That war provided an important lesson for governments. If they could put reporters into uniform as ‘War Correspondents’ they could appeal to their patriotism to produce heavily censored, upbeat copy designed to boost morale — in other words, propaganda. (The initial idea of a ‘WC’ patch was abandoned in favour of ‘C’ for Correspondent.)

In doing so, the conflict ushered in “the modern epoch of government press controls and spin”, as Paul Moorcraft and Philip Taylor put it in their book, Shooting the Messenger.

The 100-year anniversary of the war’s end is a chance to assess its disastrous legacy for journalists: trading access to military operations for independent oversight of them. And to reflect that a plethora of inconvenient but accurate facts now emerging on social media offer a real alternative for journalists keen to uncover the truth.

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Today's laptop activists seek attention, not truth

By Tanya Gold

What is striking about the First World War is the extent to which journalists and the owners of the main British newspapers colluded with the government to keep up the morale of the nation and help it win the war. The leading accredited British journalists on the Western Front were all knighted for their services, but later some admitted that their published work, despised by the men in the trenches, was far from the truth.

Sir William Beach Thomas of the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail wrote in 1925: “I was thoroughly and deeply ashamed of what I had written, for the good reason that it was untrue.” Another of the official reporters, Sir Phillip Gibbs of the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Chronicle, wrote several books after the war to justify his partial, misleading reporting of events at the front.

The horrifying stories war reporters told were not to their readers but politicians and proprietors, often at private dinners back in London. Lord Rothermere, who co-owned the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror, admitted: “We’re telling lies, we daren’t tell the public the truth, that we’re losing more officers than the Germans, and that it’s impossible to get through on the Western Front. You’ve seen the war correspondents [. . .] They don’t know the truth, they don’t speak the truth, and we know that they don’t”.

At another private dinner in London, Lord Northcliffe, who owned the Times, admitted that he suppressed news of military incompetence in the Dardanelles: “It is not wise to discuss this disastrous expedition in my newspaper, though the Germans are intimately informed of our impending catastrophe,” he said.

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This approach was shared by other proprietors. Staff at the Manchester Guardian became outraged when they discovered how much newsworthy information was being discussed behind closed doors between C. P. Scott, its proprietor and editor — today best remembered as the man who wrote in an editorial, “Comment is free, but facts are sacred” — and his close confidante, the Prime Minister Lloyd George. Scott’s own staff were outraged when they realised more than once that their own boss had failed to share with them newsworthy information he had received from Lloyd George days before.

Over the 100 years since the end of World War One, the British military and government, like the war-fighting institutions of other liberal democracies, notably the United States, have framed the reporting of the wars as a patriotic responsibility for journalists. It’s the war reporters’ eternal dilemma when covering a conflict in which their own country’s armed forces are participants: are they official eyewitnesses or independent critics?

It is possible to draw a direct line from official manipulation of the media in World War One to that of World War Two. When the British Empire declared war on Nazi Germany in September 1939, the British government reinstated World War One’s Ministry of Information in order to sustain civilian morale, censor the media and promote propaganda.

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The government saw the BBC as a vehicle to transmit government propaganda. The first Director General, John Reith, had no illusions that the government wanted the BBC to be independent. Reith wrote in his diary: “[The government] know that they can trust us not to be really impartial.”

Nor were British reporters in World War Two impartial: they believed they should help the military beat Hitler. However the two world wars were national endeavours – the wars of choice the British government has fought since, were not. Nonethless, access to the battlefield has usually been on the military’s terms and a heavy public relations spin is normally attached.

Why does this matter? News organisations have frequently presented misleading versions of events on the ground, from the supposedly bloodless air bombing campaign in the First Gulf War of 1990-91, to the one-sided depiction — mostly told by reporters from the soldier’s point of view — of the gruelling British campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Access is the main mechanism by which governments have curtailed journalists’ ability to tell the truth. Not all notable foreign correspondents go along with officially organised reporting, of course: the BBC reporters Allan Little and John Simpson don’t sign up for officially sanctioned access. Many more reporters have decided that military sanctioned access is better than none at all. They have, with varying degrees of success, done their best to negotiate with media managers in the field.

