For a moment in a Belgian wood, great-uncle Gilla is with us again When a British serviceman died in the First World War, it was sadly common for his body never to be found. This happened to Gilla, whose name, like that of all those "denied... known and honoured burial" is inscribed on the Menin Gate in Ypres. The Unknown Soldier is so called because of this grim fact. But the completely unknown, unrecorded soldier did not exist. He left his name, rank and serial number, and usually a few possessions, which were carefully collected. My family still has the small tin trunk in which Gilla's things returned - belt, gun harness, army socks, pipe, watch; the tobacco tin given by Princess Mary to all the troops, with the tobacco untouched because it was an early Christmas present and had only just arrived; the diary he kept until the day before his death; postcards from Gilla's mother, who died of TB when he was a little boy, and dance-cards with his girlfriend Mary's name repeatedly appearing on them; the 2/6d receipt for Peter, a fox terrier he bought for Mary from the Army and Navy Stores; a Catholic book of devotions; a hawk's hood (he loved birds). There is also the love letter he wrote to Mary just after he had said goodbye, presumably intended for her if he died: "I do love you Mary dear as much as it is possible for a man to love anyone... I wanted to kiss you yesterday just to spite the German Emperor and a lot of other things as well most frightfully." For some reason (delicacy? disapproval?), Gilla's father did not send this letter on; so Mary, who married someone else and died in the Eighties, never saw it. This young man - boy, really - took part in the war for less than a month before it killed him. His life made no impression on the history of the world. Yet here 15 of us are in Belgium thinking about him, and somewhere are millions of British and French, Indians and Australians, South Africans and Russians, Germans and Turks contemplating their own dead kin. War is probably the most uncivilised act of man, yet its commemoration in this way - studying all the people who took part in it - is surely the mark of a high civilisation. When Gilla went off to war, his brother Alan (my grandfather) wrote to him: "I hope you'll dodge the bullets, but if you don't it's a question whether you are much worse off than having pneumonia in 50 or 60 years" time." My grandfather's question remains hard to answer. It is impossible, visiting Ypres, not to feel something approaching envy, as well as loss. Very few people seriously want to die young, but many who grow old without having had to submit to the test of war ask themselves painful questions about their own value. The sense of potential lost applies not only to those who died, but to those who lived - women without sweethearts, and without children, men who survived - and also to those born later. All those great-uncles are reminders not only of what they were never able to do, but of ways the rest of us have not taken. Gilla himself, in his brief experience of battle, considered the same thing from a different angle: "I think anyone who gets through this ought to know how to appreciate small things and life will be very much happier," he wrote home a week before he was killed. Those small things cheered him up in the intervals between the big ones. On the morning after a bad attack, he "spent most of the time digging a dugout. A wren came and had a talk with me. When he had read his dead son's diary, Gilla's father went for a walk on the farm at home and heard and saw a wren in the hedge: "I said to it: 'are you any relation to the wren that came into the trench to talk to my dear Gilla?," he wrote in his own diary, "I spoke in a natural tone. The wren came on to a bough quite close to me... I looked at its head & eye & its beautifully marked grey & brown plumage & its pretty cocked up tail & it stayed a long time & then quietly went away. It seemed quite as if the bird felt with me & I expect the wren the Gilla saw behaved in the same way. This is a classic example of what grammarians call the pathetic fallacy - attributing human qualities to other creatures. Obviously the English wren did not feel with my great-grandfather, nor the Belgian one with poor Gilla. But that is not really the point. The point has to do with intensity of human experience and with how we try to understand our own lives. It is sad that it takes death in war to evoke such intensity. But there it is. In Ypres yesterday, we brought some earth from that farm to scatter at the site. At 3.30pm, as if on cue, a wren sang in the yellowing wood.