The window near it of Christ summoning the disciples is the better of the two, and also dated 1947. Was it part of the same commission? Other glass here by the O'Connors is good, although Heaton, Butler & Bayne's east window is perhaps not their best. Overseeing all this colour is an austere carved Stuart royal arms above the tower arch.

Perhaps the most moving survival in this beautiful church is a recent one. This is the memorial to Albert Keppel, who died in July 1917 while gallantly leading his company to the attack on an enemy stronghold in Belgium. He was just nineteen years old. The memorial features a gilt mosaic of St George, and above hangs the helmet that he was wearing at the time. By the summer of 1917, the First World War had become a disgusting affair, an industrial process. The fields of Flanders were no longer host to romantic charges into rifle fire, but to tanks, land mines, flame-throwers and poisonous gas.

Young Albert must have been just sixteen when the War broke out. What must it have felt like for his parents to have lost him in this way? I think of my great-uncle Harry Anable, also just 19 when he was killed during the first few minutes of the Battle of the Somme a year before Albert Kepple. Harry was just a frightened private, the son of a farmworker, but the shadow of his death hung over the family into my lifetime.

You can't think back to the mindset of the First World War, of course. The event, and the times that surrounded it, are beyond imagining. The whole thing is numbing, too enormous for grief. It isn't the large numbers that tear the heart, it is the individuals, and they are almost without number.