The most remarkable thing about the ceremony at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday is that it just gets more popular. A ceremony that a generation ago might have been confidently predicted to appeal to a smaller and smaller bit of the population has somehow attracted the kind of benign publicity you get for the Children in Need awards.
And the enormous crowds at the Tower to see the moatfull of ceramic poppies – one for each British life lost – has taken everyone by surprise. It’s got a good deal to do with the centenary of the First World War, of course, but that itself suggests that in a fractured Britain, people attach real emotional significance to wars from a lost world whose very language – such as sacrifice – is alien to our own.
Even for pacificists (and you don’t come across many nowadays) there’s not much not to like about Remembrance Sunday; the pity of it all trumps any kind of triumphalism.
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