterday, 8th November, was the 90th anniversary of the day when Lieutenant Harry Baker MC was engaged in the skirmish that would see him shot and killed. Only three days later, World War One ended with an armistice.
Harry’s family, led by my great grandfather, were celebrating the end of the war like most families. They had been looking forward to the return of a son who, having qualified as an accountant, was the great hope of the family.
What they got instead was a telegram informing them of their 26 year-old son’s death and a lost hope that stayed with the family for decades. So great was the bitter sense of loss that neither his parents nor his younger brother, my grandfather, visited his grave.
It was with the help of former Evening Post journalist Vic Piuk that, in the 1990s, I found out where he was buried. The led to a pilgrimage to the village of Dourlers, a tiny farming settlement in France just a few miles from the border with Belgium.
Journeying to a rural village in a foreign country and finding a grave with your family name on it is a strange experience the first time round. Having read the letters he sent home in the months and weeks before his death – letters from a man clearly weary of war – I can understand why his parents felt so bitter.
Their son – a man in whom they had invested so much hope - had died within sight of the finish line.
As poignant as Harry’s story is to me, the tragedy of the Great War was that stories like his were commonplace. Millions of families saw loved ones killed, frequently in terrible circumstances.
When you stand under Thiepval, the huge memorial to the missing on the Somme, the names that cover its walls are almost like a mourning map of the country.
More tragic, still, was the fact that what became known as ‘the war to end all wars’ was followed by an even worse conflict only 20 years later.
It matters not that modern conflicts like Iraq and Aghanistan are not on the same scale. The loss felt by the families of people like Senior Aircraftsman Gary Thompson from Sherwood, Sergeant Craig Brelsford from Chilwell and Private Andrew Cutts of Blidworth – all of whom died in Afghanistan - is just as keen and the sacrifice they made just as great.
Bear that in mind when we hold a minute's silence at 11am on Tuesday 11th November. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month is not just about the past.