AT the risk of seeming irreversibly obsessed by the First World War, I am returning to the terrible events which unfolded between 1914-18. I cannot adequately explain my morbid fascination with "The War To End All Wars", as it was optimistically, and inappropriately, labelled, not even to myself.

Much of it centres on the appalling loss of life and senseless, not to say criminal, way brave men were sent to their deaths by leaders whose tactics caused slaughter on a horrifying scale.

It is always around June and July that my interest is rekindled by newspaper and magazine articles, TV and radio programmes about major battles, particularly the Somme. The bare facts alone are enough to make one's hair stand on end. I haven't got much but what bit I have never fails to react, and I know the figures pretty much by heart.

The Battle of The Somme claimed the lives of 95,675 British military personnel, 19,240 on the first day. If that's not enough to make any thinking person pause for reflection, God knows what is. Now, 90 years after the battle, the Imperial War Museum has posted online a selection of letters and diary entries, written by men on the eve of the battle who died in it. Read them and weep.

Many were sent to wives who were widows before they got them. Most tried to be upbeat and optimistic, coloured with the nationalistic fire and patriotism with which their countrymen and women are currently anticipating a football tournament.

Percy Boswell, a 22-year-old Second Lieutenant in the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, wrote to his father: "I am absolutely certain I shall be all right but, in case the unexpected does happen, I shall rest content with the knowledge that I have done my duty. One can't do more."

Regimental history records describe how Boswell and his comrades were mown down, like a field of corn, losing 80 per cent of their attacking force.

Not everyone displayed similar enthusiasm and jingoism. Captain Charles May of the Manchester Regiment thought only of his family. He wrote to his wife: "I do not want to die. Not that I mind for myself. If it be that I am to go, I am ready. But the thought that I may never see you or our darling baby again turns my bowels to water." He, too, was cut down by German machine guns.

Wilfred Nevill, a 21-year-old Captain in the East Surrey Regiment, took two heavy, leather footballs back to France from his last leave in England. He ordered his men to kick them towards the German lines, hoping to distract them from the murderous fire they would face across no-man's land.

The ploy proved successful in that the East Surreys reached the German barbed wire but Captain Nevill was shot through the head as he dashed forward to kick the ball on.

Does it matter, so many years on, to remember these brave men and their supreme sacrifice? I think so, though what they died for has always defied logic, well it has for me. If history teaches us anything, it is that the human race never learns.