The death of the last surviving WW1 veterans changed how we commemorate

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George Bell and Thomas McGill were cousins. Their families came from the small village of Glenluce in South-West Scotland where I grew up. Every day, on my way to school, I'd walk past their names, which were inscribed on the village war memorial.

George was a labourer and enlisted early, in September 1914. He was killed at Gallipoli eight months later. Thomas enlisted in 1916 and died the following year in France. Both had emigrated to Australia, part of a wave of rural depopulation as farm workers were replaced by mechanisation.

Theirs are among 51 names on that pale grey granite cenotaph.

It was built by a master mason called Robert MacMillan Clive, who was my great-grandfather. As a child in the 1970s, we used to gather by it on Armistice Day to "remember". Once or twice, I carried the Union flag.

But it meant little to us. World War One seemed like ancient history in my childhood imagination, even though I was born only 40 years after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

Roll of Honour

Of the eight million British men who fought it, almost one million were killed: one in eight. In Scotland one in four never came home.

But today, some 107 years after the guns fell silent, there are no WW1 veterans left alive in the UK. The last veteran of the trenches was Harry Patch, who died in 2009 at the age of 111.

The idea of Remembrance, the forms it took, emerged in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, as it was then known. Now, we go on remembering vicariously, performing rituals of solemnity and sorrow to honour those who died, but the meaning of those rituals have changed over the years.

So, what does public commemoration mean when the veterans themselves have all died - and when there are few alive today who remember first-hand the mass shared grief that gave rise to them?

An urgent need to find meaning

Of the 51 men listed on the memorial in Glenluce, at least 20 have no known graves. Their bodies were either never recovered, or they were never identified.

The men of my village left their bones in France and Flanders, Palestine and Gallipoli and Greece and Macedonia.

The village - like every town and village in the country - emerged from the war as a community of bereavement. Pretty much every street had lost someone. Survivors carved their grief into the landscape of Britain, by raising memorials in stone to those they'd lost.

The end of the war in 1918 brought an urgent shared imperative: to make sense of what had happened; to find meaning, a way to believe that it had not been for nothing.

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"There was this public need for recognition," says Liam Markey, research associate at Liverpool University, who has written a study of how Remembrance has changed over the decades.

The early national commemorations were "also a way to legitimise the war", he says, "to be able to say that these were the men who ended war; that this was the war to end all wars."

Professor Jay Winter, of Yale University, author of Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, points out that this all nodded to a very deep commitment.

"You know, 'it mustn't happen again. We cannot inflict this on our children'. There was astonishment, a shock realisation that the war had been so much more horrible than anyone had imagined it could be."

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Almost immediately, the ritualising of sorrow acquired a public and national dimension.

A wooden cenotaph, initially intended to be temporary, was erected in Whitehall. The remains of an unidentified soldier were buried at Westminster Abbey on Armistice Day 1920.

The inscription on his grave reads "thus are commemorated the many multitudes… who gave the most that man can give, life itself… They buried him among kings because he had done good toward God and toward his house."

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"This is one of the most unusual moments in British history," says Professor Winter. "When the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior was consecrated, it's estimated that two million people gathered to see it.

"It was a moment of joining together in recognition of the injustice of young men dying so that the old could go on living. There's something terrible in that message and it needs to be performed in order to be tolerated".

Forgetting the appalling realities

There was a paradox central to the early years of commemoration: that performing something that came to be known as "Remembrance" became one way of trying to forget.

"I think the first thing [they] had to forget is the harsh and appalling realities of the dismemberment of human bodies that went on," says Professor Winter.

"What had to be forgotten was not only the suffering but the indignity of not dying physically intact.

"The [at first] Imperial and later Commonwealth War Graves Commissions are brilliant in that they're beautiful. The beauty forgets the ugliness of the war."

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The idea that the Great War had been the war to end all wars had fallen apart in the late 1930s, with the outbreak of World War Two.

"The white poppy first appeared as early as the 1930s," explains Liam Markey.

Some veterans themselves dissented from the formal rituals of Remembrance. "One veteran its quoted in one of the newspapers saying 'every day is Remembrance Day for us'."

At the end of the WW2, the public showed no great enthusiasm to build sites of Remembrance for those who'd died. There were no new monuments to the dead of 1939-45. Instead their names were tacked onto existing post-1918 memorials.

Participation in Remembrance services began to dwindle.

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By the 1960s, many people began to believe that as the memory of the trenches receded into distant memory, the annual commemoration had begun to serve as a way of sanitising the war; that they had begun to ritualise not shared bereavement, but national pride.

And, in the age of anti-Vietnam War protests, there was a backlash.

Benjamin Britten's War Requiem was completed in early 1962. He incorporated the poetry of Wilfred Owen, which graphically depicted what Owen called the "pity" of war.

