The general public prefers their war heroes to be dead

The first British bombing-raid of World War 2, on the Admiral Scheer battleship at Wilhelmshaven, resulted in the first RAF deaths of the conflict, with eleven of the twelve Blenheim aircrew involved losing their lives. Just one crewman survived, and he then endured six bitter years as a prisoner of war. His named was Larry Slattery, an Irishman.

He returned to Ireland in 1945, to his home town in Tipperary, where he lived in a single room above a shop, speaking to no one, ever. His face could occasionally be seen staring out of his unwashed window. He died alone in the 1960s.

The RAF rightly honours the 11 men who perished at Wilhelmshaven, as the first of the 55,000 men who were to lay down their lives in the service of Bomber Command. But how many Larry Slatterys were there, across the United Kingdom and Commonwealth, whose lives had effectively ended during the war, who endured the rest of their days tormented by demons, but whose names are on no memorials?

Remembrance Sunday has too often become an excuse for a grisly and maudlin sentimentality about a 'lost generation', or 'lions led by donkeys'. The day serves as an excuse for any cliche about war, about man's inhumanity to man, and about the futility of armed conflict.

Yet the single, inalienable truth is that a society that is not able to defend itself against threat from the outside will sooner or later go the way of the Arapaho and the Pawnee; and once a society has armed itself in self-protection, the chances are that, sooner or later, it will be drawn into conflict of some kind or other.

The original purpose of the poppies was to make work for men maimed in battle

If war is a commonplace human activity, so too is compassion: yet true, enduring, adult compassion towards the maimed of war is one of the most strikingly absent features about how British society has responded to the aftermath of war.

After all, the original purpose of the artificial poppies was to give employment to men who had been maimed in battle. These broken men were still made to work to survive. The British never even had the French tradition of reserving seats in public transport for veterans mutiles par la guerre.

In fact, it could be said that the British preferred it if all their Larry Slatterys skulked in their solitary bedsits, and gibbered in the cold