[Mithalwen]

I happen to be living in Warwickshire for the time being and I had Tolkien quotes in my mind as I drove through some of its lovely countryside - Bilbo saying how Frodo was still in love with the Shire and then Frodo saying how he had tried to save the Shire and it had been but not for him. And I remembered my great uncle in the RFC and his cousin in the Warwickshire regiment born a few miles and months apart and buried a few miles apart near Amiens - a poignant indicator of how little advance had been made in the nearly two years that separated their deaths aged just 18 and 19.

"So they gave their bodies to the commonwealth and received each for his memory praise that will never die and with it the grandest of all sepulchres, not that in which their mortal bones are laid, but a home in the minds of men, where their glory remains fresh to stir to speech or action as the occasion comes by. For the whole earth is a sepulchre of famous men' and their story is not graven only on stone over their native earth, but lives on far away without visible symbol woven into the stuff of other men's lives."-