AT war memorials throughout the Bolton area and the rest of Britain, men and women who have served in wars will gather tomorrow to honour the dead.

They will be joined by those who lost loved ones for the moving, annual services which demonstrate not only that those who did not come home will never be forgotten, but that wars are a futile business.

With each passing year, the few surviving from the First World War become fewer, but in Bolton tomorrow there will be many men and women with tears in their eyes because they so vividly remember the 1939-45 conflict.

But what is so astonishing is that, amid all the pain and grief that Remembrance Day still brings for so many of the older generation, humour can still shine through.

This year, we asked people to write down their thoughts on Remembrance Day and their memories of the war. We published a selection of them last night and more are in tonight's paper.

The contributions are thought-provoking and at times intensely sad. But there is also the kind of humour and amazing "Tommy" spirit that saw them through conditions almost too horrifying for today's generations to contemplate.

Elsewhere in tonight's paper, we report on the Fly-on-the-wall documentary which followed the every waking move of senior pupils at Turton High School. It is such a pity that there was not the technology for fly-on-wall documentaries of life in the hell-hole trenches of the Great War, or the loss of thousands of British soldiers as they tried to reach Dunkirk in the Second World War.

Mankind would probably have never had the stomach to go to war again -- if anyone had dared to show it!