We need to honour sacrifices of many

MEMORIAL: The cascade of 888,246 hand-made ceramic poppies which are now being removed from the Tower of London following Remembrance Day.

Anyone visiting the Tower of London in the past few weeks would have been drawn towards the moat.

At the foot of the grey walls, the eye was greeted by a carpet of red as almost 900,000 ceramic poppies were put in place - one for every British serviceman and servicewoman lost in the First World War.

Remembrance Day on November 11 was special this year.

It was the centenary of the declaration of World War I.

We have now got to the stage where almost no one living can remember the actual conflict. The war has thus passed from living memory into history - and our perspective must inevitably move on as well.

As the crowds gathered round at the memorials, always an emotional occasion, the focus was still on the battlefields of the Western Front - the Somme, Passchendaele, Gallipoli.

The roll of the battle honours reminds us of the ultimate in human courage, folly and endurance.

In part that is because of the war poets who wrote in such vivid terms of life in the front line.

In part it is because of the terrible waste which the conflict represents.

Still, emotions inevitably move on with time.

We do not shed tears for those who died in the Napoleonic Wars or, indeed, in the Boer War which ended only 12 years before the First World War began. The reason is they are simply too long ago.

Now the place of the Great War as the earliest major conflict in human memory is being usurped by the Second World War and, in 30 years or so, that too will fade in favour of more recent wars.

So, as the crowds gathered about the memorials and intoned the words "We will remember them", it was worth wondering what they meant.

How, in another 100 years, will the First War dead be remembered? It won't be as individuals - the links to individuals are already wearing thin.

It will rather be as part of the long procession of fighting men and women who have given their lives down the ages to enable us all to live in the way we do.

So in this centenary year it is worth looking back, not just at recent conflicts which we remember, not just at the dead of the two world wars, but at all those who through hundreds of years of history gave their lives so that the civilisation from which we now benefit could develop and thrive.

- John Watson writes from Islington in London.