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Now, however, reporters have alternative ‘access’ to areas of conflict. Social media platforms give modern journalists — and indeed the public — powerful new mechanisms for uncovering and checking facts. All over the world, officials are less able to hide difficult news.

Online investigators Bellingcat, who teamed up with professional reporters on the ground in Russia to identify the would-be assassins of the Skripals in Salisbury, are the clearest example of this. Members of the online collective have also used freely available software and crowdsourced amateur investigators to attribute responsibility for shooting down the Malaysian Airlines MH17 plane in Ukraine in 2014 (Russia) and the Sarin gas attacks in Damascus in 2013 (it was the Syrian army).

In this way, professional journalists have enlisted non-professionals to sidestep controls imposed by the men with guns on the ground. And the quality of the material produced in this way is of the highest standard, as shown by the adoption of Bellingcat’s evidence by the police detectives investigating MH17. Significantly, the steps by which this information was verified have also been published.

It is the antithesis of the cosy communication networks operating in elite circles during World War One. Channel 4 News’ chief reporter Alex Thomson describes the inevitability of pesky facts appearing online– as he puts it, they “push up through the cracks in the pavement”. The result is that many of the important facts from modern news events are less easily contained and controlled. The hundredth anniversary of the “war to end all wars” has provided the opportunity to recognise both its toxic legacy for journalism and, thankfully, that there now exists an alternative.

This was true even after the start of the war. Even months after hostilities had commenced, everyone was still writing as they had before. Rupert Brooke, for example, opened his sonnet sequence “1914” with the line:

“Now, God be thanked who has matched us with his hour.”

Even a young George Orwell (admittedly only 11 years old in 1914) was writing a poem entitled:

“Awake! Young men of England.”

There was no special shame in this. Back then, such was the vernacular of poetry about war: celebratory, nobly commemorative, heroic, jingoistic.

The shift in tone, when it came, was permanent. As Geoff Dyer pointed out in his 1994 book, The Missing of the Somme, the young Orwell was simply relying on “received sentiment”. In exactly the same way, an 11-year-old writing 50 years on could, in similar circumstances, come up with a heartfelt poem expressing the horror of war – while also relying solely on received sentiment.”

The reason the “received sentiment” changed is not just because of one war, but because of one man: Wilfred Owen.

Of all the centennial occasions commemorated over the last four years, one of the smallest yet most saddening was at the beginning of this month, just days before the anniversary of the armistice. Wilfred Owen was killed just a week before the end of fighting, in 1918, during an attack at the Sambre Canal in the village of Ors.  The telegram announcing his death arrived at his mother’s house in Shrewsbury on armistice day as the bells were ringing out to celebrate the news of the end of the conflict. He was 25 – the same age his idol, Keats, was when he died.

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By Peter Franklin

In Owen’s lifetime, only five of his poems had been published – two of them anonymously in the journal Owen edited while temporarily invalided at Craiglockhart hospital in 1917. It was there that Owen met Siegfried Sassoon, one of the many friends and family members who would make it their mission to publish Owen’s work posthumously. From the moment that the poems started to be released, they changed not only poetry, but also the mindset of their readers.

Edmund Blunden’s 1931 edition of The Poems of Wilfred Owen was picked up by WH Auden and his contemporaries and Owen’s work infused that circle. In 1939, Christopher Isherwood wrote in his diary:

“Growing up in the postwar world, I learnt – from my history master, from Noel Coward, from Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon – to loathe the old men who made the war. Flags, memorials and uniforms made me tremble with rage.”

Isherwood specifically rebelled at the staff at his school who “tried to make me believe in a falsified and sentimentalised view of the 1914 war”. For a generation who had all suffered their own losses (Isherwood lost his father in the war), Owen seemed an emissary who could be trusted. The poetry reeked of truth in a way that instantly smashed aside anyone still trying to write in the old style.

For a time during the war, and in its aftermath, Siegfried Sassoon had seemed to be the poet of the war. But Sassoon’s reputation fell away as Owen’s grew. If there is one reason for that, it is because Sassoon’s war poems were mostly polemics: sharp, devastating and unavoidable. But their point was made on first reading, after which they couldn’t improve. Owen’s, on the other hand, had a strange mixture of attributes.

