ON the eve of the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War, the top item on ITV’s evening news was of yet another strike on a UN refuge – the third to be hit – in Gaza. Ten dead, including children. The final item on the news showed the nightly remembrance ceremony at the Menin Gate, honouring the almost 55,000 British dead from the Ypres battlefield with no known grave. Laurence Binyon’s words “We will remember them” were solemnly intoned.

Meanwhile, Sajid Javid, the British Culture Secretary responsible for the official commemorations of the First World War, had urged: “We must never forget the lessons we learnt from those four bloody years.”

And what might they have been? To those who experienced the war the essential lesson was clear. It was that there should be no more war. That’s why they dubbed it “the war to end all wars”.

But of course it didn’t. Preceded by such curtain raisers as the Boer War (1899-1902) and the Russian-Japanese War (1904-05), it was a dramatic spike in what turned out to be the bloodiest century in human history, with a Second World War and virtually perpetual conflict around the globe.

In his remarks, Sajid Javid said: “The scale and scope of the First World War is almost unimaginable today, the losses impossible to comprehend.”

Not quite. Because 140,000 died when the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. It is not beyond comprehension that worse could come this century. Dropped on a capital like London, a bacteriological bomb could wipe out thousands and lead to anarchy nationwide.

We have militarised space. If not yet actually fighting from there, nations use satellites to spy on each other. A depressing development in the First World War was the adaptation of flight, fully achieved only 11 years earlier, into aerial warfare. We are the warring race, manic in our desire to slaughter each other.

But we must “remember” the slain. There was a time when I would have loved to attend the Menin Gate ceremony. No doubt I would have found it as moving as all who have witnessed it testify.

But I now regard it as an empty pantomime.

I’d wager that every one of the 54,896 named dead would willingly swap the guards of honour, the Last Post, the respectful silence of the spectators, for the cessation of war – a true, enduring peace.

Perhaps it’s my age – 76. Not much time left to hope to see the world come to its senses. There is so much to enjoy, to take pleasure in. But we are hell bent on creating such misery as that spawned by the Somme, or those Gaza air strikes.

For our leaders the key lesson of the First World War is not about peace but about defence.

As David Cameron’s special adviser on the commemorations warned that today’s world order is “alarmingly fragile”, Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, said that Britain’s troops, hardened by Afghanistan service, form “a warrior generation”.

The irony of this announcement on the very anniversary of the start of the First World War, seems to have gone unnoticed. A century after the carnage we still need warriors.

Some will fall. But we will remember them. From now until eternity, or, more likely, the crack of doom.