I went to my first Commonwealth War Cemetery when I was nineteen. At the time, I was studying military history at university, with a particular focus on the First World War.

I’d mentioned to my father one day, when home, that I really wanted to get over to France to try and get some sense of the scale of the things I was reading about, but that I didn’t have the money. A few weeks later he rang me and said that he’d bought tickets for a battlefield tour.

That trip, some eighteen years ago now, will forever be burned in my memory. For me, it was the point where history stopped being purely rational and abstract and instead became real. For the first time, I felt like I was looking past the raw facts and numbers on the page, to the thousands of individual stories that combine to create the giant, nebulous blob that is human history.

I don’t think I’m unusual in that. The Commonwealth War Cemeteries that lie in northern France, Belgium and elsewhere have a way of twisting your entire core. If you return to them after experiencing that, then you can often see the exact moment when that feeling hits the first time visitors around you too.