We remember our war dead well, but still learn precious few lessons from their sacrifice

As Britain commemorated its annual Remembrance service yesterday, some 10,000 men and women marched past the Cenotaph and laid wreaths to remember those we have lost in the many wars that have raged around the world. It was perhaps an equally sombre reminder of the passing of time that there were eight former prime ministers present, but only six surviving veterans of D-Day. Among the few who are still able to talk first-hand about the terrible events of the Normandy landings 80 years ago was 101-year-old Joseph Randall, who was just 20 years old on D-Day, serving as a Corporal in the Royal Air Force constructing temporary airfields with 5022 Squadron Airfield Construction Branch.

Few could have failed to have been moved by the sight of the spirit of Normandy group as its members finally march towards the history books, nor by the sight at the other extreme of the bright yellow and black scarves of the marchers of Scotty’s Little Soldiers charity, that helps and supports children aged just nine and upwards who have lost a parent serving in the armed forces.

Although the survivors of the First World War have now passed into history and will soon be joined by the few remaining World War Two veterans, the numbers passing the Cenotaph yesterday bearing their campaign medals has not in the least diminished, a salutary reminder that wars are still very much a fact of human life.

As King Charles led the nation in two minutes of silence for the fallen, no doubt many minds were reflecting on the renewed uncertainty for global peace that last week’s US elections have heralded in, with all its implications for military strategies around the world. In particular Donald Trump looks set to fulfil his promise to scale back US support for Ukraine, which could have profound implications for global stability. This has our PM Kier Stamer so concerned that he’s heading to France today for talks on Ukraine with French President Macron and to attend Armistice Day commemorations in Paris – the first time a UK leader has done so since Winston Churchill in 1944. It’s said their discussions will focus on urgently ramping up military aid to Ukraine in the light of Trump’s likely withdrawal.

In recent years there been regular speculation about whether or not the Remembrance Day commemorations would have any meaningful relevance after the veterans of two world wars had passed, but the red poppies evident everywhere yesterday seemed no less poignant and certainly no less relevant. So far more than 11,000 combatants alone have been killed in the Russo-Ukrainian war (United Nations figures), and the 21st century generally has been marked already by bloody and miserable conflicts – Congo, Syria, Darfur, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen. So much for the thoughts of Francis Fukuyama, the renowned political theorist who proclaimed famously that the end of the Cold War marked “the end of history” and that henceforth the world would move into a globalised post-conflict mentality that prioritised peace and prosperity.

In a world that is being increasingly pulled apart by political, social and ideological divisions, the red poppy of remembrance is as relevant as it has ever been, a rare uniting symbol of our common humanity.

The roots of the British legion’s Poppy Appeal go back over a century, when the seeds were sown by French Catholic academic Anna Guérin. Madame Guérin was so moved by John McCrea’s famous poem In Flanders Fields and his image of the poppies that –”Blow between the crosses, row on row, that mark our place” – that she pledged to travel the world raising support for war widows and orphans.

Her impassioned address to the Catholic Women’s League of Canada in Toronto in 1921 enflamed a worldwide Poppy Appeal movement that is still going strong today.

When she returned from Canada, she set out from Liverpool to London, convinced she could persuade the fledgling British Legion to accept her idea. She also knew she could help it to organise the appeal nationwide, as her experience with war widows had convinced her of the value of using women volunteers for a network of distribution and collection. She offered to fund the manufacture of a million poppies in France, which the British Legion accepted.

Madame Guérin would be delighted to know that this year as every year more than 40,000 collectors have been out on UK streets, still selling her beloved poppies and raising funds for exactly the purposes she felt so passionate about.

Sadly though, her name has been all but erased from history. Mysogony was almost certainly to blame. Women had only just fought their way to getting the vote in 1918, and there was also a lot of resentment that women had taken men’s jobs at home during the war and had done them exceptionally well. Being French, and a very capable orator, probably didn’t help much either. The British press of the time picked up enthusiastically on the Poppy Appeal, but her name was rarely mentioned.

