MY BROTHERS have middle names but I do not. Those ten letters are all I’ve got. My younger brother has two, James and William, the names of our grandfathers.

The anniversary of the First World War is a time to think of fathers and grandfathers, or great-grandfathers, depending on where you are in the generational arc.

James Taylor, my mother’s father, was really called Horace but preferred James or more usually Jim.

He was too young for the first war and a little old for the second. Anyway, East Ender Jim was working in the London Docks as the Second World War started. This was a reserved occupation, so he didn’t have to enlist, but he was moved to the docks at Bristol, the city where I was born 21 years after the end of that war.

William Cole did serve in the First World War, as I have mentioned before. He refused to fight because of his religious beliefs, but served as a stretcher-bearer and was fortunate enough to survive the Battle of the Somme, described in Jeremy Paxman’s new book Great Britain’s Great War, as “the most sickening calamity in British military history”. As Paxman recounts, of the 120,000 troops who took part on that first day of July 1, 1916, “57,000 were killed, captured, wounded or missing” and by the end of the campaign “the number of British and empire casualties had risen to more than 420,000”.

It is sobering to imagine what my grandfather must have been through. The horrors of that war are so familiar in the “mud and bullets” sense, and yet so remote from the daily experiences of our lives now.

Just what human degradation must Bill have seen, alongside all those other young men called on to serve in different blooded ways? My grandfather never talked about what happened, as was common, although he did share some scraps of memory as he lay dying at my aunt and uncle’s house at the end of a long life.

In the recent BBC1 series to accompany his book, Paxman mostly steered an uncontroversial course through the war, looking in particular at the social consequences. But he did strike a more strident note when discussing those who refused to fight.

“To be honest, the extreme conscientious objectors have always struck me as cranks,” he said in the second episode. “The war was dreadful and it was bloody. But unless Britain was prepared to see the rest of Europe turned into some enormous German colony it had to be fought, and most British people saw that.”

His comments caused a stir with Quakers and others. My grandfather was a Methodist rather than a Quaker, yet his religious beliefs prevented him from killing his fellow man. That has always struck me as a noble thing, although when I first wrote about Bill Cole in this column many years ago, I received a couple of spiteful scrawls referring to my “Conchie” grandfather.

I guess he wasn’t a conscientious objector in the most extreme sense, for those men refused to have any part in the war and went to prison for their beliefs. Instead he helped others while still putting himself at the same risk as those who carried arms.

That, anyway, is my take. One hundred years on, it is difficult to untangle what is known for sure, and what we think we know, as those who took part are gone from us.

While it is possible to appreciate Paxman’s point, those who refused to fight were brave in their own way. It must have taken courage to stand on such principle when everyone around you believed in the cause; a different sort of bravery, perhaps, but bravery nonetheless.

The First World War affected everyone in Britain in some way at the time; a century on, the tentacles are stretched thin but still touch us.

To return to names, our three have first or middle names with family links, the boys having first names from family surnames, and middle names with resonance too. The eldest, the poor thing, has Julian as a middle name.