Annette Becker is French historian specialising in WWI perspectives, who set out ‘to desanitise what has been sanitised’. She argues that official histories have tried to gloss over the reality with glorified statistics. No killers returned home; only victims and heroes. ‘Afterwards, in the 1920s, the war seemed so awful that people started to say they hadn't wanted to do it. To go back to the real experience, you have to go back to the fact that they wanted to do it. It was too painful for that generation, and the next, to accept that they were guilty of consent’. Becker says because the more people try to understand all the little gory details, the harder it is to unravel the meaning.

With three O’Gorman boys already lost, their mother Bridget, appeared in front of the Wellington Military Services Board in September of 1918 pleading for Timothy to be sent home on compassionate grounds. Bridget was congratulated for the family’s service and asked if Timothy wanted to be ‘in at the finish?’ ‘The finish looks close now, doesn’t it?’ ‘Yes, perhaps so’ she replied wisely, ’but my son may be finished before the war is finished.”