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Foremost among them was his poetic ear, unequalled since Keats in its ability at half-rhymes. If the war had not come along, Owen might still have become a great poet. But the meeting point of that Keatsian sensibility and the actual hell on earth of the Western Front is what makes his poetry something which, once encountered, never leaves your system. Just as it has never left the system of the culture.

In the century since Owen, “war poetry” can no longer be the celebration of battle. Nobody will have it, and nobody believes it. Real war poetry is epitomised by work such as “Dulce et Decorum Est.” But these poems are not simply about the horrors of war. They also contain an invention which seems to encompass almost everything. Consider the image after the gas attack in ‘Dulce’:

“…. An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.”

The vividness of Owen’s descriptions does more than turn the reader off war. Any sharp-eyed polemicist might do that. The specific of Owen’s descriptive genius is that there are things there which shouldn’t be. For instance, what is “ecstasy” doing in that line? It is not just that all of human death is there, but all of what used to be human life too.

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Just as the great practitioners of martial verse made people who had never been near a battlefield feel some valour transmitted on to them, so Owen made his readers feel as though part of the horror and (to use his phrase) the “pity of war” had passed into them as well. This process of transmission has run in a remarkable way through each of the generations that has followed.

The famous lines that Owen hoped to inscribe at the front of that book of poems he never lived to see published ended up – among other places – on the frontispiece of the score of Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem”, written for the consecration of Coventry Cathedral in 1962. Britten’s harrowing, inventive work – which interweaves the Latin mass for the dead with a number of Owen’s poems – likewise embedded a new perspective.

After “War Requiem” it became almost impossible to listen comfortably to a work like Edward Elgar’s memorial to the fallen of the same war, “Spirit of England“. If the sentiment of Elgar’s work didn’t seem exactly false, then it no longer seemed able to recognise the sheer enormity of what Europe had just done to itself – particularly its younger generation. “War Requiem” was just one example of Owen featuring prominently in the decades after his death. Three decades after that masterwork he became one of the central figures in the Booker Prize winning Regeneration Trilogy (1991-6) of Pat Barker, which was turned into a film.

Owen’s biographical life has been on an uncommon journey of its own. For years after his death, the Owen family remained understandably fierce guardians of his legacy. His younger brother Harold in particular worked devotedly on his brother’s reputation, editing his letters and writing a three-volume biography, Memoirs of the Owen Family: Journey from Obscurity. Wilfred Owen: 1893-1918 (1961) as well as Aftermath (1970).

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It was only after the immediate family died that certain other aspects of Owen’s life emerged. It became clear that Harold had, over the years, tried diligently to hide references that might reveal his brother’s homosexuality. Portions of the diaries and letters has been scrupulously expurgated. But even before recent works by Dominic Hibberd, Wilfred Owen: a New Biography (Phoenix) and Guy Cuthbertson, Wilfred Owen (Yale), painted a fuller picture, this aspect of Owen had probably been guessed at by many of his readers. There is something in the physical pain he expresses at witnessing the destruction of his comrades that was always a fraction of a pitch above what might be thought (terrible term though this it is to use in these circumstances) usual.

In “Futility“, for instance, there is his line describing “Limbs so dear achieved”. Likewise there is something in the undertow of a passage like this from “Disabled“:

“Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn,
Voices of play and pleasure after day,
Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him.”

These, to me, are among the most hauntingly beautiful lines ever written. Not least because of that use of “mothered”, only a fraction of  an inch away from becoming “smothered”.
The flood of new information in recent biographies means that Owen’s readers have got to know him better, the further their distance from him. Modern readers are now in the position of knowing Owen better than almost any of his contemporaries did.

His poetry is deeply and firmly embedded in national life as well as in our national outlook. Almost none of it is easy reading, and Owen is certainly not the sort of poet whose work you return to like an old friend. Even when he is saying something that could be consoling, he couches it – as Philip Larkin later would – in a manner that warns you that although you may wish a thought to be true, it doesn’t follow that it is.

In one passage in “Spring Offensive” he writes:

“Of them who running on that last high place
Breasted the surf of bullets, or went up
On the hot blast and fury of hell’s upsurge,
Or plunged and fell away past this world’s verge,
Some say God caught them even before they fell.”

