EVENTS this week in Afghanistan have offered a timely reminder that Remembrance Sunday and 11 November are as relevant today as they have been for more than 90 years.
A further six British service personnel have lost their lives, taking the death toll since the conflict began to 230. This has only added further fuel to the debate on whether British troops should be involved at all at a time when a recent poll rev
ealed 75 per cent of those asked said they believed that troops should be withdrawn within a year.
Gordon Brown's response was to reiterate that the UK would not walk away from the battle. On this, he is correct; to pull out now, before the job is finished, would not just betray Afghans, it would mean that those UK troops who have already died will have given their lives for nothing.
It looks like a long haul, and a PM with as acute a knowledge of history as Mr Brown's knows that no foreign army has ever won in this particular arena.
But tomorrow and Wednesday are not days for political squabbling over the rights and wrongs of British involvement. They are about remembering those who gave their lives serving their country in all wars.
There are very few alive today with personal memories of World War I. Yet more of the dwindling band of survivors succumbed to age in the last 12 months.
In the carnage of that conflict an estimated 2.5 million British subjects were killed, wounded or taken prisoner. More than half a million Scots went to France and 130,000 never came home.
In all, 400,000 British and Commonwealth men and women lost their lives in World War II, though that was a war fought as much on the home front as on the great battlefields. And there are many alive today who experienced those dark days and can still draw on personal memories, including the loss of a relative.
But it is heartening to see that younger generations too are taking time to remember the war dead. With the Falklands, Iraq and Afghanistan, plus Ireland and other conflicts, more fresh in the memory, the tradition of buying a poppy lives on.
Sales in the 15-24 age group are said to be growing, and it is important that this continues, especially at a time when British servicemen and women continue to risk and sacrifice their lives for their country.
Whatever we think of the wars themselves, it is not much to ask that at least for two minutes once a year we set aside thoughts of all other things and remember those who fight them.
