I've thought long and hard about why this day is important to me and I don't agree that it is about being thankful as such.

Don't misunderstand me, I fully accept that what you are saying is that many young men made the ultimate sacrifice and that we should be grateful to them for it.

I would like to be absolutely clear that I respect that view and feel the sincerity and honesty of the heart that utters it.

I just find it hard to feel "thankful".

Instead I wear a poppy as a symbol of the great tragedy of the painful terrified deaths that so many men suffered, and indeed of the great sorrow felt by those who survived, in one piece or not as the case may be.

I think about their youth, their innocence and who they might have been as individuals.

I try to place myself in their boots and find them filled with my own shit.

Young men, convulsing in the cold with fear, gulping down the anticipation, vomiting it out only to open their eyes and find that nothing was changing about their reality except that the man standing next to them.

Young men who had families and homes, mothers, brothers, sisters, children all hoping and praying for them. Knowing that they might not die safe in their beds surrounded by love, but could breathe their last in some grotty ditch coughing up blood in a wasteland where love was little more than a distant memory.

I find my thankfulness taken over by simple plain grief. Grief not just for the ones on "our side", but the ones forced into action by their nations merciless uncompromising hysterical culture. Other young men, swept up by a fever, who should also have lived beautiful creative lives but were compelled by forces stronger than they were able to overcome to go and die alone in pain in some field.

The thought of Jesus on the cross springs to mind -"mein fuhrer mein fuhrer why hast thou forsaken me"

May they all find salvation.