Madame Guérin remains a woman of considerable importance whose contribution to Remembrance Day ought to be acknowledged more fully.

As we look at the men and women who marched past the Cenotaph yesterday, it’s all too obvious that few lessons have been learnt from the dreadful wars the world has had to endure, as humanity seems so profoundly incapable of finding other solutions to basic human differences. One also has to wonder why leaders of countries seem so utterly obsessed with undertaking acts of such insanity as starting a war – something perhaps President Vladimir Putin might be wondering right now.

Over the past century countless words have been exhausted trying to make sense of conflicts such as the First World War and the actions of the political and military manipulators of warfare. Who could ever discern what was going on in the mind of people such as Field Marshal Douglas Hague, known by many as ‘the butcher of the Somme’, who turned more than a million men to stone because, of all things, he believed the German sub-machine gun to be a “much over-rated weapon.”

Hague’s actions have a special sharpness for me as he was equally convinced that his Irish battalions were far inferior to their British counterparts, and so he sent many brave and capable Irish regiments to their untimely deaths testing the strength of the enemy lines. Amongst such units were the 8th/9th Royal Irish Fusiliers, and my great uncle Edward Kelly, who – thanks to Hague – lost his life on 22nd August 1917 in the Third Battle of Ypres, or Passchendaele as it’s more commonly known.

It’s always said that the Great War shattered a centuries-old English order, and that nothing was ever quite the same afterwards, but in truth it had all but gone anyway long before the first shot was fired. The England that our young soldiers left was already in social and political upheaval, and the optimism of the Victorian Industrial Revolution had only led most ordinary folks into lives of poverty and marginalisation in our newly industrialised cities.

It’s such a great sadness to me that so many brave young men battled their way through the dreadful mudholes and trenches of the Somme, only to return home and find that another form of desolation had consumed their beloved English meadows.

As recent events around the country have demonstrated, England is still – or perhaps even more so – a highly complex nation, built on centuries of migration and quite relentless change, from our monarchs to our lowliest citizens. When you look at the countless diverse influences on our history, the whole question of a national identity becomes something of a nonsense and yet apparently, we all retain the most profound and clear sense of what it is to be ‘British’. Today ‘England’ and ‘Great Britain’ have become uncomfortable – and dangerous – parodies of a national myth, notions of solidarity that are already being skewed and unjustly appropriated by right wing agitators.

Back in the Spring of 1918, as Britain finally started to look towards the end of the most dreadful war in human history, Cardinal Francis Bourne issued a visionary Quinquagesima Pastoral in which he spoke enthusiastically of the coming of  a “new order” – yes, he used that phrase – that would follow the conflict’s eventual end.

“The minds of the people have been profoundly altered,” he noted.

“Dull acquiescence in social injustice has given way to active discontent. The very foundations of social and political life, of our economic system, of moral and religion, are being sharply scrutinised … Our institutions … must justify themselves at the bar of reason: they can no longer be taken for granted.”

The late cardinal’s words have a sharp resonance to the current state of social upheaval we’re witnessing in Britain, though sadly it seems this ‘new order’ is not an outbreak of the kind of moral reason and Christian charity that His Eminence imagined – if anything society has continued to regress towards its primitive origins as suspicion, indifference and antagonisms towards our neighbour have grown all the more divisive. In such a climate society pitches itself towards a state of internal warfare that perversely also tolerates external warfare as a solution to differences.

No doubt Cardinal Bourne and many thousands like him would have mourned just a little the passing of Remembrance Day commemorations as their subjects passed proudly into the history books. Sadly, it looks like the faces may change but the processions will continue with all their poignant symbolism, until we have learned that war is never a solution to human differences and that – and that if we continue to break faith with those who have died – we shall not sleep.

Joseph Kelly is a Catholic writer and theologian