As at the end of Larkin’s “Arundel Tomb” he places a similar hope before the reader – as great and deep a hope as anybody could have. And like Owen before him, he qualifies that hope.

Because what we have learned cannot be unlearned. What has been discovered cannot be forgotten. Beyond the poetry itself, this remains Owen’s remarkable achievement. To have seen Hell and to have described it in a way that means a century after his death, he is still telling us: you never saw this, but you will never forget it.

Several events are about to collide: the World War One centenary; the slow-motion retirement of Angela Merkel; rumours that Macron is suffering from nervous exhaustion; the hesitant French economy; the looming European elections; and more prosaically but menacingly, a French rural and outer-suburban revolt against a steep rise in petrol and diesel prices.

British eyes are inevitably fixed on Macron’s Brexit lunch (Brunch?) with Theresa May in Albert, on the Somme battlefields; the French leader’s hopes are pinned on an ambitious speech that he will make to launch a three-day international peace forum in Paris on Sunday, the centenary of the Armistice.

The oration has been preceded by a seven-day presidential pilgrimage through the areas of eastern and northern France laid waste by the fighting of 1914-18. These are still some of the most marginalised parts of France, laid to waste a second time in the late 20^th century by the collapse of heavy industry and traditional farming patterns.

Macron is alternating, somewhat uneasily, visits to battlefields with visits to small factories in an attempt to show that that he is not the Metropolitan President that his critics describe.

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By John Lichfield

At each stop, Macron has attempted to entwine history, commemoration and contemporary politics. But this has not been without blunders. He has already withdrawn comments he made about honouring Marshal Pétain, the First World War soldier and Second World War collaborator beloved of certain nationalist parties.

Further mishaps notwithstanding, on Sunday, before an audience including Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, he is expected to say:

“We face new populist threats to democracy, to pluralism, to the international rule of law. We face a resurgence of intolerant nationalism and heartless capitalism. None of this is new but it is new to the new generations. All the arguments and motives that we need for rescuing the democratic world order and the European Union from their enemies, old and new, can be found in World War One and its bungled aftermath.”

He will declare himself the standard-bearer for a “refoundation” of the European Union. He will, in effect, make himself leader of a crusade to defend western, liberal, democratic values against Trumpism, Putinism, Orbanism and Salvinism – but also the excesses of unregulated markets and giant financial interests.

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This is just the beginning. Next May he plans to take a leading role – unprecedented for a head of government, let alone a head of state – in the European elections. Macron will campaign in France, and possibly other member states, to promote the idea that shared ‘European sovereignty’ is often more useful than national sovereignty. He will say that only a strengthened EU can protect the economic and security interests of European nations from China, Russia and even the United States.

Wonderful, pro-Europeans will say. At least someone is prepared to make the case for Europe and face down the populists. Maybe. But Macron is taking big risks – even from a pro-European viewpoint; perhaps especially from a European viewpoint.

Apart from hijacking the First World War centenary to audition for the soon-to-be-vacant role of “leader” of the EU, he is basing his strategy on the European elections where low turn-out favours extreme parties of Left and Right. Worst of all, he is doing these things from a position of weakness not of strength.

Macron – the young man who seemed never to doubt himself – has fallen into a black, introspective mood. After an extraordinary rise to power, and an inordinate run of good luck, the reality of front-line politics has taken its toll.

Since the summer, he has suffered a series of setbacks – the first in his life since he failed as a young man to gain entrance to the super-elite French college, the Ecole Normale Supérieure – and his poll ratings have sunk to around 29%.

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There are reports from within the Elysée that Macron is “drifting” and unable to make decisions. It is said that he relies too much on a small internal coterie of young advisers, nick-named “the nursery”.

Last week, he took four days off to spend time with his wife, Brigitte, in Honfleur in Normandy. Elysée officials dismissed suggestions that the President was “burned out”. This was, they said, merely the kind of long weekend that millions of French people award themselves from time to time. He was recharging his batteries before his punishing Armistice tour.

There has also been talk of growing ill-feeling between Macron and his Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe. Despite his boast that he would be a Jupiter-like president, Macron has been tempted, Sarkozy-like, to become his own prime minister. Like Sarkozy, he has been sinking in the opinion polls while his, PM, remains relatively popular.

