A society that forgets its past and is embarrassed about remembering the sacrifice of those who have gone before is one that loses its past and, with that, loses its future. As those young people I referred to were able to remind me and many of my colleagues, there is something special about pausing to remember. We are not dwelling on or glorifying war, but remembering the sacrifice of those whose sole responsibility was to aid and abet their colleagues and to protect and defend the society in which they lived, and which nurtured them.
A short debate followed in which Duncan Smith’s proposal was broadly welcomed, although everyone agreed that nothing could be done without first ascertaining the wishes of the family of the last veteran to die. If for any reason the family did not want a state funeral, it was suggested, a national service of commemoration should be held instead. Don Touhig, then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence, cautioned that however appropriate a state funeral might seem, and whatever popular support there was for it, there might be logistical difficulties in ascertaining who really was the last veteran. More than half the service records of the period had been destroyed during the Blitz, and so reliance was put upon those veterans who had identified themselves. No one was under any obligation to identify themselves and there might be veterans who preferred anonymity or had either by choice or oversight not made themselves known: as recently as March of that year two new French veterans had been ‘discovered’. To further complicate matters, Touhig stated that the government’s definition of a last veteran was rather more flexible than the generally agreed one. He argued that anyone who had served during the war, and even those who had not finished their training and were still in Britain when the Armistice was declared, should be recognised as veterans. It became clear that some sort of service of commemoration might be a more workable arrangement than a state funeral, and this was what the government eventually decided upon. On 27 June 2006 the Defence Secretary, Des Browne, announced that: ‘A National Memorial Service will allow the whole nation to honour the valour and spirit shown by the veterans of WW1 and will commemorate an entire generation.’ This would take place in Westminster Abbey within about twelve weeks of the death of ‘the last known World War One veteran’. As with Duncan Smith’s original proposal, the ceremony would be modelled on the one that took place on 11 November 1920 when Britain’s Unknown Warrior was laid to rest in the Abbey ‘among the most illustrious of the land’.
A state funeral for the Last Veteran would undoubtedly have provided a neater symmetry than a mere service of commemoration, since it would have marked the end of a prolonged period of national mourning which started with the state funeral of the Unknown Warrior. Not only was the Unknown Warrior, like the Last Veteran, an individual representative of all those who served in the First World War, he was also an individual chosen at random, or at any rate by chance, just as the Last Veteran achieved that status by an accident of longevity.
Ever since the Armistice there have been arguments, not all of them seemly, about how the First World War should be remembered, commemorated and represented. In all this the veterans have played a significant and sometimes controversial role. Veterans were not always seen as remarkable, fêted and honoured because they provided a link with a particularly poignant piece of our history. Over the years they had been treated with a great deal less deference and consideration, had been obliged to fight for their rights, had been involved in later battles in which the weapons were bricks and batons and the enemy was the forces of law and order in their own country. They had been both the centrepiece of our national acts of commemoration, and dismissed as increasingly irrelevant, standing in the way of liturgical reform. Above all, they had remained a constant reminder of a major historical event that in all sorts of ways, not least the psychological, shaped the twentieth century.
In Britain the international catastrophe that was the First World War has been adopted as a peculiarly national trauma, one that has cast its shadow down the years and haunts us still. There have been other wars since 1918, and in all of them combatants have had to endure privation, discomfort, misery, the loss of comrades and appalling injuries. Even so, the First World War continues to exert a hold upon the collective imagination in Britain in a way it does not in, say, the USA. The statistics are, of course, extraordinary. On the First Day of the Somme 20,000 British soldiers were killed, the equal of the entire sum of casualties of the Boer War. The number of British service personnel killed in the Second World War was less than half the number killed in 1914–18. Even when you add in the many more civilian casualties Britain suffered during the Second World War – some 60,000 – the overall number of deaths is still smaller than the dreadful tally of the Great War. Over 30 per cent of British men who were aged between twenty and twenty-four in 1914 were killed in action or died of wounds; of those aged between thirteen and nineteen the figure is more than 28 per cent; some 200,000 women were left widows and 350,000 children left without fathers.
Bad as this was, it was not unique to Britain. France, Germany and Austria each not only lost more combatants than Britain, but also lost a higher proportion of their overall population: France lost 1 in 28, Germany 1 in 35, Austria 1 in 50, Britain 1 in 66, Italy 1 in 79, the USA 1 in 2,000. Furthermore, although the mass slaughter on the Western Front was indisputably awful, for all the talk of ‘mechanised killing’ it does not compare with the industrialised murder carried out by the Nazis during the Holocaust. It remains a grim statistic that of the six million British who fought in the First World War roughly one in eight were killed, but they were at least killed fighting in defence of their country or for some sort of patriotic principle rather than simply rounded up for liquidation. It is not even a question of numbers. The long lists of names on First World War memorials, many of them from the same family, tell of the losses sustained by individual villages, towns or cities, but none of them speaks so eloquently of communities destroyed as, for example, the interior walls of the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague, where the names of some 80,000 Jewish victims of the Holocaust from Bohemia and Moravia are inscribed, arranged by where they once lived: men, women and children, street after street after street. The bomb that fell on Hiroshima in 1945 eclipsed anything produced by even the greatest bombardment of the trenches, resulting in between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths in an instant.
Regardless of the historical and demographic facts, when remembering the First World War the British continue to talk about a lost generation. There is a sense that as a nation we have never quite recovered from this loss, that the flower of British youth was cut down in Picardy and Flanders, that an irreplaceable wealth of talent and an almost prelapsarian state of innocence were destroyed for ever between the years 1914 and 1918. Cast out of the Edwardian Eden, where it was somehow always perfect summer weather, we have ever after tended to look yearningly back rather than expectantly forward.
The war has become part of who we are. It occupies a disproportionately large place in our sense of the world and its history and remains a seemingly endless resource not only for historians, but for novelists, poets, dramatists and composers, for cinema and television. The sounds and images of the war are so imprinted on the national consciousness that we recognise them instantly: the foreign place names such as Mons, Ypres, Loos, Passchendaele and the Somme, which retain a familiarity even for those who could not point to them on a map; the lines of men at the recruiting offices on 4 August 1914 and the rows of crosses (now replaced by rounded headstones) that marked where those bank-holiday crowds ended up; the scarlet poppies blowing in a landscape rendered unrecognisable by shellfire; the mud and the blood, and the big guns in France that could be heard this