Why, as the Great War recedes further into the past, does it loom larger?

Another Remembrance Day app­roaches as I write. Another autumnal Sunday; another Last Post; those poppies again; in Derbyshire the church parades; another nationwide two-minute silence. The occasion always sets me thinking about what people call ‘perspective’ in history.

Sir Percy Cradock, leaving Peking as ambassador nearly 30 years ago, said something about history’s rear-view mirror in his valedictory despatch: ‘In the socialist state,’ he wrote, ‘it is the past that is unpredictable.’

And not just in the socialist state. The longer one lives the more the past appears as a landscape in perpetual, usually gradual, sometimes radical upheaval. As each succeeding generation gets its recent history into what we like to call perspective, the mountain ranges in our wing mirrors heave, warp and morph, often almost out of recognition.

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Sometimes it happens because new facts are uncovered, prompting a reappraisal of causes and culpabilities. As it became clear Saddam Hussein had not, after all, possessed weapons of mass destruction, we reassessed the British-American propaganda campaign before the invasion. As the evidence of Hitler’s genocidal atrocities mounted, what was seen by my parents’ generation as one of the secondary justifications for war came to be seen (by my own) as more central.

Sometimes it happens because standards and cultural values change. Slavery and (more controversially) colonialism are examples.

And sometimes memories just fade. Sharp edges soften and scars heal. In the end we more or less forgave the Americans for pulling the rug from under our feet at Suez; more recently our departure from Hong Kong had an agonising quality; but a mantle of historical inevitability settles slowly over such chapters, and we think little of them now. We ‘move on’. Already, weeks pass without any mention of Afghanistan — and we haven’t even quit yet.