On the advice of doctors, Queen Elizabeth II will not attend this year’s Festival of Remembrance at the Albert Hall. Her absence will be poignant. The Queen was 19 on VE Day in 1945. She served in uniform in the war, in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. She represents the very youngest generation who fought in the second world war. That generation will not be with us much longer.
The Queen does still hope to lay a wreath at the Cenotaph on Sunday. But we have to face up to the reality that one day there will be no one left who knew the world at war; there will be no reunions, no one to attend solemn remembrances, no one left to pass on their experiences to relatives. This is the purpose of Remembrance Sunday: to ensure that war does not recede into a distant historical memory.
To take a moment to contemplate the sacrifice of a great-grandfather you know only from a faded photograph is a very different business from remembering fathers, husbands, sons whose faces you can still see and whose voices you can still hear.
Between what used to be known as the ‘Great Powers’, all-out war has become all but unthinkable
But we will lose a lot if we allow the world wars to pass into history.
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