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My stomach has churned today to see and hear the likes of David Cameron and Barack Obama uttering vacuous cliché about remembrance on the 100^th anniversary of the outbreak of World War One.

How dare they? How dare they stand over those graves and pontificate while selling weapons to child murderers, while endorsing the deaths of innocent people, while funding research into weapons of mass destruction, while putting the profits  that go with making the sort of death engines that killed the Great War millions ahead of the peace for which those dead men yearned? How dare they?

They stand over the graves of millions who had to stand up and fight for their convictions or their country or because they were told to, and they haven’t even the guts to stand up to child murderers who are slaughtering innocent men, women and children.

Obama must rank as the greatest political disappointment of my lifetime now he’s shown he hasn’t even the backbone to stand up to child killers. Oh yes, he’s had to deal with the machinations of America’s far right dragging like a dead weight on every shred of decency he’s tried to introduce to public policy, and oh yes he’s brave enough to send unmanned robots to deal death, or mutter about “torturing some folks” – but moral probity? The human decency to say to fascist child murderers: “No. No you fucking don’t”?

The sight of the craven cowards of the western political establishment solemnly vomiting tritenesses about peace and reconciliation and remembrance while standing by as children scream and die has sickened me to the absolute core.

I hope the people who follow this place will do what you can to support every effort that is being made to bring the murderers of Israel to justice. For example, look out for the gathering worldwide Twitter campaign to bring the Israeli government before the International Criminal Court for its disgusting war crimes, identified by the hashtag #ICC4Israel, and boycott Israeli goods.

To all of you who say there’s no point, it won’t change anything, it’s a tiny meaningless gesture: shame on you. It’s a means by which decent people put themselves on the side of right against wrong. Better something, anything, than the world’s answer. Which is nothing.

And as for the centenary of the start of the Great War, remember this: it was a war made by politicians and fought by millions of ordinary people like you and me, many of them civilians. Few politicians died. So fuck the politicians standing on graves today in the hope of a few more votes, fuck the dullards criticising Ed Miliband because he didn’t write a nice little cliche on his wreath: remember the people, the people who died because their ruling classes couldn’t resolve the world’s problems.

This constant simmering rage with which I try to live means I haven’t been able to stand any of the ‘official’ remembrance, though I respect the idea of switching off our lights for an hour this evening.

At the weekend I re-read Helen Thomas’s World Without End, her memoir of her tempestuous  life with her flawed and troubled husband, the great poet Edward Thomas, and wept helplessly at her description of Thomas’s last leave before his death at Arras in 1917.

I’m going to finish this week, on this anniversary day, with Helen Thomas’s account, because I think it expresses better than anything else I’ve heard today what war was about for real people, and still is, and who we should be thinking about in the dark this evening –Edward, his widow, his fatherless children, never able to stack logs with their Dad again, and all of the lost ones and widows and fatherless children, and the fatherless children now and still to come.

The days had passed in restless energy for us both. (Edward) had sawn up a big tree that had been blown down at our very door, and chopped the branches into logs, the children all helping.

The children loved being with him, for though he was stern in making them build up the logs properly, and use the tools in the right way, they were not resentful of this but tried to win his rare praise and imitate his skill. Indoors he packed his kit and polished his accoutrements.

He loved a good piece of leather, and his Sam Browne and high trench-boots shone with a deep, clear lustre. The brass, too, reminded him of the brass ornaments we had often admired when years ago we had lived on a farm and knew every detail of a plough-team’s harness.

We all helped with the buttons and buckles and badges to turn him out the smart officer it was his pride to be. For he entered into this soldiering which he hated in just the same spirit of thoroughness of which I have spoken before.

So we talked of old times that the children could remember. And the days went by till only two were left. Edward had been going through drawers full of letters, tearing up dozens and keeping just one here and there, and arranging manuscripts and notebooks and newspaper cuttings all neatly in his desk – his face pale and suffering while he whistled.

The children helped and collected stamps from the envelopes, and from the drawers all sorts of useless odds and ends that children love. Merfyn knew what it all meant, and looked anxiously and dumbly from his father’s face to mine.