To break out of this trap, and escape from his own self-doubt wanted a means to re-launch his presidency. As one Elysée official said: “He wants to be a hero again, as he was last year. First and foremost he wants to be a hero to himself.”

Hence Macron 2.0 – a crusade against populism and the revival of his proposals for a stronger, more flexible European Union. But Macron’s decision to make the First World War centenary overtly political has drawn criticism from the Right and the Far Right in France. They say he is downplaying the military achievements of France in 1914-18. This weekend should, they argue, be mostly the commemoration of a glorious victory.

Hardly. The slaughter and sacrifice of World War One are certainly worth remembering. Its “military achievements” less so. It is to Macron’s credit that his seven day tour includes long-forgotten sites of slaughter of French troops in 1914 and 1915, not just the standard salute to “heroic” Verdun.

Nonetheless, his speech on Sunday is an enormous gamble. While he may be ready to lead a pro-European fight-back. It is not clear who is ready to follow him.

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It is unlikely that Germany, as it seeks Angela Merkel’s successor, will move rapidly in Macron’s direction. Britain is leaving the EU. Italy is ruled by Eurosceptics. Spain is preoccupied with Catalonian succession. Much of eastern and central Europe is trying to evade or defy the EU’s commitment to openness and democracy. The Liberal Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, though Macronian in many respects, dislikes some of Macron’s Eurozone and protectionist ideas. Ireland fears Macron’s push for harmonised corporate taxes within the Eurozone.

The French President has made it clear that he plans to ignore these difficulties and plunge into a vigorous, personal campaign in the European elections next May. Here the risks are even starker.

On past experience, the European elections are the worst forum in which to try to whip up popular enthusiasm for the European Union. Turn-out in France, like most countries, tends to be poor – around 48% in 2014. Those who do vote tend towards the disgruntled and the extreme.

In the latest French polls, Macron’s centrist La République En Marche party and its allies are running neck and neck at around 20% with Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. In one poll this week, the far-right party had taken a narrow lead. Last time Madame Le Pen “won” the French part of the European elections with 24 per cent. Such an outcome, or even a dead heat, would be a humiliation for Macron – and a repudiation for his European crusade

Further reading

Why rural France is fertile ground for Le Pen

By John Lichfield

Madame Le Pen has her own financial and political problems but French domestic politics will take a lurch next week into territory which favours her anti-elite, anti-metropolitan message. Motorists from rural and outer-suburban France are threatening to block roads en masse on 17 November in protest against a surge in pump prices of petrol and especially diesel. The price spike – over 30% this year – is partly caused by high oil prices but also by increased taxes intended to reduce France’s 60 per cent dependence on heavily-polluting diesel cars.

Residents of rural and outer suburban France already feel fenced out of the relatively booming economies of bigger towns and cities. They see the jump in petrol prices as a threat to their way of life imposed by wealthy urbanites who go to work by metro or bicycle.

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“You are crushing people,” one man told Macron on his visit to Verdun. In return, he got a lengthy presidential lecture on the need to reduce pollution and dependency on oil – not untrue but unlikely to calm tempers. The pump price revolt –  apolitical so far and spread informally by social media – looks likely to turn into one of those French street rebellions which easily spins out of control.

Far from promoting his European vision with his youth and energy, Macron risks damaging it with his domestic unpopularity. As one pro-European French commentator, Marion Van Renterghem, said this week: “He is beeping his horn loudly while driving straight into a wall.”

War imposed huge strains on the societies involved, and all felt the consequences, including the United Kingdom: Ireland broke away, and the empire began to fissure. Infinitely more traumatic were the fates of central and eastern Europe and the Middle East, where the collapse of the empires that had ruled them gave opportunities for independence to new nations, but caused years of bloody conflict and revolutionary violence that destroyed many millions of lives and led to mass ‘ethnic cleansing’. Some of the consequences still fester today.

The human cost for Britain, though less than for several other countries, had been immense: the line of mourners for the inauguration of the Cenotaph in Whitehall stretched for seven miles. People wanted victory to be for more than selfish reasons: in the novelist H.G. Wells’s phrase, they wanted it to be “a war to end war”. Only this seemed to make the terrible sacrifice bearable.

