Rossdavidh asked Tim Butcher:

So, I have to ask, and it's fine if the answer is "nothing much", but what did you do on Nov. 11, 2018, the 100th anniversary of the "end" of the Great War? Thanks again for writing "The Trigger" about how it started!

Tim Butcher Well I thought of the 1918 endgame and the reckoning. I thought of Gavrilo Princip who died a few months before the Armistice was signed, trying to think how he would have felt for being the unintentional cause of world war. And I thought of those who did not quite beat the whistle, solders like Wilfred Owen who died in the last days just before the guns fell silent. And I thought of how little our leaders today consider 1914-18 beyond the theatrics: the poppies, the wreath-laying, the bump in the throat quietness when the bugle sounds and people morph their nationalism into patriotism. And I went to bed worried that we shape shift history at our peril and those in power today in Asia, Europe and America are peril incarnate.

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