Has our tolerance of war changed?

It is a terrible observation, but with another British soldier killed in Afghanistan yesterday we are two military deaths from 100 service people killed in the Afghan War since the beginning of this year.

With the homecomings through Wootton Bassett and the now ever-present cameras and crowds, these are events rarely seen before outside world war.

I was at Brize Norton once for the homecoming of a British soldier killed in Basra. Only the family, someone from his regiment and the lord lieutenant of Oxfordshire were present. Not any more, these days.

One senses that these very public markings of each death in Afghanistan are exerting there own dynamic on the government – hence the prime minister’s remarks at the Guildhall in London on Monday night and David Miliband to Nato meeting in Scotland yesterday. This is not a “war without end” said Mr Miliband.

Yet today is the very day that the battle of the Somme ended in 1916, not even 100 years ago. It was the very middle of the first world war. The battle had raged for just four months and shed a staggering, utterly shocking number of lives, in excess of one million.

The government continued to send hundreds of thousands of young men to die on the poppy fields of Flanders and beyond for a further two years.

My grandfather was at the Somme. General Sir Thomas D’Oyly Snow lost 4,000 men from his regiment this day alone. One general losing 40 times the UK’s loss this year in Afghanistan, in one day.

In 93 years our tolerance of death on the battlefield has experienced a welcome revolution. Does it mean then that our tolerance of war itself has dwindled? Is a direct assault on our own land now the only cause for which most of us would agree to lay down our lives?

Perhaps for once we should thank the media. Had the slaughter on the western front received even one per cent of that accorded to deaths in Afghanistan, would the great war’s carnage ever have been stomached?

For how much longer then, with this degree of focus, will another war in a foreign field be stomached? Intriguingly I suspect, quite long.

The conflict in Northern Ireland tells us the media come to suffer battle coverage fatigue. Afghanistan may come to suffer from it too. On the other hand it may not, and if that is the case the political clock on the wall is ticking hard.