The war poets had not been much read in the 20s and 30s. They had not appealed to a public seeking to turn the page on the horrors of what they'd lived through.

But by the 60s they, and especially Owen, had found large new readerships.

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Alan Clark, before he became Conservative Minister, published The Donkeys - based on the phrase "lions led by…" - which challenged the settled narrative that the leader of British forces in France, Earl Haig, had been a strategic genius and the architect of victory.

At Haig's funeral in 1928, a million had lined the streets but by the 60s he was popularly perceived as the "Butcher of the Somme".

The war experience was now being mercilessly satirised. The stage musical Oh! What a Lovely War opened in 1963 and was turned into a film directed by Richard Attenborough in 1969.

Much of the public wanted a different take on war - and one that challenged solemn pieties at the heart of Official Remembrance.

After the last survivor has died

It has been 14 years since the last surviving British veteran of WW1 died. As for WW2, of five million British men and women who served in it, the Royal British Legion believes fewer than 8,000 are still alive. The youngest of these is 98 and many are over 100.

So, what will Remembrance mean when they are all gone?

Poppy Scotland, a charity linked to the Royal British Legion, plants a Garden of Remembrance at this time of year in the heart of Edinburgh.

Last weekend I watched as people queued to buy Remembrance merchandise from a pop-up retail shop: t-shirts bearing the words Lest We Forget, poppy-themed Christmas cards, napkins, water bottles, mugs, enamel poppies for your lapel, large plastic poppies for your car.

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Jane, a 56-year NHS worker, was taking donations in exchange for poppies.

"I do this every year," she said. "It's not just for veterans of the Second World War. It's for all those serving. At work I've seen a lot of people who've served and been affected by war, often in their mental health. They need support. It means a lot to me."

The Garden of Remembrance is a carpet of little wooden crosses, perhaps nine inches tall, decked with poppies. I watched a woman plant one and stand quietly for a few moments.

"It's nothing to do with the military for me," she said. "I come here to remember my sister, who died of cancer two years ago. She was my only sibling. She wasn't religious so I haven't used a cross, just a vertical piece of wood. But it's good place to come and remember."

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Debbie Clapham, from Stowe-on-the-Wolde in Gloucestershire, has bought an enamel poppy and is pinning it on her husband Sean's rugby shirt.

"We go the parade every year in Stowe," she says. "People still come to watch but the parade itself is getting smaller and smaller. They stop the traffic, and you can see some of the drivers getting irritated - and that annoys me."

"I was in Perth, Australia one Armistice Day," says Sean. "The whole city came to a standstill at 11am. There were bagpipers at all the street corners. It was very moving."

Inevitably, as the generation that fought WW2 disappears, the focus is shifting.

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There are 176,000 service veterans in Scotland out of 2 million in the UK as a whole, many of whom will have fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. Poppy Scotland, like the Royal British Region in the rest of the UK, offers them financial support, help with housing, and with the adjusting to civilian life when they leave the armed services. They also offer support with mental health.

"The poppy is not a symbol of war," says Jessica Gillespie, the Poppy Appeal manager here. "It's a symbol of Remembrance."

I say that most of the people buying the merchandise seem to me very middle aged. Where are the young? I ask her.

"We're seeing more and more young people volunteering," she insists. "There a rugby international in town later. Wait till the rugby fans arrive. We'll be busy with the young then. Rugby fans are among our biggest supporters."

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The public rituals we perform as a country haven't changed much in a hundred years. But the spirit of them, the sense of purpose that accompanies them, shifts all the time.

For the men and women who took part in them more then a century ago, they were about alleviating devastating personal and collective loss and a grief that embraced the whole population.

In the absence of that grief, and soon, when there is no-one left who served in WW2, how will these acts of Remembrance retain their power to move us?

The challenge will be to remember that the core purpose of the phenomenon we call Remembrance not to celebrate victory, or to celebrate the flag, or to take pride in what was done on the battlefields, but to acknowledge a great and overwhelming collective sorrow - and what Wilfred Owen called the "pity of war".

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Back in Glenluce there is a name on the memorial that holds my attention more than others: William Clive.

I've often wondered whether, like Robert MacMillan Clive, we were related. No photo of William survives, but we know quite a bit about him. He was five foot seven-and-a-half inches tall, with dark hair and grey eyes, and like others he too had emigrated, enlisting in Toronto in March 1916. He had, for a spell, worked as a nurse.

He died age 34 at the Battle of the Somme, six months after joining the Army.

Had William Clive survived into old age I might have met him when I was a child. And so long ago as it feels in some regards, this, on the other hand, makes WW1 seem startlingly recent.

Top picture credits: European Pressphoto Agency, Roll of HonourMore from InDepth

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