Our modest war heroes may be forgotten by the state — but not by the Telegraph

Every morning, when I am faced by my pile of newspapers, almost the first thing I do is to turn to the obituary page of the Daily Telegraph. Obits in all the serious papers are good — generally much better than they were 20 years ago — but the Telegraph has a particular specialisation which its rivals hardly try to emulate. Three or four times a week it carries pieces about former servicemen who fought in the second world war. To be included it seems that you need to have won a military medal, or else gone on to achieve high rank after the war. These obituaries record the acts of sacrifice and bravery of young men over 60 years ago. There is nothing like them anywhere else in the British press.

Over the past year or two I have noticed that the number of these obituaries is slowly declining. This is hardly surprising, if you think about it.