It was catastrophic, cataclysmic and all destructive. It wiped out empires and aristocracies and tore through the middle class. The First World War was a conflict that should never have happened, was pursued foolishly and incestuously by the royal families of Europe and fertilised the ground for an even greater war two decades later. It produced an atmospheric solemnity of grief and loss, and a lingering, collective neurosis.
On November 11, 1918, when the guns fell silent in Europe, some 16 million had been left dead. A ceremonial ritual grew up around commemorating the fallen. So horrific were those events that a convention known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact was born, an instrument that initially began as a bilateral agreement between the United States and France to abandon war as an instrument of foreign policy. Eventually, virtually all the established states of the day signed it, heralding a most fabulous illusion, pursued even as countries began rearming.
The commemorators that tend to make an appearance on Remembrance Day often prove to be the war-makers of tomorrow. The demand that we all wear red poppies and contribute to the causes of veterans would be all the more poignant and significant were it to discourage killing, foster peace and encourage the brighter instincts of human progress. Instead, these occasions are used by the military-minded to ready the populace for the next conflict, a form of vulgar conditioning. Before his death in 2009 at the ripe age of 111 years, Harry Patch, a........