Well said, Keith.
I've seen parties of giggling, larking schoolchildren reduced to silent awe at the Thiepval memorial, on which are carved the names of the 72,085 British soldiers who fought in the Somme sector of the Western Front and whose bodies were never found.
What moves them is certainly not hatred or nostalgia - they're too young to hate and too young to have any memory of that other time. It's a sense of the monstrous waste of war; a realisation that every one of those names represents a human being, often little older than them, whose existence was obliterated in the peaceful, rolling countryside in which they now stand.
Those kids come from all over the UK, but an enormous number do come from Ulster, because - as has been remarked in the coverage of Trimble's visit - the Somme has enormous significance in the history of "The Troubles".
The 36th (Ulster) division - nicknamed Carson's Army - was composed of new volunteers who, in many cases, went over the top wearing their Orange sashes. They advanced further than any other division on that day, at a cost of over 5,000 casualties - more than half the divisional strength - while assaulting the virtually impregnable Schwaben Redoubt.
Many of them had been members of the proscribed Ulster Volunteer Force before the war, and there was some feeling that they had been placed in the most hazardous part of the front with the hardest objective as "punishment" (scratch an Orangeman and you'll usually find a conspiracy theorist! :^) ). However the courage and sacrifice of the Ulster division was recognised, even though it had come at a huge cost.
Certainly, when the Free State was formed just five years later, most of Ulster remained part of the Union, with all the consequences that have followed, including the post hoc romanticising and falsificationof the Orange input into the Ulster division's record.
In Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme the catholic writer Frank McGuinness deftly illustrates the idea that the lessons of history are so often used wrongly, to justify contemporary bigotry and conflict. McGuinness wrote in the early 80s, when the current Troubles were at their height, but his message is as valid today.
And, as if in some horrible assent to McGuinness's theory, the elegant Helen's Tower memorial to the Ulster division near Thiepval has a new neighbour - a squat, shiny black granite memorial. Still very new, it stands out from the many other memorials in the area because of a bright orange painted sash and the words "No Surrender".
To me it is jarring and ugly, and does smack of hatred, jingoism and warped nostalgia (just as did the attitude of Ireland for many years in refusing to acknowledge the huge contribution - entirely voluntary - made by hundreds of thousands of Irishmen in two world wars)
Yes, war is rarely glorious - it's about pain, bereavement and suffering - but we do need to remember what it is and what it does, So, instead of "no surrender" we should learn its lessons and say "never again".
Sorry, a long ramble, but what the heck...