Peter Rhodes on the horror of gas warfare, the pessimism of today's youth and men portrayed as morons

ONE of the most disturbing things about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi is that the Saudis seemed to think the West would not make much fuss about it. Time may prove them right. How different things might be if it were not for all that oil.

"YOU have stolen my future" declared some of the posters wielded by teenagers at the People's Vote march in London. It's depressing to see a generation so enthusiastically embracing pessimism. They should talk to some of the unemployed millions of youngsters in the Eurozone and ask what the EU has done for them.

AN earlier generation took a more robust view. One hundred years ago in October 1918, my grandfather Private John Willie Smith and his mates of the Duke of Wellington's Regiment knew the war was almost over and dared to hope they would survive the next few days. In the early hours of October 20, billeted in huts near the northern French town of St Python, the Tommies heard their artillery firing at the Germans. The Germans responded with shells filled with mustard gas.

IN his diary, grandfather recalled: "We were in a big orchard in a little shack and the old brute dumped one right through the top. This is where I was gassed. I was attended to at once. I was going blind. It was an awful feeling. I was in hospital for 42 days. The Armistice was signed while I was here." Exactly 100 years ago today, my grandfather was a 23-year-old contemplating a life of blindness, his spirits at rock bottom. Millions of folk celebrated the end of "the war to end wars." But in later life Grandad admitted that when he heard the news, on November 11, that the Armistice had been signed, "I couldn't care less."

BUT soon he recovered his sight and his sense of humour. By Christmas Private Smith was in Germany as part of the British Army of Occupation. His troubles were not over. He fell seriously ill with pneumonia and feared he would die. Or as he put it in his diary, in a line which still moves me and captures perfectly the bleak, graveyard humour of the boys of the Great War: "I thought I was going to be a land owner in Germany." We don't breed them like that any more.

THE TV ads for Plumbs fitted furniture covers continue the casual abuse of males seen in so much of our popular culture. The woman in the ad is bright, clever and switched-on. Her husband is a clumsy, muddy-booted moron who doesn't even understand that it's his old chair under the new covers. The trouble with endlessly portraying men as big, irritating children is that eventually that's how they behave.

MY suspicion is that Mrs Plumb is planning to murder Mr Plumb. In the study. With the tape measure.