Quiet and Brave

And then there were three. Henry Allingham, 112, Harry Patch, 110 and William Stone, a mere stripling at 108, are the only ones left. They are the last three men living in Britain who served in the First World War. This morning they will assemble, for perhaps the final time, at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, where, at 11am, 90 years to the minute since the guns fell silent, the final veterans of the Great War will lead the nation in a two minute silence that honors all the country's war dead in all its many wars.

The continuing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have concentrated minds in this remembrance season, but it is still the First World War that is the primary focus of attention and, yes, grief, even 90 years on. Indeed, the more the Great War recedes into the distance, the greater the interest in it. As the number of survivors has dwindled to a handful over the past decade, so the war has become more, not less important. Soon even these doughty survivors will leave us and the final flesh-and-blood links to the carnage will be gone.  It will, once more, be as Robert Graves put it, "Goodbye to All That".

Perhaps interest in the Great War will slacken then, but I doubt it. The arguments still rage. Each year new histories appear, new television series are commissioned and new novels with the war as its backdrop are published. Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong was perhaps the most popular British literary novel of the past 15 years, selling more than three million copies, while Pat Barker won the Booker Prize for The Ghost Road, the final volume of her First World War trilogy. The war continues to compel a dreadful fascination.

So perhaps it's not surprising that anyone visiting Britain at this time of year cannot help but be struck by the little red paper poppies sported by much of the populace. More than forty million of the paper flowers, modeled on the blood-red poppies that grew in Flanders' fields, were distributed this year, the proceeds going to the Royal British Legion, a charity which cares for ex-servicemen.

The Labour government recently dropped proposals for a new national holiday that would celebrate "Britishness." And rightly so. The proposal was met with scorn and ridicule, largely because no-one felt there was any need for a public display of flag-waving. In any case, Remembrance Sunday and the anniversary of the Armistice are enough. Though a somber affair, these days remind us all of the common bonds that tie the country together: bonds of blood and time and sacrifice in periods of monumental collective effort.

Typically, it's the defeats and disasters that echo more strongly down the years. Dunkirk looms larger in the popular imagination than el-Alamein; the Somme and Passchendaele define the First World War more thoroughly than the great victories of 1918.