Further reading

Why are woke liberals such enemies of the past?

By Peter Franklin

Although there was anger against the enemy, and a popular demand to ‘make Germany pay’, there was a countervailing desire for reconciliation and a new peaceful world – an aspiration that earlier generations would have thought impossible, but which we have never abandoned. A League of Nations was created to keep the peace. King George V declared that war should be consigned to “a dead past“.

Many progressives, with the economist John Maynard Keynes as their spokesman, deplored what they saw as excessively harsh treatment of the now democratic Germany, which was made to pay economic “reparations”. Here was the origin of the policy of “appeasement” – to satisfy German grievances – which was generally accepted in Britain. Support for the League and for general disarmament was strong in all parties and sections of society. The Oxford Union famously voted in 1933 that “this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country“.

Our modern political landscape was created by the war. The once dominant Liberal Party split, and Labour replaced it as a major party. Wartime solidarity led Britain to take its final steps to democracy, giving the parliamentary vote to all adult men and eventually all women. The then prime minister, David Lloyd George, promised “homes fit for heroes“. Welfare benefits rose faster than ever before or since, despite the huge public debt created by the war.

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When do empires end?

By Allan Mallinson

But the British economy had been severely damaged. Vast overseas investments had been liquidated. Industry had slashed exports to supply the war effort, and overseas customers had turned to other suppliers such as America and Japan. Postwar markets for textiles, steel, ships, and coal collapsed, plunging whole regions into depression – something that still scars our society today. The short 1926 General Strike was one of the consequences. Worse was to come. Global economic crisis from 1929 onwards created mass unemployment, caused serious political instability in much of Europe, and brought Adolf Hitler to power in Germany.

For all these reasons, disillusionment with the outcome of the war began in the late 1920s. It seemed that “the war to end war” had been a mirage, and that life had got worse. Books, plays, poetry, paintings and films appeared in every country highlighting the horrors of the trenches. The British public clung, during the 1930s, to the “no more war” ideal, opposed spending on armaments and placed its hopes in the League of Nations.

Mounting aggressiveness by fascist regimes in Italy and Germany met with a redoubled desire to ‘appease’ Germany, and to keep Britain out of European conflicts. “Do not compete with the fascists in arms and they will not rearm”, declared the Labour leader Clement Attlee. By a tragic irony, fear and hatred of war born out of the sufferings of 1914-18 thus made another war more likely; and it materialised in 1939.

Further reading

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By Peter Franklin

To have to fight a second war against Germany and its allies might seem final proof that the First World War had been for nothing; indeed, that it had sown the seeds of even worse horrors. Or – as many at the time believed – that victory in 1918 had been wasted by the politicians. But whether this was due to treating Germany too harshly or by “appeasing” it was a matter of debate. It is a question that can never be resolved.

Britain had fought, in 1914, to prevent the dominance of the Continent by an aggressive Germany and its allies, and to ward off a potential threat to its own security. Victory meant the temporary removal of this threat. What if Britain had been defeated? It is impossible to gauge all that was at stake in the war, and how a different outcome might still have been affecting us today.

But defeat would surely have meant severe impoverishment, economic and social disruption, insecurity, and dangerous political division and bitterness. The prospects for a democratic future for Europe would have been bleak. In short, while the First World War did not bring the utopian future that idealists hoped for, it staved off an immediate danger, and gave peace and democracy a chance. So the Europe we live in has as its matrix the victory of 1918.

Further reading

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By Michael Burleigh

Was Britain changed in ways that still affect us? The belief that the carnage of the trenches somehow destroyed national solidarity, confidence and trust is fanciful. The funeral in 1922 of Field-Marshal Earl Haig, the former Commander-in-Chief, brought huge crowds of mourners into the streets.

Only since the 1960s has the First World War become a byword for futility and an easy way of bashing the Establishment and ‘militarism’ – though ironically, ‘militarism’ was what people in 1914 thought the war was against. The truest symbol of the legacy of the First World war is the poppy, which has no parallel in any other combatant country. The poppy combines a sense of national solidarity with consciousness of human suffering – very different from the heedless jingoism of the late Victorian age, which the First World War destroyed for ever.