Can one man's life be said to be worth more than another?

It's a question impossible to ask, let alone answer.

But as we follow the dusty tracks at Gallipoli from the Hellas Memorial

to the cemetery at the farm, these are the things we consider. When we study the Great War, we of course study the

battles and the tactics and the units and the technology, but it's much more than that, isn't it

really? It's the study of ordinary human beings, of ordinary people, of ordinary men and women in those extraordinary circumstances of the First World War.

And when we visit the cemeteries and study the stories of those who never returned, and we see how their lives echoed not just across the battlefields themselves but way beyond that

affected children and wives and sweethearts whose lives would never be the same again with the loss of

someone on the battlefields of the First World War we discover how important i would guess human life is and what it means to people

and how that the end of a life can be the end of so many more things beside,

because with the death of someone in that great conflict,

was the end of a promise of greatness, a life unfulfilled? What could they have gone on to achieve?

This is something I find myself over the last few years asking more and more when I visit

the cemeteries, the vast cemeteries like Tynecott and the small ones like Hawthorne Ridge.

What would these men, what would these women who died in the conflict, what would they have gone on to achieve? And could we say somehow

that there might be some lives that were extinguished by that war that were more important

than others, that their promise of

greatness was more significant. It feels like a hard, a terrible thing to say, to even think,

because each life is important, every life is important. But then when you study the lives of those who had already given so much

in those final years of peace before the Great War, it does make you think they'd achieved

such a lot already by 1914. If they'd lived to see the world beyond the war, what more could they have

given to the human story? What more could they have given to us all? And this is a question that

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