I sat by the Baltic sea last weekend with a German couple and a good friend from Berlin. We talked about our families and discovered that our grandfathers could have been fighting each other in WW1 - lives ruined by nerve gas and killing. Our fathers and uncles were each physically and emotionally damaged by having to fight in WW2, in Russia and Burma. We thought of our sons, appreciated the peacetime we have lived in, and hoped that this generation would not lose their awareness of how much this matters.