Today is Remembrance  Sunday and this year, thanks to the internet, we know more of the detail and scale of our personal loss, repeated in almost every family in Europe and the Commonwealth.

We remember George Stewart who died at Passchendael in 1917.

We remember Frederick  McWicker, from Bacup, who died of his wounds on 12th November 1917, fighting in the Egyptian theatre of war with the 5th battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers.  He was 24.

We remember his brother, Walter McWicker, my husband’s grandfather, who died of his wounds on 24th February 1918 in Flanders, fighting with the East Lancashire Regiment.  He was 39, a slipper-maker with three children, conscripted late into the war because of deafness and he died when he failed to heed the bugle calling a retreat.

We remember Geoffrey Sebastian Buck M.C., D.F.C., who died in action with the RAF in France on 3rd September 1918, aged 21. His plane which had been badly shot up while flying over the lines, disintegrated on landing.

We remember his uncle, Cyril Bernard Wilson Buck, priest and army chaplain, aged 39 when he died, tirelessly tending the wounded under fire in France on 29th September 1918 for which he was awarded a posthumous military cross.