IT is possible to feel the deepest admiration and gratitude for what was achieved on D-Day and yet believe that the 60th anniversary commemorations were overdone.

Nine years ago, celebrations on the 50th anniversary of VE (Victory in Europe) Day were widely interpreted as drawing a line under major remembrances of the Second World War. Yet the 60th anniversary of D-Day brought the biggest "commemoration" yet, far overshadowing the 50th anniversary, itself a major occasion. Air drops, landing craft on the beaches, a symbolic Channel crossing by warships, flypasts (plural), even a pageant of film, song and dance. Were these necessary or appropriate? Wouldn't the simplicity of just a parade and the ceremonies of remembrance have been more telling? Should we play up, or play down, the overtones of war, which we all know to be ghastly?

At least the 60th anniversary involved Germany, excluded from the 50th. The presence of Chancellor Gerhard Shroeder, two months old on D-Day, was among the best features of the event. And of memories by the veterans none, in my judgement, stood out more than that of a German, Hein Severloh. As a 20-year-old gunner on Omaha beach, he shot more than 1,000 Americans. Captured, he became castigated the as "the beast of Omaha". But he was only a young soldier doing his duty. Heroically - yes, for so it was - he defended his post for nine hours. D-Day was the full extent of his war. Near the end he shot a GI through the head with his rifle, and he is haunted by the vision of the soldier spinning, dead, on to the beach.

Told from his German home, Herloh's experience echoes that described by Wilfred Owen in his great poem Strange Meeting. In Hell he meets a dead soldier - "with a thousand pains that vision's face was grained". But also with "piteous recognition in fixed eyes", the dead man tells him: "I am the enemy you killed, my friend".

It is in this poem that Owen coins his famous phrase "the pity of war". The dead soldier says: "Now men will go content with what we spoiled. Or, discontent, boil bloody and be spilled".

Of course we have "boiled bloody" many times since Owen had this searing vision. For all the fine words of world leaders, the sacrifice of those who died on D-Day is mocked by every death in war since then. A cartoon in The Independent on Sunday showed troops wading ashore from a landing craft chalked with an arrow to "OMAHA BEACH and on to Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Northern Ireland, Falklands, Middle East, Kashmir, Rwanda, East Timor, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq".

That says it all, really. We are addicted to war. There will be more grief. More bloody milestones to mark. And the pious sentiment "Let us not forget" will be uttered over the hapless dead of conflicts yet to come. On the 60th anniversary of D-Day, the now-frail mourners needed military cover, provided by gunships and fighter-planes on the lookout for terrorists, much as they had done on D-Day itself. If the dead had come back, what would they have made of that?

THE St George's Cross everywhere. The Euro elections I thought, amazed. But no - a footy tourney. Correct priorities? Probably yes.