TODAY, as the country bends its collective mind to commemorate the great sacrifice of the First World War the official focus is the national service in Glasgow Cathedral where people of all ages and backgrounds will gather in a spirit of thanksgiving and remembrance.

All over the country there will be other similar services as communities great and small come together to remember the lives of thousands of young soldiers who left small towns and quiet country places between 1914 and 1918 never to return.

Last night there was a commemoration evening in the Old Parish Kirk in Kirriemuir and tonight there will be a similar event at Gosford House near Longniddry where the war dead of Angus and East Lothian will be remembered with music and poetry. Both caught my attention and demanded my attendance because they are attempts to reclaim humanity from the awfulness of a conflict which cost around 8.5 million lives with many more wounded or missing. Besides, it was in both counties that I began my own journey of commemoration in 2014 and the experience helped me to understand that the individual is what we must acknowledge in any act of remembrance.

So today I’ll be thinking about three men who fought in the conflict and who came back with their minds and attitudes changed for all time. I met them 30 years ago in the late summer of 1988 during a visit to the Western Front when their memories were still fresh and it was still possible to see in them the young men who had gone off so hopefully to war.

Each of them had lived through experiences which not only left a lasting impression but also reinforced General William Tecumseh Sherman’s remark to cadets bound for the US Army in 1879: “There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all Hell.”

As a commander during the recently ended American Civil War, Sherman knew what he was talking about. The first veteran in our group was called Johnny. A regular soldier who had made his career in the Middlesex Regiment, he regarded his role as an infantryman as both his job and his calling.

Professional to his finger tips and blessed by an old soldier’s insouciance and sense of the ridiculous he took huge pride in being one of the last of the “Old Contemptibles”, the name adopted by the British infantry of 1914 following a derogatory remark about the British Army allegedly made by Kaiser Wilhelm II.

He also took pride in the fact that as a young soldier he had been trained to fire his Short Magazine Lee Enfield rifle – the standard British infantry weapon of the day - at the legendary rate of “ten rounds rapid”, putting up a withering field of fire so ferocious that the attacking Germans thought it could only have come from machine guns.

During his first encounter with the enemy during the retreat to Mons the lines of German infantry got so close to his battalion’s position that they stopped being a grey indeterminate mass and he could see that they were individual young men not so very different from those doing the killing. In fact, he heard them before he saw them.

They were marching arm-in-arm and were singing loudly but melodiously; some had removed their steel helmets and were wearing student caps as if to remind themselves of the civilians they had been a few short months earlier before battle commenced.

Johnny survived the war and witnessed some dreadful incidents during the fighting, but he never forgot the memory of those young German soldiers lying in bloody heaps beneath the hot French sun of September 1914.

The second veteran had served as a part-time Territorial soldier in the West Yorkshire Regiment before the war and could not wait to get into action. His chance came early in 1915 on the Ypres Salient and his first taste of action was almost his last. While his battalion was waiting to go over the top a shell-burst spewed shrapnel over the trench killing the man next to him, his best friend from his home village, but leaving everyone else intact.

A sergeant roughly shoved a sack into his hands and told him to pick up the body parts. Minutes later whistles blew down the line as the West Yorkshires went into the attack creating fresh casualties and what had happened to the eviscerated friend was quickly forgotten.

But not quite. After the war he trained as a doctor and in old age went back to visit the scenes of his youth; above all he was desperate to find the grave marker of his long-lost friend who had been killed all those years ago. Thanks to the ministrations of the wonderful Commonwealth War Graves Commission whose staff lovingly tend the cemeteries on the Western Front and on other battle-fronts the retired doctor got his wish and he was able to pay his respects from his wheelchair. “Look at him, he’s still nineteen,” he mused as he gazed intently at the grave marker. “And look at me, I’m just a helpless old man.”

The third veteran was perhaps the saddest. He had served as a volunteer in the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, joining up quickly to do his bit in the late summer of 1914 in case the fighting was all over before Christmas. The life and soul of any party, it seemed that nothing could ever worry him or knock him out of his good humour. Even in the face of death it seemed that he would have found something amusing in the situation. In that sense he was not unlike the young lad in Siegfried Sassoon’s poem Suicide in the Trenches: “a simple soldier boy/Who grinned at life in empty joy.” And, as I discovered later, like Sassoon’s young soldier he had also glimpsed “the hell where youth and laughter and go”.

It was only after this veteran’s death a year or so later that I learned from his family that once a year on September 25 he would lock himself in a room to hide the tears that came annually when he remembered his fellow Cameron Highlanders who had fallen in the fighting on the opening day of the Battle of Loos.

Fought in the late summer of 1915 this was the first of the great killing battles of the war and the British losses were grim - over 60,000 killed, wounded and missing.

His own battalion lost 687 casualties and at roll call that evening the survivors simply called out “over the hill” to acknowledge the name of a missing comrade.

I learned a lot during that visit to the Western Front, namely that some things are worse than death and that some wounds are more horrific than others because they exist in the mind and cannot ever be seen. Today I’ll be remembering those three men and hoping that no others will have to experience what they went through a hundred years ago.