Apparently, the summer of 1914 was, weather-wise, a good one, and I guess some of the fiercest fighting inevitably happened on what we in Britain sometimes call a "glorious" day. Today was glorious too, and there's something untouchable and pristine about the power and beauty of nature itself, irrespective of other events. I imagine that occasionally, my grandfather and others looked skywards and observed this anomaly. Interestingly, the paradoxical notion of nature as an independent bedfellow to mankind's atrocious deeds is something referred to by Victor Frankl in his book "Man's Search For Meaning". As a prisoner in Auschwitz, he would observe the outside world, the sky, the twittering birds and so on and marvel at its ability to co-exist alongside the naked atrocity of the Holocaust, without seemingly being tainted by it. Frankl treasured this idea and cites it as contributory to his survival, alongside, I suppose, his obvious luck (just like Grandad).