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He laughed, then nodded at the re-enactment. ‘This is the first time I’ve ever done this.’

‘Me too.’ One of the re-enactors suddenly put his hands in the air. ‘Oh look, he’s surrendering and he’s a bluecoat!’

The bluecoats were Unionists, whereas the Confederates traditionally wore grey. Not the easiest of colours to tell apart at the best of times, but what made it even worse was that the Confederate Army struggled to find grey material, so some of their soldiers wore dark blue. Unsurprisingly, this led to considerable confusion. For instance, during the Battle of Shiloh, some of the Confederate forces fired at their own soldiers. As if that wasn’t crazy enough, the Union then ran out dark blue cloth, some of their old uniforms faded to grey as the dye washed out, and many Unionist troops were given grey jackets to wear over their blue shirts. No wonder so many soldiers died.

After a few hours, the re-enactment ended with no sign of who had won. Several of the participants recognised me and wandered over for a chat. They told me they’d all made their uniforms themselves and had been very accurate about the details, to the point where one of them had a period pipe that he kept smoking, staying in character throughout. They were great fun. I couldn’t have asked for better company.

From the re-enactment, I drove directly to Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery, a military graveyard on the banks of the Mississippi. More than 220 generals from the Civil War spent time at Jefferson Barracks and many of them were laid to rest in the cemetery, which covers more than 330 acres. Established after the Civil War, it contained nearly 160,000 graves by 2005. Since then, several thousand more have been added.

There wasn’t much I could say about this place. The sight of all the graves said it all, really. Every grave was identical – each one a uniform size in an indistinguishable serried rank. Tombstones in civilian graveyards are often engraved with poems and little one-liners, but there’s none of that in military graveyards. Just the bare details: name, regiment, date of birth and date of death. Occasionally, the tombstone would have a few additional words, such as ‘Loving Father’ or ‘Dear Brother’, but more often it was just the basic facts in row upon row of tombstones, rolling over hill and dale.

To me, it seemed a wee bit obscene to make something so horrible look so neat and tidy. I know that’s a very cruel thing to say, because I’m sure the people who designed the cemetery did it with the very best intentions, but it reminded me of the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire – a monument to all the British forces killed on duty or as a result of terrorism since the end of the Second World War. When it was opened, a commentator on television explained that some of the walls listing the dead had been left blank. Apparently, there was space for about ten thousand more names to be added. When I heard that, I thought: Does this bastard know something I don’t?

What horrifies me most about war memorials is that no anti-war sentiments are ever displayed. It’s as if war is fun or noble, when actually it’s all about shit and snot and blood and guts and soldiers’ stomachs hanging out and people with their faces blown off. But they never showed that side of it. Perhaps, if they did, there’d be less of it. I remember seeing a picture of a soldier in Vietnam who was sitting, waiting to die, with his jaw missing. His head now started at his top row of teeth; everything beneath that was gone. They didn’t put that on the recruitment posters, did they? But that’s what war is to me. And I don’t care who we’re fighting, I don’t hate them enough to do something like that to them.

Maybe all of this hit me particularly hard at the Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery because I visited it shortly after Osama bin Laden was nailed and America was rejoicing in a huge wave of triumphalism. I found all of that rather horrifying – that delight in death and that attitude of ‘Why don’t we