You might have noticed that there's a war on. No, not what’s happening in the Crimea or in Syria or Afghanistan, but the legacy of one which broke out a hundred years ago.

We may still be still five months from the actual anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War, but the media bombing has been heavy already. I’ve a concern that war-weariness will set in before we even get to August, and that the commemorations will be all over by Christmas (to coin a phrase).

Hang on to your helmet; there’s to be five years of this.

What I’m hoping, as we reflect on the events of a century ago, is that it will not all be bugles and poppies. Although academics and historians have long been arguing about the events in Flanders, we’ve yet to do so as a nation.

Back in the immediate aftermath of Armistice – in the early 1920s – nerves were too raw, and sensitivities too high, to engage in a balanced discussion. With a death-toll close to one million, this was not the moment to wonder whether the whole shooting-match was worth it. Better to concentrate on the memorials.

By the time that period of mourning was over the clouds were gathering for a second war and this, too, was hardly the time to do so either.

Get that out of the way, and by the late 1950s popular opinion was being shaped by the Cold War instead. The possibility of mutually-assured destruction for the lot of us served to bring all military solutions into discredit. It was in such an atmosphere that musicals, novels and pop music turned the “war to end all wars” into a case-study in the futility of conflict.

Easier by far to retreat into a study of war poetry than to argue the pros and cons of the British involvement in the internal affairs of the Balkans all those years before.

Now, at long last, as the centenary approaches, and the TV programmes fall thick and fast, we can begin to have that long-delayed national conversation.

It will, of course, be interrupted by Waterloo, the Magna Carta, the Jacobite Uprising and plenty more. Where would we be without anniversaries?

* Dr Chris Upton is Reader in Public History at Newman University Birmingham.