I’ve been trying to think of a way to write about this momentous World War I centenary – a hundred years since the beginning of the disastrous battle in which more than a million young men would lose their lives.  All the British soldiers involved in the Battle of the Somme had volunteered to join up: they were fighting out of patriotic duty, for king and country – motivated by an abstract ideal of heroism which likened war to a game of sports. To die for one’s country was still seen as a glorious death.

Yet these were ordinary men, wounding and killing other ordinary men over the control of a few miles of muddy ground. Of course they fought at the behest of governments and military leaders, but also backed by a groundswell of public opinion which had roundly rejected any idea of a compromise peace with ‘the Hun’.

A hundred years later, I feel we are still being exhorted to ‘take sides’. Are you with us or against us?  is the prevailing sentiment and I have been caught up in it too – in the Brexit vote, in the realignment of political parties, even in my local neighbourhood. At times this year I have felt very angry, despairing, betrayed, fearful.

I am usually more of a fence-sitter, trying to hold onto a sense of (what I see as) the middle ground while the extremes pull in both directions. I’m often astonished by the strength, ferocity and above all certainty of other peoples’ beliefs and opinions.  Maybe I’m just woolly and indecisive, but I prefer to think of it as  a kind of noble doubt.

If I believe something passionately and you believe the opposite – where do we go from there? Am I ‘right’ and you ‘wrong’, or vice versa? When Nigel Farage (erroneously) stated that the battle for Brexit had been won ‘without a shot being fired’,  he was alluding (somewhat threateningly I think) to the violence that such passionate beliefs stir up in people, such that they might be willing to kill and inflict harm on fellow human beings for having a different opinion.

Somehow we have to find a way to work with our differences, not to get ‘entrenched’, stuck in the mud of our own side’s supposed superiority. Otherwise, how far can we really say we’ve come in the past hundred years?