A soldier's story is as much about love as it is about the cruelties of war

A man who had seen the worst of war believes it could only be embarked upon as 'the last, the last, last resort'

The gloom comes in at the end of October and sits like a coastal fog until spring. It is a nagging melancholy for which good company and laughter are the best antidotes. These and the promise of work in the southern hemisphere, where the seasons are reversed and Christmas carols are sung on the beach. Fortunately the nature of my work ensures reasonably regular, if brief, periods of escape to the south. I don't think I suffer from so-called "Seasonally Adjusted Depression".

No, nothing as serious as that. Perhaps it is nothing more than the reasonable response of the sane mind to the reality of a northern European winter. Or perhaps more accurately, the response of the sane mind to the desolate England of the M25. Twice this week I have driven along this rue sans joi in the driving rain. This highway of road cones and Little Chefs is a fit landscape for the tedium of modern driving. We drive to arrive. The journey itself is a meaningless blur. The motorists on either side of me look grey-faced, mortgaged, forlorn. I catch my face in the mirror and realise that I look exactly the same. To borrow – and slightly alter – a famous line: I had not thought debt had undone so many.

In the winter drizzle, motorway England seems hunched and beaten to me, with only the electricity pylons to hold up the sky. But just outside Colchester I follow the directions I've been given and take to the smaller roads. And then my rage against the present begins to subside as another England emerges from the wintry penumbra. It is not quite an Elgar moment, but almost. The road narrows and there are cattle in the fields on either side. They are fine, fat, healthy looking brown bullocks. A little further on there is a field of newly ploughed earth upon which several pheasant are loitering. The rat-run of the M25 has vanished.

I stop the car and get out. Far to the west I can make out the grumble of traffic, but it is not loud enough to destroy the serenity of these quiet fields. I am on my way to see a wonderful man, a retired colonel by the name of Donald Easten, who lives in the village of Wormingford.

Perhaps it is more accurate to say that I am here for the sake of memory. Not my personal memory, but the recollections of others who week by week are dying out. It was my personal experience of reporting war which led me to a strong belief in the necessity of remembrance. I think it is well done in this country. Sombre and reflective, with no sense of glorifying war.

In a week's time I will be presenting the BBC Remembrance Day programme from the Cenotaph, and I am in the process of writing a book about a terrible battle in which Donald Easten fought. His house lies just beyond the village of Wormingford, nestling in the most beautiful part of the valley. The other day he took me for a walk along the banks of the River Stour and pointed to Suffolk, just yards away across the brackish water.

To reach his home, you drive down a narrow lane past the village church. Donald and his wife Billy will wander up the lane to the church to commemorate Remembrance Sunday. He was a soldier in Bill Slim's 14th Army – the "Forgotten Army" which turned the tide of battle in the east – and Billy commanded an anti-aircraft crew in London. One night her crew brought down a German bomber. "I just burst into tears," she says, "knowing that a command of mine had ended somebody's life." They are gentle people for whom war is a thing best remembered in quiet voices. In this season of remembrance Donald is thinking of his brother, his brother-in-law, and his first cousin, all of whom were killed in the early years of the war.

I came to know them both because I am writing a book about one of the most terrible encounters of the war in the Far East. Donald Easten was a company commander at the siege of Kohima, when a small British force was surrounded by a vastly stronger Japanese army and held out against a two-week onslaught. They fought off wave after wave of Japanese attacks while the defensive perimeter shrank to a mere 500 yards. Shells landed in the midst of the wounded, food and water began to run out.

As General (later Field Marshall and Viscount) Slim recounted in his memoir Defeat Into Victory: "There had been longer sieges in military history, but few as intense. The village of Kohima is in India, close to the Burmese border, and the Japanese fervently believed that if they defeated the British here, then an advance to Delhi and the defeat of the Allies in the East was possible."

Donald was a young captain in the Royal West Kent regiment, and like many of his soldiers had been in the Territorials just before the war. To borrow the American phrase, they were "citizen soldiers".

Not long before he went off to war, Donald and Billy made up their minds to get married. They both understood there was a strong chance he might not be coming home. Marriage was a gesture of hope as well as love. But they agreed there would be no sad goodbyes. So Billy would stay away from the window when the Royal West Kents marched past. But she heard the feet coming up the road and couldn't restrain herself.

She looked out and caught Donald's eye, and wondered if she would ever see him again. Three and a half years later he came back, the same quiet and unassuming man he'd been when he left, but a man who'd seen the worst of war and who for the rest of his days would believe it something that could only be embarked upon "as the last, the last, last resort".

I came to the story of Kohima through the father of a close friend of mine. Colonel John Shipster knew he was dying, and his son Michael asked me to record some of his war memories. John had been part of the force which came to relieve Kohima and drove the Japanese Imperial Army back into Burma, one of the most catastrophic retreats in the history of war, with thousands of men starving to death in the mountains. To the end of his days he was troubled with dreams of the terrible hand-to-hand combat in the jungle. Nowadays the stories of that war can seem much of a piece with the rural landscape I described earlier: part of a country that exists in little pockets here and there, but that is gradually being lost to us. The physical loss is inevitable, but the stories we must record and hoard.

There are many valid reasons for remembering the dead of war, but none that matters so much to me as the need to recognise what it does to those who must endure its terrors – civilians and soldiers – and the demands it places on ordinary men cast into the most extraordinary situations. The curious thing is that not one of those I've spoken to has ever pushed his own story. Without fail, every man has spoken about what his friends did, particularly the friends who did not come home. Belatedly, I have come to realise that the story of the ordinary soldier is as much about friendship and love as about war and its cruelties.

The writer is a BBC Special Correspondent