Not too sure about Napoleon. Not much to choose in that war. Whoever won, most people lost. And it's hard to imagine that on balance the defeat of the Kaiser's Germany was worth the nightmare of the rest of the 20th Century that the war unleashed, even aside from the horrors of the war itself. (And they are still going on into a new century.)

The best time to fight wars is before they begin. Once they come it's just damage limitation, whatever you do.

Here's a poem by one of the lesser known First World War poets, Geoffrey Dearmer who died in 1996 at the age of 103.

Night held me as I scrawled and scrambled near
The Turkish lines. Above the mocking stars
Silvered the curving parapet, and clear
Cloud latticed beams o'erflecked the land with bars;
I crouching flat between
Tense-listening armies, peering through the night,
Twin giants bound by tentacles unseen.
Here in dim-shadowed light
I saw him, as a sudden movement turned
His eyes towards me, glowing eyes that burned
A moment ere his snuffling muzzle found
My trail; and then as serpents mesmerise
He chained me with those unrelenting eyes,
That muscle sliding rhythm, knit and bound
In spare limbed symmetry,those perfect jaws
And soft-approaching pitter-patter paws
Nearer and nearer like a wolf he crept -
That moment had my swift revolver leapt -
But terror seized me, terror born of shame
Brought flooding revelation. For he came
As one who offers comradeship deserved,
An open ally of the human race,
And sniffing at my prostrate form unnerved
He licked my face!

And here is a note about him from Time Magazine in 1996: DIED. GEOFFREY DEARMER, 103, Britain's last surviving World War I soldier-poet; in Kent. Despite losing his mother and brother to the war and experiencing the brutality of battle in Gallipoli and on the Western Front, Dearmer exhibited none of the bitter cynicism that marked the work of many other war poets.

Known for being gentle and self-effacing, he published two acclaimed collections after the war. Unable to make a living as a poet, he worked as a government censor and then as an editor for a critically praised BBC radio show. Although his poems were occasionally discovered by younger readers, Dearmer fell into obscurity until his last anthology, A Pilgrim's Song, was released three years ago, on his 100th birthday. Laurence Cotterell, the editor of the collection, said of Dearmer, "Most men in the trenches would have looked down and seen mud swirling around their boots, but he looked up and saw the stars."