I have just heard a presenter on the BBC Countryside programme talking about WWI dead. What this is doing on a programme about farming, the countryside and wildlife I don't know. The chap was in a graveyard and told me that this was the grave one of fallen of the war who gave his life for my freedom. One of my grandfathers died in that war (dysentery in Cairo) I am remembering him and his fellows this week. I have been wearing my poppy. But I do think this "They died for our freedom" line is complete nonsense. My grandfather didn't die for my freedom; I couldn't tell you why he went to war; I doubt that he could. After struggling to understand the history of the First World War I can still find no sense in it except the shifting of power and boundaries between the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Russia Empire as the old political forces and the rising power of a new force - Germany - on the other, and the dragging in of the British Empire into all of this. I can't see anything in this that suggests to me that this was a war to grant or maintain my freedom. This rewriting of history to transform all of the wars that Britain entered, even WWI, into heroic, valiant and inescapable defences of liberty is utterly bogus and deeply dangerous. Revisionists like Gove might like to say differently, but WWI, whatever else it was, was not a struggle for our freedom.