Peter Rhodes: Respect - the one word that took a soldier to his death on the Somme

Exactly 100 years ago tomorrow, on December 25, 1915, Alvin Smith celebrated his last Christmas. He was 19.

His family sat down to Christmas dinner at their farm in the Yorkshire Dales. They were joined by Alvin's 18-year-old girlfriend Amy, and his best friend, Willie.

Alvin looked across the table and said: "Well, Willie, we'd better enjoy this Christmas because we probably won't see the next one."

Seventy years later, Amy told me: "There was nothing dramatic about the way he said it. It was just a statement of fact."

Alvin was right. He and Willie were about to enlist in the Duke of Wellington's Regiment and go off to do their bit in the First World War. As they enjoyed their Christmas dinner a century ago, Alvin had nine months left to live, Willie only six.

Alvin was my grandfather's younger brother and could probably have avoided the war altogether. He was his father's only hand on the small family farm in Lothersdale, near Skipton. Twice, his father had successfully pleaded at the recruitment tribunal for his lad to be spared call-up into the army. But then, in a single, silly teenage exchange, the emotional pressure became too much.

"Would you love me if I was a soldier?" Alvin joked as he walked with Amy.

"Well," she teased, in a reply which haunted her for the rest of her long life, "I might respect you a bit more."

Respect. That did it. Alvin insisted his father must let him go. And if Alvin was going, Willie was determined to go too. The pair enlisted a month after Christmas. By May they were in France preparing for the battle they knew as The Big Push and history calls The Somme.

Willie died in action on July 7. Alvin was killed on the third Sunday in September of 1916 in a small-scale attack to seize a length of German trenches. Alvin and a group of his mates were blown to pieces, probably by British mortar bombs falling short.

I began researching his life and death in 1980. By then Amy was old and blind but still spoke lovingly of the sweetheart she had lost. When I suggested the Somme lads saw war as an adventure, she quickly corrected me. By 1916, there were no illusions. The volunteers knew they were off to slaughter.

"They went out of nobility, pure nobility," said Amy.

To mark the 80th anniversary of Alvin's death in 1996 I laid a single white Yorkshire rose on the war memorial in Lothersdale and a second rose a couple of days later at the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing on the Somme.

I hope to do the same for the 100th anniversary, keeping faith with the words on the certificate issued to all the families who lost members in the Great War: "Let those who come after see to it that his name be not forgotten."

Next year will see huge commemorations of the Battle of the Somme which claimed about a million British and German casualties. Millions of families will reflect on what might have been; the lives lost, the undone years, the children and grand-children unborn.

And I will think, as I always think when considering the life and death of Private Alvin Smith, how strange it was that on the third Sunday of September 1986, exactly 70 years to the day after Alvin departed this world, our daughter was born into it.

Individuals die but families regenerate. Their spirit goes on. And even as a hard-boiled atheist, I will be mindful tomorrow of Kipling's thoughts: "They will come back - come back again, as long as the red Earth rolls. / He never wasted a leaf or a tree. Do you think He would squander souls ?"

Have a very merry Christmas.