The first sentence of the daily diary of Earl Haig, the British commander in the First World War, is remarkably banal. 'Fine day but cold and dull,' begins the entry describing November 11, 1918.

As it turned out, the day was anything but dull. And it was certainly fine: after four years of warfare, at 11 that morning, the guns would be silenced.

At the same time on every succeeding Sunday morning closest to November 11, next Sunday included, many of us pause to remember that moment.

Ninety years on, what are we doing? It was all a very long time ago and recollection demands an ever greater act of imagination. There are now only three men alive who survived to the Armistice.

It is not just that the interval of time is so great. Most of us simply have no sense of what military life is like: a couple of generations have passed since we could all expect to have spent part of our lives wearing uniform. There is not a single person at the top of Government with first-hand experience of service life, let alone of the terror of combat.

The men and women who send our soldiers to war - and that devout Christian Tony Blair sent British forces into action six times in five years - have never had to carry a gun themselves.

In that, they merely reflect the nation they lead: we have become flabby and comfortable and the Army, Navy and RAF are remote tribes of which complacent civilians know little.

In marking the anniversary of the 1918 Armistice, we do not, as my pacifist friends claim, 'fetishise' war or applaud it as a way of solving problems.

Many of us may profoundly disagree with the ambitions and distrust the motivations of the politicians who send soldiers, sailors and air crew to do jobs they could not do themselves.

What we're taking part in is an act of respect, not for warfare but for the poor sods whose task it was to carry guns and who did not return to grow old, as the rest of us grow old.

So, let us silence the offensive claim that by honouring the dead we condone war.

Doubtless, in the early days of the First World War, there were a few boneheads who went off to the front thinking the whole thing a bit of a lark. But the vast majority weren't like that.

I have never forgotten having tea with an old boy who had become a brigadier in the First World War. I was 19, about the same age he had been when sent to Flanders. What brought me up short was his remark that he knew that when he arrived at his sector of the front, his life expectancy was two weeks.

'When those of us who survived came home,' he said, as he laid down his cup quietly, 'half the chaps we'd been at school with were dead.'

The rituals enacted across the country by men and women, old and young, the religious and the atheistic, are not taking place to glorify violence but to respect the memory of those young people. It is an entirely different thing.

Every country sees history through the prism of its own contribution and to the British the First World War is always about the trenches of the Western Front, with perhaps a nod at the Dardanelles, Lawrence of Arabia or the Battle of Jutland.

But for the Italians, it is the horrific fighting in the Alpine snows at the Battle of Caporetto; for the Russians, the war's animating role in the Bolshevik Revolution, and for the Australians, a (highly distorted) propagandist example of the way callous Poms sacrificed heroic Diggers at Gallipoli.

This is not to downplay the British Empire's contribution to the war.

More than 900,000 young men from the Empire had futures they never tasted. Two million more were wounded in some way: footballers who returned from France with no legs, breezy, confident teenagers reduced to shuddering ghosts, handsome children who were to spend the rest of their lives with no face.

The great tragedy of the peace that followed is that it achieved the reverse of what had been intended.

One can understand why magnanimity might have been hard. But Germany, too, had suffered a terrible blood-letting. Of all the participants, the German loss of life was highest at two million, followed by the vast casualties of Russia, France and Austria-Hungary, which lost 1.7million, 1.4million and 1.1million respectively - a total of more than six million men sent off to fight, never to return.

The German officers claimed to have been expecting a proposal for a temporary cessation of hostilities, which is what an armistice is.

Instead, gathered on a train hidden in a forest near Compiegne in northern France, they listened for the best part of two hours as the Allies recited their terms.

It was complete surrender or nothing, including immediate withdrawal from occupied territories and the handing over of submarines and warplanes, battleships and destroyers, 5,000 pieces of artillery, plus thousands of locomotives, lorries and wagons. They were to acknowledge the Allies' right to claim damages.

They had 72 hours to agree.

For the Germans, the position was impossible. Word reached them that the Kaiser had abdicated. The German navy had mutinied. An epidemic of flu was carrying off much of the cannon fodder before it could be put in harm's way and back in Germany there was real revolution in the air.

So, at five in the morning of November 11, 1918, the leader of the German delegation, Matthias Erzberger, put his signature to the paper.

The Allied Supreme Commander, the 67-year-old General Foch, who had seen the flower of his country's youth sacrificed to German ambition, couldn't bring himself to shake Erzberger's hand.

The harsh terms of the subsequent political settlement so humiliated Germany that it prepared the way for the rise of Hitler and yet more bloodshed.

The agreement reached in the railway carriage truly had been no more than an armistice, a pause for breath before Europe was again engulfed in horror.

So what H.G. Wells called The War To End War achieved nothing of the sort. Since 1945 alone, more than 16,000 British servicemen and women have died in action.

The way things are going in Afghanistan, British soldiers could still be risking life and limb long after Tony Blair has retired to his country house and a seat in the House of Lords.

I shall wear a poppy not because I believe the gun is the best way of settling disputes, still less because I admire the pretence, ambition, folly, vanity or desperation of the politicians who make the fateful decisions.

I shall wear a poppy because an act of remembrance once a year is the very least that those of us who have not been asked to risk our lives can offer those who did not have our choice.

By J. Paxman

Thank you for a thoughtful and considered post.

regards
acav

Hear, Hear! Perhaps the most thoughtful post on the site. Thank you.

Eloquently put to pen. Hope the world reads it.
Thank you.
Rick