The Great War (1914 -1918) was called 'the war to end all wars', yet the negotiated peace and the Treaty of Versailles (1919) did little but sow seeds of such discontent that the world rushed headlong into another global conflict just a generation later. The Second World War (1939 -1945) claimed more lives and casualties than the First and was probably a more truly global conflict.  Yet, in the west, we somehow see WW2 as a 'cleaner' or 'more civilised' conflict than WW1.  Alistair Horne, in the preface to his excellent book 'The Price of Glory', probably the definitive account of the 1916 Battle of Verdun, states:   "If there ever had to be war again, then World War II with its tanks and aircraft and blitzkriegs showed that there were better ways of waging it than by hurling tens of thousands of men to certain death across the mud of no-man's-land..... Perhaps in our self-satisfaction we chose to suppress the unpalatable truth that World War II had not really been won by tanks and aircraft, but by the (Sommes) and Verduns fought out of sight of our western eyes in the East, at Stalingrad and before Leningrad; where hundreds of thousands of Soviet and German infantrymen had died, in appalling battles of attrition, just as they had a quarter of a century previously.  The reality is that, between two equally powerful, modern, industrial states, total war costs lives." Total war costs the lives of both service personnel and civilians alike and there is little discrimination between either.  Even on the Western Front in World War2 daily attritional rates from D-Day to the end of the war stand comparison with anything experienced in the First World War. For many in their middle years today, WW2 was fought by their father's generation and seems a piece of history within reach, but, as with the first great conflict, those who survived were reluctant to discuss their experiences with anyone other than fellow comrades in arms.  Our knowledge is more likely furnished from books, feature films and television documentaries, of which there are a plethora, than stories recounted by our fathers.  Our quest for knowledge seems insatiable.