'War to End All Wars' was just the start of many more.

SO ONCE again, on yet another November Sunday, they gathered at the Cenotaph while countless others stood, heads bowed, before weathered war memorials around the country.

And as always they spoke of those who had made the "supreme sacrifice", who had laid down their lives for their country.

But once, we were told, there would be no more such sacrifices.

For 81 years ago today, on November 11, 1918, Cardiff's Lord Mayor, Councillor Amos Kirk, announced to a cheering crowd outside our City Hall that "this is the greatest event in the history of the world", and our great- grandfathers believed him.

We can excuse them, and we can forgive Amos Kirk's euphoria, for there would be no more killing. Ever. Because it had been, yes, the War to End All Wars.

Instead it was the prelude to the even greater carnage of World War II with its 56 million dead, and to all the wars that followed, our young men dying in Korea and Kenya, Aden and Northern Ireland, the Falklands and Iraq while Vietnam drained America of its brightest and best, the bloody struggle between Iran and Iraq costing a million lives, lasting longer than that War to End All Wars.

And even as princes and politicians laid their wreaths and mouthed their platitudes on Sunday, two more British soldiers died in Afghanistan, making it 232 deaths since the start of that adventure in 2001.

No comfort for the grieving families of these latest fallen to hear the inevitable elegiac lines intoned: "They shall grow not old as we that are left grow old..."

Then, as always, we are told that the men (and now the women) we honour "gave their lives". They didn't. Their lives were stolen from them. Why? Maybe Rudyard Kipling, whose own beloved son Jack was swallowed by the mud of Flanders, gave us the answer in 1919.

Just two lines, never more relevant than today when we remember the reasons for the invasion of Iraq:"If any question why we died, tell them because our fathers lied."

No, this time not our fathers. This time, our leaders. From Blair the claim that we were 45 minutes away from nuclear attack, that Saddam's WMDs were ready to turn the Middle East into a wasteland.

What, I wonder, was Tony Blair thinking when he stood stone-faced before the Cenotaph just a few days ago? Instead of honouring our dead he should be apologising to them.

What hypocrisy, then, to glorify the victims of past conflicts, to repeat the reassuring cliches, as we send our young men and women to their deaths. Again, for what? Harry Patch, the last survivor of the Somme, who died this year, regarded the solemn ceremonies around the Cenotaph as a sort of showbusiness.

Men who survived that same killing field have told me over the years that they knew no-one who made that much-trumpeted supreme sacrifice.

But they knew plenty who had been sacrificed, lambs singing their way to the slaughter, to what the generals called a glorious death.

Douglas Haig, Britain's supreme commander in France, told his men in April, 1918, when defeat was more than a possibility: "With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight to the end."

Thousands of those men did. And died. In his memoirs Lloyd George remembered Haig as "treating his soldiers with disdain", while staying far from the front line.

Haig went home to become the 1st Earl Haig with a state funeral when he died in 1928 aged 66.

No funerals at all, though, for those men he had ordered to "fight to the end".

Another war poem tells us how those men felt about their commanders: "Good morning, good morning, the General said, when we met him last week on our way to the line. Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead, and we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine."

How will those who survive the snipers and the bombs of Afghanistan remember a war that for many seems to echo Kipling's thoughts - "If any question why we died..."

Perhaps they will remember it as Billy Olsen remembered what he called the Great War.

Billy, whose Land Fit for Heroes turned out to be a bedsit in Cardiff in old age, often spoke of Mametz Wood where 600 Welsh soldiers died, as many missing, 3,000 wounded in July 1916.

Before he died, aged 95 in 1987, before he joined his old comrades, he told me what he thought about that War to End All Wars.

"It accomplished nothing. It was continued in 1939.

"It wasn't worth it. We were mugs."

Is that how they will remember Helmand Province, I wonder, as they gather once more round the Cenotaph in years to come?

CAPTION(S):

dead he should be apologising to them, he says