Yesterday may once more have been the last Armistice Day in living memory of combat. Four million viewers watched BBC’s Remembrance Sunday ceremony on November 9 at the Whitehall Cenotaph, this year marking the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I, or the Great War as some still choose to call it despite WWII. Fighting stopped on the Western Front at 11 am on November 11, 1918 — the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month has since entered the realms of cliché and legend. The symbolism inherent in the time and date is what we feel about most of the markers of last century’s defining conflict.

Four million wouldn’t have watched Remembrance Sunday proceedings, the ceremony would not have survived eight decades, had there not always been this remembered reality: the exploding shells and the gas and the smoke and the muck and the angst of the trenches, of watching comrades fall or being blown apart, the Pity of War with which we came to associate all warfare. And yet, so many of us remember WWI mainly because of the millions of icons it produced; symbols which imbibe the reality long gone and hold it for posterity. They are the mileposts of history, the objective correlative of emotions people have felt within ever since. Where does one begin to count them? Harry Patch — the last veteran of the trenches on the western front, the Whitehall Cenotaph, the little red poppies people sported there on Sunday evoking the Flemish battlefields that could grow only poppies after the conflict, the war graves and memorials, the verdant Somme fields, the Last Post at Ypres’s Menin Gate sounding every night at 8pm for 80 years, the Menin Gate that Flemish locals revere dutifully and that Siegfried Sassoon despised, Sassoon’s poetry itself?

... contd.