On one of the early chaotic army days of World War II in France, I was combining the disagreeable tasks of eating and censoring letters home written by the men in my section.

One letter was of the ‘hope-this­finds-you-as-it-leaves-me’ variety, but it contained five words that stood out in the surrounding illiteracy: ‘War is a be bleed in bastid’. It was a statement that became an epitaph because a few days later the writer was blown to bleeding pieces during a dive-bombing attack.