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Many of the songs in the programme were inspired by the First World War.Ìý A war which seems to have a special fascination for so many people and to have inspired so many songs, and so much writing. This was partly, I suspect, because it was the first industrial war, the first war where fully mechanised armies and their machines rolled off the assembly line; partly because of the horrors of the trenches and a war that seemed no more than a litany of horrors in the mud; partly because it was a war of "lions led by donkeys" and partly because of what was lost.

In Britain at least, some kind of innocence seems to have vanished with the boys and men that died in those four years and nothing after that would ever be the same again.

Some villages lost a whole generation and small towns like and sent battalions to war in the famous only to find that they had been lost in the mud of the and other battlefields.

My own father was killed in 1944 when his Lancaster bomber was shot down over Holland so, when it came to recording the programme, I felt I had some understanding of the stories told by many of the songs.

Like the cenotaphs and memorials in many of our cities and towns the songs of "War, and the pity of War" are there lest we forget.