And I knew Edward’s agony and he knew mine, and all we could do was to speak sharply to each other: “Now do, for goodness sake, remember, Helen, that these are the important manuscripts, and that I’m putting them here, and that this key is for the box that holds all important papers like our marriage certificate and the children’s birth certificates, and my life-insurance policy. You may want them at some time, so don’t go leaving the key about.”

The last evening comes. The children have taken down the holly and mistletoe and ivy, and chopped up the little Christmas tree to burn. And for a treat Bronwen and Myfanwy are to have their bath in front of the blazing fire. The big zinc bath is dragged in, and the children undress in high glee, and skip about naked in the warm room, which is soon filled with the sweet smell of the burning greenery.

The berries pop and the fir tree makes fairy lace, and the holly crackles and roars. The two children get in the bath together, and Edward scrubs them in turn –they laughing, making the fire hiss with their splashing. The drawn curtains shut out the snow and the starless sky, and the deathly silence out there in the biting cold is forgotten in the noise and warmth of our little room.

After the bath Edward reads [to] them. First of all he reads Shelley’s The Question and Chevy Chase, and for Myfanwy a favourite Norse tale. They sit in their nightgowns listening gravely, and then, just before they kiss him good night, while I stand with the candle in my hand, he says: “Remember while I am away to be kind. Be kind, first of all, to Mummy, and after that be kind to everyone  and everything.”

And they all assent together, and joyfully hug and kiss him, and he carries the two girls up, and drops each in her bed…..

Then he says, as he takes a book out of his pocket: “You see, your Shakespeare’s Sonnets is already where it will always be. Shall I read you some?”

He reads one or two to me. His face is grey and his mouth trembles, but his voice is quiet and steady. And soon I slip to the floor and sit between his knees, and while he reads his hand falls over my shoulder and I hold it with mine.

“Shall I undress you  by this lovely fire and  carry you upstairs in my  khaki greatcoat?” So he undoes my things, and I slip out of them; then he takes the pins out of my hair, and we laugh at ourselves for behaving as we so often do, like young lovers.

“We have never become a proper Darby and Joan,  have we?”

“I’ll read to you till the fire burns low, and then we’ll go to bed….”

Only now and again, as they say drowning people do, I have visions of things that have been – the room where my son was born; a day, years after, when we were together walking before breakfast by a stream with hands full of bluebells; and in the kitchen of our honeymoon cottage, and I happy in his pride of me.

So we lay, all night, sometimes talking of our love and all that had been, and of the children, and what had been amiss and what right. We knew the best was that there had never been untruth between us. We knew all of each other, and it was right. So talking and crying and loving in each other’s arms we fell asleep…

Edward got up and made the fire and brought me some tea, and then got back into bed, and the children clambered in, too, and sat in a row sipping our tea. I was not afraid of crying any more. My tears had been shed, my heart was empty, stricken with something that tears would not express or comfort. The gulf had been bridged. Each bore the other’s suffering.

We concealed nothing, for all was known between us. After breakfast, while he showed me where his account books were and what each was for, I listened calmly, and unbelievingly he kissed me when I said that I, too, would keep accounts.

“And here are my poems. I’ve copied them all out in this book for you and the last of all is for you. I wrote it last night, but don’t read it now… It’s still freezing. The ground is like iron, and more snow has fallen. The children will come to the station with me; and now I must be off.”

We were alone in my room. He took me in his arms, holding me tightly to him, his face white, his eyes full of a fear I had never seen before. My arms were around his neck.

“Beloved, I love you,” was all I could say.

“Helen, Helen, Helen,” he said, “remember that, whatever happens, all is well between us for ever and ever.”

And hand in hand we went downstairs and out to the children, who were playing in  the snow.

A thick mist hung everywhere, and there was not sound except, far away in the valley, a train shunting. I stood at the gate watching him go; he turned back to wave until the mist and the hill hid him.

From World Without End, by Helen Thomas; first published by William Heinemann 1931; reprinted by Carcanet, 1987; the passage is quoted in full in The Independent’s A History of the First World War in 100 Moments (e-published, 2014).