Letter: Remembrance

Sir: John Lichfield writes of the apparent need for a British museum or visitor centre which would explain so much of the inexplicable to British and Commonwealth visitors to Great War battlefields ("The memory of war", 6 November). He mentions the German cemeteries which he finds moving - but does not mention any need for visitors to be educated there.

Why not mark the appalling waste of life, and educate visitors in the follies of excessive nationalism, by losing the label "British" and insisting on "European"? Nations divided and hostile at the start of the century can surely collaborate on a museum project which would belong to us all as the century ends. An imaginative European approach to history, recognising jointly the suffering which afflicted all combatants, would speak more to future generations about our determination to overcome differences than any number of remembrance ceremonies.

MARY DUNK

Alpheton, Suffolk